Zombie Fever: Origins (7 page)

Dr. Greer had said that the best time to attempt an infiltration into the compound undetected was during the change of shifts at three a.m. But Tomas wasn’t sneaking in. His plan was to hide in plain sight. After all, he needed to get his father out of there and the only way he believed that would be possible would be to sneak in with a transport van similar to the ones he’d observed parked in the compound. He figured that once he made it through the front gate, the rest of his plan would fall into place.

He turned on the windshield wipers as droplets of early summer rain began to fall. His vision was limited as he’d painted most of the windshield with a dull gray paint to obscure his face from the security cameras out in front of the Vitura compound. He had to lean forward close to the wheel to see out the small clear horizontal line he’d left as his only means of seeing ahead.

The rain began to beat a steady rhythm on top of the van as he waited at one of the many stop lights along Mira Mesa Boulevard. He held his breath, hoping that a random police officer on patrol wouldn’t come up behind him and run the plates he’d stolen off one of Andy’s neighbor’s trucks, or notice that his windshield was intentionally obscured and pull him over for a vehicle violation.

But the promise of rain must have driven most late-night commuters indoors as the boulevard was virtually empty and less than five minutes later he was driving along Sorrento Valley Road.

Before turning into the small dead end lane where Vitura Pharmaceuticals was located, Tomas pulled to the side of the road and switched off the lights. When the road was clear of vehicles, he climbed out of the cab, went to the back of the van and, as quietly as possible, lifted the rear door, pulled down the ramp and rolled the motorcycle out of the bed, parking it off the road under a cluster of trees. Every getaway movie he’d ever seen had a Plan B. The motorcycle was his Plan B; - a means of escape in the event everything went haywire.

He got back in the van and drove into Vitura’s drive. His stomach started doing summersaults as he got closer. While he wasn’t opposed to ingesting the occasional illicit drug or breaking an inconsequential law to, say, skinny dip with his ex in a hotel pool after hours, he was an exceptionally law-abiding person when it came to other people’s welfare - his moral compass holding steady when it came to harming people. But his plan involved committing several serious and potentially violent felonies. Breaking bad was something new to him and wracked his nervous system.

“Doc, you there?” Tomas asked. His throat was dry and his voice cracked.

“I’m here, Tomas.”

“I’m turning towards the gate now.”

“Tomas. Focus and don’t hesitate or you’ll look suspicious. Remember, fluid movements. Calm and serene. You can do this.”

The van pulled up to the gate. Tomas cranked down the window and held the badge out high towards the cameras. He turned his head away and waited.

There was a clank and the gates trundled open.

Tomas rolled up the window and drove through. It was a mystery to him why his father’s old security badge was still functioning and he couldn’t help but wonder if Dr. Greer didn’t have something to do with it. Even exiled, he imagined she still had colleagues working inside the compound sympathetic to her cause and willing to do her favors when called upon.

The white cargo van stopped alongside a line of similar white vans. As casually as possible, Tomas exited the compartment with his head down and cap low, carrying the unzipped duffel bag, his eyes darting back and forth searching for trouble.

He raised the van’s door up and pulled the ramp down, leaving the door open for easy access when he had his father in tow.

His father’s soft-soled orthopedic shoes were cramped and hurt his feet as he walked. Tomas winced, his pinky toes screaming in pain as his toenails snagged against the torn bits of leather inside the worn shoes. Two scientist-looking types appeared on the sidewalk in front of him. He nodded as they approached but they ignored him as they strolled past, absorbed in their conversation and above acknowledging a lowly security guard. This gave Tomas some relief. If it were common practice to ignore the working class employees, then all he had to worry about were the other security guards, and maybe the janitors, blowing his cover.

He turned and followed the sidewalk between the buildings and started circling the administration building. When he thought the coast was clear he veered close to the building, reached into the duffel bag and, as he walked hurled, two tannerite devices - one at a time - onto the roof of the three-story structure.

Even with the light rain and cool wind blowing in from the nearby coast, he was sweating nervously: the khaki guard’s shirt sticking to his back, saddlebags of perspiration forming under his pectorals. He zipped up the bag, acted like he’d forgotten something, turned and began walking back towards the two rear buildings, taking deep breaths and gathering his courage now that the initial stages of the plan were behind him. If the plan were to fail, he’d expected it to happen when trying to enter the compound or when he was throwing the bombs onto the building. Both of those aspects of the plan required a dangerous degree of exposure. Now he just had to keep his head down and find his dad.

The buildings didn’t have any signage or markings.

Dr. Greer said the laboratories were in the building diagonal from the administration building he’d been in earlier in the week.

Tomas rounded the corner and, to his relief, saw that the cargo bay doors were wide open. There were three men inside using a noisy forklift and heavy-duty pitch arms to load a truck with large metal containers. The forklift made a racket and the pitch arm’s joints whined as the men angled the containers in with the mechanical extensions. They didn’t notice the unfamiliar security guard making his way along the far wall behind the shoulder high crates packed with industrial machinery.

He counted off the paces … thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty … stopping when his feet hit a hollow plate on the concrete floor. He poured the thermite into a convenient little mound on top of the metal floor panel and stuck the magnesium cord into the pile.

Now for the telephone call.

Tomas dialed the fire department and whispered, “There’s a huge five alarm fire at Vitura Pharmaceuticals on Sorrento Valley Road. I think there are people trapped inside. Bring everything you’ve got.” He hung up before the operator could ask any questions.

He lit the magnesium cord and ran down the aisle away from the flashpoint, knowing that it would release an extreme amount of heat energy and light, possibly attracting unwanted attention. As he ran, he clicked the call button three times on his phone and heard two successive booms outside from his roof bombs. Yellow warning lights inside the building began to swirl around and the emergency sirens began to wail.

The thermite was doing its business; a radiant glow and popping sounds came from the molten iron that streamed off the metal plate. The thermite ate into the compartment onto the thick cable underneath.

Tomas watched the three workers as they evacuated the cargo bay. One of them noticed the radiant light on the far side of the room from the thermite burn. He shouted to his co-workers but they were more concerned about their own hides and pulled him along with them out of the building.

There was a metallic clunking sound and Tomas panicked as he watched two-foot thick steel shutters begin descending along their tracks in front of the cargo bay doors.

He was going to be trapped.

But the shutters stopped three-quarters of the way down as the thermite finally ate through the security cable, disabling the emergency system.

“I’m in,” he said to Dr. Greer who was waiting anxiously to hear those very words.

“Okay, Tomas. Now, I need you to listen carefully. This may sound antithetical to your current situation but I want you to hold where you are for five minutes. You need to give the scientists and other workers time to evacuate before you start searching room to room. Otherwise, someone will stop you. Sit tight and breathe. I know this will be difficult, but it needs to be done.”

“Roger.” He went a step further and climbed under a large fabricator on blocks beside the flight of stairs to the second floor. Safely hidden, he watched as employees ran by, their feet not more than six inches from his nose. He wasn’t sure whether exactly five minutes had passed, but it had been two minutes since the last pair of sensible shoes had hurried by, so he crawled out, climbed the stairs and slipped inside.

The yellow lights and emergency sirens gave the corridor a fun house appearance. Just as he entered the hallway, a group of workers in lab coats came thundering down the hall towards him. He was too early after all. Tomas straightened up, held open the door, and said authoritatively, “This way, people.”

They ran by with scarcely a glance his way.

The double wide corridor stretched down the center of the second floor for at least a hundred yards and there were at least a dozen doors on each side labeled Laboratory 1, Laboratory 2, Laboratory 3, etc. Every door had an electronic lock with palm and iris scanners. It would take him at least an hour to break into each of them with the angle grinder and search inside for Andy. “Doc, I’m on the lab level. There’s like a kajillion labs up here. Any advice on where to start?”

“Sorry, Tomas. My research department wasn’t in that building. I’ve only been on that floor a few times. Do you see the security booth to the right of the door? Maybe you can still access it with Andy’s card. There should be a manifest or something of that nature that might be of use to you.”

Tomas went to the booth and jiggled the door handle but it was locked. He slid the security card through the reader attached to the door frame but it flashed red. Frustrated he cupped his hands and peered into the booth, hoping to get a glimpse of a handwritten list among all the scattered papers on the desk or a blueprint of the floor or anything helpful. But there was nothing in view worthwhile. He was about to abandon the booth and break the door, when the rotating image on the desktop monitor flicked to a different view.

Tomas gasped.

The hi-def picture showed a tight shot of Andy, crisp and clear, unconscious and suspended upright in an acrylic cylindrical tube in a translucent fluid, an oxygen mask clinging to his face and hundreds of tiny colored wires sticking out of tiny holes in his skull. And underneath the image, the screen read, “Laboratory 9.”

A rage consumed Tomas - the likes of which he’d never felt before. He remembered the cold, reptilian way Bertrand had explained his father’s ‘death’ and the sorrow and guilt that had coursed through him when he dumped the urn over Sunset Cliffs. And there was his father, alive, just as Dr. Greer had said, being ruthlessly experimented upon for the benefit of a misguided, nefarious multinational corporation. Andy may not have been the best father, but he always had the best intentions in mind for Tomas. No matter what type of contract he signed, no matter the amount of money paid, that poor man didn’t deserve to be exploited in such a shamefully heinous manner.

Tomas sprinted down the corridor counting off Lab 1, Lab 2, Lab 3, until he finally reached Laboratory 9 near the end of the corridor. He made a mental note that he’d have to make a gurney with the tarp inside the bag and pull his father all the way back to the cargo bay. His initial plan was to lead Andy along with the rope. But now that seemed impracticable seeing the state his father was in. He dropped his duffel bag beside the door, retrieved the angle grinder and began cutting the door jamb near the bolt. Dr. Greer had said interior lab security was more for unauthorized entry of personnel than to secure the contents inside and that the palm readers and iris scanners were the main impediments to entry. The doors themselves were standard variety commercial doors and the angle grinder sliced the metal with ease. Less than a minute later and it was open.

Laboratory 9 was a mammoth place that had the air of a medieval torture room. There were large circular saws attached by long arms to stainless steel tables. There was a row of shelves with large jars with brains, heads and other body parts floating inside. Tomas counted off fourteen different machines bizarrely sadistic in nature. All of them had diverse configurations but they shared some common features; chairs or seats inside or on top, complete with leather straps, head prongs, long tentacles attached to probes, cutters and small metal hands. And in the rear of the chamber were six upright cylindrical chambers: five of them were empty, but the last one held his father.

The duffel bag dropped to the floor, forgotten as Tomas ran to the tube which stood on a waist high pedestal crammed with electronics. He touched the side of the tube and it was cool. The curvature of the glass gave his father the circus side show look of an image reflected in a funhouse mirror. And Andy was in a much worse condition that he’d seen on the security monitor. Andy hung in the jelly-like fluid nude, a thick tube running into his rectum and equally grotesque catheter jammed into his urinary tract where his genitals used to be. There were countless wires protruding from his skull and they’d removed his right arm below the elbow and inserted tubes into the stump, capping it with a black rubber sleeve. The utter lack of humanity, the sole crushing humiliation and disregard for the dignity of this individual’s life struck a chord in Tomas.

He felt a profound shift in his core, unaware that seeing his father exploited in this manner had severely altered his world view.

He circled around the cylinder, looking for a way to open it to get Andy out of the chamber. But it looked as if the only way to extract him was from the top of the container, at least four feet above his reach.

“Doc, I need more advice. Andy’s floating in some tube. Have you seen this before?”

There was silence on the other end and Tomas thought Dr. Greer hadn’t heard his inquiry until she spoke. Her voice was different somehow; compassionate yet gravely serious, “Tomas, I’m afraid you’re going to have to abandon the rescue. I was wrong about their plans for Andy. I thought that my absence would set back the zombie fever project but it sounds as if Vitura had accelerated their timetable. It seems that my colleague Dr. Taverna has taken over and final approval has been given for the deployment of the current IHS strain. They’re not going to ruthlessly experiment on Andy after all. What you’re seeing is the latest in advanced stasis. They’re planning to preserve Andy for as long as possible. Tomas, they’ve turned him into a living culture for the virus. They’re going to keep him like that indefinitely, withdrawing live virus to use on the rest of the world. He’s become patient zero for the program.”