It all falls down, p.28
It All Falls Down, page 28
part #1 of Birth of Heavy Metal Series
They would have taken the elevators, but they, like most of the other tech in the lab, were still down and they didn’t want to waste the time to find a way to turn them back on.
Which brought them all to the next question. They were supposed to look for data. If all the systems were down, they would need to bring some back up so they could find what they were looking for and get the fuck out.
The data on the facility that Elena had given them said they would find the main computer servers down in the basements, near where the medical bay was supposed to be.
They were on the ground floor, and the basement they needed to find was the second of four. How they’d found the time and equipment to actually dig four levels down and build in an irradiated zone was a testimony to how inventive the people in charge of the project had been.
Savage and Sam led the way down the stairs, their weapons drawn as if they expected and were ready for trouble. Terry and Madigan brought up the rear, with Sal and Courtney sandwiched in the center. They didn’t pause on their way down the steps. Sal wanted to be able to do a thorough check and to investigate and explore, but while they were still dealing with a situation that involved a whole lab with a security team and top-of-the-line security systems in place that had simply dropped out of all communication, they had to assume there were hostiles around. That, in turn, meant they would do what they came for and move their asses out as quickly as possible.
Those were Madigan’s orders. Not even the operative was brave enough to defy the woman when she had keeping her team alive on her mind.
When they reached the second-level basement, Savage and Sam breached it in smooth, practiced motions to make sure no surprises awaited them before they gestured for the team to enter.
This level was altogether different from the ground floor, which was immediately apparent when they stepped through the door. The lights were all on, as the others had been, but these revealed a less pristine view. Blood splattered across the walls, instruments were strewn over the floor and drenched in red as well, and overturned furniture and scattered papers completed the scene that greeted them. There had definitely been a fight here, Sal surmised from his position behind Sam and Savage. Madigan and Terry moved into a forward position as well.
“Okay.” The operative spoke when no one else seemed inclined to. He grasped his pistols a little more firmly now. “I guess things didn’t end very well for the researchers.”
“Was there any doubt?” Madigan asked.
“Well, no, but there was always the thought that these people might have encouraged the guards to get greedy and between them, stripped this place of anything they could carry and got the fuck out,” he suggested. “No such luck, though. Too bad.”
They appeared to have reached the section where animal tests were conducted, as evidenced by the containment units that filled the labs to capacity. All the doors were opened, and there was a large amount of blood spread around them. Only blood, though, no body parts and no internal organs or bones that might indicate who or what the blood belonged to.
“It looks like rats were in this section,” Courtney said and indicated the smaller cages. “Some containment for larger numbers of insects for testing here in the clear plastic tubs. But…what would they need cages that big for?”
Sal and Madigan both knew what the cages looked like almost before they saw them. The familiar design confirmed what they didn’t want to believe—the way it was made with cutting-edge technology to keep anything from breaking out and with the simplified locking mechanism and the three air holes on the top.
“Holy fuck, they were doing that here too?” Madigan asked and looked at Sal, stiff with outrage. “Who the fuck thought this was a good idea?”
“What are you talking about?” Courtney asked.
“You really need to start reading your reports,” the other woman retorted and shook her head.
“Human testing.” Sal answered the question and stepped closer to the cages. The biggest problem was that they were open and empty, which meant that whatever or whoever they’d run those tests on were gone by now. The question was, where were they? “This is the same cage they kept the man they were testing in the Zoo in. It’s the same design and everything, which, to my mind, means they were running the same tests. Infusing humans with the goop in there.”
“Shit.” Sam shook her head, the gesture indicative of a scowl. The rest of the team felt the same sick, cold feeling in the pit of their stomach telling them exactly how wrong everything that happened there was. “I guess we know why they wanted to have this lab in the middle of an irradiated wasteland, huh? There is no better place to break all the Geneva human rights conventions.”
They held a quick moment of silence, not really out of respect for the poor bastards who had been sent there to be poked and prodded with alien goop by sick minds, but rather because they needed it. The ethical problems aside, the fact remained that someone appeared to be funding these tests on other humans. That or some government or another was paying for this. Evidence pointed toward the Russians, but Sal couldn’t shake the feeling that there were other factors in play.
Despite his academic curiosity about what was happening, he suddenly lost all interest in staying any longer. They needed to get their data and get the fuck out. Hopefully, they would be able to get the governments all around the area to bomb the absolute crap out of this place based on the evidence of what had happened there. His first instinct was to record it all and expose whoever was responsible, no matter what the political fallout, but common sense told him this fledgling Zoo needed to be destroyed before it gained a real foothold in Europe.
“The server room should be down the corridor to the left,” Madigan said, and her brisk, efficient tone dragged them clear of the ethical situation they desperately wanted to walk away from. Sal took the front of the team this time, He needed to get as far away from those damn cages as he could. There were some things scientists simply didn’t do, things he could never see himself doing, even under the most exigent of circumstances.
They headed deeper into the floor, and most of the rooms were in a similar state. All contained cages, although only a few had those made for humans, which demonstrated that there were at least a handful of different tests that were run on those unfortunate enough to be there. He had to hope that the people they sent were the rapists and the murderers, the worst of the worst. Even that wasn’t justification enough for this but knowing that bad things were happening to bad people somehow made it a little better, for some reason.
“Okay,” Madigan said and raised her hand to bring the group to a halt as she checked the facility map. “The server room should be somewhere around here. The medical ward is there.” She indicated the room that had a red circle and a cross painted on the door. “Which means the server room should be directly across from it.”
They moved to the unmarked door opposite the medical ward. It was, predictably, locked, but considering that it had been put in place to stop scientists in lab coats, the soldiers and researchers in combat armor were able to break through without difficulty.
“Okay,” she said and looked around the room. It was filled from wall to wall with a variety of servers, all still on if the blinking lights were any kind of indication. That was something of a comfort. They were deprived of Anja’s help without active comms and probably wouldn’t know the first thing about turning the devices on and getting them running without burning or shorting something out. Thankfully, with everything on, they would be able to plug their suits into the servers, copy the data, and be away from the facility in a few minutes. They would let Anja deal with decrypting and understanding everything later.
“Okay, I think…Sam, Terry, Monroe and I can probably handle transferring the data,” Savage said as he scrutinized the room to make sure there weren’t any threats inside. “Jacobs, can you and Kennedy keep an eye on the door and make sure nothing tries to attack us while we’re in here?”
Sal nodded firmly, primed his assault rifle, and stepped outside with Madigan. She was silent for a moment, but he could tell by her rigid posture that she was no doubt grinding her teeth and scowling.
“Do you really think we can trust him?” she asked in a hushed tone, even though she had opened a private connection.
“I thought you were starting to warm up to him already,” he replied, and she shrugged in response.
“He is cool under fire, I’ll give him that,” she conceded. “But trust him? I don’t think so. I leave that kind of shit to Anderson and Courtney while I watch their backs and wait for him to try to pull something, betray them, and kill us all. Something like that.”
“Well, we all know how much you like saying I told you so,” he said and blinked quickly. There was…something in the back of his mind. A weird feeling, something he couldn’t quite shake off and which drew his attention to the medical ward door. “So, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll give him the trust since he’s earned it thus far, in my opinion, when he helped to save Courtney’s life—and Anderson’s and his family’s, as well as all the other things he’s taken care of. You can go ahead and continue to not trust him and kill him if he ever tries any funny business, deal?”
“Deal.” She grunted, clearly still ill at ease, and was about to turn away when she swung fully to face him again. “What the hell are you doing?”
He froze and realized that he’d begun to walk across the hallway toward the door, which was weird because he hadn’t really meant to do that. While he was vaguely curious about what they might find in the medical ward, a second before, he had told himself there was no point in sticking around to investigate every nook and cranny. They were here for the data, pure and simple. They would get it and get out.
And yet he couldn’t shake the need to go into the room.
“I…uh, thought as we had a couple of minutes while the rest of them collect the data we might as well do some exploring, right?” He had thought quickly to come up with a good enough excuse to get past her sharp mind.
She didn’t seem convinced, but while she was the gunner of their team, he was the specialist and she was supposed to listen to what he had to say. It was difficult to actually read what was going through her mind, of course, but she didn’t say a word as she crossed the hall to stand beside him.
“I’ve got your back, Sal,” she whispered, and he’d have bet good money that she wore a smirk. She primed her weapon and activated one of the rocket launchers on her shoulder.
He chuckled. “Ready for anything, huh?”
“Of course. I’m reasonably sure I could bring this whole place down if we really needed me to.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” He gripped the door handle and turned it slowly. Unlike the one into the server room, it was unlocked and opened smoothly to allow barely enough room for the two of them to step through one at a time.
The view that greeted them was almost more stupefying than anything else they’d seen during the rest of their strange, bizarre trip to the most famous and least metaphorical nuclear meltdown in the world.
The lights were on inside, which had to be a huge demand on the electrical system since it was a massive room. There were a handful of medical dispenser units distributed throughout with instructions written in Russian. Even if they were in English, though, he doubted that he would have been able to tell what they were for. He wasn’t that kind of doctor, after all.
But it didn’t take that kind of doctor to know what was happening to the people who were on the cots and beds that filled the room. Sal had to blink a few times to make sure he wasn’t seeing things, but each time he opened his eyes, nothing had changed. There were still people on the cots, and they were still…alive?
That didn’t seem right. He approached one of the nearest beds. There was no medical equipment attached to the woman who lay there, completely nude. Her chest rose and fell rhythmically, though, so there did appear to be some signs of life.
He leaned closer and frowned when he noticed the other telltale symptoms. The veins on her body were highlighted a bright blue against her pale skin and almost looked like they should have throbbed as they pumped blue blood through her body. Her eyes were closed, and she looked to be unconscious.
“Were they…testing on all these people?” Madigan asked, and he looked up and realized there were about two or three dozen or so, which filled the whole room.
“I don’t think so,” he said and checked the patients one after the other to confirm that they showed the same blue-veined symptoms of overexposure to the alien goop. “There were only five or six of the cages in the labs, and I think the basement would be the only place to store them. If you calculate the weight of those cages and try it against the tensile strength of the prefab slabs—well, I’ll let you do the math. Or rather, imagine me doing the math.”
“Where have they all come from?” she asked, her tone sharp with disbelief as she moved down row after row of unconscious patients who simply lay motionless in their cots, waiting for…something. He wasn’t sure if she could feel it too, but there was a tension in the air that he couldn’t shake. She definitely seemed tense as well, but it didn’t look right. It wasn’t the same thing. He could tell.
“Well, if I were to venture a guess, I’d say the ones closest to the door are the test subjects,” he said as something tugged his mind to the other end of the room and the doorway there. It had to be the only place in the building that was in the dark. He desperately wanted to go there, but something within fought back—a survival instinct, maybe, that dragged him away from what he knew would definitely be a bad idea. “The ones after them are the researchers and scientists who were here when the lab went dark, and the rest are members of the teams Molina sent before us.”
Madigan looked at him and sensed that something was a little off from the distant tone his voice had taken on. “No…we had the numbers of the people who were here and who came after. There aren’t enough in these beds.”
“I assume some of them resisted or fought back against their conversion or something like that,” Sal replied, unsure why he was talking like that. He wasn’t even certain where those words came from. Pain bloomed in the back of his head and expanded to the point of distraction.
“Conversion?” she asked, and he could feel her studying him.
Before he could answer, one of the patients on the cots moved. No, not the cots. Despite the fact that there weren’t as many people as had been reported, there were still too many for the cots in this medical ward. Behind the cots, others had been placed on the floor or were in wheelchairs. It was one of those in the wheelchairs who suddenly jerked.
“Salinger?” A hauntingly throaty yet familiar voice rasped from the man’s lips. “Salinger Jacobs?”
He narrowed his eyes and stepped closer to the man, who looked like he tried to push himself out of the chair. “That’s me. Who are you?”
“Don’t you recognize me?” the man asked and looked despondent at the questions.
It took him a moment, but there was something familiar about him. Most of his facial features were bathed in blue by this point, and he looked worse off than the others. Something appeared to have paralyzed the right side of his face and dragged it down, but…dammit, there was something familiar about the face, and the voice too.
“Holy crap,” he gasped and moved closer. “Smythe? Andy Smythe?”
“Wait, the same Smythe who kidnapped you and dragged you into the Zoo against your will, Smythe?” Madigan asked and immediately took a step forward, but Sal waved her back for the moment. He must have been on the team Molina had sent in. None of the reports had included any names.
“Yes,” he replied and gasped for breath. “You…you need to leave now, Jacobs. It…wants you. It has you.”
“What are you talking about?” Sal wondered.
“Get away from him, Sal,” Madigan warned and raised her weapon.
“I don’t know what it did to me,” Smythe continued and a terrified look of horror spread across the half of his face that he still had control over. “It’s…changing me. I can hear a voice in my head, but I don’t know what it’s saying. It shows me things I don’t understand and tells me to do terrible things, I don’t know why. I’m trying to resist, to fight back, but…it’s doing things to my body to make me follow.”
“What the hell are you guys doing here?” Savage asked from the door. He jogged through the room and tried to ignore the unconscious people in the beds as he approached Sal and Madigan. “We have the data, and we need to get the fuck out of here. Now.”
Madigan looked like she agreed with him again and turned to grab Sal’s shoulder as Sam, Terry, and Courtney entered the room as well. They, however, were less focused on getting out than trying to decide exactly what it was that they were looking at.
Sal growled, shook Madigan’s hand from his shoulder, and turned back to Smythe. “What is it showing you?”
“Come on, Sal!” she snapped. The man didn’t answer and simply pointed toward the door he had been drawn to since he entered the room. Hell, since he’d entered the building, even if he hadn’t known it at the time. He peered inside where something moved and glowed a soft blue in the darkness, weaving hypnotic patterns to invite him closer and draw him in.
Madigan grabbed his shoulder and hauled him away, more insistently this time, and he tried to dislodge her again. The weaving lights followed him and drifted into the illuminated ward. He remembered seeing tentacles like those in the Zoo, remembered watching them drop from the branches, grab people, and drag them away. He didn’t know how it was possible in this place.
As they moved closer, the pain in the back of his head turned blinding. He vaguely heard himself scream as he dropped to his knees and grasped his head, his hands stopped by his helmet. The pain only grew worse as he closed his eyes.
Chapter Thirty
Chernobyl: The Laboratory Inside The Containment Dome
