Lethal Seasons (A Changed World Book 1) (15 page)

“Some industries were totally wiped out, while others were able to manage. Small farms continued as before, sometimes pulling in neighbors to replace the fallen. Religious organizations continued as before. Some factories were able to downsize production and continue output. But the fact that their customer base had diminished drastically was not as great an issue as the disintegration of currency. Money no longer stood for anything of worth.”

History of a Changed World
, Angus T. Moss

With Wisp leading them, Nick was relieved that they wouldn’t spend more than a few hours tramping through buildings. Their search turned up a mix of scientists and support staff. Three had been sleeping and were totally unaware of the situation. The others had been isolated until they were found. All were skeptical at first. Once they crossed a body-strewn street, they had no more doubts. Shocked and panicked, they were willing to remain in the conference room while Nick, Wisp, Kyle and Ruth finished locating those still alive.

Leaving the guards’ barracks for last, they returned to the conference room to get a better sense of the situation. Nick paused in the hallway, signaling Wisp to join him as the last few survivors filed into the room. “Is this it? Can you feel anybody else?”

“I need to move away from all these people to be sure.”

“This is a lot less than I expected.” Nick stared at the lab workers talking among themselves in subdued tones. Wisp had been invaluable in finding them in the labyrinths of corridors and offices. But Nick felt that he needed one more check. “Take a weapon off one of the dead guards. Walk the perimeter. I think we will end up bedding down here for the night. I want to make sure we are secure. We’d better shut the gates. I don’t want to advertise the lack of personnel here.”

Wisp gave him an odd look. “How long do you intend to stay?”

“I'd like to get out of here first thing tomorrow.”

“You think you will find answers by then?”

Nick glanced down the hall, halfway down a limp hand lay across a threshold. “I’m gonna try.”

Wisp gave him a nod and walked away.

Nick went into the conference room and found all eyes on him. “Okay folks, here's the situation as we know it. Bad vaccine seems to have killed off a hell of a lot of people. Maybe a couple of cases of flu also. I’m from High Meadow Med Center. We came here to ask some questions. We got any supervisors here?”

Heads swiveled, but no hands went up.

“Let's go round the room real quick, and see what we've got.” Nick went over to the smartwall to make notes. Each person stood, gave their full name and position then sat down. The next person then did the same. He was amused by the formal recitation. Very orderly. Despite, or perhaps because of the tragic situation, they all seemed to be remaining calm. There were eight scientists, four guards, four lab techs, a file clerk, groundskeeper and a janitor. As they were speaking, Nick took the time to look them over. A lot of nervous faces in the group, mostly among the scientists. The guards looked surly. He expected trouble there. “How many people do you normally have around here?”

There was a little mumbling, but no one offered him an answer. He needed more information before he could put a plan together. “Okay, let's try it another way.” He started a new column on the smartwall, calling out questions. “How many teams are there? How many scientists per team?” Several times people tried to correct him on titles, but eventually he got solid numbers. There were four basic sections: research, production, shipping and administrative. He drew a line and added them all up.

“About two hundred people work here.” He pointed to the list of survivors on the other side. “This is all you've got. Can you still run this place?”

One of the guards shifted in his seat for a minute before reluctantly raising his hand. Nick nodded at him to go ahead. “There were a couple of...um, groups sent out awhile back.”

Nick kept his face passive. He was sure the guard was talking about the men hunting William and Lily. “Out where?”

The guard turned to look at the others in uniform. He shrugged without meeting Nick’s eyes. “Some project of Rutledge’s. It’s been awhile, so I guess maybe they aren’t coming back.”

“Found better bennies,” the fellow next to him grumbled, to which most of the guards chuckled.

Nick’s mouth went dry. He felt a little guilty for hoping that he and Wisp had killed all of them. But he didn’t like the thought of a bunch of mercenaries out there on the loose looking for a new source of
benefits
. “Okay, but that was guards, right?” He pointed to the list on the board. “Do you need all these jobs filled?”

Silence answered him, but the question was mostly rhetorical. The people in front of him looked stunned. He needed to get them thinking. “Ruth thinks this is bad vaccine. I saw boxes of it on the trucks. Did any get delivered?”

There was a rustle around the room as people turned to look at one another.

“I don’t think that there is anyone here from shipping,” Kyle said.

Nick felt a pang of loss for people he'd never met. More human beings lost to stupidity. Angus would have a fit. But he needed some answers. He was going to have to break it down again. “How many delivery trucks are there?”

“Fifteen,” one of the guards answered.

“How many on site right now?”

“Twelve,” another guard answered. “Ten in the garage and two parked outside.”

“That makes three trucks unaccounted for. Are they delivering vaccine? Do we need to contact settlements?”

“No.” Kyle stood to speak. “The shipments go to the distribution warehouse.”

“Okay. Contact them.”

The staff looked back at him uneasily. Kyle cleared his throat. “Who should do that?”

Nick snorted. Geniuses didn't always make good leaders. “Don't you have some kind of contingency plan? What if a tornado had killed these people?” He saw a couple of faces brighten.

“The disaster plan,” Kyle said. “Yes. That is exactly what we should do.” He glanced back at his colleagues. “I am not authorized.”

One of the scientists lurched to his feet. Red Team, Nick thought he’d said. A tall, lanky fellow with long brown hair.”I can look into it, Kyle.”

“Thank you, Jonas. Perhaps you should take someone with you?”

Jonas gave him a half-shrug. “The dead don’t scare me. I’ll go find the procedures and report back.” He looked toward Nick, but avoided eye contact. “Okay?”

“Sounds like a plan. If we’re not here, I’ll leave a note on the board where we’ve gone.”

The scientist squinted at the list of survivors. Nick watched his Adam’s apple lurch as he swallowed nervously. “Right.” He walked out, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets.

“Okay. Good.” Nick looked at all the blank faces staring at him. “Next is probably food and shelter.”

Kyle stood up. “I believe the first thing we should do is to remove the dead to a single location.”

Murmuring skipped across the room. Nick heard more than one person complain about physical labor. He let them grumble, aggravation was better than shock. Kyle was right. The dead needed to be dealt with if they were staying, but Nick didn’t want to be here a minute longer than he had to. They could clear out a space for the night then leave in the morning. He wasn’t sure what should be done here, but he didn’t want to be the one in charge of it.

Nick rapped his knuckles on the board until people quieted down. “We now have twenty-one people. Out of about two hundred. That means that there are possibly one hundred and eighty-nine corpses spread out in these buildings.”

“That can’t be right!” A woman in a lab coat waved her arms in a violent negation. “You must have counted wrong. That’s an eighty-seven percent mortality rate. That’s...that’s...”

“Inexcusable,” Ruth snarled.

“Are you accusing gold team of this...this...” she waved a hand, at a loss for words.

“It wasn’t ready, Kim,” Ruth snapped back at the woman. “He added—” she pointedly glared at Nick. “It wasn’t ready.”

“But Rutledge said we all had to have it...” Kim took a shaky breath. “I was scheduled...I, oh God, I was supposed to get it this afternoon.”

Nick saw the change in the room. The scientists looked worried, the labs techs looked scared and the guards got angrier. “Food and shelter,” he said, in an effort to get them back on track. “A cafeteria would work. We’re all going to need to eat before long. And we can easily bed down where we’re eating. I would recommend not going out where there are bodies until we are sure that they all died from the bad vaccine.”

Silence answered him again, but this time it was one of assent.

*    *    *

Nick left the group discussing the best place to spend the night. There were already factions forming. A few people wanted to leave. He decided that wasn’t his problem. If people came to him for help, he’d gladly supply it. If they wanted to go off on their own, less for him to worry about. He grabbed Kyle and Ruth and headed for the last building that needed to be searched. Wisp caught up with them as they reached the barracks. He was glad to have the biobot back at his side. It surprised him to realize that he trusted Wisp to watch his back.

The main door was propped open. Nick led them in. The ground floor had communal rooms: cafeteria, lounge, gym and a few offices. He assumed the upper floors were sleeping quarters. Any rooms that had been occupied now held only dead bodies. Wisp led them into the main lounge with the insistence that there were living people in the building.

“There's no one here but the dead,” Ruth said accusingly to Wisp. She pulled a corner of her collar over her nose. In the heat of the day, the bodies were beginning to stink.

“They are in the lower levels. We need to find a way down.”

Ruth looked reluctant, but Kyle’s quiet acceptance of Wisp’s declaration brought her around. Nick sent them off in different directions to search for stairs or an elevator. All of the staircases they found started at the first floor and went up. Next they searched offices.

The fact that the door to the lower levels was in an odd little foyer behind the head of security’s office, set off alarm bells for Nick. He’d opened a door, expecting a closet and found a short passage. Pretty sure he’d found what they needed, he called the others over. At the end of the passage was a small room with two doors, a table and four chairs and a long row of cabinets that took up one entire wall. Three of the chairs held bodies dressed in the ubiquitous black uniform, which inferred to Nick that they were on duty. Nick opened the first door. It led into a large kitchen. A man in whites was sprawled on the floor by a walk-in freezer. He shut the door. They could look around the kitchen later. The second door was heavy steel with a keypad lock.

“Can you open that?” Nick asked Kyle.

“I can try.”

While Kyle tried a variety of pass codes on the door, Nick checked the cabinets. He pulled open all the doors. Bottles of pills, towels, stacks of surgical scrubs in pastel colors. He grabbed one of the pill bottles and handed it to Ruth. “What is this stuff?”

She squinted at the label for a second before her eyebrows shot up. “It’s well, sort of...” She handed the bottle back like a hot potato, her mouth turned down in disgust. “Um...chemical restraint.”

The alarm bells in Nick’s head clanged a bit louder as he thought about why they might have large bottles of stuff like that.

“Makes sense,” Wisp said. “The people I feel are very subdued. They are probably drugged.”

The door gave a two-note chime and swung open. Kyle led the way down to the basement. A door at the bottom of the stairs was locked, also. This one was older, having a keyed lock. Ruth located the keys hanging within reach and let them through.

They entered a pristine area of white walls and grey-tiled floor that smelled of refrigerated air and disinfectant. A long corridor stretched out in front of them with doors evenly spaced along the length of it. Nick had only a vague impression of the size of the building above them, but it was obvious that the corridor in front of him was a good deal longer than that. The doors had simple slide locks on them. In the wall, next to each door was a long, narrow hatch also with a slide lock. They stood in a small foyer. To the right was a short hallway that lead to an elevator. Nick figured it must come down from the kitchen. Food carts were parked along the walls. To the left was a desk, several filing cabinets and a wall rack holding charts.

Kyle looked at Wisp. “How many people are being held here?”

Wisp closed his eyes, a frown creased his forehead. “More than ten, less than fifty.”

“It must be like a jail,” Ruth said. “For people who break the rules.”

Nick shook his head. “I don't think so. This is a little too elaborate for the occasional drunk or insubordinate soldier.”

“What if these are criminals?” Ruth asked in a scratchy whisper.

Kyle frowned at her. “This is a research installation. We have no reason to be dealing with criminals.”

“Even for experimentation?” Nick asked.

“I would never condone such a thing!” Ruth snapped.