The Hungry 4: Rise of the Triad (The Sheriff Penny Miller Series) (7 page)

Miller wasn’t even aware that she’d gone off the reservation, not at first. She just noticed that the other people were no longer standing around. No one was there. Miller spun in a circle. She was alone in a large hallway. There were doors, but all of them were closed. An uncomfortable tension washed over her. She’d gotten completely lost in featureless surroundings that may as well have been a maze.

Miller pondered. She had four alternatives, points of the compass. Frustrated, she chose one arbitrarily. She walked straight forward, through double doors, and found herself going down another set of spiraling steps. Lower and lower into the bowels of the building, the safety lights fading away, the atmosphere turning rapidly into nothing but shadow and gloom. Miller paused in the darkness. Something was wrong. The fluorescent lights were completely off down here. It was almost pitch black and uncomfortably cold. People weren’t expected to be down here… or weren’t allowed.

Miller’s stomach growled. She went through the next metal door and walked into another empty seating area.
There has to be a break room or kitchen somewhere
. Still hoping to score a snack, she wandered down the next hall, turned a corner and abruptly ran into a locked set of automatic double doors. She stepped in front of them but nothing happened. They were the kind you need a wireless key card to pass.

“Fuck a duck.”

Miller squinted and leaned down. There was a window in the door, but it was blackened and she couldn’t see through. A creepy feeling jogged up her spine like a daddy long legs on steroids. The same old feeling returned. This was wrong, all over again. She’d somehow gone from bad to worse. This whole wing seemed to scream
go away.
That fact alone was enough to make Miller feel very, very uncomfortable.
What are they hiding down here?
After so many experiences with government labs and their secret passages, she did and didn’t want to know. Her training nagged at her mind, but deep hunger gnawed at her belly. A distant voice in her brain told her to leave. It also whispered something far more sinister:
Curiosity killed the cat.

Miller examined the card reader—it was basic solid-state RFID technology, nothing to jimmy.
Now what?
she thought. Just then the door clicked and began to swing open. Miller panicked for a second. She looked around for a place to hide. The slow speed of the electric door gave Miller just enough time to tuck herself between the door and the wall. She was visible if someone looked the right way. All she could do is hope they wouldn’t.

Two men emerged. They both wore black tactical combat gear. She watched from the slit in the door. The duo walked out casually, semi-automatic weapons down at their sides. Were they coming off shift? That raised the question, what were they doing here in the first place, armed to the teeth? Were these Special Ops guys? Mercenaries? And what was it that they would be coming off shift
from?
This was supposed to be a rehab center, not an Army base. There should have been no need for weapons in the building—outside, perhaps, but not down here.

Unless…

The two men walked past Miller without looking back in her direction. She took a deep breath and licked her lips. Common sense told her to wait a few minutes and try to sneak back upstairs. Her law enforcement instincts told her that there was something important to learn by staying behind. Once again, the rush of adrenaline seemed to clear her mind. The door began to close, moving as slowly as it had opened. Miller heard the faint metallic whir.

Once she decided, Miller didn’t hesitate. As soon as the two soldiers were around the corner, she ducked in through the slowly moving double doors before they could close and lock. Her heart was pounding. She felt excited, nervous, and fully alive. When she walked forward, soft lighting came on automatically.

This new wing was very different from the others. It lacked the soft carpet and soft colors of the main building. This was a medical facility of some kind—perhaps not too surprising to find one at a rehab center—but there was something odd about it. Something that felt heartless and artificial. She’d had many bad experiences with secret facilities already, so this was something that made Miller feel both queasy and angry. That bastard Rubenstein was up to something after all.

The lights were set down low, and the security cameras seemed directed at the center of the room. Noting that, Miller clung to the wall. She never had been a much of a cat burglar. She generally preferred to kick in doors and clear a room with shouts and a loaded weapon. Still, thanks to the zombie plague, she was also no stranger to staying under the radar when absolutely necessary.

Something made a soft clicking sound somewhere above her head.

Miller froze. One of the security cameras was pointed in her direction. She was not certain if it had moved, or she’d just not noticed it before. She slid down the wall a bit surprised that no alarms had gone off, that no one had come to find out what the hell she was doing down here. She came to yet another four-way corridor. She chose a direction and crept forward.

There were rooms on either side of the corridor. Miller peeked in through the windows. She saw small exam rooms of some kind, with tables and trays and locked cabinets full of pill bottles. There was nothing that suspicious or worrying about them. No evidence of wrongdoing. Furthermore, no alarms had gone off. No one was upset or rushing down the stairs to arrest her. So maybe there was nothing to worry about after all?

A quote popped into Miller’s mind:
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing man he doesn’t exist.

She continued down the dimly lit corridor. She slipped around the next corner. There was another set of double doors down there, but they were motion activated and opened smoothly just as she approached. Spotting something out of the corner of her eye, Miller looked up as she stepped through. The sign over the door read
Custodial Ward.
The floor was tiled and clean as a baby’s conscience.

There were even more cameras located in the new area, and this time it featured solid locks on each and every door. It looked like a dead end. Miller told herself to turn around, while she could still remember how to find her way back upstairs to her room. This was not worth it. She told herself to leave. Then she willfully ignored her own request. Slowly, carefully, she tiptoed across the tile and looked in through the small, high window of one of the locked doors.

What she saw made her stomach clench with terror.

Miller backed away in horror. She went to the next room, looked in. She checked another, and then another.

Each room held a man or a woman strapped to a bed. Each of those patients appeared to be asleep, but their mouths were open, and some were moaning. They were almost certainly drugged. Miller worked her way down both sides of the long corridor, up and down the entire row, and discovered that every room was exactly the same. People locked away from the others at the Serenity Center, all of them sedated and apparently held captive.

Something was very wrong here, all right, and now Miller knew what, though she didn’t know precisely why. Someone was experimenting on these prisoners. None of them looked as if they’d been exposed to the zombie virus, much less turned, but there was no way to be sure of that. This had to be stopped. Miller needed evidence to show Scratch, something they could take with them to share with the world. She hit the file cabinets, found them locked, and tried to get into one of the computers. The wall socket power was turned off, possibly as a security precaution. Frustrated, Miller spun in a slow circle, taking in her surroundings.

Unfortunately there were no documents lying around anywhere, no handy brochures describing the evil practices of the custodial wing, nothing that obvious to aid her urgent investigation. If she hadn’t seen the soldiers coming out of the wing, Miller probably wouldn’t have noticed the place, much less visited this floor or even thought much of it. The lights brightened a bit. The air conditioning clicked off and the air immediately felt warmer. Miller was panting. No other sounds entered the room. She could feel her heart thudding in her chest and hear the blood rushing through her ears.

She heard something. A muffled noise. It was probably time to get the heck out of Dodge.

Still, Miller continued down the hall, looking in through the tiny windows. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she wasn’t willing to give up yet. The drugged feeling had faded away. She was running on stimulating rush of endorphins and adrenaline. Something was off, though she couldn’t put her finger on it. Miller felt like she hadn’t since the first days of the apocalypse, like the zombie virus was active and operating in her system. Her nagging hunger bothered her, but other than that she felt clear-headed for the first time in quite a while.

“Hey!” A muffled male voice called from somewhere nearby. Perhaps someone who had seen her peeking through the window? “Hey, let me out. I can’t take this shit anymore.”

Miller backed up to the previous door. Her feet squealed on the clean tiles. She looked inside and focused her gaze. She spotted someone trying to sit up in the cot. He was a youngish man in the shadows. He had military tattoos on his arms. He struggled against the restraints that held him fast to the hospital bed.

“I promise I won’t tell anyone,” the man pleaded. “Please, just let me go.”

“Promise you won’t tell anyone
what?
” asked Miller, quietly. She didn’t offer him freedom. She wasn’t going to commit to anything yet, much less easily believe anyone else’s story. This guy could have been a plant of some kind—or a genuine lunatic. He could have been an addict going through withdrawals or hallucinating. It was rehab of some kind, after all.

He could even be about to turn undead on her.

“The zombies,” the man said. “I swear to God, I’ll never tell a soul about them.”

“What?” whispered Miller.

“I don’t even know that woman,” the man said. “I was just trying to get a burrito. I had no idea what she was going to do when she killed him. Please let me go.”

“How long have you been in there?”

“Forever. Help me.”

“Let me think.”

“You’re… you’re not one of them, right? You gotta get me out of here.”

Screw it,
Miller thought.
At least he knows more than I do.
She made a decision. She tried the door. The knob didn’t budge.

“I can’t open it,” said Miller. “You’re locked up tighter than a flea’s butt. What have they been doing to you?”

“They keep giving me shots of God knows what. It feels like I have ants under my skin. And I’m starving all the time. The hunger gets so bad.” The man’s face writhed in the shadows. He seemed truly terrified.

“Take it easy, friend. What’s your name?”

“Alex. Alex Dragan.”

“All right, Alex. I’m Penny. Try to stay calm. Hold it down. I’ll see if I can get the damned door open and get you the hell out of there.”

“Hurry!”

Miller considered her options. She didn’t know if freeing Alex was wise, even if she could figure out how to do that, but she wasn’t about to leave him behind. Forcing the door open was bound to set off an alarm and bring someone to investigate, though Miller couldn’t understand why she hadn’t already been discovered. She needed answers. She also couldn’t just leave this guy to his fate. Rubenstein had to be performing experiments on this guy Alex—and perhaps every other patient in the secret wing. But then what could she do about that, or anything else for that matter? She didn’t have keys, or lock picks, or a gun, or anything that would allow her to get past the door and get Alex out of there. Even if she smashed the glass, it was embedded with wire mesh that would prevent her from climbing through to release him. Miller chewed her right knuckle. She needed time to think.

“Hey!”

Someone was standing right behind her
. Time’s up, Penny.

Miller turned just in time to see an orderly fumbling with his Taser gun. She had only one choice, so she charged like a bull with a sword up his ass. The man was surprised by the attack. He tried to step aside, tried to fire. Miller flat out tackled him while he was off balance, thus gaining an advantage despite the fact that he outweighed her by close to a hundred pounds. He went over backwards. The two of them slid across the floor, Miller on top. Miller pulled back and rolled off the man. She kicked his weapon out of the way. He was on his hands and knees now, fury darkening his features. Miller let him get close to position but timed her next move perfectly. Before he could center himself, she turned to the side and kicked hard. His body flew backwards. Miller got lucky. The orderly slammed his head into the far wall with a loud crack. He groaned, slid down the wall into a sitting position and went limp.

Miller looked around for the lost weapon. It had to be somewhere.

A second orderly appeared and saw his friend out cold. He wisely didn’t bother to shout a warning. Miller saw him coming but this time she did not run towards him. She was worried about the situation spiraling out of control. If she got killed, Scratch was surely a dead man. Miller raised her arms as if giving up. She crouched low near the wall. The Taser probes hit her, and she went down with a thump. Her body did the electric grid jig for a long moment. The damned thing really, really
hurt.

Miller groaned and rolled over. The guard was surprised by her resilience. He seemed to expect her to have been knocked unconscious.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Miller moaned. “I’m a girl, you big bully.”

The guard looked down. He was not amused. The leads were still attached to his Taser unit. He didn’t try to replace the probes. “You stay right there, miss.”

Miller lay still.

The guard fumbled for some other kind of weapon at his belt, perhaps Mace or pepper spray. He was apparently very serious individual.