Toxic (43 page)

After an hour, they continued their rounds of the neighboring businesses. Bruce got his hands on one rare useful object: a machete he found at the foot of an overturned aisle in one of the stores.

“This could be useful. We won’t always have bullets for the guns, right?”

The soldier agreed. They retraced their steps.

Because of its location between the shopping mall and the clinic, the MacDonald’s restaurant would make the ideal observation post. From the room with its exploded bay windows, the view looked over the highway, allowing them to spot dangers and warn the others on time.

When Bruce pushed open the shaky door, he stared at the landing. Immediately, he raised the 45 in the direction of the threat: a zombie behind the deteriorated counter, which started to grunt and whine right away. He was getting ready to shoot when Masters grabbed his forearm.

“No!”

Surprised by his reaction, the biologist took a step back.

“What’s gotten a hold of you?”

“Don’t shoot. That’s all.”

“But you said that we needed to...”

“She’s tied up,” the soldier cut him off, before advancing into the middle of the chaos of papers, cartons and boxes of all types among the remains of vegetables and mud.

“She?”

The colonel approached the counter. Then his face changed. He leaned against one of the rare tables still on its four legs.

“Are you OK?” the young man asked him, all of a sudden worried.

Faced with the lack of a response, he walked up to his mentor. The infected woman pulled with all her force against a chain attached to the foot of a stove. The pieces of her uniform showed that she had worked here and that before her transformation, she had been a blonde woman, rather large, maybe in her forties. Of course, she no longer possessed anything except the skin on her bones, so the guess was a cautious one.

“We shouldn’t leave a single one, even tied up.”

“No. I’m going to take care of her,” Masters told him.

“Very well. Do you want the machete?”

The grunts intensified. The creature was getting more excited. Its fingers scratched the surface of the wooden counters, which were stained with strips and snippets of rotten flesh. She opened her mouth in a frantic rhythm, making her black teeth crack to the roots.

“You go away. Go find the others. I’ll take care of her.”

When he turned towards the colonel, he noticed his weary features and his cloudy eyes. The biologist then realized the situation.

“Do you know her?”

With a broken voice, the soldier confirmed his suspicions.

“My ex-wife. Now leave me be a moment.”

N
aakrit showed himself to be receptive to interrogation techniques, the emissary judged, while watching the naked Russian under the beating sun of Dubai, upside down and with his feet tied to a crane via a cable. The human’s body, red like bark, shone with sweat. Did the mercenary understand that fear was not always proportional to pain levels? He had just achieved an important success by fulfilling his commitments to the Kuat Cartel. The feeling of a completed contract was perhaps filling him with a sort of satisfaction that made him prone to experimentation. The delivery temporarily relieved him from the commercial pressure exerted by demanding customers. One million units...

The Kuatians had liked the animal samples, according to the rumors that had been circulating since the Primark’s return. With his business once again underway and the potential for fabulous profits once again made reality, the troop’s morale had improved. As long as the situation remained manageable, Naakrit wouldn’t abandon the planet. Not without having tried every way to get his hands on the dividends of his efforts. And pay off his debts.

Since he arrived, the reptilian had treated the interrogation of the prisoners captured during the raid on the icy continent with priority. Jave had had the time to hone his arguments. Human bodies were accustomed to physical suffering. Their protection mechanisms included the use of screams, and when faced with too intense stimuli, their brain deactivated and the subject fainted. Then they had to wake them up again and restart the cycle of violence until the next loss of consciousness. Because of this, torture revealed itself to be quite an inefficient method.

Naakrit had therefore modified his approach to the issue. He ordered one soldier, who was sitting in the crane operator’s seat, to move the Russian. The machine’s turret pivoted and dragged him to the other side of the wire fence. The jib continued to rotate and then stopped, causing a slight pendulum movement. A deafening clamor rose form the mass of infected assembled below, obsessed by the meal about to fall from the sky. They would eat their prey alive in a few minutes.

“Speak to him,” Naakrit whistled.

The two aliens had climbed onto a raised platform at the foot of a small building whose façade had been destroyed by the combat. Jave leaned in with his chest.

“Ivan, my friend,” the emissary started, in Russian. “I suggest that you cooperate.”

“
Niet!
 If I tell you anything, I’ll end up cut into pieces. Isn’t that what you do to us anyway?”

His fear was well-founded, Jave admitted.

“We can come to an agreement.”

“You’d leave me alive in this rotten world? I’d rather die.”

The Primark gave a sign to the mercenary charged with operating a second crane. Very quickly, a second man was hanging by his feet at Ivan’s side. Below their heads, the tide of moving corpses got even more excited.

“Listen to me. Sergei is your friend,
da
?”

Jave didn’t wait for his response. “I’m sure that you don’t want to be responsible for his death. Not like this. Devoured by monsters; that’s not an honorable way to die.”

Naakrit leaned in with his bony head, skeptical about the translation proposed by the tera-servers. His mouth opened, revealing his two rows of teeth.

“Honorable?”

“I think it’s essential to establish a sort of emotional link.”

The Primark got agitated. “If you don’t get an encouraging sign in an octain of a second, I order you to drop one of the humans.”

“Do you want to write them off?” Jave provoked him.

“Hundreds of thousands of products are being captured in Africa and I delivered to an important client. I’ve regained wiggle room.”

The emissary understood the message. It was in his best interest to play one more card before the reptilian decided to speed things up, out of amusement or spite.

“Do you want to see the
rodina
 again? Was that what you told me?”

The Russian’s cheeks went taught, the Lynian noted.

“
Pojdite, chtoby trahnut’ sebja, esli Vy mozhete
!”

Not having understood the meaning despite the assistance of his software, Naakrit turned to Jave, who gave him the toned-down version.

“It’s slang. A relationship between their bowel movements and sexuality, I believe.”

“An insult?”

“I imagine.”

After a new signal to the soldier, Sergei dropped three meters. The grunts doubled and the infected became agitated, their arms raised, ready to rip the victim to pieces as soon as he hit the ground. Luckily, they weren’t capable of jumping that high. The foul odor made the torture victim’s stomach curdle and with his hands tied behind his back, he couldn’t plug his nose. Sergei couldn’t help but let out a heave. His vomit sprinkled the disfigured beings, which just increased their excitement.

Ivan didn’t react. The human was determined and resigned to death, but not his friend.

“
Niet! Niet!
” Sergei begged. Give them what they want! I can’t die like this.

The lack of a frank response caused another drop. Sergei bent at the bottom of the cable. He lifted his head, escaping the claws of the creatures, which were now in an uproar, with centimeters to spare.

“Ivan!” he yelled.

Naakrit observed the scene with amusement, Jave perceived, watching the far end of his forked tongue tickle his thin lips.

By twisting his body, the human caused a pendulum movement that the infected followed in the hopes of ripping off a piece of living flesh. Sergei pushed himself in the hope of maintaining the movement, which couldn’t be easy, as he was also turning around in circles. He wouldn’t last long like this.

“He’s smart,” the Primark analyzed.

“A scientist.”

“That won’t save him if the other doesn’t say anything.”

Jave ignored the remark and increased the pressure on Ivan.

“We know that there’s a cure and that to find it, we need the encryption key. The people who you were in contact with have information. All we want is to help you and to cure the people affected by the virus.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ivan yelled.

“Give them what they want!” Sergei yelled once again.

The emissary grazed his bracelet. A screen rose up to the stubborn human and presented an upside-down video.

“This was filmed by a drone in Florida. What you see is an individual who survived a horde of infected.”

Surprise and then disbelief passed over the face of the Russian.

“This is the proof that an antidote exists.”

Don’t let the subject have time to reflect, Jave told himself, putting on a sequence whose emotional charge was going to break his resistance, or so he was persuaded. He had kept it for the end as a last resort.

The image changed, revealing the portraits of two women.

“Tatianna and Veronica. We found these images in your personal belongings and we compared them to our database containing the biometrics of each prisoner.”

The Russian’s muscles contracted. His hands gripped each other behind his back. The Lynian had requested that a botcam film him close up to follow his reactions. His bracelet projected a three-dimensional image of the face overcome with emotion. It showed the blow.

“My family...?” he murmured.

“One of them is alive.”

The screen revealed a compact crowd of soldiers and civilians under a dome. Ivan recognized the uniforms of the Pacific fleet. Then the information feed focused on hollow features framed by blond hair.

“My daughter...”

“She was captured close to Vladivostok,” Jave specified.

“I... I want to see her.”

“I want the code.”

The Lynian understood that he had won even before the conclusion. Ivan’s pupils dilated and then became troubled, which, if he referred to what he knew about human physiognomy, resulted from the secretion of tears.

“I have your word?”

Sergei let out a sigh of relief.

“
Konechno, u vas est’ moe slovo
,” Jave confirmed.

Later, Jave joined Naakrit in the control room as the sun shone a red-orange hue.

“You impress me more and more,” the Primark declared. “Making use of our archived feeds to find that human... What would you have done if she hadn’t passed through one of our domes?”

The capture dated back nine months. Tatianna was somewhere in the Commercial Collective in tiny pieces. The emissary contented himself with a neutral response.

“It’s irrelevant. It worked. Period.”

“You obtained an excellent result,” the reptilian added. “We have what we want and that’s all that matters.”

Jave cut him short. “What’s going to happen to the Russians?”

“They’ll have the right to one last meal.”

In possession of the code, the Squil, a specialist in pre-tech technology, got to work on the computer. The Lynian watched him enter the sequence with the help of the keyboard, key after key. The operation was annoying. The machine wasn’t as archaic as previously thought, the expert had discovered. It contained Kroon nanotubes integrated into its principle structure.

Human devices relied on silicon chips that the races of the Collective had abandoned thousands of years ago in exchange for quantum models in the form of helicoid tubules folded against themselves. Their manufacture required a knowledge level beyond the scope of the local civilization. The obvious conclusion had rattled the head mercenary. The Lynian confirmed that for the time being, he had no explanation of the presence of this technology.

Thanks to the code and the Squil’s abilities, the hybrid machine revealed its secrets. After several octains of seconds, Naakrit whistled in deception. No black sand under the rock, he proclaimed, using the reptilian expression given to it.

Their efforts received little recompense but were not in vain.

In the middle of the listing of numbers, which the Squil guessed were just decoys destined to drown the important information, there emerged two series of coordinates and names. The absence of the least reference to a Site A frustrated Jave, who would have liked to get his hands on other samples. He was still wondering what meaning to give to the confusing results of his Nairobi experiment.

The Squil was still working on the computer. The machine was capricious and delicate to use, according to him. He succeeded at transferring the information to the mercenaries’ network. After a brief moment, the chief of operations turned towards his superior.

“We have determined the locations.”