* * *

As dawn began painting the distant horizon in strips of red, Joe Ledger and Sam Imura prepared to ride out of town on a pair of horses, a day later than they had hoped to. Ledger did a pretty good job of keeping a confident smile on his face, but no one was really fooled. He was sweating with pain as he climbed into the saddle, and sat gritting his teeth as the horse jostled and jangled him. Grimm, still in quarantine, howled so loudly they could all hear him blocks way.

“If we find Collins,” said Joe, his face running with sweat, “one of us will come back on her quad. With any luck, Site B will be big enough to evacuate the townsfolk to.”

Gutsy looked around at the town, then back at him. “This place already feels dead. Maybe it belongs to them. They can have it.”

Her words seemed to leech all the heat out of the day. Even Ledger shivered—though maybe it was a fever from his wound. Gutsy wasn’t sure.

She stood with Benny and Chong, watching the two soldiers ride away.

46

A FEW HOURS LATER, KAREN Peak called the group together in an examination room at the hospital. The large crowd that had met in Mr. Ford’s classroom a few days ago had dwindled, Nix and Lilah gone to California and Ledger and Sam off looking for Site B.

The body of the dead soldier was now covered by a bloodstained blanket. Dissection tools lay in a bucket of hot, soapy water, which told Gutsy that the postmortem had been performed. Part of her wanted to see what was under the blanket, and to understand the technical process of post-mortem; the other part of her was disgusted by the thought. She saw her friends glancing at the shrouded figure and figured they were having similar thoughts. Well, maybe only the disgust.

Dr. Morton sat on a folding chair next to the table, and Manny Flores leaned on the edge of the table, looking worn out and scared. “First off,” he said, “we confirmed that this soldier did not die as a result of a bite or from smoke inhalation.”

“Then what killed him?” asked Gutsy.

“A gunshot wound to the chest,” said Flores. “He bled to death.”

The room plunged into shocked silence.

It was Urrea who finally spoke. “Wait… he was alive? I don’t understand. This man wasn’t a zombie?”

“He was not,” said Flores. “We also did some spot-testing on the other bodies from the car wash, and none of them are standard reanimates.”

“What about the ones at the school?” asked Ford. “The ones dressed in civilian clothes?”

“They’re the same as this man,” said Flores.

“You lost me,” said Urrea. “So, if the car wash attackers weren’t ravagers or shamblers… what were they?”

Flores glanced at Morton. “Doctor, this is your mess. You should explain it.”

Morton fidgeted with the bandages on his left arm. When he began speaking, his eyes seemed to stare through rather than at anyone gathered there.

“First,” Morton said slowly, “I suppose I need to admit that I haven’t been entirely frank with you people about the full scope of the research being undertaken at the base.”

“Before you say one more word, let me say this,” said Gutsy. “If you don’t tell us everything now, you’re going to have a lot more to worry about than a few zom bites.”

Morton almost smiled. “I’m probably going to die and reanimate as one of those things, girl. Am I supposed to be scared by your threats?”

“You should be,” said Alethea, and her words hung in the air for a moment. Morton was sweating, but he tried to paste on an expression of professional calm. He wasn’t able to sell it, though.

“I intend to be frank with you,” he said frostily. “The autopsy confirms what can best be described as a worst-case scenario, which means I’m in as much danger as you. So, in case you think I’m doing this out of the goodness of my heart, think again. I’m a coward; I’ll admit it. I don’t want to die. I also know that you people need me because I’m useful, and I intend to leverage that. So… no more games.”

“Then get to it,” said Benny.

Morton nodded. “You need to understand that the main base—the Laredo Chemical and Biological Weapon Defense Research Facility—was not created to study Lucifer 113. It existed long before that; it was built even before the Cold War. The base was part of a bioweapons program launched in 1942 as a backup plan if the Manhattan Project failed.”

Gutsy heard gasps from Urrea, Ford, and Karen.

“What’s the Manhattan Project?” asked Spider.

“It was a top-secret military program,” explained Urrea, “launched in 1939 by the United States—”

Tags: Jonathan Maberry Benny Imura
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