Lost Roads (Benny Imura 7)

—THUCYDIDES

53

GUTSY CONTINUED FOLLOWING THE YELLOW lines. Going deeper. She was relieved that so little of the complex was damaged down on the lower levels.

Because the hazmat suit she wore was completely sealed, her body heat had nowhere to go, turning her into a walking swamp. So much sweat ran down her legs that her feet squelched inside the boots. But she didn’t dare open the hood and take a sip of water or let a breeze in.

Everywhere she looked there were signs of panic and violence. An open doorway surrounded by bullet-pocked walls. Blood splashed high from the force of opened arteries. A few corpses with head wounds. A headless man dressed only in boxer shorts. They were evidence of small battles lost, where both the living and the dead had wandered off, recruited by default into the Night Army. Or, perhaps, the wild men.

The yellow lines ended at a massive metal door set with an airlock. The door stood open, propped by a leather swivel chair. Gutsy stopped and stood looking at a message someone had written on the wall in blood:

GOD FORGIVE US

The airlock was set into a concrete wall reinforced with plates of steel. Morton’s notes included a method to bypass the lock, but it wasn’t necessary. She left the swivel chair in place to make sure the door would remain open.

Directly inside was a kind of mudroom, with clothes hung on pegs and five brand-new and undamaged hazmat suits. They were of better quality than the one she wore, but she didn’t dare change.

The mudroom led to a much smaller airlock that was similarly blocked open, this time with a small metal trash can. Gutsy stepped over it, placing her feet deliberately to avoid noise. The suit itself rustled a bit, but there was nothing she could do about that except pay attention to the room, listening for sounds, watching for movement.

Morton had warned her about the facility’s biohazard alert system—something he called a BAMS unit. He’d explained that this was a bioaerosol mass spectrometer, which was a device that could detect infectious particles in the air. There were BAMS units positioned throughout the facility. As she stepped inside, one of the units mounted above the inside of the door began flashing a red light and—exactly as Morton had warned her—two ferocious jets of steam hit her from either side, and a third blasted down on her head with such force that it drove her to her knees. The steam jets, Morton said, were filled with a strong combination of antibacterial, antiviral, and antifungal agents, as well as some kind of solvent like bleach. It blasted her for ten seconds and then abruptly stopped, leaving her gasping.

She struggled back to her feet, trembling and scared.

“Keep going,” she urged herself. “Don’t stop.”

Gutsy moved from beneath those spray heads into a much larger room. She had expected to find a laboratory, but it was really more of a combination clerical office and storage unit. Rows of desks lined one side of the big room, and rank upon rank of heavy metal cabinets faced them across a narrow walkway. The cabinets each had a number stenciled on them, 001 through 012. Morton had been very specific about what things he wanted from cabinets 003 and 009.

Four emergency lights cast the room in a dirty yellow wash that pushed the shadows into the corners but did not dispel them. Gutsy didn’t trust those shadows, but time was ticking away; so she threw caution to the wind and began moving fast. Morton’s notes told her where to find a durable foam-lined cooler from a stack of them against a back wall. They were each marked with a biohazard symbol like those that could be found on abandoned trucks from the Centers for Disease Control that were everywhere in the Broken Lands, on walls all through this complex, and even on the hazmat suit she wore.

She hooked a foot around another swivel chair and pulled it over to the cabinets, set the cooler on it, opened the top, and then reached for the handle of 003.

A sound made her stop, as still as a statue.

It was not a growl. Not a moan. Not even the scuff of a shambling foot.

The sound was the cold, sharp, precise click of someone racking the slide on a pump shotgun.

54

“DON’T SHOOT,” CRIED GUTSY WITHOUT turning. Her body was rigid with fear.

There was a scuff of a shoe on the concrete walkway behind. She didn’t know what to do. Most los muertos couldn’t use a weapon, but if this was a ravager, then she was going to die very badly.

The silence stretched, and Gutsy strained to hear something—anything—that might give shape and meaning to what was happening.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Another scuff. Closer. And now Gutsy could hear the person behind her breathing. It was soft, rapid, and pitched slightly high. She didn’t know for sure, but her gut told her it was probably a woman.

“My name is Gabriella Gomez,” she said.

There was no reply, but the breath paused for a moment.

“My friends call me Gutsy.”

Nothing.

“I’m from New Alamo.”