“Enough.” He glanced down at his watch. “Keep working.” Then he turned on his heel and exited the room.
She glanced back at the screen. “Apparently, you’ve forgotten what I do,” she whispered, typing furiously and finding the code within minutes. She stood and left the room, walking through sterile white hallways to the medical lab. A keypad was on the door.
“Sami?” George Bankel asked, looking up from a computer. “What’s up?”
She smiled at the former Harvard computer programming professor. “Just stretching my legs. You?”
The man glanced at his clock. “Ah. Time to pray. I’ll be back.”
She’d known it was his time to face Mecca, and she waited until he’d left her alone in the center. Many people had succumbed to Scorpius, so the hustle and bustle of the computer center had ebbed. She ran past the refrigerators holding icky-looking vials of dangerous stuff and to the keyboard, typing in the code she’d uncovered.
The wall opened.
A long hallway stretched before her, the floor concrete, the walls a stark white. Blue doors with windows were set every few yards.
Her legs trembled, but she moved forward and looked inside the first one. It was a room that looked like a jail cell with a cot, toilet, and sink. A woman sat against the far wall, her arm in a cast, bleeding pustules all over her face. She looked up, her brown eyes already dead. “Kill me,” she whispered.
Sami stumbled back. Voices roared around her, all from different cells. Several faces pressed against the small windows, bruised and bloody. Oh God. There were so many test subjects.
“Sami!” Greg Valentin ran for her, his gun in his pants. He was a guard in the center, and he’d become her friend. “What the hell?” He glanced quickly around, grabbed her arm, and dragged her back into the computer room before shutting the door. “Are you crazy? They’ll kill you for going in there.”
She gaped. “You knew?”
He blanched, his dark skin flushing. “The doctors are trying to cure and understand the infection, and they need test subjects. Only people who’ve been infected already.”
Sami backed away from him. “That’s inhumane. We can’t do that.”
Greg leaned in. “There’s no choice. Go back to work, and don’t tell anybody what you just saw.”
She turned, bile rising in her throat. Oh, she was going to open those cells and let those poor people out . . . and then she was running like hell to get home to her family. If any of them had survived, she needed to find them. They were all she had left.
Months in the future, she woke up with a gasp, her heart thundering. Oh God. What were they thinking to consider going to the Bunker? The place was closer to hell than she ever wanted to get.
Yet did they have a choice? She’d do anything to save Tace, and this might be his only chance. Her body trembled. There had to be some way to shore up their defenses first. If not, then they wouldn’t stand a chance against the Bunker soldiers and their weapons.
In her worst nightmares, she’d known she would die back at the Bunker.
Was that just her imagination or was it a premonition?
* * *
Tace kicked back in his chair and studied the rough drawing of the Bunker on the whiteboard. Raze sat on his left, Jax on his right, and they all swirled crystal tumblers of Scotch. The good kind they’d found in a doctor’s office in Westwood. The three women had disappeared to try to get some much needed sleep. “Human experimentation. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised,” Tace murmured.
Jax winced. “I can’t imagine what they tried. I mean, if you think about how we’ve changed, how many brains did they cut into?”
“Gross.” Tace scrubbed both hands down his face. Sami had told them about a couple of files she’d found, and it was ugly. Everything from trying deadly cures to seeing how quickly a survivor could heal from different injuries—even snakebites. He focused on the physical layout of the Bunker and tried to banish the nauseating thoughts. “Looks tight,” he muttered, pointing to the center of the building.
Raze nodded. “If they have enough soldiers to guard each point, then it’ll be next to impossible to infiltrate with our current resources.”
“We need explosives,” Jax said, tipping back his drink. “Otherwise we have no chance.”
“Copy that.” Tace crossed his legs at the ankle and viewed the schematics of the elevators. “The entry point concerns me.”
“There has to be another way via stairs or a tunnel,” Raze agreed. “Sami said the workers only used the elevators to get underground, but once electricity went down, no way would the Bunker use generators in such a wasteful manner. Especially if they kept people prisoner there.”
“Or she’s right that the elevator shafts are the only way up or down,” Tace said thoughtfully. “That’s how she got out—by climbing the ladders set into the walls.”
Jax glanced toward his medic. “You okay with all of this?”
