Scott Sigler - Contagious

The man on the other side of the airlock door sounded both happy and angry at once. “If you do that, we’re going to torture you for a looooong time. Give them to us, and we’ll let you go.”

More footsteps outside, more men packing into the collapsible hallway.

Perry didn’t know what to do. He waited for Dew to say something, anything . They were so fucked.

“Perry,” Dew whispered, too quietly to be heard through the airlock door, but Perry heard him in his earpiece just fine. “On the containment cell’s control panel, type in pound, five, four, five, and then as soon as the airlock light turns green, hit five again.”

Perry ran the four steps to the isolation chamber’s door. He typed in the numbers. His fingertip hovered over the final 5.

A pounding on the airlock door.

“Time’s up, asshole!” the man outside yelled. “We’ve got a lot of firepower out here!”

“And I’ve got some in here,” Dew said. He raised his .45 and emptied the magazine at the hatchling cage on the left. Just like Perry’s shots from the day before, the glass spiderwebbed as bullets tore the hatchling to splattery pieces. Dew’s empty magazine hit the floor and he reloaded.

“You fucker !” the man screamed.

More footsteps outside the airlock, then a solid thump—the airlock door from Trailer A, closing.

The light above Dew turned from red to green. That equalized pressure in the walkway. Ogden’s men were coming in.

Perry pressed the 5.

Spray nozzles in the ceiling, the floor and the walls erupted with a heavy mist of concentrated bleach and chlorine gas. Perry’s visor instantly beaded up with the deadly liquid. They heard initial noises of confusion from outside the door, then screams of panic, coughing and vomiting. Gunfire erupted, but no bullets hit the airlock door.

“Make sure your safety is off,” Dew said. “Follow me, watch my back, and make sure you don’t point your gun my way, got it?”

Perry nodded quickly.

Dew opened the airlock door. Perry followed onto the collapsible walkway, the chlorine fog so concentrated that he could barely make out the three bodies lying on the grate, tearing at the small holes they’d shot in the walkway’s collapsible walls.

Dew pulled the trigger six times. Two for each man. They stopped moving.

Perry followed Dew but felt a slight pressure on his right thigh. His heads-up display flashed a message in orange letters—SUIT INTEGRITY BREACH.

He looked down at his thigh. A piece of metal in the shot-up, torn walkway had ripped a three inch gash in the suit. Chlorine gas roiled around the tear. Perry froze for just a second, thinking this was it, that his lungs would burn, before he realized that air was shooting out of the cut, not in. His suit’s positive air pressure.

Perry heard four more gunshots from inside the autopsy room.

“Dawsey, move it!”

He reached down with his right hand and grabbed the cut, bunching the material and sealing off the hole as best he could. He ran into the autopsy room.

Two more bodies. Dew reloading again.

“You idiot,” Dew said. “Did you tear your fucking suit?”

“Just go already!”

Dew turned and ran into the main decontamination chamber. Two more men clawing at themselves, trying to break free of the chlorine spray that shot into their noses, their screaming mouths, their eyes.

Dew killed them both.

A roar from outside and the tearing of metal.

“Get down!” Dew screamed as he dove to the bleach-wet floor. Bullets tore huge holes in the decontamination chamber’s wall. Someone outside opening up on the trailer. Perry hit the deck hard, adrenaline raging through his body. His hand came off the hole in his thigh as he hit, and he scrambled one-handed to close it up again.

Machine-gun fire sawed through the trailer walls. The air filled with flying chunks of white epoxy, yellow insulation and a disturbing amount of thin, jagged metal torn from the trailer’s exterior. An explosion rocked the trailer on its suspension, throwing Perry up in the air and smashing Dew headfirst against the wall. The walls buckled and twisted. Perry landed hard on a bent floor. Dew slumped to his belly, then rolled on his side.

“Dew! Dew, are you okay? What the fuck was that?”

“Grenade,” Dew said, his voice oddly calm. “In the computer center. They’ll throw one in here next.”

Perry saw chlorine gas roiling away from three spots on Dew’s helmet. His faceplate was cracked. Higher-pressure air pushed out from the new holes.

“That’s not good,” Dew said.

“No fucking shit !”

They were both leaking air. The compressors on their suits could only compensate for so long.

“Take the guy outside,” Dew said as he scrambled to his feet. “Hit him or we’re dead.”

Perry saw a gaping bullet hole at the base of the wall. Sunlight poured through, lighting up a beam of green mist. He crawled toward it and forced himself to look out. The guy was on top of a Humvee, shooting a huge gun mounted in a turret. Perry was wearing bulky gloves, spraying mist kept beading up on his visor, he held his right thigh with one hand and someone was shooting at him—but the guy was only about twenty feet away.

Perry rolled to his side and extended his left arm. He aimed Dew’s .45 at the man’s head and pulled the trigger until the slide locked on empty.

The machine-gun fire stopped.

The man went limp and fell sideways. He half-hung off the turret’s right side. He didn’t move.

Perry heard the seven-shot report of another .45.

“Perry, I’m outside!”

Perry scrambled to his feet, a little too fast—he caught another piece of ripped wall on his left arm, and the suit tore again. He didn’t bother looking at it, just ran out of the decontamination room and into the final airlock walkway. The last door hung partly open, bent and twisted, full of small holes. Perry sprinted the last ten feet, shouldered the door without breaking stride and found himself outside in a sunny winter afternoon.

Dew stood in the middle of the burned-out house, crouched in a wide stance, .45 in front of him as he swept it back and forth.

Not knowing what else to do, Perry did the same.

Dew emptied a magazine into the dead man in the Humvee turret. Just to be sure, apparently. He reloaded, then let out a long sigh.

“Fuck,” he said. “This is completely fucked, kid.” He took off his helmet and looked at it. Perry saw four or five cracks—the thing was useless.

“At least it served its purpose,” Dew said, and tossed the helmet away. He looked at Perry’s suit. “I don’t think brown sticky tape is going to help that.”

Perry looked at his left arm. Something had hooked the PVC just past his wrist, then torn the fabric almost to the shoulder.

“Perry, you sure that gate opens at one-fifteen?”

Perry nodded. “Yeah, totally.”

They heard engines, heavy vehicles coming down the driveway.

General Charlie Ogdenstood in the back of the Winnebago, waiting for Chelsea to say something. She just sat there, petting Fluffy. She no longer looked like an icon of love. She looked flat-out pissed, her small face furrowed with anger.

He knows we are here. He is coming.

“Are you sure? Sure they didn’t get him?”

I can sense him. You failed.

“What about the men we sent to attack Whiskey Company?”

They are dead. You failed.

Ogden said nothing. He’d known that all the men would die. Even with the element of surprise, the odds were just too great. But if he’d kept all eighteen men together, they would have crippled Whiskey Company. This was Chelsea’s fault.