Chapter Ten.
"The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous."
-Aldous Huxley
Author's Note: I would love to say that I haven't updated because I've been really busy or something, but to be honest, I'm just lazy. So, without further delay, here is chapter ten! It's written totally out of order, because I DO WHAT I WANT, THOR.
Some housekeeping matters: due to recent activity taking place on fanfiction . net, I have temporarily removed the explicit scene from chapter seven, and I will be hosting it on Ao3... once it stops crashing. My username on there is tori_tots. Additionally, because fanfiction . net has announced the ability to create covers for your stories, I got ahead of myself and made one, a link for which is on my profile.
It was so fucking hot in Mali. Sweat clung to the collar of Max's blue button down shirt, a poor choice for the weather. The room was spartan, reinforced metal walls and a concrete floor. He sat with his hands cuffed to the back of a flimsy folding chair. A woman's thick voice poured in from the hallway.
"You mean to tell me that he has not completed his degree yet?"
"Not yet."
"Then what do you bring him to me for?"
"Why, Miss Gionne, he is my son."
"Do you think that means anything to me?"
When he had first entered the facility, Max had been stunned to see hundreds of men toiling in the lower portion of the factory. Their task was a decidedly unsavory one: lifting up dead bodies and hurling them into the furnace. The glazed look in the factory worker's eyes brought to mind a story Simone told him once.
And then the witch doctors rounded up all the men in the village and cast a spell on them.
He heard the woman arguing with his father again.
"Do you know how much cleaning up your son and his friend's security breaches have caused me?"
"Miss Gionne, with all due respect, it is not my fault that your mercenaries turned against you."
The witch doctors were working for the sugar plantations.
"You left the brains of the organization up in Berlin, and bring to me this sniveling wreck you call your son. We will be lucky if Richter and Wagner are recovered alive."
"Are you implying that those boys were responsible for my son's work?"
"Mr. Fischer, your son couldn't engineer his way out of a paper bag. I needed Ritcher and Wagner."
So the zombified—don't laugh, they were real zombies—the zombified workers labored day and night to cut down the sugar cane.
The door opened with an unceremonious clatter. His father came in, staring down at his shoes. The great David Fischer, sinking inside his sweaty black suit, cowering before a woman who couldn't have been much older than Max. The woman who had been arguing with his father outside the door looked more like a socialite than a pharmaceutical mastermind. Her brown hair was done up in a massive bun, and she wore a distastefully low cut dress. Of more interest to Max than her breasts was the pistol she held in her right hand.
Well, what happened to the witch doctors, once everyone was a zombie?
"Hello, Max," she said. Her throaty accent made everything sound like a curse.
"Miss Gionne."
"I have some questions for you."
Max nodded in response. His father paced around the room, rubbing his temples.
"Where is Heidi Kline?"
"I don't know, Miss Gionne. I haven't seen her since the incident with Simone."
"The incident. Of course," Gionne rolled the word incident for what felt like an eternity.
"Where is the sample?"
"It's in the lab."
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely."
You always ask the weirdest questions, Max.
"Who engineered the virus?"
"Myself, Ulrich, Peter, and Luke. Heidi took a few peeks at it, but she didn't touch anything."
"And if you were given the necessary materials, do you believe you could replicate your results in the lab?"
"Yes, I could." Max puffed his chest out a little. The truth was, he wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of anything they gave him. Most of his lab work involved brewing coffee.
Anyway, once they had all their zombies, the plantation owners killed the witch doctors, so no rival companies could learn their secrets.
"That's a shame, Max. The sample must be destroyed. Even the copies up here." The woman tapped her temple with her free hand.
Max added one more talent to Miss Gionne's repertoire. Pharmaceutical genius and an excellent shot. Right between the eyes.
The scariest thing about that story is that it's true; don't you think so?
Excella forgot that Max was still handcuffed to the chair. It fell with him to the floor. She winced at the sudden noise.
"You just killed my son!" David Fischer yelped.
"You are rather perceptive."
"You crazy bitch!"
Excella's mouth twitched as she pointed the gun at David.
"Your son was a waste of breath. I need the boys who made the virus. Right now, they are being held hostage by my own employees. I want you to listen to me very carefully, Mr. Fischer. I cannot afford to have any loose ends."
"Where the hell is Dr. Travis? He would never approve of this nonsense!"
"Dr. Travis is dead."
"Then who's the CEO?"
"You're looking at her, Mr. Fischer."
Excella fired the gun again. The bullet pierced straight through the blue tie David Fischer had insisted on wearing, despite it being well over eighty degrees. She gave the room a cursory glance and picked up her mobile.
"Darling, I'm going to need a clean up crew in C-42. And a new Research Director."
Tragedy strikes Tricell Incorporated once more this evening, after the untimely death of CEO Dr. Gordon Travis. Travis suffered from a heart attack, possibly the result of mounting stressors, such as the hostage situation in Berlin, where two budding Tricell researchers are being held by a terrorist faction who oppose Tricell's recent forays into stem-cell research.
"That's bullshit," Agent Hayes commented, observing the television.
"What's bullshit is that we're hearing about this on CNN," Hunnigan replied. She wasn't one for strong words, but the situation was beginning to spiral out of control—even moreso than when her top agent went rogue, and a less than flattering picture of him showed up on her desk—something she had not thought possible until now.
"I'm having trouble getting intelligence on Tricell," Hayes responded.
"Is Broom coming in yet?"
"Broom's mobile is off."
Hunnigan grit her teeth. No agent of the US Government was ever supposed to be unreachable.
"Who are you talking to in Tricell?"
"Their press representative. I can't very well send a squadron of agents to Africa. We don't even have a motive, or a suspected crime at that."
"Simone Braun was shot in an apartment owned by David Fischer, with a gun owned by David Fischer. His son was dating her."
"I do agree that the situation is tragic, but how does it warrant the CIA's investigation?"
"The son worked in the lab with the two boys being held hostage right now. We suspect they were building a bio-weapon. One member of the lab group is dead, the other is in our custody right now after an attempted assassination."
Hayes' face lit up with the sudden realization.
"So, if they were building a bio-weapon, and now they're being picked off... Tricell must be behind it somehow."
"There's our motive." Hunnigan said. Her mobile began buzzing in her pocket. She pulled it out and answered.
"Hunnigan, this is Leon."
"Leon! Where are you?"
"I'm in Berlin... and it looks like there's about to be an outbreak."
"What?"
Behind her, Hayes craned his neck in an attempt to hear.
"There's a situation at the lab. The Tricell mercenaries were sent in to kidnap the two remaining researchers, but they went rogue and tried to take them hostage. The two researchers got infected, I'm not certain how... it's pretty ugly looking. So far, the infection doesn't appear to be airborne, but we don't know anything about the pathology."
"How did you get into the lab... you know, never mind. Have the police entered the building yet?"
"Nope. They still think it's a hostage situation. The Tricell mercenaries were... disposed of. Eaten, actually."
"Alright, I'll get in touch with the police department. You stay alive, and I think I can make all this business from earlier disappear."
Hunnigan snapped her phone down and turned to Hayes.
"Kennedy's on the inside of the lab. We've got two carriers loose. Batten down the hatches."
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment. In moments where the panic and stress should have crushed her, Hunnigan could see exactly what she was to do next.
Peter Richter couldn't have told you off the top of his head what an AK-47 looked like, though he might have been able to identify it out of a pile of guns. Regardless, he didn't need to know what kind of gun was digging into his back to know that it was bad news. The mercenary was a woman, he could tell that too, even though he was blindfolded. She had a scratchy voice—his comparison to the American Batman film had been received poorly, ended with the butt of a rifle colliding with his ribcage in a none too pleasant manner.
"Where's Luke?" he grunted, for what felt like the fifth time.
"Luke, Luke, Luke. All you ever talk about is Luke," she growled. "He's safe as a kitten, just as safe as you, provided that Tricell ponies up the cash soon."
"Why are you doing this? You're scared, aren't you? Scared of the advances we're making in science..." She smacked him with the broad side of her gun again.
"Honey, I don't give a shit about your science. The only thing that matters in my world is cash."
"It's a shame then," he began, pushing his wrists against the confines of the rope they were tied in. The knot was coming loose. "That your world is about to change rapidly."
Peter pushed himself to his feet, still blind for all intents and purposes, and took the ungraceful, yet effective, tactic of throwing himself forward, in a sort of armless body slam. He felt himself make contact with the woman, as she fell to the ground. The cheap gun clattered to the ground, almost discharging. The force of the fall on his wrists had pushed the loose knot to the breaking point. Peter pulled his hands apart and ripped the blindfold off his face. Disoriented from the buzz of activity in the past hour, he didn't think of doing anything to the mercenary, who was passed out on the floor from the head trauma, or to even take the gun. He wouldn't have known to do with it anyway. He had one thought, and that was to get to Luke, the man who was closer to him than any brother could ever be. Peter took off into the hallway, where he was greeted by the sight of another mercenary—this one was a large and muscled man, one he didn't have a chance of knocking over—waving his gun in the air over a hallway full of hostages.
"Hey, asshole," Peter called, invigorated by the life or death experience. The mercenary spun around and pointed his gun in Peter's face. "No, don't shoot me; I'm the guy worth the big bucks," Peter called, with a hysterical little laugh punctuating the statement. "Where's Luke?"
The man pointed wordlessly towards the adjacent lab door. Peter smiled and nodded, the remnants of his hysterics not quite faded. He took off in a proud gait toward the entrance. Had he been paying attention to his surroundings in the least, he would have noticed the mercenary reaching for his radio.
"Luke!" he yelped, slamming into the lab, upsetting a table of instruments. Luke was tied up on the floor, as he had been. Luke's captor seemed to be a little more capable than Peter's had been—Luke's knots weren't coming undone. The mercenary sitting next to Luke was a bird like woman in all black combat armor and knotty red hair, perched on the lab desk and brandishing her assault rifle. The room was white and sterile, with a centrifuge sitting in the corner, whirring away. The hum was maddening. This was the room they began synthesizing the virus in... maybe the sample was in here...
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" the bird woman asked.
"I'm getting my virus."
"Like hell you are. Don't think that just because I can't kill you, don't mean I wouldn't shoot you in the foot."
Luke gave a muffled cry. His mouth was bound—another point for birdy—but he could still hear. Peter, emboldened still by the endorphins and hysteria yelped out, "Try me, bitch!"
She was a damn good shot; hit him right in the foot. Peter screamed in pain, and took a lunge at the counter. Despite the pain, he almost laughed when he saw it. Those idiots had just been sitting on top of the virus. Peter smashed a fist through the glass and pulled out the vial.
"You shoot me, and I'll take this. You ever seen The Hulk, lady? It would be like that." He dangled the vial above his mouth. "You know, they said that this shit causes uncontrolled mutation. That doesn't sound all that bad right now. My friends are all dead, my work is ruined, and you've got a gun pointed at the only person I give a shit about anymore. You ever hear about Umbrella, back in the late 90's? They said it was a chemical spill, but the rumor is that their head scientist went nuts and released a virus, then he injected himself with something and turned into a monster. Sorry son of a bitch—but, we all want to be God's, you know? Science is ego food. You can't spend twelve hours a day staring into a microscope unless you think you're the best person who's ever done it."
She stared at him with wide set eyes. Peter laughed.
"I hope you were listening, because people will want to know what the last words of Peter Richter were." Peter walked over to Luke, still holding the vial above his head. He ripped the gag off of Luke, and then pulled the stopper out of the sample and drank half of it, pouring the remainder into Luke's mouth.
As their corpses bubbled and burst, the mercenary ran from the room screaming.
It was around two in the morning when they reached Berlin, but the city was wide awake. They parked the car two city blocks away from the campus. The black sky was cut with the lights of helicopters and police cars that partitioned off the campus grounds.
"What's the plan?" Leon asked Ada, as she unbuckled her seat belt and pushed open the door.
"We get in, take the sample, and get out," she replied, simplistic as ever. She pulled a gun from the back of the car and slid it into her jacket. "You might want to leave your backpack behind."
"Very funny. I'm just getting my gun out."
"Shooting mercenaries isn't really my style, so I plan on avoiding detection whenever possible."
"I wasn't anticipating doing a singing and dancing routine myself."
"Of course." Ada shut the car door and locked it. "Just follow me."
"Gotcha, captain."
They walked at a brisk pace down the street, trying to make themselves look for all the world like dazed tourists with no idea that they were walking into a potential biohazard. The night sky was a deep indigo—like ink spilled from some archaic well—punctuated by a dusting of stars. Leon kept his pace steady behind Ada, easing past the "Do Not Cross" barricade, slipping behind a tree to asses their position. The campus buildings were marble behemoths from another time, stately and ominous, casting long shadows across the ground. The air was thick, like it was about to rain. Up ahead, the science building was illuminated by the light of a dozen or so police cars.
They were in luck—security seemed to be concentrated to the front side of the science building. The unlucky part was that there was a helicopter scanning the perimeter, and a single guard appeared to be stationed at each exit. Ada bit down on her bottom lip, before coming to a decision.
"See that guard standing under the tree?"
"Yeah, what about him?"
"And you see there's another door to the left of him, about thirty feet?"
"Uh huh."
"Head for the door to the left."
"What? There's a guard there."
Ada pulled her pistol out, aimed it towards the guard to the right. Leon balked.
"What the hell, Ada?"
"Trust me," she said, not even bothering to give him a glance.
"No, you tell me what you're going to do," he spat at her, angry whispering in the dark.
"After all this, Leon?" she asked, no malice in her voice, just her typical snide tone, which somehow hurt more. It was distant.
He took a few cautious steps toward the door from across the grass. There was a gunshot that split the air, like a crack of lighting hitting a tree—just like lighting hitting a tree. Leon turned to his right, and saw that Ada had shot a branch off of the tree the guard had been standing under. The branch had merely grazed him, but the guard, who was probably just a university employee, was thoroughly spooked. He screamed, and the man guarding the door Leon was to enter ran to his colleague's aid. Leon took off for the as-of-now unguarded door, keeping in mind all the stealth tricks he'd picked up during his time in the Secret Service. He could hear the guards over to his right laughing about the incident. He slid down into a tumbling position—another trick he'd picked up, and nearly slid into the door, which he opened with a crack. Ada came in after him. He hadn't even heard her.
"How'd you do that?" Leon whispered.
"Practice."
Leon surveyed the area around them. They were in a dull stairwell, lined with white brick. The halogen lights above gently flickered. The sign on the wall read Untergeschoss, basement. A camera peaked at them from the ceiling. Ada caught Leon eying it.
"I'm sure the kidnappers have it on a loop. If not, we can just grab the tapes on our way out." Leon nodded, remembering that her last plan had worked. "Now then, let's go before the guards out there wise up."
The pair made their way up the stairwell, to the fourth level, where Ada recalled the lab was. Halfway between floor two and three, they heard an inhuman growl. It sounded like metal scraping together in a way, an ungreased cog stuck in a machine.
"Well, that's exciting," Leon commented. Ada began to reload her pistol.
"I only have a few bullets left."
"Sounds like the good old days."
Author's Note: Massive thanks to everyone who reviewed last update: Chanto, the real Berliner and a huge source of help; Ruingaraf, whom is a dear, and without her invite, chapter seven would be languishing on my computer in all it's porny glory; Riot Siren, who is responsible for keeping me sane while I write; Sara Nameer, who is super encouraging and wonderful, and inspires my lazy ass to write when I don't want to; and Bhernandez, who always makes me smile. You guys are the best. Also, lots of thanks are due to my unofficial sounding board, SLT, who keeps me writing even when I think I suck. Virtual hugs to you all!
Until next time.