"Who puts an office building underground?" asked Leon. He crept slowly down the hallway, on high alert. There didn't seem to be any activity in the hallway. Leon had to remind himself that if it was a normal office, that would make sense: it was getting to be pretty late at night.

"Oh, plenty of places," said Cecil. "It's great for those who pursue a subterranean lifestyle, and allows employers to be more inclusive."

Leo rolled his eyes and backed against the wall, motioning for Cecil to do the same. From there, Leon peeked around the corner. The hallway continued, much of the same. The branched off a little ways down, intersected by another hallway running parallel to the one they had come down and perpendicular to the one they now faced. At the end of this hallway was another metal door, much like the one they had come in through from the tunnel, with a glowing red EXIT sign above it.

"Look," said Leon, turning back to Cecil. "The coast seems clear. Let's get out of here."

"We can meet back up with Carlos once we get out of here and help with the vaccine," said Cecil. "Let's go."

The two men rounded the corner, making their way down the hallway. Some plain lacquered wooden doors were spaced as they went down, labelled as different offices with names that neither of the men recognized or remembered immediately after reading. Leon held his gun at the ready, and tensed when they reached the cross-hallway, which proved to be empty, reaching down about thirty feet both ways before halting, with one door on the wall in the direction they came from on each side.

Cecil tried the door, but it was locked. "Damn it," said Leon.

"There's probably a key in here somewhere," said Cecil, glancing back at the hallway and the many doors it held.

"Maybe," said Leon, "but we don't have time for this right now!"

"We don't have any options," said Cecil. He stalked to the first door, turned the handle, and found that it opened easily. He glanced inside, and then looked back to Leon. "Are you coming?" he asked. Leon reluctantly nodded and followed him.

Cecil switched on the lights, and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary for an office. There were two chairs set up, facing a desk. The desk was home to a desktop computer, a desk calendar, and a rolodex. Behind the desk was a bookshelf full of books of similar size and shape to each other. A few papers lay on the desk. Leon went around the desk and picked them up.

MEMO
TO: ALL EMPLOYEES
A reminder to attend the mandatory company vaccination before the town vaccination tomorrow. Beat the lines, use common sense: get vaccinated today! Your life, and more importantly, your job, depends on it! All employees who fail to do so will face the consequences of their actions.
Assemble in Conference Room B for your compulsory vaccination at four o'clock sharp.
MANAGEMENT

"That's weird…" said Leon. He turned to Cecil, who had his tongue stuck out at the bookcase in disgust. "What?"

"These books are… awful," he said. He reached to pull one off the shelf to show Leon, but recoiled before he even touched it.

"What?" asked Leon, moving to look where Cecil was looking. The books were all the same height, red with a black stripe at the top and bottom of the spine. They were labeled "StrexCorp Employee Manual," followed by a volume number and year of publication. The newest was dated to the current year, but tracing them backward, they went back in time very quickly, a long time. The books didn't seem to get older, though, as they progressed back down the shelves, all of the pages as bleached white as they would have been at their first printing, none of them yellowing with age.

"So StrexCorp runs this office…" said Leon, drawing a finger across the volumes.

"I knew there was a reason to hate them," said Cecil, clenching his fists. "And it makes sense."

"They would have the resources for the bioengineering of the T-virus," said Leon, "and could easily seem inconspicuous when delivering vaccines."

"We need to warn Night Vale," said Cecil.

"We need to find the key," said Leon. He turned back to the desk and pulled out the drawers, one by one, slamming them shut when he found nothing but meticulously organized office supplies. "There's nothing here," he said.

"Why don't we check another office?" asked Cecil.

"I think I've got a better idea," said Leon. He handed the memo from the desk to the other man.

"Conference Room B," said Cecil, scanning the document.

"I figure we should check there next," said Leon. "We might find out more about Strex's plot while we look for a key. I mean, we still don't know why they would want to release a bio-weapon." Cecil nodded, and they left the room, shutting off the light behind them. They walked down the hallway back the way they came, toward the tunnel, watching for the "Conference Room B" label on a door. When they reached the cross-cutting hallway, Leon glanced down to the left and right. He calculated for a moment, and then led Cecil to the right.

There was only one door off of this hallway, and it face them from the left as they walked toward it. A brass plaque on the middle of the plain door told them that they had reached their destination. "We'll go in on the count of three," said Leon. He stood with his gun at the ready, and Cecil placed a hand on the door's knob. "One," said Leon. "Two…" Both men were tense. "Three." Cecil opened the door to complete darkness. Leon kept his gun up, and Cecil felt around for a light switch.

"Ahhhh!" shouted Cecil, holding his hands up against the sight in front of him.

The conference table in the center of the room had three partially torn-apart bodies slumping over it, and six or seven more stumbling around the room, blood dripping from their mouths and hands.

"Holy shit," said Leon. He fired a shot into the skull o the closest zombie. "They tested the virus on some of their own." He fired another shot into another zombie, and it stumbled into a chair before crumpling to the ground.

"Is this what the T-virus is like?" asked Cecil, clutching his chest. His wide eyes darted from the waltzing carnage to Leon and back again.

"This is the tamer side of this God damn virus," said Leon, firing another shot and dispatching another zombie. They had all realized the men's presence in the room, and were bumbling toward them. He fired a few more shots and reached into his pocket, pulled out a new clip, and replaced it for his empty one. A few more shots, and the rest of the zombies were down. Leon lowered his gun. "Don't get too close to the corpses," he said. "They might still try to bite."

Cecil wasn't exactly comfortable with that, but he took a tentative step into the room after Leon, who went right to the table. He rummaged through some of the files that the former employees has left open on the conference table. "What do you make of this, Cecil?" he asked, holding up a sheet of paper. Cecil picked his way over, carefully stepping around the bodies on the floor, and examined the memo.

STREXCORP
SYNERNISTS INCORPORATED

You have been a very productive employee, and have appeased the Smiling God in such a way that you may be an integral part of StrexCorp's exciting new plans for Night Vale, which will soon be home to a strong and happy division of StrexCorp Synernists Incorporated. Your diligence and hard work will allow many others to also give up their entire lives to work for a glorious company. You have given your lives to your work, and StrexCorp is grateful and eager to take them.
-Management

"That seals it, then," said Cecil. "StrexCorp is going to try to take over Night Vale by turning everyone into zombies with that awful T-virus!"

"They're the ones who are running this operation, that's for sure," said Leon. "And they're serious enough to test on their own employees. Maybe making sure what they had really worked."

"Maybe that's how they took Desert Bluffs…" muttered Cecil. He shook his head. "No," he said, "they were a much of mindless zombies anyway."

"That means that by inviting Ada, they could be sure to protect the people they want to protect, and use her as their fall-woman."

"They'll take out the whole town," said Cecil, "and then just say that it was Ada."

"We have to get out of here," said Leon. "And warn people. And get the real vaccine out."

They moved to the door and left the zombie corpses behind. They entered the hallway and without having the deliberate, entered the first office that they came to. Had they not known better, they could have thought that this was the same office that they had already investigated. It featured the same books, desk, computer, and chairs. The men moved to the desk, and rummaged through the drawers. Their contents almost exactly matched those of the desk in the other office.

"This is eerie," said Cecil, shutting the last drawer.

"More eerie than the hidden underground office complex and the zombie conference?"

"Almost," said Cecil. They exited the room and tried the office across the hall. It also was almost identical to the other two offices. A quick search through the desk drawers yielded nothing, and Leon let out a frustrated snort.

"C'mon," he said. "Let's check the next one." Cecil followed him out of the room, and into the next office. It did not surprise either of them that the office looked basically just like the other offices. Leon marched right over to the desk and began checking the desk drawers. Cecil, however, hung back, observing the room. There was something about it that was different than the other offices, and it took him a moment to figure out what it was. He walked past Leon, who was having trouble with one of the drawers, and to the bookshelf, where he pulled down the one out-of-place manual down.

"This damn drawer's stuck!" exclaimed Leon. Cecil ignored this and placed the book in front of him.

"Look at this," he said. Leon took the book from him.

"'Android Care and Maintenance for Androids,'" he read. "That seems a bit redundant, doesn't it?"

"Not if you're a self-regulatory android set up to produce local radio," said Cecil. "Remember the man-android-thing in the garage? Daniel? This is his office."

"And?" asked Leon.

"And," said Cecil, placing the book back on the shelf where he had found it. "That drawer is locked. Probably because it contains something worth being locked up."

"Like?" asked Leon.

"Like they key out of the facility where a weaponized virus has been tested, especially if an android, who would not be affected by the virus, were to administer the test."

"Cecil," said Leon, relaxing, "you're a genius." Cecil grinned. "However," continued Leon, "we still need to get into the drawer, and it's still locked."

"Honestly," said Cecil, "this place is in order—to a point where it's sort of creepy." He lifted the desk chair, the swivel wheels rolling aimlessly in the air, and hefted it over his head. Leon's eyes widened and he backed out of the way before Cecil brought the chair down hard on the desk, breaking it down the middle. Cecil kneeled down and rummaged through the spilled contents of the middle drawer. It was a moment before he brought forth a plain key. A smile stretched across his face.

"Well then," said Leon, standing and brushing himself off. "Let's get the hell out of here."