AN: Here we go, another little chapter.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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A few days in the basement of the CDC was long enough to enjoy the thought of never going back out into the big bad world, but that's all it was. It was a thought. It couldn't be the utopian existence that everyone seemed content to believe that it might be.
But it seemed to Alice that she was the only one that had thought of that.
Everyone distracted with one thing or another, Alice took herself on a tour of the facility. The CDC, above all else, was a medical facility. It wasn't the Holiday Inn and it wasn't a scenic bed and breakfast. Things had been treated and studied there that most people would shudder to even know had ever existed.
And Alice was curious about a few things when it came to this place that was supposed to be their Promised Land.
The facility was all but abandoned, as evidenced by the presence of only Jenner. Everyone else was gone…everyone but him.
And that raised some concerns.
But Alice soon realized that anywhere she might like to explore was locked by code. Computers ran and buzzed in a main room, but any that she tried to access demanded from her the thing that she didn't have…a code.
And she knew that this wasn't like trying to break into a coworker's laptop to play around on the internet during some break. She wouldn't dare to try to figure out the code because she didn't know what "getting locked out" might mean for everyone around.
While she was looking around the computer room, checking to see if any happened to be conveniently signed in, she heard the sound of a man clearing his throat and jumped when she turned to find that Jenner had snuck up on her.
"Curiosity killed the cat," Jenner said. He chuckled. "In your case…curiosity killed the Cheshire cat, I suppose."
Alice forced a smile.
"That's what I've heard," she said.
"Dr. Alice Walker," Jenner said. "Publications?"
"I wasn't that important," Alice said. "I published a few graduate level articles, but nothing that anyone else couldn't have figured out."
"Smart lady," Jenner said.
"I have my moments," Alice said.
"It's lunch time," Jenner said. "Your friends are missing you. Aren't you hungry?"
Alice shook her head.
"Not particularly," she said. "How long does it last, anyway?"
"Lunch?" Jenner asked. "Until everyone's done eating, I guess."
Alice shook her head again.
"The food," she said. "How long until the supplies runs out?"
Jenner started to walk away and Alice followed him quickly. He looked back over his shoulder with some irritation, but a little irritation wasn't ever enough to deter her. She followed him to what was clearly his office. He gained access to it with a key that he had and Alice followed him inside.
"You can't answer that?" Alice asked. "How long until the food runs out?"
"The food won't run out," Jenner said. "This place was stocked for years. It was stocked to feed nearly a hundred people for up to a year…and to feed them well."
Alice quickly tried to run through her mind how much food that might be. It would have been enough to save a small country somewhere from starvation, perhaps, but it would run out. Even if it was more food than her brain could even fathom, it would eventually run out.
"But it'll run out," Alice declared. "What happens when the food runs out? We run again?"
Jenner sat down in the plush office chair in his office. For a moment it was as if he'd forgotten her presence entirely. He clearly wasn't going to answer her inquiries about the food.
"I told you," he said. "Those doors aren't opening again. Don't worry about the food."
Alice perched on the arm of one of the chairs in his office that would have been used with whomever he needed to have any sort of conversation with during business hours. She clearly wasn't the person he wanted to see sitting in those chairs.
"How can I not worry about starvation?" Alice asked. "My friends and I starving to death? It just so happens that it's pretty damn important to me."
Jenner smiled.
"It shouldn't be," he said. "You won't starve. The food isn't running out."
And Alice suddenly had a very good feeling that this was as close as she might ever come to having tea with the Mad Hatter himself. She chuckled to herself.
"I have another question for you," Alice said.
"Of course you do," Jenner said with some irritation. "You're impertinent that way. What is it?"
"How is a raven like a writing desk?" Alice asked.
Jenner looked at her and she raised her eyebrows at him. And he smiled so she mirrored his expression. But it worked enough to make him laugh a little and change the level of guard that he had up.
"Where did everyone else go?" Alice asked.
"I told you," Jenner said. "They're at lunch."
"Your coworkers," Alice said. "The CDC was never a one man operation. It was also never stocked for a hundred people to remain when there was only going to be one man here. Where are the others?"
Jenner tried to ignore her. Since she wasn't going anywhere, though, he finally rolled his eyes up in her direction and put his elbows on the desk between them like he was about to tell her what the results of her tests were.
"They opted out," Jenner said. "I told you that."
"How?" Alice asked.
"Excuse me?" Jenner asked.
"How did they opt out?" Alice asked. "Do you have weapons here? Did they leave or did they commit suicide? How did they opt out?"
When he raised an eyebrow at her, Alice smiled again.
"Morbid curiosity," she offered with a shrug.
"Some left," Jenner said, "in the early days. After that? They hung themselves mostly. Is that morbid enough for you?"
Alice nodded her head.
"How did you get the Walkers?" Alice asked.
"I'm going to have to ask you to excuse me," Jenner said. "I'm sure you'll understand. I'm really quite busy."
Alice stood up and put her hands on the desk, leaning down close to his face.
"You're not busy," she said. "You don't have a single thing to do. This place is almost closed down. You and I both know that. Just like we know the food is going to run out one day. How did you get the Walkers for the experiments? They had to come from somewhere."
Jenner stared at her. He was clearly not a man who liked to be confronted. He was the kind of man who had probably turned up his nose at the thought of women in science. Alice knew the kind. She'd had one as a mentor once…if mentor was even the proper word for it.
"If you haven't noticed, Dr. Walker," Jenner said, hissing out her name despite the boredom he heaped into his other words, "they're everywhere. They're not entirely hard to come by."
"So you went outside and you caught them?" Alice asked. "With your bare hands?"
She couldn't explain it, but there was something off about Jenner. There was something that was making her uncomfortable out him. He didn't seem to have the personality to do something like kill someone, but there was something about him that seemed just off enough that she couldn't discredit the possibility entirely.
What was certain was that he'd been doing experiments on Walkers, to try to understand everything that happened to them, and he'd mentioned to that to them all. What he hadn't mentioned, really, was how he got the Walkers or how long he kept them hanging about.
And Alice was beginning to wonder if he might have infected his own coworkers to keep feeding his need to experiment.
And if that was the case…what if they'd just walked into his trap like rats?
"The test subjects were volunteers," Jenner said. "Experiments were done on people, just like with every other disease studied within these walls, who willingly donated their bodies to science. Their reanimation occurred in controlled environments."
Alice walked past him and over to the window of his office that looked out over the computer room. Once he might have supervised people from that window. Now he was supervising empty chairs and computers. The people out there were nothing more than ghosts at best.
"What made you stay?" Alice asked. She turned around and looked at the man.
"I believe it's time for you to go, isn't it? Surely your friends are curious about where you are," Jenner responded.
"They don't care about me," Alice said. "I'm just an extra they picked up somewhere…nothing important."
Jenner held her eyes a moment.
"Why did you stay?" Alice asked. "What made you stay when everyone else was bailing out? Did you love your job that much?"
"Did you love yours that much?" Jenner asked.
"I left," Alice said. "If you haven't noticed…I'm not in a hospital anymore. I think the guys with the big guns trying to shoot me were like my eviction notice. But not you…you stayed. Why?"
"Why do you ask so many questions?" Jenner asked with a chuckle.
"Character flaw," Alice responded. It wasn't the first time someone had asked her the same thing.
"I stayed because I believed what I was doing," Jenner said. "I made a promise that I would stay. I made a promise to someone special that I would stay until there was a cure. I'd stay until the end. Whichever came first."
Alice heard something in his voice and she was struck because his words made sense to her. They made more sense to her than she really liked admitting anything this man said made to her.
"Who was it?" She asked.
"It doesn't matter," Jenner said. "I let her down anyway. There's no cure…now there's just waiting for the end. And then…"
"And then?" Alice asked.
"And then we become one of them…" Jenner said.
"In here?" Alice asked. "Not unless you infect yourself."
Jenner looked at her and offered her a smile that almost looked like grin of the Cheshire cat that he'd mentioned earlier.
"It's time for you to be going, Alice," he said. "It's almost tea time."
Alice narrowed her eyes at him.
"Just one more question," Alice said.
Jenner stood up and slammed his hands on his desk.
"I am tired of your questions! Don't you understand? They don't matter anyway! Nothing you can ask me matters anymore! The world is gone! It's over, Alice! It's over for me and it's over for you…and it's over for every one of them. There's nothing left! Why do you care enough to ask questions that can't be answer?" Jenner asked.
"Because you care enough to ignore questions that can be answered," Alice responded. "How long do we stay here before we're going to be forced to leave? How long do we stay here before we're out of food? How long does the electricity last? There is still a world out there, even if it doesn't look like one we've seen before. So how long are we in here before we hit the road again? How comfortable do we let everyone get?"
Jenner got up quickly and rushed to her fast enough that Alice thought he might attack her. She backed up, tripped over her own foot, and slammed into the wall behind her. She might have slid down it, but Jenner caught a hand and hauled her back up on her feet. He smiled at her.
"You remind me of someone I used to know," he said, his voice lower. "She was like you…at it until the end. But her end came too."
Alice swallowed, but she didn't dare to respond, unsure of what the man might do at the moment.
"Come here," he said, tugging her by her arm.
Alice followed him and he pointed to something that looked like a clock on the wall, except it was ticking down like a digital hourglass.
"That's how comfortable you can get," he said. "Get comfortable. That's it. That's the end of it all. The food won't run out…the electricity will…and that tells you when."
Alice looked at it, closed her eyes, and looked at it again. If it was right, they had less than an hour ticking down.
"And what?" Alice asked. "We're…we're leaving?"
The pounding in her chest told her that wasn't what they were doing, though.
Jenner laughed at her and then he squeezed her arm tight. He nearly yelled at her, probably in pent up frustration from her earlier line of questions.
"This is the CDC, Alice," Jenner yelled. "You're a smart woman. Every disgusting, noxious, deadly germ known to man has passed through these walls…plagues that would wipe out the world if any of it were left. What do you think happens when it can no longer be contained? Decontamination."
Alice didn't have to ask for clarification. She knew exactly how something like this would be decontaminated, and it wasn't with rubbing alcohol.
"We have to leave," she said. "We've got to get out before…"
"NO!" Jenner yelled. "Don't you understand? It's fast…it's quick. It's painless. Let them be happy until they go. Don't tell them. If you tell them then they'll do what? Go back out there? Your leader begged me to come in here! They want this."
Alice shook her head at him.
"You can't just kill everyone!" She screamed back at him. "Are you fucking crazy?!"
"You can't leave," Jenner said. "The doors won't open. We're already under lockdown. There's no way out. You might as well sit down and calm down while you wait."
Alice snatched away from him and fled the space, running in the direction of the place she hoped all her friends were gathered to heat. Maybe Jenner was right…hell…maybe she'd slipped right on down the rabbit hole after all.
But they had to try.