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He led her through a maze of corridors to the medical wing and ushered her into a glass-fronted observation room. Grace maneuvered between counter tops and stasis chambers to peer through the long window into an adjacent exam room.
The girl was in bad shape, skin discolored, covered in welts and scratches. She was smiling the smile, gleeful, manic. Grace watched her make a circuit of the room. Eight or nine years old. Must have belonged to one of the technicians, maybe a project manager. The girl had been someone’s daughter.
Jacobs turned from a cooler at the far end of the room. Cupped in his hands was a white rat.
“Is it dead?” Grace asked.
Jacobs shook his head. He had to spit out the mouthpiece before speaking. “They’ve got hundreds in there, in stasis. I’d say we’ve got five, maybe ten minutes before it revives. I need to see what she does.”
Grace touched the rat’s side. Its fur felt cold and matted.
Jacobs secured the face-mask again, then motioned her away from the exam room door and entered, carrying the rat.
The girl reacted with no particular venom to Jacob’s presence.
When he offered his gloved hand, she took it without looking up. He lifted her and set her on the edge of a gurney. He left the rat resting beside her.
Back in the observation room, he took off the headpiece and set it on the counter.
“Now watch,” he said, leaning towards the glass.
The girl sat where he’d left her, swinging her feet, smiling the deranged smile. Beside her, the rat lay peaceful and motionless.
“Right now, its body’s still retaining carbon dioxide, but as it comes up, the emissions will be transiently high. It’s going to be a little CO2 bomb in a minute.”
The rat twitched violently.
When the girl moved, it was with unexpected ferocity, snatching up the rat and sinking her teeth into its side. Blood ran copiously, soaking into the front of her dress.
As Grace watched through the glass, the girl’s eyes turned up to meet her gaze. She was holding the animal to her mouth with both hands and then she let it fall. Blood was dripping from her chin and the rat lay motionless and red on the cement floor.
Jacobs had pillaged a battery-powered tablet from somewhere and was making rapid marks with the stylus, murmuring to himself.
There was a low, industrial whirring as the fans came on. Grace flinched as the ventilation system roared to life. Jacobs only stood with his head bent, tapping at the little screen.
On the other side of the glass, the girl began to pace frantically, scraping at the walls with her fingers.
“What’s she doing?”
Jacobs glanced up. Above them, ducts ran along the ceiling, their shining planes punctuated by vents.
“She’s just got a whiff of us,” he said. “The air’s circulating again.”
In the other room, the girl was scrabbling at the floor vents and then at the edges of a broad grate in the wall. It occurred to Grace that if the DEET worked like Jacobs said it did, then the girl wasn’t responding to it. That she must be smelling something else. Or maybe the DEET didn’t work after all, but was only a placebo. She did not know whether Jacobs had intended the fallacy to comfort her or himself.
“Are they really mindless?” she said, with her palms against the glass.
Jacobs looked at her strangely. “You mean, did they experience brain injury? If we could mitigate the reaction to incidental levels of CO2, we’d be certain. But no, I don’t think they’re stupid.”
The lights failed then, and the room lapsed into blackness except for the flicker of the tablet. Without ceremony, Jacobs lit the xenon lamp and continued his notations. Grace reached for her sidearm.
Out in the corridor, footsteps echoed. Multiple people-eight, nine maybe-and coming closer, but they were unattended by the manic sounds of laughter. Grace moved so that her back was to the wall.
Jacobs still scribbled on his tablet, letters slanting down in a frantic scrawl before the CPU converted them to type. He was talking to himself under his breath, alive suddenly, animated. His intensity had become frantic, bordering on possession, and it frightened her.
The door swung open and the strangers came in slowly, with wary looks and raised guns.
“Who are you?” said a tall, craggy man at the head of the group. He stepped into the light. “What are you doing here?”
He wore no uniform. Someone had sewn stripes onto the sleeves of his jacket, but the stitches were sloppy, inexpert. A scar ran across the bridge of his nose and then jagged abruptly down one cheek. Behind him, a contingent of men held firearms. Mostly hunting rifles and shotguns.
Grace moved forward, standing at attention. “Private Maureen Grace and Sergeant Rabe Jacobs, 68W.”
The man nodded. “Trask,” he said.
He gave no rank and did not need to. His ma
She glanced at Jacobs, who sat limply, watching the newcomers with the air of someone drugged. “We’re investigating a possible course of action. The sergeant’s developing a theory and has acquired a research subject.”
“This research subject here?” Trask said, raising his pistol to the glass. “This raggedy little bitch right here?”
At the desk, Jacobs set the tablet down. “What are you doing? She’s not a threat, you moron. She’s just a little girl.”
The look Trask gave him was long, calculating. “And she’d have your throat out in two seconds.”
“I had her calm. I had her sedate, even when I was in the room. We have all the preliminary evidence necessary to pursue this. Are you listening? We could alleviate their aggression. We could fix them!”
“And lead them around like pets? Keep them until they’ve had enough one night, and kill us in our beds?”
Jacobs scrambled up from the desk. “It is our duty to cure them.”
“There is no cure,” Trask said, coming down hard on each word. “No cure but to rout them, and pick them off one at a time until it’s over. There’s no way to play nice and then go home.”
Around him, the other men nodded, their gestures tied to his orbit like moons or planets. Grace watched them. Trask embodied all the qualities vital in a leader. His voice was low and commanding. His face was honest. It promised suffering to anyone who got in his way.
Above them, the ductwork clattered. In the eerie glow of Jacobs’s lantern, the men started, raising their weapons to the ceiling.
Grace crossed to the observation window and pressed her face to the glass. “She’s gone, sir.”
When the ventilation duct dropped down into the observation room, the sound was very loud. The whole apparatus seemed to peel away from the ceiling-a long, shining arc that hung for an instant at its apex, then crashed to the floor with a deafening clang.
Grace watched as a dim figure scrambled out on hands and knees, slashing and clawing at everything in reach. Lank, dirty hair, tattered dress, dark splatters down the front. Then nothing but the smile. The handgun was light, not powerful, but efficient, up out of the holster and in her hand. She put the girl down from eight yards.
Beside the desk, Jacobs lay under the remains of the duct. The aluminum had torn jaggedly, like a mouthful of teeth. Her ears still rung with the sound of metal striking cement and on another plane, laid over the metallic clatter, the shot echoed again and again.
She did not recall crossing the room, but there she was beside him. His cheek had been raked open and he gasped for breath, looking up at her. A dull, shocked look, like he was offended by the treachery of the world. The wound in his side was long. Not a puncture, but a ragged gash, first through the material of the biohazard suit and then through his skin and after that, the subcutaneous fat. The blood was bright, arterial red.