The Hallowed Cure, page 30
“Finally!” Sharpe said. She slipped back inside.
Saul held the door for us as we ducked down and entered what looked to be a relatively well-maintained school building. Ahead was a long, straight hallway with narrow lockers on each side. I’d never seen any school like this one, but I hadn’t really had a traditional childhood.
Sharpe’s heels clicked on clean floor as she led us off as if she was still running her lab at Cloud Nine. “This way. I insist on having
my coffee before I explain everything again.”
“Why don’t you explain, Saul,” I said as we walked. “Fill me in.”
Walking beside me, with Lincoln and Frank shadowing us both, Saul spoke. “So you didn’t get my message explaining the current situation and requesting aid.”
“Nope.”
“Then why are you here, Riven?”
I waited a moment as I considered even more outlandish theories. Had Sharpe cloned Saul? Was he a Saul Bishop clone, working with Doctor Sharpe to get information out of me? Given how absolutely ridiculous my night have been so far, I couldn’t actually rule that out.
“Where’d you recommend I take Mia on our first date?” I asked.
“Ah,” Saul said, and smiled as he looked ahead. “Figaro Street.”
“And what’d you do before you joined Special Tactics?”
“A number of things, but the one we spoke about that day as we stared at the Eiffel Tower was musical theater. What about you, Grant? What was the first real civilian activity we undertook together after the war?”
“Clothes shopping.” I smiled with relief. “So you’re not a clone.”
Saul nodded gravely. “So you know about the clones. What else do you know?”
Before I could answer, Sharpe took a hard right. I grimaced as she opened a door and stepped into what might be a classroom.
After a glance back at my squad, I stepped in after her.
Inside was mostly long tables with stools. The tables were occupied by glass vials and bottles, gleaming machinery that looked like it been pulled right out of Ethan Gambleswitch’s lab at Cloud Nine, and what looked to be at least four cel-powered batteries running it all.
Also, there was a coffee machine. Sharpe removed the big jug and poured black fluid in a small cup. She then started ripping open tiny pink packets and shaking stuff into the cup. Sugar?
Either way, it looked like she was going to be at that awhile. I glanced at Frank. “You want to stay for the debrief?”
“Fill me in later,” he said in monotone. “I’d like to check the perimeter.” He looked to Saul. “If that’s all right with you.”
Saul smiled. “We’d welcome your assistance. You’ll find my associate on the roof. She’ll walk you through our current security arrangements.”
I nodded Frank’s way. “Be careful.”
“Always am.” He saluted as he stepped out, then closed the door with his third arm. Show off.
I turned back to Saul. “There’s signal jamming across the island.
We never got a message from you. When you failed to report back, Caitlyn thought you’d been captured or killed, so she sent in me, these guys, Mia, and Caley to find you. The plan was to drop us off to look for you while Caitlyn went on to the capital, but our plane got shot down.”
“Griffyn’s work, no doubt,” Saul said. “His Hallowed clones have access to large caches of former Cloud Nine weaponry, and a plane flying low over the city would attract their ire. Even if Griffyn hadn’t intended to draw you out there, his Hallowed would assume the plane would report the current situation to others. As for Miss Alexander, she is still alive?”
“We think so,” I said. “The plane went down mostly intact, and we found it with both medical and food supplies looted. Reese and Amber should be with Caitlyn if they all survived, but we don’t know where they’re holed up. I decided it would be better to deal with Sharpe than look for them. If they’re safe, we didn’t want to bring a bunch of zombies down on their heads.”
“But Mia’s not with Caitlyn and the others?”
“We got separated in the crash. Mia’s probably still in the city somewhere, as is Caley. They should still be alive if they... if they didn’t...”
Saul placed one hand on the shoulder of my armor. “She’s alive,”
he said calmly. “Remember who we’re talking about here.”
“Right.” I liked his confidence in Mia. I needed it right then. “So yeah, we came down in a foreign city and got separated. I found Lincoln and Frank, found Captain Sato—”
“You found Captain Sato?” Saul asked, interrupting me. “What has she been up to?”
“Scouting Sharpe’s facility. Killing clones. She was with us until she decided she was bored with waiting for your lookouts to spot us.”
“So you found her and then ... lost her?”
“Frank has a communicator that can reach her. She gave it to him.”
“How are you able to communicate through the jamming?”
“Who knows with Captain Sato?” I asked. “Important thing is she’s alive and will link up with us sometime soon, hopefully. We can communicate.”
“That is a relief,” Saul said. “Despite Sharpe’s continued insistence to the contrary, I was quite worried she’d captured and killed her, then refused to tell us out of fear.”
Sharpe cleared her throat. “I’m standing right here, you know.”
“We’ll get to you,” I snapped, and looked back to Saul. “So anyway, we tried to capture a zombie and interrogate it. I talked to us and said it was Jack Griffyn, and then we got swarmed.”
Sharpe set down her steaming cup. “So you know about Jack’s clone.”
Finally, something made sense. Sort of. “His clone?”
“I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject with you, given your history with the man. Now that I don’t have to worry about you calling me a liar,” and with that, she offered Saul a pointed glance, “it will make filling you in on our current predicament considerably easier.”
I glanced her way and kept my face calm. “All right. Your turn, doc. Time to convince me not to kill you. Why are you here, why is a clone of Jack running around, and why did you turn everyone on this island into zombies?”
“I did not,” Sharpe said. “Turn everyone into zombies, I mean. I was technically responsible for creating Mister Griffyn’s clone, but only on his explicit orders.”
“But she could have at any time,” Saul added grimly. “Turned everyone into zombies, I mean.”
Sharpe tsk ed and shook her head. “Not like this. I’d never be so sloppy as to activate them all at once, and thanks to Jack’s
carelessness, almost two years of irreplaceable and groundbreaking panacea research will soon be reduced to ash.”
I stared at her in growing disbelief.
“There’s no concealing our activities from the Republic of Singapore any longer,” Sharpe continued, as if that was the real problem here. “All we can do now is salvage what’s available.”
“Research.” I continued to stare. “Those were people out there.
Forty thousand of them, families with kids. You got a plan to salvage them, doc?”
“If I did, would I be seeking help from you?” Sharpe picked up her cup again and took a careful sip, then lowered it. “In retrospect, it may have been careless to infect them with the base agent without more safeguards in place. Yet how was I to know Jack Griffyn’s clone would wake up and throw a wrench into everything? It was supposed to remain suspended.”
So Lincoln’s speculation about Doctor Sharpe infecting the population of Neo Tao Payoh with panacea cells through food and drink was correct. It took a good bit of self control not to walk over and throttle this woman with my armored hands. Yet the clone part was new.
“So tell me how this clone woke up. Exactly.”
“I can only speculate.” Sharpe adjusted her glasses. “Cloning was, of course, a last resort. Mister Griffyn very much wished to live.
Yet if he could not do so in his current body, he insisted on having one made as a backup, one bioengineered to react to panacea exposure by becoming Hallowed. After he died, of course, I saw no reason to activate his clone.”
“But it woke up anyway,” I reminded her.
“Which, again, isn’t my fault,” Doctor Sharpe said calmly. “I believe it is the fault of the original Mister Griffyn, or rather, some lingering element of the panacea cells inside his body. You do recall that his body was absolutely littered with corrupted panacea cells, right?”
Like my body. Riddled with panacea poisoning. Still, she was still making about as much sense as a boat in the middle of a desert.
“Explain that to me again, but make it make sense this time.”
Sharpe sighed a very put upon sigh. “I believe surviving and corrupted panacea cells within the very dead body of Mister Griffyn communicated with the very live cells in his clone using the phenomenon you refer to as organic wireless. Whatever remained of the original Griffyn woke up his clone and ... merged, for lack of a better word.”
“And then clone Jack busted out and took over your lab?”
“The clone was Hallowed,” Sharpe said. “Very strong. In retrospect, we should have stored our research bodies and cloned bodies separately, but we had limited space and I had no idea then that panacea cells within a lifeless body could still communicate with others nearby.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “There’s no way that could happen.”
“Of course it could,” Sharpe said impatiently. “It did. Somehow, surviving panacea cells within the original Griffyn’s body communicated with and transferred data to those within the inactive clone. Think of like a virus, traveling from an infected host to infect a previously uninfected host, except through the principle of cross-cell contamination.”
“Organic wireless,” Lincoln added, probably trying to be helpful.
“And the panacea cells are their network, Grant, over which this clone communicates. Makes sense, right?”
“Does it?” I demanded. I didn’t know much about computers or computer networks, but Lincoln did. I’d trust him if he thought Sharpe wasn’t spewing complete bullshit.
“I don’t know how to dumb it down any more,” Sharpe said calmly.
She was lucky I’d already decided not to throttle her. “All right. So your sleeping Hallowed clone of Jack woke up and took over your lab. By itself?”
“That was the wrinkle I couldn’t have anticipated,” Sharpe said, and in that moment, she sounded almost excited. “We’d long figured out how to use the body of Eve Alexander for limited and directed panacea cross-contamination. I was close to figuring out how to use it as a command-and-control center for Hallowed entities within a
specified radius, which is the breakthrough that would have pushed us to a new horizon. Jack figured it out first.”
“And he ... what?”
“Mentally seized control of all active Hallowed clones in our facility,” Sharpe said. “With those fully under his sway, all remaining non-Hallowed personnel were easily purged.”
I considered everything Sharpe had just laid out for me. They hadn’t just made clones of Hallowed. They’d made a Hallowed Jack clone, and now it had full control over all the other Hallowed and apparently the bodies of all the zombies in the city, using the dead body of Caitlyn’s mother like a megaphone or ... something. It was all massively fucked up.
“So how do we kill Jack?” I asked.
Sharpe smiled. “Finally. An intelligent question!”
Saul stepped between us. “Grant,” he said warningly.
I focused on Saul instead of my desire to compress Sharpe’s head into something less resembling one. “How’d you capture her, anyway?”
Sharpe huffed. “No one captured me. After I recognized Jack’s clone had full control of our facility and was purging non-essential personnel, I evacuated through an emergency tunnel created for just such a contingency. It was only after I’d escaped that I encountered Saul Bishop and his small group of Special Tactics soldiers. I then enlisted them to protect me while we prepared an operation to deal with the clone.”
“So she walked out of her secret passage and straight into your guns?” I asked Saul.
He smiled. “Exactly right. We learned of the existence of the VIP
escape tunnel after interrogating one of the chief architects of the construction firm involved in creating the facility. We had planned to use it ourselves to sneak in and look for Captain Sato, but Doctor Sharpe’s unexpected arrival, and the subsequent transition of the majority of the island’s populace into panacea drones changed our plans.”
I glanced at Lincoln. “You were right, Linc. She infected them.
Just like your movies.”
Inside his helmet bubble, he looked rather pale. “Never seen a movie quite like this one.”
“Next question,” I said, and looked to Saul. “We’re safe here, I guess, since you don’t seem worried. So why aren’t you worried Jack’s zombies will overrun the school?”
“We are outside of his sphere of influence,” Saul said, and glanced at Doctor Sharpe again. “Doctor, could you explain?”
“Why not?” Sharpe asked sardonically. “We will continue to use modern networking terms, since those seem simpler for your minds to process.”
I waited in stoic silence. That, at least, seemed to bother Sharpe’s smirk.
“The radius of operation for Eve Alexander’s organic wireless ability remains limited,” Sharpe continued. “The facility in which it rests lies on the north tip of the island. We are almost to the south, and the current radius doesn’t extend this far.”
“So Jack can’t send his Hallowed drones or zombies after us because he loses direct control once they’re out of his range,”
Lincoln said with what sounded like relief. “Like a remote control car that rolls beyond where you can drive it.”
Sharpe nodded. “A weakness the clone will no doubt learn to counter in days, not weeks, if left unchecked. I hate the necessity, but at this point, the only way I see to stop this clone from extending its reach across the island is to destroy the entire facility.”
“Why the entire facility?” I asked. “Does that mean if we kill this Jack, he can wake up another clone? How many clones did you grow of the old bastard?
“Only one,” Sharpe said. “Jack, however, has likely been producing new clones of himself since he woke up. I suspect most will be ready within a day or two.”
“So how do we take out an entire facility? Self-destruct button?”
“Yes,” Sharpe said.
“The facility has a self-destruct button,” Lincoln whispered. “Oh wow, that’s cool.”
“You’re fucking with me,” I told her. “Those aren’t real.”
“This one is,” Sharpe said. “Shaped charges and architectural weaknesses were built into the facility during its construction for just such an eventuality. Unfortunately, there is no way to activate the protocols remotely. They must be activated from a room inside.”
This all sounded way too easy to me, yet ... Cloud Nine did seem like the type to construct a way to blow up their whole facility, to cover up evidence, if nothing else.
“So we push one button and it all goes boom? Including Jack Griffyn, all his clones, and the control mechanism?” That was a cold way to refer to the dead body of Caitlyn’s mother, but she wasn’t here to be hurt.
“Reaching the room where we trigger the cleanup protocol is why we requested Hallowed reinforcements,” Saul said. “We do not know if the clone is aware the room exists. What we do know is that it has five full squads of Hallowed soldiers along with hundreds of panacea drones. My people and I are talented, but we could not fight through all that alone.”
“One thing,’ I said. “You said this thing is a clone. It’s not Jack. So how does it know things Jack knew, like what Hahna said when she tossed him off Cloud Nine?”
“It knows that?” Saul asked. “And what did Captain Sato say to him?”
I gave it a moment. “Have a nice fall.”
Saul simply stared. “Are you fucking with me?”
I managed a grin despite the horrible situation. “Not this time.”
Hahna was likely going to kill me for spreading this around later, but at the moment, I couldn’t help it. I turned back to Doctor Sharpe. “So explain that. How’s it know the last thing Jack saw before he died?”
“That is fascinating,” Sharpe said, and she looked newly intrigued. “Could it be that memories themselves can be transferred during cross-cell contamination? If so, perhaps Jack’s hopes for immortality through panacea research were less speculative than I believed.”
“He’s still going to die,” I reminded her. I looked to Saul. “By the way, who are the locals? Can they help us assault the facility?”
“I’d prefer not to ask them,” Saul said. “Almost the entire group is civilians, and they’ve already suffered greatly at the hands of Doctor Sharpe and Jack Griffyn.”
“Not my fault,” Sharpe reminded everyone.
“So why aren’t they zombies?” I asked, ignoring her.
Saul cleared his throat. “We’ve actually be calling them panacea drones. It’s a far less loaded term. Don’t forget many of those who weren’t infected have relatives who were.”
“Sure,” I said. “Answer the question?”
“Sharpe spread panacea cells through the island’s cloned chicken, which is a favorite of many locals. Some object to eating chicken on moral grounds. They weren’t infected.”
“It hadn’t occurred to me there were people who wouldn’t eat cloned chicken,” Sharpe said, sounding annoyed. “Even I make mistakes. You don’t have to keep pointing that out.”
“How many survivors are we talking about?” I asked.
“Perhaps a thousand,” Saul said. “That’s why we were unable to evacuate the island and return to Cloud Nine. Once we realized what was happening, I made the call to remain and help the survivors organize search and rescue. We’ve helped them gather the resources necessary to defend themselves from the panacea drones and, if necessary, evacuate the island.”
