WilPharma Research Division — Sub-Level 3 | October 4, 2005 | 15:33
The lobby had been white twenty minutes ago. He could tell because the handprints on the elevator doors were still wet.
Alen bypassed the elevators. He took the maintenance stairs — access point behind the second service corridor, door labeled HVAC MAINTENANCE, which was where the access point was on every corporate building of this type because HVAC access needed to reach every floor and HVAC maintenance doors were the ones that people stopped seeing after the first month. He descended two levels in just under ninety seconds, moving at the pace the stairwell permitted, which was faster than it looked from the outside because the stairwell had no obstacles and he was not adjusting for light.
Sub-Level 3 was the sound first.
Not the sound of the infected — he had been expecting that. The particular silence
underneath
the sound, the way the ventilation had changed quality from the upper floors, the way the air was moving differently in the space between the sounds. Something in the space was using the ventilation system. Something that moved on ceilings.
He stopped in the maintenance stairwell doorway and did not open the door.
Through the reinforced glass panel in the door: emergency lighting, amber and red, the strobe effect of a system trying to maintain protocol during a power fluctuation. The corridor was wide, three meters, standard pharmaceutical research layout. Two bodies visible — lab coats, both down, the posture of rapid death rather than the posture of slow conversion. At least one of them had made a choice about how to end it; the shot grouping on the wall told him how.
Somewhere above the door. On the ceiling, in the section of corridor he could not see from his current angle.
He listened.
Wet movement. The specific friction of weight on a painted concrete surface — not human weight distribution, the wrong rhythm, the wrong points of contact. He knew the classification from the Nursery's virology sessions and from the Grayweather files: Licker-class. Skinned. Echolocating. Blind.
He did not move.
A Licker's threat profile was straightforward if you understood it: the blindness was real, the hearing was not approximate. A misplaced footstep was an attack vector. A suppressed firearm still produced enough mechanical sound to register. The correct approach was displacement — create a sound source away from your intended path, use the response window.
He reached down without looking at his hand and found a specimen jar on the floor — there were several, scattered from an overturned equipment tray near the stairwell door. Heavy glass, probably 200ml. He calculated the angle he needed, the force, the likely impact point and resulting sound distribution.
He opened the stairwell door — the hinge was adequately maintained, minimal sound — and threw the jar in a flat arc toward the far end of the corridor.
The jar hit the wall and shattered and the Licker came off the ceiling like a system discharging.
He was already moving. Forefoot contact, zero heel, maximum speed in the window before the Licker reoriented from the false target. Seven meters to the junction, three meters left into the restricted access corridor, the blast door at the end of it. He went flat and forward as the door began to close on its automated lockdown protocol — a safety feature he had noted in the building schematic — and rolled through the closing gap with enough clearance that the door edge caught his jacket rather than his shoulder.
He came up on the other side. Standing. Unhurt.
The server room was ahead.
END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Chapter Twenty-Three follows...