bruise, but she wasn’t concerned about that.
She could hear the muffled sound of gunfire through a heavy double door she’d just slipped through and her pursuers’ excited voices. Dripping with sweat, she ran faster, hoping that the corridor led someplace safe or, better yet, outside.
Lucia turned a corner, then stopped suddenly at an abandoned checkpoint with a metal detector. There wasn’t a soul in sight. A newspaper lay on a table. Beside it was a cup of steaming coffee. A radio resting on a pile of folders softly played some music. The guards must have run down the main hallway when the alarms went off and were probably shooting on the other side of the door.
She searched the table for a weapon, tossing a pile of papers on the floor in her rush. All she found was a gun-lovers magazine and a penknife.
She jiggled the drawers but they were locked.
Her gaze fell on a colorful poster of smiling soldiers passing rations down from an army truck. The caption read “The Third Spanish Republic is looking out for you.” Below the poster was a file cabinet, its top drawer standing wide open. The guards had left in such a hurry they’d forgotten to lock the drawer.
Lucia rifled through it but all she found was a handful of magnetic cards and papers on a clipboard where someone had scrawled some names and hours. Lucia assumed it was a record of who’d been given the cards. Her heart sank. Just as she was about to toss the clipboard aside, she spotted something written across the top in bold: 71410NK.
She ripped off the sheet of paper, stuffed it in her pocket, and took off running. She could hear footsteps getting closer.
After a few feet, she hesitated at the top of a staircase, panting, swallowed hard. She’d been so sure that that hallway led outside, and yet here she was, at the top of some stairs headed down to the basement.
About the same as winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. But one thing was certain, if she didn’t go down there, those maniacs would corner her. The look in that red-haired guy’s eyes had made her feel really scared—and dirty. She wasn’t going to stick around and argue with him.
She sighed and started down that long flight of stairs. It was well lit and meticulously clean with the faint smell of disinfectant. If it weren’t for the lack of windows—and people—those stairs would’ve seemed completely harmless.
Lucia ran all the way to the bottom. The ugly, light green tiles on the floor and walls were different from the upper hallways, but otherwise it looked the same. Red arrows and a symbol she couldn’t identify set it apart from the rest of the hospital.
Lucia stopped for a few seconds to catch her breath. She felt as if her heart would explode and the bruise on her hip was throbbing. The sound of footsteps flying down the stairs spurred her on. She followed the red arrows without hesitating, as a voice in her head screamed,
The hallway led to a square room. A heavy steel door with the same unfamiliar symbol took up an entire wall. She was sure she’d seen that symbol before, but she was so scared, she couldn’t think where.
Beside the door was a panel with numbers, buttons, and a slot. It was an alphanumeric keyboard, like on a cell phone; each key corresponded to letters and numbers. She grabbed the magnetic card from her pocket and inserted it into the slot. A screen lit up with a welcome message, along with a digitized photo of a confused- looking, gray-haired doctor wearing glasses.
GOOD AFTERNOON, DR. JURADO. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PASSCODE.
Lucia froze. Then she remembered the code scribbled on the piece of paper. With trembling fingers, she pulled the paper from her pocket and punched the code into the keyboard. The screen went blank for a millisecond and then a new message appeared.
WRONG PASSCODE. YOU HAVE TWO (2) TRIES LEFT. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PASSCODE.
Lucia brushed a sweaty lock of hair out of her eyes. “You idiot, you can’t even type a damn code right!”
She typed it in again, as calmly as she could, making sure it was correct. She pressed ENTER and the screen went blank.
WRONG PASSCODE. YOU HAVE ONE (1) TRY LEFT. PLEASE ENTER THE PASSCODE.
She felt her stomach clench into an icy fist. If this wasn’t the passcode, she was done for. She wouldn’t get another chance. Plus, those footsteps sounded really close now. She beat her fist against the door. That was stupid. The second to the last character of the code was not the letter
WELCOME TO THE ZOO, DR. JURADO. HAVE A NICE DAY.
The door opened with a hiss. Lucia had just enough time to slip in before a blast from an HK kicked up splinters of plaster from the wall she’d been leaning on. Another bullet hit the control panel. It exploded with fireworks and gave off a faint singed smell. Lucia tried to close the door, but the system had been fried when the panel blew up. With death at her heels, Lucia headed into that room. As she did, she recalled the meaning of the biohazard symbol emblazoned on the door.
Then an alarm went off.
33
The spiral staircase creaked and shook beneath our feet. Flakes of rust showered down as we climbed flight after flight. That staircase was in such bad shape, it mustn’t have been used before the Apocalypse. A thick layer of ash and dust rose up in white clouds making us sneeze and giving the stairs an unworldly, sinister look. Someone behind me whistled through his teeth nervously.
When we finally reached the third floor, an emergency door, crisscrossed by a thick chain, cut us off. I collapsed onto one of the last steps, like most of the group, gasping for breath. The bone-dry air, the heat generated by the napalm, and the dust swirling around us made us desperately thirsty.
With clumsy hands, I unscrewed my canteen and took a couple of long gulps. I passed the canteen to Broto, who’d flopped down next to me, his two-hundred-plus pounds shaking the staircase. The computer geek took a very long drink. I couldn’t take my eyes off his Adam’s apple, bobbing up and down as he gulped down half the canteen. Finally he took a deep breath and handed it back to me, with a loud belch.
“How’re we gonna get that damn door open?” he asked, after a long silence.
“No idea, but I’ll bet Tank has thought of something,” I said, rummaging around in my backpack for a cigarette. Then I remembered I’d left my last pack on the SuperPuma.
“Everybody get back!” One of the legionnaires was unrolling a cable away from a plastic substance that one of his team had stuck around the frame of the door. The cable was connected to a metal box the size of a cigarette pack with a button on top.
“Shit! That’s going to make a lot of noise. Let’s go, pal,” Prit muttered as he pulled Broto to his feet. Our computer whiz had gotten his backpack stuck between two rungs in the staircase. He looked like a huge snail as he
