She puzzled through that as she held a flashlight up for the sergeant she was with to search several desk drawers. Grady must have been immune, she decided. It was the only thing that made any type of sense as to how the infected outside hadn’t torn him to shreds like they’d done to poor Chris McCormick on the perimeter with her. She hadn’t known. She would have never abandoned him if she’d known.
Hannah wiped the unbidden tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. God, if she’d known that Grady, or anyone else from the team was still alive, she’d have done everything in her power to have tried to save them. Instead, she’d fled northward like a coward. All of the rationalizing of her actions on that day was shattered. She’d spent the past year telling herself that there was nothing that she could have done. It was all bullshit.
“Hey. Hey, I can’t see, ma’am.”
Hannah’s eyes snapped up. She’d allowed the flashlight to dip as she wallowed in self-pity, plunging the desk area into darkness. “Oh. Sorry,” she mumbled, elevating the beam back to the desk.
She’d come to Brazil in the hopes of finding closure, but all she’d done was create more problems for herself. She knew that Grady was dead. He had to be dead. There was no way he wasn’t. He’d been experimented on until his body finally succumbed to whatever they’d done to him.
He was dead. He was dead. He was—
“Hey, look at this,” someone called from another part of the sublevel.
The sergeant she was with picked up the trash bag of journals that he’d tossed in there and walked toward the voice that’d called out to them. “Yeah, what is it?”
“The motherload!” the soldier proclaimed loudly, pointing his flashlight into a room filled with monitors and computers. “It’s the facility’s security room. They probably recorded everything that went on in here and it’s all saved on these hard drives.”
“Bag it all up,” the sergeant ordered. “Our time’s up. We’ll review everything back at Fort Bliss.”
Hannah eyed the banks of powerless monitors and knew that they’d found the answers to what actually happened here. This would give her the closure she needed. They’d videotaped the entire operation and it appeared as if they hadn’t had time to remove the data down here in the depths of the facility.
“Sergeant Wood, we need to exfil this site now. The natives are getting restless and beyond the snipers’ ability to control.”
Hannah glanced at the sergeant’s radio resting on his vest. “Okay, you heard the major. We need to go.”
“Wait!” Hannah exclaimed. “What about the videos? We can’t just leave them.”
“We don’t have time, ma’am. The infected are—”
“Screw the infected!” Hannah began grabbing disks off the shelf and tried to push them into the sergeant’s hands.
“Ma’am. Ma’am!” he yelled in her face, grabbing her hands. “We need to go. If the infected overrun this place, we’ll end up the same as the people who worked here. Dead. You hear me? Dead.”
“I was here,” she screeched. “I was here, dammit. I know. I need closure. I need…something.”
The sergeant stared at her for a moment. “Fine. We’re leaving in thirty seconds, boys. Get everything you can.”
The small team went to work. They swept compact disk cases into their bags by the armful. Hannah grabbed a laptop and disconnected the cords. Then, she thought better of it and pulled power cable from an outlet in case they needed a way to power the equipment and didn’t have a compatible cord. It was a weird two-prong connector that she’d only seen used in Iraq when she was there. Hopefully someone back at the base had an adapter kit.
“Okay, time’s up,” Sergeant Wood said. “We need to go.”
Hannah did a quick once-over of the security station. It appeared as if they’d gotten everything in that quick flurry of activity. She nodded, clutching the laptop to her chest with one hand, while grasping the pistol grip of her M-4 with the other. It was an awkward position and she hoped to God that she didn’t need to defend herself, otherwise the laptop was going to fall.
The team raced up the stairs, bags of evidence bouncing against their legs. With all the notes and files that had been left behind, Hannah wondered what in the hell had happened there. The facility had been abandoned quickly, did that mean that there was a chance that Grady had gotten out? Or was he one of the wretched creatures that they’d killed when they entered the building?
Sergeant Wood’s radio squawked constantly about needing to exfil the site immediately, urging them to run faster. One of the men tripped and fell, the contents of his bag scattering across the ground. He tried to scoop loose-leafed papers back into the sack, but Sergeant Wood yelled for him to leave it and go.
The distant sounds of unsuppressed gunfire reached their ears by the time they made it up to the ground floor. They tried following the orange arrows in the reverse direction since that’s how they’d gotten inside, but that didn’t work. The arrows pointed the way from several different sections of the facility and before too long, Hannah was convinced that they were lost.
“Stop!” she shouted when they came to another intersection of hallways. “Listen. Follow the sounds of gunfire.”
They held still for a moment, trying to suppress their heavy breathing. The men tilted their heads, trying to angle their ears for
