'And what about you Fitch? What do you have to say?'
'Ain't shit for me up top. Not as a fucking blind cripple. Time's running out for you though sir. You better get along.'
Hiamovi and Colt stepped into the lift first. Cortez and Greaves followed. Fitch had been right, Greaves didn't smell good, as Akecheta, Hastiin and Simon Peter noted when they squeezed in.
'Great Chief,' said Ahiga. 'The UTN and the Fifth Age of Man are noble causes, no matter what sort of deeds they are built on. Don't waste this moment. Don't let everything we've done be in vain.'
'I won't,' said Hiamovi as the doors slid shut.
As Ahiga watched Hiamovi go for the last time, he wondered if he was leaving everything he'd built up in safe hands. Then he realised he had little time for such thoughts, these were the last minutes of his life. A time for action.
He pushed Fitch and Golding back into the kitchen. They'd stopped bitching about being pushed around and just accepted it now. Ahiga turned on all the ovens and every gas ring without lighting them.
'Hey what's that smell?' Golding said as the appliances hissed away.
'That,' said Ahiga. 'Is the smell of our coming victory.'
A minute later both squadrons of guards converged on the kitchens. By the time the torch beams had landed on Ahiga, Fitch and Golding standing in the middle of the room it was too late to mention the smell of gas.
Ahiga's right arm was raised. In his hand he held a Zippo lighter. Fitch and Golding both had hold of Ahiga's wrist.
'You're not getting away from me mother-fucker,' said Fitch. 'I'm gonna follow you all the way to hell, just to see you suffer.'
'Race you,' said Ahiga and struck the wheel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Anna came to with the sound of the explosion. The ceiling outside the lab had come down and shaken her awake.
She stood slowly, limbs shaky. She drew a deep breath and let it out again. She was light headed and more than a little euphoric.
Anna felt as though she had just pulled through a thousand major illnesses all at once. She had walked in the valley of the shadow of death and climbed out to bask in the sun. She wanted to burst into laughter and tears at the same time.
The virus had shown her death and transformed her body. She heard a ringing in her ears. No, not in her ears, in her whole body. So much sensory information was suddenly flowing into her. Things that she would never normally know about.
She could taste and smell every surface in the lab, all at once. Feel the bodies of every rat, spider and fly in the complex. Anna heard the bacteria in the guts of every person and felt the chemical electricity crackle through their brains.
She was no longer human.
The virus's millions of endlessly replicating microbes were spreading throughout the complex. Each one sending back information along a complex chain to the nexus of their activity. No wonder they had to rebuild her normal human physique. If, in fact, her physique had ever really been human.
Anna reached out with her mind in a hundred different directions to find a way out of the laboratory. The way she'd come in was blocked but there was a further series of rooms beyond these, that led to a staircase.
Anna found the doorway. She didn't need to see in the dark. She had thousands of extra senses now. The door was locked. She felt the static hum of electricity coming off it. Strange, Anna had thought all the electricity to be down. She reached out in search of another source and found a smaller back-up generator, channelling energy to only a few parts of the complex.
Anna concentrated and was able to cluster a whole culture of microbes around the wiring of the lock, eating it away until it shorted and the door slid open. The minute she stepped inside the room she knew she didn't want to see what it held.
This was where the thick blanket of sorrow, the air of death and clinical cruelty that pervaded the whole complex originated.
The rooms were full of corpses. Deep frozen corpses, dissected corpses, disease ridden and putrefying corpses and, in the ovens out the back, the ashes of burned corpses. It was the age of the corpses that troubled Anna. She could tell from all the information she was receiving what they were. But she did not want to admit it.
In the last of the connecting rooms Anna felt life of a kind. Sickened by so much dead flesh she instinctively moved towards it.
The room was filled with preserved body parts, limbs, internal organs and bones. Many of them had been sliced open for inspection. All of them belonged to children no older than eight years old. Many came from unborn foetuses.
At the far end, beyond a series of midsections sliced from infant brains and placed between perspex, were three incubators. Anna came closer, hardly wanting to see what they contained. She was not pleased when she did.
Inside all three incubators were four month old babies. Their expressions were entirely vacant. Their limbs twitched one at a time in an ongoing pattern, like they were puppets or automata. Over two thirds of each child's skull was missing. Their brains were exposed and a complex array of micro-circuitry was fused to them. Wires ran from the circuitry out of the incubators and into a series of monitors and displays.
A door hissed open behind her and Anna turned to see four figures enter in bio-hazard suits. She had been so engrossed and repulsed by the children in the incubators she had not noticed their approach, although she was now aware that her microbes had been alerting her for some time. She just hadn't acknowledged them.
The figures removed their head gear. It was Sinnot and his cronies Roth, Bennet and Joe Blackfeather.
'I see you've been admiring our handiwork,' said Sinnot. 'Impressive aren't they?'
'What in God's name are you doing to them?' said Anna, barely able to control her anger. 'What is this place?'
'Ah, I believe it's time to admit our guilty little secret. You see Anna, everything you see around you is a testament to our failure and your uniqueness.'
'I don't understand.'
'And neither do we. We don't understand you. How your biological composition works and, more importantly, how to replicate it. You see we're missing the original research team that created you, not to mention all their research. For a brief while, just before The Cull, it was necessary for us to hide from our employers. We hid in splinter cells to avoid detection and we took everything we had done with us. That was when we left you with the Amish.
'Or rather when our colleagues did. They left you to grow up there. Monitoring you and the five others like you from afar. Then The Cull hit and we lost contact with our colleagues. Lost everything they knew. Our old employers took us back, we began working on the project again. But try as we might we could never create another host for the virus. Not without the original research.
'We tried of course. We've been trying for years. At times we've come close but never close enough. All our efforts have ended in failure. The subjects have always died, often quite painfully.'
'You mean,' said Anna. 'All these children…'
'Complete failures everyone. It's quite tragic when you think about it. We've created the perfect biological weapon. The single most effective way of dominating a global population that has ever been conceived. And yet we just can't seem to find the last piece of the puzzle.'
Anna could feel her anger at these cold little men rising. The offhand way they discussed their atrocities enraged her. Her fury spilled out like a wave across every interconnected micro-organism in the complex.
'And what,' Anna said, pointing to the incubators. 'Are you doing here?'
