There was, of course, a part of me that had hoped for a miracle. There was some small slice of my soul, separate from logic and reason, that still believed the whole mess would prove some crazy accumulation of coincidences and everyone would be just fine, or, failing that, that the destruction might be less than total, and at least a few of the technicians – some of which I knew personally prior to their assignment – would be able to salvage something of a life after we came in and fixed whatever had gone wrong. But the larger portion of my mind was prepared for what we saw. The airlock stood wide open and, as expected, the lab within held three, maybe four of the five Participants I had sent to live down here while they conducted their research. None of them appeared alive.
Ramsay and the others were already inside confirming this. Ramsay started with the lab itself while Banks and Bergman moved deeper into the bunker, back towards the living quarters. I strolled along in Ramsay’s wake, and started taking inventory as he covered all the corners (Charles, a lifer hardware ace twenty-two years out of Cal Tech, married well, four-bedroom house in the country, two kids, both in school, one playing first chair piccolo in the orchestra, one hoping to make first squad on the pitch next spring…Britt, one of my closest friends, up-and-comer middle management, confirmed bachelor in a condo downtown, amateur poker enthusiast who never met an insight strait he didn’t like…Rauch, high school whiz kid and my former intern, and my personal recommendation for appointment to this project despite his getting my coffee order mixed up with my director’s half the time) and that’s when things started to seem a little…off. They didn’t show any of the horror-movie symptoms that had haunted my dreams for the past three nights – the sores, the legions, the violent emptiness of limbs riddled with bacteria eating their flesh clear down to the sockets, or, in one instance, a single fungus-like mutation that had absorbed the bodies and assimilated the minds of everyone inside the bunker. Instead, they all appeared to have died of…trauma. Charles lay on his side, shoved into a bloodstained corner, his chest riddled with stab wounds from the screwdriver stuck in the final one. Rauch slumped over his desk, head twisted, eyes bulging out of their sockets, swollen to the size of plums. The whites were splotched with blooms of crimson from a smattering of ruptured veins. His face was purple down to his shirt, where an angry bruise circled his neck from the dimeteroid cable that was used to strangle him. Britt still sat in his chair, blood dripping (dripping?) from a slit on his wrist onto the fragment of old champagne bottle he had used to open it. Each of them had a holoscreen still hovering over them, and…
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Wait, why dripping?
It took a moment to register. I stood there watching, too engrossed to move, as Britt’s face paled and colored as the lights of the screens brightened and dimmed.
It’s funny how the mind reacts in a crisis. Sometimes it springs into action, injecting shots of adrenaline into the body in an attempt to spur a reaction, any reaction, to try and somehow solve the issue. Sometimes it grows cold, and analytical, its sense of awareness heightened well beyond its normal levels so crucial details aren’t missed. Sometimes it shuts down entirely, leaving the body to fend for itself, its only concern protecting itself from whatever danger it perceives. And sometimes it zeroes in on one specific aspect of the situation, meaningful or not, that it can’t quite seem to process, and uses it as a mental anchor, a rallying point for its scattered wits. This time, mine chose the last. It focused on the dripping from Britt’s wrist, and insisted on cataloguing each drop as it oozed out of the opened artery, gathered on the scab-encrusted edge of the wound, spilled over onto his skin, ran down his hand, formed a pregnant bead on the tip of his middle finger, and fell, splattering onto the pool on the floor, and soaking into the congealing mass.
Drip…
Drip…
Drip…
Twenty seconds per drop, give or take a couple. Barely relevant, of course, but that’s how long it took for me to grasp the real significance of the scene. That dripping…it meant Britt couldn’t have been dead going on four days. That dripping put his time of death at a couple hours gone at most.
Ramsay was busy calling orders to the others, so I inspected him more closely. I’m no medic, and I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but I figured it was better than standing around doing nothing while I waited for the techy stuff. I picked up his arm and traced my finger over the wound, feeling for the skin and flesh through the sterine of my bio-suit. Another squirt of arterial red dribbled through the gap. It danced and sheeted off my gloves before splashing into the puddle on the floor. Everything felt normal as far as I could tell. Definitely not someone that had been dead for the better part of a week. And definitely exsanguinated.
Britt…
My throat closed up, and I felt the searing pinch behind my eyes of tears not allowed to flow. He’s really gone…