“Not so fast,” Leah sputtered. “What just happened? How did you knock him out like that?”
“Hmm? You’re asking about this thing?” Noah pulled the syringe gun back out and waved it around. “I picked it up earlier. The doctor I killed was carrying it.”
Leah pulled back a little. “Uh, okay. Some kind of tranq gun, then?”
“I think it’s the same deal as whatever the soldiers were using yesterday. It injects a blinding agent.”
“So that guy you just took out was infected, then.”
“Yeah.” Noah shoved it back in his pocket and turned away.
In the next several minutes he checked all the remaining doors in the hallway. Each one opened to reveal identical living quarters, about half of which were vacant. The rest of the rooms were mostly occupied by regular, uninfected people, though there were a few who had the dust. Nobody else was awake.
Noah closed the last door with an unhappy grimace.
“What a waste of time,” Leah groused.
“I don’t understand,” Noah muttered. “There should have been at least some sort of maintenance closet, right? They have to clean the rooms somehow! I know this is Insight we’re talking about, but if there’s one thing they do well, it’s clean up after messes.”
“I dunno, Noah,” Brian said wearily. “We should probably get moving, though. We’ve spent too much time here already.”
“It was worth checking,” Clarissa said consolingly.
With one last disgruntled look around, Noah reluctantly nodded and turned to trudge towards the stairwell access door. Elias and May were already waiting there for him to finish checking the doors, too uncomfortable with the process to stand any closer and associate themselves by proximity.
The access light turned green as Noah approached, and May pushed the door open for them all to file in.
“We need to go down one flight,” Noah said, mentally retracing their steps from earlier. “The treatment room and the vat storage room are both on the third floor.”
They quickly descended the stairs and paused at the exit while Noah peeked out into the hall.
“It’s empty,” he said, and stepped out.
“Shouldn’t we be covering our faces?” Elias quietly asked. “What if we’re being recorded on camera? We could get seriously fined for damages.”
“Haven’t seen any cameras around,” Noah shrugged. In fact, he hadn’t seen a single security camera since entering Insight. He rubbed his neck awkwardly as he remembered his getup for his previous unauthorized jaunt through the halls.
“Hidden cameras are a thing, you know.”
“Feel free to wear a mask if you want. I’m not gonna stop you.”
It’s kind of too late at this point,” he grumbled, glancing warily around at their imaginary observers. After a moment he pulled a mask from his pocket and equipped it despite his words.
They went through the double doors at the end of the hall into a familiar corridor; this was the section of the building that had evidently been dedicated to researching the dust. The treatment room was at the far end, with their waiting room and the vat room located somewhere between there and where they currently stood.
The building was just as brightly illuminated as it had been during the day, and though that made their lives a little easier at the moment, it also implied the presence of late-night workers. Noah was optimistic that they’d run into a few employees. Shoring up his stores now would do a lot for boosting his confidence that nothing would go wrong when they met up with his father later.
Noah glanced to his right as a door there lit up green, then stopped in his tracks.
“Are you kidding me?” he yelled.
“Be quiet,” Brian hissed.
Noah pointed at the JANITOR sign affixed to the center of the door and gave his friends a helpless look.
“Huh. Sweet,” Leah said.
“Don’t just stand there, let’s see if it has a vacuum,” Clarissa prompted, grinning.
Noah shook his head ruefully and pushed into the room. Three bright overhead lights flickered to life as he entered.
The ‘closet’ was actually somewhat spacious. Metal shelves lined two of the walls, various bottled solvents arranged upon them in colorful rows. The remaining wall was made up of a wooden pegboard from which a mop, broom, and archetypal wet floor sign hung. Sitting below these three items, as if framed, was a vacuum.
It was a canister vacuum, consisting only of a red gumdrop-shaped storage tank and a black coiled hose.
Noah grinned. “Woah! Jackpot!”
“Are we sure that’s a vacuum?” Brian asked half jokingly, stepping over to it. The plastic tank was painted with a smiling face to make it appear like the hose formed its protruding nose.
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“It’s perfect,” May said. “I kind of want to name it for some reason.”
“Will it be strong enough to work, though?” Clarissa wondered. “The doctors said they were using an industrial-strength vacuum for the treatment. This thing looks like a kid’s toy.”
“Let’s find out. Who wants to go first?” Leah asked brightly, grabbing the power cord and searching the wall for an outlet.
“Wait a moment,” Noah quickly interrupted before anyone could volunteer. “Shouldn’t we wait until we’re out of the building? Heinrich mentioned some side effects following treatment. It’s probably safer to get out before we unintentionally take ourselves out of commission.”
“Why’d we spend so much time looking for this thing, then?” Leah demanded, gesturing with two arms to the smiling appliance.
“It wasn’t that long,” Noah protested. “And I thought we were planning on treating the patients upstairs before we left.”
“What, all of them? But you’d have to break into their rooms to cure them… Noah! People value their privacy!”
Noah shrugged. “They’ll get over it. And only a couple rooms are occupied by infected people. It’ll take like three minutes to get them all cured.”
“They might not want to be cured,” Clarissa said, shooting him a sideways glance.
“Well, then it’s a good thing I have a tranq gun.”
She paused, then grinned. “That’s one way to handle it.”
Leah grabbed the handle atop the vacuum and pulled it towards the door. “I got the vacuum. As much as your plan is a massive violation of privacy, it kind of needs to happen. We have to do everything we can while we’re still here to ensure that every source of dust Insight possesses is destroyed. They might have stores somewhere we’re unaware of, obviously, but there’s not much we can do if they’ve thought that far ahead.”
They left the room. The hallway was still clear.
“Alright, if we’re going to cure anyone upstairs, we should do it before we blow up the vats,” Clarissa said. “Depending on how big the explosion is, it might set off some alarms. And I don’t want to be finishing up any business while the building is screaming at us.”
“Sounds good to me,” Noah agreed.
“Are we really doing this?” May grumbled.
“It’s the responsible thing to do,” Noah assured her. “Think of it like a public service.”
They retraced their steps up to the hotel-like floor.
“Let’s start with that guy I already knocked out. Hopefully he’s still out cold.”
“He’s not actually unconscious,” Brian said. “Just blind and helpless.”
“Tomato, tomahto,” Noah said, marching past him down the hallway. He stopped outside the man’s door.
“Are you sure this is the right room?” May asked.
“Yes. I have an excellent memory.”
Brian made no effort to hide his incredulous laugh. “No, you don’t.”
Noah maintained eye contact with his friend as he slowly opened the door, revealing the man splayed across the entryway.
“Who’s there?” the man asked fearfully.
“Luck. Nothing more,” Brian said resolutely, ignoring the man.
“You just wish you possessed my superior intellect,” Noah said as Leah wheeled the vacuum into the room. Clarissa, Elias, and May came in after her, shutting the door behind them.
“Today’s your lucky day,” Noah told the man. Leah bustled about, plugging in the vacuum and unwinding the hose. There was a flat plastic nozzle attached to the end, which she removed and tossed aside. “You’re getting saved from a terrible fate at the hands of Insight.”
“What?” he mumbled. “They said they’d fix my heart problems.”
Noah glanced around. His friends looked back at him unhelpfully. “Uhh. Well, they probably would have, but you’ll just have to trust me when I say it wouldn’t be worth it. You’ll just have to stick out your heart problems for the sake of humanity. Sorry. The thing is, you have something that we can’t let Insight keep, so just hold tight for a moment while we suck it out of you.”
“What?” he yelled. As panicked as his voice sounded, he was still incapable of moving an inch. He lay helplessly as Leah gingerly inserted the end of the tube into his mouth.
“Brian, turn on the vacuum. I’ll hold the tube in place.”
Brian did as instructed. The whine of the motor filled the air, prompting a muffled squeak of terror from the man.
They let the vacuum run for several minutes. They didn’t want to cut it off early, of course, but they also didn’t want to be sitting around in this guy’s room all night. They ended up just standing around awkwardly as the vacuum ran.
“He’s not going to suddenly regain mobility, is he?” Leah asked, seeming to only now consider what the results of the treatment could be.
They all shrugged.
“He’ll still be blind, at least,” Clarissa said, though she stepped forward to stand nearby, ready to react if the man started fighting back.
He never did, and Brian finally announced, “I’m shutting it off.”
The vacuum went silent and Leah pulled out the tube.
“Well, the nozzle is clean,” she said uncertainly, holding it up. “That’s probably a good sign, right?”
“Unless the vacuum was so weak that all of the dust is still in his lungs,” Elias pointed out.
“Hmm. Hey, stranger, mind giving us a few coughs so we can confirm the treatment worked?”
“Like hell I will,” he said angrily, then coughed, apparently involuntarily. Nothing came out.
“Fiddlesticks,” he muttered.
“We appreciate your cooperation,” Leah said, rolling her eyes.
The man’s hand twitched slightly in response, and she leapt away in alarm. He didn’t yet seem capable of further movement, however. “Oh, he’s definitely cured,” Leah said.
“Alright, great work, gang,” Noah said. “Let’s pack up and hit the next room.”
Brian efficiently wound up the cords and wheeled the vacuum out the door, with everyone else following behind.
Before Noah stepped out of the room, he paused and looked back at the man. “You should feel all back to normal within- uh, what was it, twenty-four hours?” He looked to his friends for confirmation. “Yeah.”
“What about my heart disease!?”
“Er, we wish you well on your future medical endeavors. Apologies for the hassle.”
“You’re so mean,” Leah said, shaking her head.
Noah shut the door. “What am I supposed to say? Of course this is gonna be awful for him. This was probably his only hope of fixing whatever was wrong with his heart, and we pranced in and stole it away from right under his nose. Literally. He could very well end up dying because of what we’ve done, but don’t forget that someone else would have died to fuel his healing. What we’re doing is trying our best to make sure Insight can’t use the dust on a larger scale.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Leah muttered. “I know why we’re doing this. Doesn’t make it feel any better, though.”
“This is the next door we want,” Noah said suddenly. “Everyone ready? This person isn’t gonna be pre-incapacitated, so I’ll have to stick ‘em before we do anything else. Let’s go.”
They charged in to treat their second target.