Both the guards and Noah’s own friends paused warily, staring at the bomb, but Heinrich only laughed. “That won’t do anything. You got that from 3-C-20, correct? The detonator has been removed.”
Noah stared at it. Seriously? Is he bluffing?
“Well, I put it back,” he declared.
“I don’t think you did,” Heinrich replied, smiling. “You know what we were going to use them for? They were going to be dust bombs. But the dust- in its natural state, at least- combusts too quickly for it to be an effective weapon when paired with explosives, and the effect of exposure is too delayed for most practical field use.” Heinrich paused for a moment, seeming to be lost in thought for several seconds before he recollected himself and continued speaking. “Before we solved both issues, we found that a non-explosive auto-release timer worked somewhat better. The dust spreads well enough on its own.”
Solved both issues? What does that mean? Noah stared suspiciously at the doctor.
“You’re going to sell dust bombs?” May spluttered, horrified.
“No, of course not. It was considered, but ultimately, we decided there was more profit to be made in the field of medicine rather than weaponry. Selling the dust in that fashion would be the same as handing our competitors the keys to our success. We have far better control over who can access it this way.” Heinrich suddenly looked around at the guards surrounding them. “What are you waiting for?”
“Er, you seemed to be interested in conversing-”
“They don’t have to be able to see to carry a conversation,” Heinrich snapped.
“Of course, sir.”
Seeing they were out of time, Noah didn’t hesitate. He tugged the pin free of the safety mechanism, just for fun, and hurled the grenade as hard as he could at Heinrich’s face.
However, he currently possessed a fraction of his usual strength, and rather than impact Heinrich’s face as intended, the projectile drooped and hit the man in a somewhat lower region. In the moments before a guard dove between them, too late to shield Heinrich, Noah saw the doctor silently double over.
“That was beautiful,” Clarissa breathed.
A woman standing beside Heinrich tracked where the grenade landed and kicked it away in the direction of the doorway. Her aim was poor, but the device rebounded off someone’s boot and came to rest exactly in the center of the doorframe.
The initial guard, seeing he had failed to protect Heinrich, turned his attention to Noah and lunged forward needle-first. Noah couldn’t dodge in time.
Clarissa dove in between them with Brian held before her like a body shield. The needle sunk into his neck with quite a bit of force behind it.
The guard gaped in surprise and tried to tug the weapon free, but before he could recover it, a deafening boom shook the room.
Several people began shouting. Noah looked around in shock, his vision slightly blurry for some reason, and saw dust pouring in huge dark clouds from the door. Those closest to the grenade had been thrown to the ground.
“I think your bomb was live,” Brian informed him. “Also, why does my neck feel warm?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Clarissa said, after checking to make sure he hadn’t actually been hit by shrapnel in addition to the syringe gun hanging from below his left ear.
Elias saw Brian’s predicament and tore the weapon free, then turned and emptied it into the nearest guard. The unwitting man was staring at the door and failed to notice that he’d been impaled until his vision was gone. His hands shot to his eyes and he stumbled sideways into another guard.
“I think this is our cue to leave,” Elias said. “Did any of you get hit?”
Noah glanced down, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding. His vision was beginning to clear as well. “I think I’m good.”
“What did you do?” Heinrich howled. Noah was disappointed to see he too seemed to have avoided taking any shrapnel, perhaps in part due to his crouched position. “Do you have any idea what was in that grenade?”
“Ignore him,” Leah said. “Come on.”
They picked their way in the general direction of the door. Dust was rapidly filling the space, creating such poor visibility that Noah could barely make out anything or anyone out of arm’s reach.
May could have taken the pendant out from behind her collar to clear the room, but the chaos was to their benefit. They were just a few nameless shadows moving around in the gloom, and they made their way forward unchallenged.
A scream suddenly cut through the air. It cut off with a gurgle less than a second later. Noah spun around, wondering if one of his friends had taken an opportunistic bite out of a passing guard, but the five of them stood close around him, eyes forward and intent on escape.
What was that? He ducked away as the dark form of a guard suddenly loomed before him, but the figure was suddenly bowled over by another shadow, and both people disappeared back into the haze. There was another scream.
There are more zombies in here, he realized, but he couldn’t understand where they were coming from. “The dust may have infected the guards, or at least those of them that are unmasked, but it shouldn’t cause them any symptoms for at least a few hours yet. Right? What’s happening?”
His friends didn’t have any answers, but Heinrich did.
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“What you’re seeing isn’t just dust, as much as it may appear so,” the doctor’s voice came despondently from the darkness. “Do you know why an infected individual only begins to display symptoms after nearly half a day has passed?”
Noah frowned. What did that have to do with anything?
“We didn’t either,” Heinrich said as if they had responded. “Not until we thought to look at some blood samples we happened to come into possession of a day prior. These provided several crucial pieces of information by allowing us to watch the dust develop through several evolutions within the blood in real-time.”
Elias glanced at Noah and spoke under his breath. “You don’t suppose that blood would happen to be the samples you had taken on campus, would you?”
Noah ran his hands over his face. “They probably are.”
Heinrich continued speaking like he was a teacher lecturing his students. “The dust is a parasite, and it needs time to adapt itself to its host. However, the blood samples revealed that it can continue adapting to human blood outside of a human body. We realized it was progressing through its standard stages of development from within the vials. This pre-acclimation means that when inhaled in either a mist or gaseous form, the blood of an infected person will create symptoms of an identical stage of progression to rapidly develop in a previously uninfected subject. Not all the symptoms, mind you. Only hunger and healing. Those are the most important ones, after all- like any other infectious disease, the sole purpose of the dust is to spread itself, and it requires flesh to do so. All other symptoms are merely extraneous side effects, and end up developing at a slightly accelerated pace, at best.”
Noah had turned most of his attention towards getting to the door, which seemed to have simply disappeared. He feared he and his friends had gotten turned around at some point, as they had yet to find so much as a wall. The room was big, but it wasn’t that big.
Despite being distracted, enough of Heinrich’s words registered for him to know he didn’t like where the monologue was headed. Or where it began, if he were being honest.
“Additionally, uninfected blood can be used as an incubator for the dust, and with enough time, it will become indistinguishable from blood originally sourced from an infected individual. This ‘bloody dust’, whether fabricated or genuine, does not immediately combust as does its regular counterpart, which makes it an ideal substance to be paired with a standard grenade. Shrapnel injures the target, and then they immediately become infected by the fast-acting dust and turn on their fellows. It’s honestly such a lost opportunity that we cannot market the dust as both a medicine and a weapon.”
“Where is that man?” Clarissa muttered, adjusting how Brian was positioned over her shoulder so that she could grab her penlight and shine it around. The beam of light hit the clouds in front of her like a wall, failing to penetrate whatsoever. “I think he needs another kick in the balls.”
“Now, what I can’t understand,” Heinrich resumed flatly, “is how the grenade you stole from down the hall ended up with its detonator reinstalled. I watched it be removed with my own eyes just a few hours ago when the decision was made to discontinue further development of the dust as a biological weapon.”
“What I can’t understand is why the hell you’d mess with something that’s probably capable of turning half the continent into a zombie movie,” Leah shot back. “Did you seriously think the stuff wasn’t dangerous enough to begin with? I can’t believe the only reason you decided against it at all was because it wouldn’t make as much money as other alternatives. How scummy can you get?”
Noah was beginning to feel quite lost within the room, and so he stopped and identified May from the five silhouettes behind him. “Do you think you could get the pendant out? We’re never going to find the exit at this rate, and if it gets any darker in here, we could find ourselves as incapacitated as Brian.”
“Plus, you know, it probably wouldn’t be good for the dust to get out into the rest of the building, if it’s not too late,” Leah added.
“I already have the pendant out,” May said. “It’s not working like it should. It’s trying to draw in the dust, and it kind of is, but the suction is really weak.”
Noah groaned. “Because it’s not just dust, it’s aerosolized blood with dust mixed in?”
“I would guess so, yes.”
“Screw you, Heinrich,” he muttered.
At least the grenade seemed to have stopped spewing dust. The air began clearing as the clouds dispersed out into the hall outside. The pendant helped as well, though the effect was greatly reduced from its usual potency.
Noah’s range of vision gradually increased until he could finally take in the state of the room. Most of the guards were on the floor, either because they were wounded, dead, or trying their best to look dead so as to avoid the four unmasked guards who had clearly been zombified by the grenade. Even from where Noah stood, disappointingly far from the door despite his efforts to escape, he could tell which people were faking at a glance. Only six people, not including Heinrich, had entered the room with gas masks, and four of them had already been killed. Noah watched as one of the infected guards suddenly descended on a seemingly dead man, who began screaming as he lost a piece of his back to the zombie’s jaws.
He tore his gaze away in search of Heinrich, but the man seemed to have disappeared.
“Over there,” Leah said, pointing at the vats. Heinrich had hidden himself behind them, and now as the dust began to clear, he was trying and failing miserably to get himself up into the open top of the fifth container.
“He’s trying to hide,” Noah muttered angrily. “He doesn’t get to hide.” He nearly went after the man himself, but the guy still had a chainsaw, so he went with another option.
“Hey, you four!” he shouted at the guards. They looked over at him with conflicting expressions, urgent hunger warring with horror, though the hunger was clearly prevailing. Their infection isn’t developed enough to censor as much of their thoughts as it should be, he realized.
He tilted his chin at Heinrich once he had their attention. “You might wanna grab him before he seals himself up,” he suggested helpfully.
They looked over at the doctor.
“He has a chainsaw,” one of them said.
“You outnumber him,” Noah responded. “Besides, you don’t want to eat that lady.” He gestured at the last surviving uninfected guard. “She's one of you, just a fellow guard doing her job.”
“Pauline,” another guard said, nodding.
“Yeah! See, you’re good buddies. Heinrich, on the other hand…” Noah paused thoughtfully. "He's probably a terrible boss. Nobody would blame you for taking a couple bites out of the guy.”
The four guards looked at the doctor consideringly.
“One move and you’re fired,” Heinrich warned, stepping away from the vat. “And decapitated.” He brought the chainsaw to life and raised it threateningly, a twisted expression on his face. The teeth turned into a silver blur and it emitted a high-pitched motorized whine.
The guards looked at each other. One of them nodded, and as one they stepped forward. Heinrich flinched.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Leah muttered, watching the guards creep towards the doctor.
Noah looked at her. “What?”
“Make them listen to you like that.”
“There’s no secret,” he laughed. “They’re just normal people. Er, as normal as you can be and still decide to work for Insight. The dust doesn’t erase who you fundamentally are, it just tacks on a few quirks. There’s no reason they wouldn’t heed a valid suggestion.”
“...Sure,” she said skeptically. “You think they can really take Heinrich down?”
“Of course. It’s four against one, and they’re trained security guards.”
“They don’t have a chainsaw.”
“It’ll be fine,” Noah said unconvincingly. “Just watch.”