Chapter Nine
It’s growing… the mass is growing, on its own… so like a cancer but… coherent, self-organizing… so beautiful… Happy Valentine’s Day, love. Maybe… maybe this won’t be the last. [Lab Notes, 2/14/04]
Clark clipped the NODs over his face and switched them on. Peering out through a four-inch-wide window he could make out a little of what was happening. Out by the main gate of the prison a crowd of survivors had gathered. They were beating on the gate with their fists, their mouths wide with shouts and pleas that he couldn’t hear. Someone was screaming—a real, in extremis scream—but it was far away and it didn’t trigger his fear reactions. It sounded like someone was watching a slasher film on a television in another room. “We let them in, of course,” he said, because Horrocks had asked him what the soldiers at the gates should do. “They don’t have a chance out there on their own.”
Horrocks hurried away, taking his troops with him, leaving Clark alone in the observation balcony above the interrogation rooms. He could still hear the screaming.
Calm. He had to stay cool, calm, collected. The prison’s emergency generators were up and running. Lighting in the corridors and pods was at a reduced level but it was holding up.
The first thing to do was to establish a secure perimeter.
Easy. The supermax prison was one of the most hardened facilities on the continent. He remembered assistant warden Glynne’s introduction to the place. There were ten thousand doors in Florence-ADX, he’d been informed, and all of them could be remotely controlled.
There was a master shutdown switch in the operations room. Simple. Get everyone inside that he could, save as many of the people from the shantytown as possible, then hit the switch. Seal the prison off. Then he could worry about why the power had gone out. Then he could worry about what happened next.
Get to the operations room, and hit the master shutdown switch.
Easy.
He forced himself to start walking.
He flipped open his phone and dialed for Vikram. Told his old friend to meet him in the Ops Room. He had a feeling they should stick together at this point. He called the Civilian as well but got no response. Made another call, to the MP station, told them to secure the girl. He had a sneaking feeling she had something to do with the power outage. Why? Why did he think that? She was chained to a wall—she could hardly have sabotaged the prison’s main generators from inside the Pub. Then again, why had he thought she would be able to tell him anything about the Epicenter? He’d been so sure of her key role in the Epidemic, but for the life of him, he couldn’t have explained why. Just a feeling, a gut feeling.
He’d made a lot of mistakes and gotten a lot of people killed for his gut feeling. It was time to get rational again. To think like an engineer again.
Fine. Logic. Logic dictated that the generators hadn’t gone down on their own. Logic dictated that the prison was under attack. He could still hear screaming. Was it closer?
Vikram was already in the Ops Room when he arrived, looking concerned, his beard matted to one side where he’d probably been sleeping on it. He had a sidearm strapped to his belt. Clark’s hand involuntarily went to his own weapon.
“The troops are letting in the people from outside. The story they tell is not good,” Vikram told him. The Major started up one of the computers. It would drain emergency power but not much of it and it would let them see what was going on. Vikram called up some views from surveillance cameras around the facility. The main courtyard was clear, swept by searchlights that showed nothing. The helipad on the roof looked fine.
The western fence was mobbed by the dead.
Their faces were blanks in the low-light view, their hands pale blobs that picked and tore at the barbed wire. Clark couldn’t see their wounds or their blank expressions but he recognized instantly the way that they moved, the slow, remorseless march, the dragging but unrelenting way their arms lifted and fell and pulled and ripped and beat.
“Where did they come from? How did they gather so quickly? We expected a few of them at a time, not an army. The dead don’t surge, Vikram. The dead don’t surge. That takes conscious planning.” Which normally they didn’t have. Yet they’d shown some measure of it when they escaped the detention facility in Denver. The girl locked down in the pub showed plenty of it herself.
This was a directed attack. A raid.
“Get some men with crew-served weapons up on that wall. I don’t think the infected can get through the wire but I don’t want to give them time to try.” Clark rubbed at his face. “Get the Stryker crews mobilized, I want to cut this off from the rear before it can turn into something significant. Are all of the survivors inside the gate?”
Vikram peered into a computer monitor and puffed out his cheeks before answering. “Yes. All of them that still live. They say the dead attacked their shantytown, first.”
That would explain the screaming. It was definitely closer now.
“Fine.” Clark went to a boxy terminal bolted to the wall by the door of the room. It looked like an antique next to the ruggedized laptops and industrial strength cabling that Vikram had installed in the Ops Room. It was the control terminal for all of the prison’s facilities and systems. Clark booted it up and paged through a main menu until he found what he wanted: !!!EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN!!!
“Step away from that door,” he called. Vikram was a good ten feet from it but he stepped away anyway, like a good soldier. Clark hit the ENTER key and an alarm sounded throughout the entire prison for two seconds. Moving silently on electromagnetic servos the door swung shut and clicked three times. It was locked tight. The clicking seemed to go on for minutes as nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine other doors throughout the facility shut themselves and locked automatically.
For a long time Vikram and Clark just looked at each other and waited for something to go wrong. Nothing did.
“There. We’re safe,” Clark announced. “Now we just have to decide what to do next.”
The two second alarm sounded again and the door of the Ops Room ghosted open.
Clark’s heart started beating very fast. Too fast.
“Bannerman,” Vikram began, but Clark held up a hand for patience.
He studied the terminal in front of him. He hadn’t touched anything. He called up an activity log and saw that nine seconds after he’d given the order to lock the prison down, someone else had given the order to release the doors again. All of the doors, including all the gates. Even the exterior gates. There was nothing to stop anyone or anything from just walking into the prison.
It could have been a glitch but of course, it wasn’t.
There were security terminals all over the prison, and any one of them could have undone Clark’s lockdown but it wasn’t just a case of someone pushing a random button on a terminal. It wasn’t just a simple matter of a few keystrokes to undo an emergency lockdown in the system. It required someone to input an authorization code and then to manually set all the prison’s systems to “all clear”. You had to know how to do it and you couldn’t do it accidentally. Clark checked the activity log again.
“Someone’s in the infirmary. Someone who wants the doors open.”
Vikram chewed nervously on his lower lip until it looked red and sore. “Perhaps,” he said, his eyes very wide, “perhaps we should go there and discuss this with them.”
It was the worst idea Clark had ever heard. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. “Right,” he nodded. He removed his weapon from its holster.
