The Second Sphere

“What?”

A grin sprang to her face, pushing the skin on her cheeks into puffy nodules. “What happens if those JSF troops open the Sector door?” she asked. “You know how much the TSG would love to have a victory to call its own. Don’t you think?”

The truth is, I didn’t have an answer for her. “When did you learn so much about what the TSG wants?” I asked.

“You think they stand a chance against the virus? We can’t just sit by and let it spread,” she said. Her voice teemed with impatience. Malinda put a hand against the emergency exit door. “Let’s go,” she said, as though her two sentence argument had convinced me.

“You want to kill tens of thousands of people?”

She put her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes at me. “If that virus gets out, Orion, we’re not talking about thousands of people being dead; we’re talking hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions.”

“What if they decide not to open the doors?” I asked. “What if they decide it won’t work? What if our troops beat the infected back? You don’t know what’s going to happen.” I stared down the tip of my nose, daring her for a response.

“Is that a chance that you want to take? You think it was bad before? Three hundred troops, no matter how well trained they are, can’t beat back a fast moving virus.”

Her face radiated certainty. I wondered who made her dance. She didn’t invent these words. Someone had written them for her. She merely recited them.

She read the hesitation on my face, because Malinda wasn’t done trying to convince me. “You want to risk the lives of everyone on the second sphere by waiting for the governor to make a decision?” She began to shake her head. “I don’t want them to make a decision, Orion. I want them to have no choice at all,” she said.

As much as I agreed with her sentiment, this extreme effort was a great stretch, even for me. But, standing there, I realized that there were clear choices. I could stay where I was, on the eleventh floor, and wait for the possibilities to unfold, which would likely culminate in either death by virus-infected transfer or a long trip to Mars. Or, I could follow Malinda, seize the moment, and force Governor Busch’s hand, and have no chance of seeing the future. More unappealing choices didn’t seem possible.

I dropped my head and felt the words even before I heard them. “Okay,” I said. “But Emergency Protocol One means that the Emergency exits are locked. We’d need special permission to get into that stairwell.”

“Oh Orion,” she said. “You like to worry about the little things, don’t you?”

She moved to a small panel by the door, pried off its face and linked two wires together. An orange burst of electricity sparked and the door clicked. Malinda drew a pulse pistol from the waistband of her black pants. She adjusted a knob on it.

“Let’s go,” she said.

No alarm sounded when we stepped into the cold, dry stairwell. A few emergency lights ran into the distance, showing our way into the abyss. The shrieks of the infected sounded endlessly. Curdled screams echoed off the concrete walls. I followed Malinda as we crept down the stairs. It was difficult to tell whether the sounds were from above us or below us.

When we reached the seventh floor, coming around a turn onto the landing, three infected troops moved awkwardly before us. Their uniforms were ripped at the seams, hanging off their bodies. The synthetic blood that covered their arms, legs, and faces reflected maroon in the dim glow of the emergency lighting. They banged against the walls like they couldn’t see, scratching and scraping at one another, pulling bits of flesh from each other’s bodies. They clearly hadn’t heard us coming. Malinda whistled a shrill note, and they raised their heads. She leveled the weapon and landed three head shots. Their bodies fell in rumpled piles of stinking flesh.

We moved quickly down the stairs. In the darkened hallway of the sub-basement, we moved furtively along the walls. Our steps pounded rhythmically across the floor. Malinda’s breaths were short, but heavy. The scent of synthetic blood was in the air. Skittering sounds came from ahead of us. Two more infected troops appeared in our path and Malinda shot them down without hesitation.

The third sub-basement became strangely quiet after that, as though someone pressed the pause button. Then, bursts of gunfire from the outside broke the silence, and the screams of men and women tore the quiet to shreds. I thought of Karl Lower and all the other people who were probably sick, and wondered what they could do in the face of mindless death.

We moved further down the hallway, creeping ever closer to the weapons depot. I kept my head up, sensitive to the smallest sounds: dripping water, air from vents. I heard scratching behind me, but when I swung around, I saw nothing.

Near the entrance to the weapons depot, I felt a sticky substance under my feet. Malinda flashed the light from her weapon along the floor. Synthetic blood spread around us like a lake.

The door to the weapons depot was gone, perhaps torn away by the troops who’d come down, not thirty minutes before. A light came on when we stepped through the entrance. Several soldiers lay dead, their insides pasted across the floor. The shrill sounds of the infected echoed from deep within the depot.

“We’d better move quickly,” I said.

Malinda grabbed two bags from the ground, handed me one and began to move.

“Light explosives,” she said.

The main explosives room was just around the corner from the entrance. A pale yellow light came from a lone bulb that hung at the center of the cavernous room. We moved quickly, loading up on biosynthetic explosives, little jolts of power that, if linked together, could do a nice job at cracking the foundation of the Laslow Building. I gathered the stubby fuses for the explosives by the handfuls. Malinda got a trigger and shoved it into her bag as well. We were set.

Getting all of these explosives made me realize that we wouldn’t walk out of the Laslow Building. The only way for us to ensure that this thing went down the way we wanted it to was to be right on top of it when we pulled the trigger. That trigger would be the last thing we’d see.

“I’m going to get myself a weapon before we get out of here,” I said when we were back in the hallway.

“Hurry,” Malinda said.

I jogged back down the hall to the last room on the left. In the darkness, I couldn’t see much. As I entered the room, I made a left and crept down an aisle. I kicked several weapons under my feet, scattering them across the floor. I bent down, picked one up, felt the weight of it in my hands, and put it to my nose. The gun was fully loaded and hadn’t been fired.

Boorish grunting made me jump. Fingers were on my shirt, and warm, tangy breath filled my nostrils. I turned. It was only a matter of instinct that I fired as quickly as I did, sending a blast through its chest. The infected creature collapsed on the ground in a crumpled heap.

“Orion,” Malinda called. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. I jogged back down the hallway, the smell of the virus still in my nose.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.

A cripplingly loud moan startled us. A crash followed, then the sound of pounding footsteps came from our right. Malinda took aim before the creature came around the corner. Fear leaned over me and put all of its weight on my shoulders.

It was Len, or whatever being that once was Len. His face was peeled away down by his chin to reveal bone and muscle. His uniform was torn around his chest and hung to his waist. There were pieces of flesh dangling from his hands, and blood covered him like he’d painted it on himself. He bellowed again.

“Shoot him,” I said. The darkness lingered in his eyes, swirled around as it gained strength. Then he took a step forward, and Malinda pulled the trigger. Len fell to the floor, a mass of burned flesh. Blood poured from the wound.

Malinda grabbed the grenades that Len still wore around his waist and shoved them in her pockets. She spotted another troop lying on the ground, gutted. She took the pulse rifle held firmly in his hands and walked back down the aisle with the gun slung over her shoulder.

“Best way to do this,” she said, her breathing heavily, “is to lay these explosives in the ventilation shaft of the stairwell.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” I said.

“Let’s get as many of them as we can on the lower levels. We can crack this building with what we’ve got. Keep a few for the very top where the oxygenator and gravity machine sit.”

“Up by the Transport pad?” I asked.

She nodded. “Once we’re there, all of the charges get linked together and BOOM.”

“And goodbye,” I said, a waver in my voice.

“You ready for this?” She asked.

“I’m ready,” I said. But I wasn’t sure I was. I’d chosen this never-ending life, and now I wanted to set fire to it.

My senses awoke. The darkness was suddenly real again, and the sound of the infected echoed through the building. From the outside I heard the clack of troops, and the firing of weapons; the screech of humans being attacked, their flesh feeding those creatures.

We made our way slowly back to the stairwell, ready for what lay ahead, and to what I thought was certain death.