The windows were blocked, so Nella had no idea whether it was day or night when she woke, but she sat up with only one idea in her head. It wasn't the door Frank had been fascinated with. It wasn't the doorknob either. It was the lock. But why? Nella looked around her. Both Frank and Dr. Schneider were still asleep. She thought about taking another painkiller to stop the gnawing grind in her shoulder, but the idea that Frank was bothered by the lock had grown enormous in her mind. Something important hovered just beyond her groggy thoughts. If she could concentrate, she knew she could find out what it was. She had the overwhelming feeling it was something she ought to know.
Nella fumbled in the dark for the lantern. She switched it on, blocking the light with her body and slipped out of the quiet office. The hall and the world outside were pale gray with early morning light. She switched off the lantern and left it just outside the door. For a moment she was at a loss. What was she doing? She decided to go to the vault. If anything in this place had to do with a lock, it must be there. She was no detective, but she had an undeniable urge to see it for herself, to see if there were any clues about who had been there before her. She walked down the hallway toward the elevator. When she got to the smooth little panel with the call button, she began to feel distinctly creepy. What if she called the elevator and it arrived with someone already inside? She told herself not to be ridiculous, but once she had imagined it, there was no shaking the idea. She became more and more certain that if she called it, there would definitely be someone inside. Would it be a decomposing corpse simply jumbled like an abandoned marionette against the back wall? Or a Looter armed to the teeth and ready to grab whatever, whomever he wanted? Or just an Infected, mad and starving, stretched hide over the empty drum of its ribs, all jaw and talon? Nella backed away from the elevator doors almost without realizing it. She decided to look for the stairs instead.
The stairs were almost worse. With a slim window every other floor, the weak morning light was barely a glow against the concrete floor. Every step Nella took was echoed three times in the small stairwell so that it sounded like there were a crowd running after her. She forced herself to keep climbing, more from shame at letting the idea of the elevator defeat her, than in any real desire to get to the vault alone. Nella was grateful that it was only one floor. She had to rest a the top, sitting on the last step in front of the stairwell door. Her shoulder pounded and her breath was harsh and loud in the stairwell. She worried briefly at her body's weakness, wondering if the infection in her arm might truly kill her. She'd been exaggerating the night before, trying to drive a point home with Dr. Schneider, but now it hit her as true. The drugs to help her were simple. Simple enough that they were still being reproduced in a rudimentary way, but not for public consumption. Not for an affordable price, anyway. Nella sighed, startling herself with the echoes. Her body was just going to have to shake off the infection by itself. And climbing stairs when it was unnecessary wasn't going to help her do that. She stood up and opened the staircase door.
She felt tiny ants of unease creep over her skin as she faced a rounded silver door surrounded by contamination instructions and biohazard warnings in bright yellow and black, like hornets descending upon her. The door, which was supposed to be failsafe, airtight, unbreachable, was propped open with what looked like an old shoe. Nella felt a dryness creep from a patch in the back of her throat until it filled her chest with desert sand. Don't be stupid, she told herself, those doors haven't been necessary for years. Dr. Schneider, the scavenger scouts and whoever took the sample have all been inside and they are fine. Still, she couldn't argue the instinctual dread she had of entering. It was so palpable that Nella could imagine the smell of infection, could almost convince herself that she smelled a slight sourness, like fruit turning or like the clinging scent where roadkill once died, years before. She knew infection didn't have a smell, but she almost smelled it anyway. She thought if she moved her head just right, she'd catch a whiff in the breeze her movement made. She reminded herself again not to be ridiculous and walked through the airlock door.
She was in a dark, tiny passageway. She found the light switch and powerful overheads clicked on. The small room was lined with benches and white plastic suits. At the far end was a sink and another airlock door, again held open with a shoe. The first one's mate. Nella wondered why there were no alarms. Wasn't there supposed to be an alarm when the airlocks weren't working correctly? She passed through the door and turned on the next light. The overheads competed with a small star of purple light sitting in the center of the room. She tried not to look at it, afraid it would somehow harm her and passed through the next open door, this one held open by a silver instrument cart. The drains in this room hinted that it was for decontamination showers, but nothing happened as Nella passed through, and she again wondered why none of the decontamination systems were working as intended. Was it because the samples were all dead? Or had they been disabled? And if they were disabled, who had enough knowledge of lab procedure to know how to do that? The airlock at the end of the shower room gaped open into a dark void. She held her breath without even realizing it and stepped inside, fumbling for the light switch, but it did nothing when flipped. She waited until her eyes adjusted to the dim, milky light seeping in through the high, dirty windows.
Nella immediately realized why no alarms were activated with the airlocks forced open. Whoever had opened the vault had attempted to incinerate it. She wondered how the rest of the floor, the rest of the building, actually, had avoided catching fire. All of the surfaces were covered with soot. The scavenger team and Dr. Schneider had left footprints in the thin layer of ash on the floor. Beakers had melted into coin sized puddles of glass, now dark medallions fused with the lab tables. Along the edges of the room were round vats, all hanging open like hell's buried treasure chests dug up. Nothing else was recognizable. Nella walked carefully over to one of the vats. They had no soot inside and the glass vials seemed intact, which meant they must have been opened after the fire rather than before. Except one. She could see it in the gray light, its lid cracked and blackened. She walked over to it. She could only see into the top part of the cylinder, but it was enough. The vials had melted in place, their rack holders surrounding a thin stem of collapsed glass. Three empty slots were all that was left of the Recharge bacteria.
"I found it like this, except the other storage containers were closed."
Nella whirled around, startled by Dr. Schneider's voice. She was relieved to see Frank standing by the door behind the doctor.
"I tried to find out if it had been misclassified, or if the vials had been moved to another container." Dr. Schneider peered into the closest container. "I went through the records and surviving vials for all ten thousand samples. One by one. But the Recharge bacteria was gone. That's when I started on the security tapes," she looked up at Nella, "which I recommend we get back to. We only have a few days."
"Wait, Dr. Schneider. You never said anything about a fire. Aren't these labs designed to initiate a burn when there is a containment leak?"
"It's not automatic. You wouldn't want someone burned alive in here. There is a panel outside the next door and one in the security office downstairs in case of an accident. The burn can be initiated from either place."
"But the power would have to be on, right?"
"Well, yes. But the lab also has a back up generator. Besides, the entire building also has emergency power from the solar cells."
Nella walked toward the lab door. She noticed Frank looked nervous and shot him a confused glance. "How long was the backup generator designed to run?"
"Seventy two hours. But right now it's on the solar energy."
"But those panels were not functioning when you got here, right?"
"Yes, they were luckily unbroken, but they were covered with leaves and sticks that had blown over them through the years. Where is this all going?"
r /> "When the main power went off, how long would it take to switch to the solar panels?"
"Dr. Carton said the solar panels were already working when he left the lab after the outbreak. In fact, he said he had planned to stay here, but the solar panels couldn't handle the whole building's power and he was worried about lack of heat and running out of food. That's why he left."
Frank stared intently at Nella. At last he said, "I think we should watch the first security recordings. Not work our way backwards."
"What?" asked Dr. Schneider, "Why?"
Nella turned to look at Dr. Schneider. "When I was in medical school, we were required to learn biosafety procedures, regardless of our final professions. Level four labs, which, I assume this is, are required to have the capability for a controlled burn of several hours in case of an accident. That means a steady stream of fuel. Which also means a steady source of power to control it. The solar panels just aren't reliable enough. Dr. Carton would already have drained the battery significantly after the main lines went out. It had to be when the backup generators were triggered."
"Well, that wouldn't have been until the solar panels weren't creating enough power to sustain this lab."
"Right," said Frank, "the outbreak was in December, remember? That's why it was so bad, because travel and public interaction was so much heavier than normal."
"I remember quite clearly, Mr. Courtlen. As I said, Dr. Carton was worried about the heat-"
"Exactly," interrupted Frank, "And how much less would the solar panels have produced when they were covered with snow? The backup generators must have kicked on within weeks, maybe days. Certainly within the first year."
"Whoever did this covered their tracks with the fire. And knew the control procedures were still in place and available for use." Nella said it slowly, thinking it aloud rather than announcing it. Frank looked downright ashen and seemed to sway like a tall tree in wind as she said it. Dr. Schneider turned and ran from the lab. Frank sprang after her. Nella felt exhausted, the pain from her shoulder leaking into her side as well. She thought about the stairs she'd have to take if she avoided the elevator again.
She stumbled out to the changing room and sat on the bench. She disliked waiting for help, but she knew that Frank would be back soon, disappointed that the crucial footage was missing. Nella already knew that a person didn't break into a level four lab, set a fire to cover their tracks and then smile at the camera.
She gently rubbed her sore shoulder, looking at the dead electrical panel near the airlock. Whoever did this had to have both the entry code and know how to activate the emergency purge. A lab employee? Or maybe someone that was able to get into the security office? It wouldn't have been hard with the building abandoned in the panic. Nella closed her eyes, half dozing as she tried to think through who would have known about and wanted access to the Recharge bacteria.
Dr. Carton and Dr. Schneider were both obvious choices. They both knew the building procedures for the lab. They both knew about the bacteria, and they, more than anyone else except Dr. Pazzo, perhaps, would want to keep it secret. Without the samples and documentation, no one would ever be able to prove that they had caused the epidemic. That, in essence, was what Dr. Schneider was doing here now. But someone else had beaten both Schneider and Carton to it. And that person hadn't destroyed the samples, just taken them away. What were they planning on doing with them? Why do nothing for almost a decade?
The only other people that knew about the existence of the resistant strain were Dr. Pazzo and Ann Connelly, at least, as far as Nella knew. If the samples had been taken in order to blackmail one of the scientists, then the thief would have had to ensure that Ann and Dr. Pazzo survived in order to be witnesses. Nella opened her eyes. Whoever had taken care of Dr. Pazzo and Ann also stole the Recharge samples. She shook her head. What were they waiting for? The trial had already started without Dr. Carton and without Dr. Schneider. The time to come forward or to get what they wanted had already come. Maybe it wasn't blackmail.
Revenge? That seemed more likely to Nella. She had met many, many people who wanted revenge for what had happened. For what each person had faced, for what they had to do, even now, to survive. She had even met people so miserable and full of anger that they'd take the rest of the world with them by releasing the bacteria if it meant vengeance. She sighed as she realized that maybe even Frank had been that angry once. That maybe even she had been that angry once.
But then why keep Ann and Dr. Pazzo alive? They were readily available scapegoats. Nella looked back toward the seared lab. This had happened quickly. Too quickly after the outbreak for some elaborate plot of revenge. It was too fast. Who would have known that these particular people were responsible? It took the military years to figure it out. No one could know that fast. Unless Dr. Carton were lying about where he was after the outbreak. Or someone else was.
Nella was too tired to keep wearing out the circular path in her brain. She felt a buzzing behind her eyes and the heat from her shoulder was overwhelming. She closed her eyes.
Sick