Chapter 14
Liam did not answer.
He stood in that white room in his dead friend's coat with a photograph against his chest and a Beretta on his hip, and he looked at an old man in a filthy laboratory coat and could not make his mouth work.
"You know," Marcus Vance said.
"Sir—"
"You know something. It's on your face."
The old man took a step forward, and then another, and the .
45 hung forgotten at the end of his arm.
"You know his name. You must. You got in here, so you have the code, and the only man in the world I gave that code to was Elias, so you have met my brother, and you are standing there not answering me."
Liam looked at him.
He thought about lying.
He thought about it for exactly one second, and he thought about a man's brother sitting in a lit box under a dead city for two years and four months telling himself a story about the door, and he understood that there was no lie in the world that would survive the next ten minutes.
"He made it," Liam said.
Marcus Vance's face broke open.
"He made it?"
"He walked two thousand miles east." Liam's voice was steady and he did not know how.
"He carried your code in his head and he came out of the trees into a camp in Minnesota in the middle of the winter, and he told them everything. The door. The code. The name carved in the steel. He drew a map of this hillside with a piece of charcoal because his hands wouldn't work right."
"He's alive."
"No," Liam said.
The white room hummed.
"He had the sickness," Liam said. "He'd been walking through it for months. It's an engineered thing and it's moving west to east and he'd watched it burn through three camps before he got to ours. He got to us and he was already dying and he shouted about Seattle until the fever took his voice,
and then he was lucid for an hour at the very end, the way they sometimes are, and he told our healer everything. And then he died. And we buried him in ground so frozen it took four men a whole day to dig it."
Marcus Vance stood absolutely still.
"He made it two thousand miles," he said.
"Yes."
"On foot."
"Yes."
"In winter."
"Yes."
The old man turned away.
He walked six steps into the racks and put one hand on a shelf full of glass vials and stood there with his back to them, and his shoulders were shaking, and nobody in that room moved or spoke for a very long time.
"Elias couldn't run a mile," he said at last. "He had a bad knee from college. He worked in insurance."
Liam said nothing.
"He was the soft one," Marcus said. "Everybody said so. I was the one who did things. I was the one with the degrees and the lab and the funding and the plan for the end of the world, and Elias sold insurance in Renton and had a bad knee."
He laughed, and it was terrible. "And when it came, I sealed myself in a hole in the ground, and he walked across America."
He turned around.
His face was wet and his one good lens was fogged and there was something in his eyes that Liam recognized instantly, because he had seen it on James Wilford's face on a beach six days ago.
"Tell me he wasn't alone," Marcus said.
"He wasn't alone," Liam said. "Our healer sat with him. Her name is Sarah Vance and she is not any relation to you and neither of us has ever been able to make sense of that, and she held his hand for eleven hours and she closed his eyes."
Marcus Vance sat down on the concrete floor.
He did it slowly, the way a building comes down, and he put the .45 on the floor beside him and he wept, and James Wilford crossed the room and sat down next to him on the concrete and did not say a single word.
He just sat.
Liam watched him do it and understood that he was watching a man do the thing he had spent thirty-one years learning how to do.
They gave him an hour.
They did not have an hour. There were four hundred men coming for that hillside and Doyle had said tomorrow night, maybe the night after, and every minute in that room was a minute stolen.
They gave him an hour anyway.
And when it was done, Marcus Vance stood up, and wiped his glasses on his filthy coat, and put them back on, and became, in the space of about ten seconds, an entirely different man.
"Right," he said. "How did you get in."
"Chloe," Liam said.
"Who?"
"The girl who came through that door eleven hours before we did." Liam stepped forward. "Where is she. She's in this facility right now. Where."
Marcus Vance's face went carefully blank.
"There's no girl," he said.
"Don't," Liam said.
"Son—"
"Don't you dare." Liam's hand was on the Beretta and he did not care.
"She walked through that door at four this morning. Your man Doyle's watchman saw her do it. She put in the code and the door opened and it shut behind her, and then somebody came back and propped it with her boot and laid her pack out in your corridor and inventoried it."
Marcus said nothing.
"So you've seen her," Liam said.
"Yes."
"Then where is she."
And Marcus Vance said, "You need to understand what's in this building."
Nobody spoke.
The fan hummed in the ceiling.
"Sit down," Marcus said. "All of you. It'll take ten minutes and it is the most important ten minutes of your lives, and if you walk deeper into this facility without hearing it I promise you that you will die down here."
Liam did not sit.
"Talk," he said.
Marcus Vance took off his glasses again and rubbed his eyes.
"There are three levels," he said. "You're on Level Three. It's storage and it's the only level that's supposed to be accessible from outside, which is why my name's on that door and why the code opens it."
He pointed at the racks. "Everything you see here is exactly what it looks like. Bandages, antibiotics, saline, sutures, vaccine stock. It is a strategic reserve. It's the reason this place got built and it's the reason it's got its own power."
"And Levels One and Two?"
"Level Two is the lab."
"And Level One?"
Marcus put his glasses back on.
"Level One," he said, "is why I've been locked in here for two years and four months."
He walked to the back wall.
There was a stairwell there. Liam had not seen it, because it was behind the great gray cabinet with the batteries, and it went down, into the hill, into the dark.
There was a door at the top of it.
It was shut, and there was a keypad beside it, and the light on the keypad was red.
"That's a hard lock," Marcus said. "Nobody opens it. Not me. Not anyone. That door locked itself two years ago on an automatic protocol and there is no code on earth that opens it, and that is the single best thing that has ever happened to the human race."
"What's down there?" Isaiah said.
Marcus Vance looked at him.
"The sickness," he said.
The room went absolutely silent.
"Not a cure for it," Marcus said. "Not a treatment. Not a vaccine. Those are up here, in this room, and I will give you every last vial of them and you can carry them out of here on your backs and I will help you load them."
He pointed down the stairwell.
"What is behind that door," he said, "is the thing itself. The live stock. The engineered agent. Six hundred litres of it in cryogenic storage on its own dedicated power circuit, because it was built here, in this building, by people I worked with, and I did not know what it was for,
and by the time I understood, it was too late."
James Wilford stood up.
"You built the plague," he said.
"No."
"Doctor—"
"I did not build it." Marcus Vance's voice cracked like a whip and everyone flinched.
"I built the reserve. I built this facility to hold vaccine stock and antibiotics for a metropolitan population in the event of a pandemic, and it was funded, and I was very proud of it,
and then someone else's program moved into Level One two years before the lights went out and I was told it was a biocontainment annex and I was told I did not have clearance and I believed them, because I wanted to believe them, because I had a green light and a budget and a name carved on a door."
He was shaking.
"And on the afternoon the world ended," he said, "I was standing on Level Two when the power went and the emergency systems came up and I heard the hard lock on Level One engage. And I went to the panel. And it wasn't a biocontainment annex."
He looked at Liam.
"And I have been sitting in this building for two years and four months," he said, "because I am the only man alive who knows that six hundred litres of the thing that is killing your camp is sitting in a freezer forty feet under a city of three thousand people. And I have not been able to leave.
Because if I leave, somebody eventually gets in here, and somebody eventually gets down there, and I did not know how to explain to anyone out there what that would mean."
"The sickness is already out," Liam said.
Marcus Vance closed his eyes.
"Yes," he said. "I worked that out about a year ago, from what I could hear through the door."
"How?"
"Because somebody got a sample out before the lock."
Marcus's voice was flat. "There were four people on Level One that afternoon and there is a body in the stairwell and there are three that aren't, and I have had two years to think about it,
and the only thing that makes sense is that one of them walked out of this building with something in a cooler and got as far as they got before it got away from them."
"Two years," Isaiah whispered. "It's been moving for two years."
"Yes."
"East."
"Yes." Marcus opened his eyes. "And it will come back west. It always does. It'll wash back and forth across this continent until it runs out of people,
and the only thing standing between three thousand people in this city and that outcome is a room full of vials on Level Three and an old man who won't leave."
Liam was not listening anymore.
He was looking at the stairwell door with the red light on it.
"Doctor," he said. "Where is my friend."
Marcus Vance did not answer.
"Doctor."
"She came in at four this morning," Marcus said.
"And?"