Belize

Chapter Fourteen

Serena didn’t know how long she’d been hiding. In the middle of all the chaos outside of the elevator, her watch had been ripped off her wrist. Someone had tried to grab her and tore the watch free, but she didn’t know if it was a living person or a dead one that did it. In those insane moments, people had been screaming and pushing, trying to get away. People had been trampled, their bodies knocked to the floor and stomped on as others tried to escape. Serena barely remembered exactly what happened, it was all a terrifying blur in her memory.

The bloody dead thing that used to be Dr. Saldivar blocked the hallway and everyone just started running like a stampede. The crowd seemed to flow around him, everyone too scared to even touch him and risk getting infected. But the hall was too narrow for everyone to get past, and that’s when it all became a screaming madhouse, as people began shoving each other into Saldivar’s clawing hands in order to save themselves. Serena just went with the flow of bodies, too scared to resist. All she could see was Saldivar’s deranged eyes and bloody hands reaching out for her.

One single thought kept ramming into her mind. Someone had become infected. One of the viruses that the lab experimented with had somehow gotten loose and infected someone. She simply couldn’t believe it, even though she saw it with her own eyes. And it wasn’t some minor scientist like her that somehow infected themselves, it was the Research Manager himself.

Serena had let herself be pulled down the hallway with the others, but then they encountered Garcia and the crowd scattered once more. Red lights in the ceiling began to flash ominously. Serena had found herself suddenly alone, so she simply ran, she didn’t even know where. She ran down hallways she had never been to before, parts of the lab she didn’t normally have access to, but no one bothered to stop her or ask for a ID badge.

She had no idea what she was supposed to do, so she ran until she found an empty lab room with some long white lab desks. A pair of red doors with the words “Advanced Research - Senior Employees Only” led to another room. The doors were locked, so Serena went to one of the desks and frantically crawled under it. The desks faced away from the lab entrance, so anyone looking into the room would not see her. She had been hiding there ever since. She thought that it must have been an hour, but for all she knew, it was only ten minutes.

Carefully, a sense of dread creeping into her bones, she examined her arms and hands for any scratches or cuts, even a stray drop of blood. She checked her clothes and the bottoms of her feet. She only had her stockings on now, since she’d lost both her high heels during her panicked flight. After a thorough examination, she didn’t find a single trace of blood or a cut of any kind. She was safe, she wasn’t infected.

But lots of others were. How many infected people were in the lab now? At least ten people? She tried to count them off: Saldivar, Garcia, the other woman, Paul, Elise, Benjamin, the other man whose name she didn’t remember, the security guard. That was eight. Serena had no idea how many people got infected when the crowd surged past Saldivar, but she was sure that a few others must have been. Were there others she didn’t even know about? The thought that there might be as many as twenty infected people in the lab made her sick to her stomach.

Her world was limited to the underside of a desk and the wall a few feet behind her. She had no idea where anyone else had gone. There had been no announcement over the intercom, no voices in the hallway calling for survivors, nothing to indicate that anyone had come to rescue them. The only thing she had heard was a few stray gunshots. If Serena poked her head out from behind the desk and looked at the white tile floor nearby, she could just faintly see the reflection of a blinking red light in the hallway.

There had to be protocols to deal with emergency situations like this. They dealt with infectious diseases, and no laboratory could do that kind of work without robust emergency procedures.

Of course, those procedures, if they existed, didn’t help the people in America. Serena didn’t want to think about what happened there. All she could think about was how they blew up the whole city with a nuclear bomb. What if the infected people in the lab somehow got loose and made it to the surface? Would they destroy Belize City too?

Suddenly, Serena heard footsteps, fast ones, echoing in the hallway. They came closer and she nearly shrieked in fright when something banged hard into the doorway of the lab room. She heard a gasp for breath and then someone scrambling to their feet, their shoes squeaking on the tile floor.

And then a man appeared behind the desk and nearly collided with her as he tried to duck under it. Serena did scream then, backing away frantically, kicking with her legs. The man fell backward and swore, looking back at the doorway. Serena had never seen him before, but he was obviously one of the scientists at the lab.

“Shit, they heard you. They heard you, they’re coming,” he sputtered, struggling to get back to his feet. He got up and ran back out of her sight, and she lifted her hands to the top of the desk and raised herself up to peer over it, her whole body trembling in fear.

A figure passed by one of the windows looking into the hall, and Serena covered her mouth to stifle another scream, but it was too late anyway. It was one of the security guards, and he was a walking dead man like Saldivar and Garcia. The side of his face was ripped open, flaps of skin hanging down over his bloody neck. He only had one remaining eye. He walked to the doorway and moaned softly before coming inside.

The scientist, meanwhile, ran over to the set of red doors and grabbed the handle, but the doors wouldn’t open for him either. He shouted in anger and kicked at the door before turning around and watching in horror as the security guard stumbled inside.

Serena snuck around the desk and grabbed one of the tall metal stools lined up along the work bench on the adjacent wall. With a scream, she jumped forward and threw it with all her might. It smashed right into the security guard’s face and he flopped over onto his back, groaning incoherently, his hands fumbling at empty air. But before Serena could ever celebrate her momentarily bravery, she spotted three more figures shambling down the hall in their direction. Three more people that she didn’t know, scientists who worked in other parts of the lab. How did they get infected?

“Come on!” the man yelled desperately. “Help me!”

“What are we going to do?” Serena wailed.

“These doors! Come on!”

He took a few steps back and ran at the door, slamming his shoulder into them with a rattling thud. They weren’t heavy wooden doors, they were just thin sheets of metal. One of them had a huge dent where the man had struck it. Serena ran over to him and together, they ran at the door, hitting it as hard as they could. With a crack, one of the hinges broke off and the door rocked inward, but Serena bounced off and wound up on the floor, her arm throbbing in pain.

The man gave the doors one more try, practically leaping at them with all his weight, and they finally swung open, the electronic lock shattering into pieces. Serena got up just as the three infected people made it into the lab and the security guard slowly rose to his feet. The scientist grabbed her arm and pulled her after him.

The doors led to another large square room with long rows of computer consoles and arrangements of lab equipment. One wall was lined with glass shelves containing large vials and sealed glass beakers. At the other end of the room was another door, this one white instead of red.

Serena was dizzy and sick, and her arm hurt. “What are we going to do?” she asked miserably. “We broke the door, they can come in after us!”

All the computer desks were attached to the floor. There were no large chairs or tables or filing cabinets to shove in front of the door, nothing but more metal stools and some computer equipment on a rolling cart. They couldn’t possibly hope to hold the doors closed against four infected people. Eventually they would get tired, but the infected people would never get tired, they would keep pushing for hours and hours until they got inside.

The man ran to the other door and Serena followed him, knowing it was hopeless. The next room, or the one after it, would be a dead end. There was nowhere to hide, and the infected people would just keep coming after them. Faintly, she wondered if she would have been better off hiding under the desk. Maybe the infected people would have gone after the man and left her alone.

Surprisingly, the other door was not locked, but it didn’t even have a lock. It was just a swinging door without a latch at all. “Live Specimen Lab” was stenciled on it, but Serena barely registered the words. They went through the door just as the infected people came through the red doors in slow but relentless pursuit.

She followed the man into the next lab room and set her hands on her knees, leaning forward and gasping for breath, feeling like she was going to faint or vomit, or maybe both. Her hands were shaking and her heart was pounding, and she raised her head to ask the man what they were going to do now. The man was pulling on a large desk near the wall to her left, and it scraped across the floor, leaving a gouge in the white tile.

“What …?” Serena said, but the words faded away as she looked to the far wall behind him.

There were four large chambers recessed into the wall, blocked off by thick glass, like the lizard terrariums she saw as a child when she went to the Belize City zoo. Each terrarium was about four feet long and three feet tall. Two of them were empty.

Two of them were not. Inside the chambers were creatures like nothing Serena had ever seen before, nothing she had ever imagined could exist. They were like insects, but they were huge, as large as German shepherds. Their mottled green and yellow skin was disfigured with bulging growths and spikes of bony flesh. Each of their six segmented legs ended in sharp claws, and their hideous insectoid faces had compound eyes like a fly and dripping mandibles like a spider. They thrashed and jumped inside the glass chambers, hissing and scratching at the glass with their claws. It looked like there were two creatures in each chamber, but they moved around so fast that there might have been three or four.

Not that she took the time to count them. Serena screamed in horror and backed up into the corner. “What are those things?!” she screamed, pointing a trembling hand at them. “My God, what are they?!”

“Help me with this desk!” the man shouted.

But she was frozen in terror, trapped in between infected people and disgusting mutated monsters. She slid halfway down the wall, closing her eyes tightly and shaking her head. This was all wrong, she though over and over again, this could not be real. She should have stayed in the other room and let the infected people chase after him. What was in those terrariums was some horrible mistake of science, something even more nightmarish than the infected people.

“Damn it! They’re just experiments!” the man yelled.

“I can’t do this,” Serena sobbed, pressing her hands against her face.

The man kept pushing the desk, but it was too heavy and gouged into the floor so hard that it got stuck. He grabbed one of the monitors and hurled it through the doorway. It crashed to the floor and Serena screamed again. She pushed herself along the wall farther from the doorway and saw the infected people making their way inside. The man hurled another monitor and it struck one of them straight in the chest, knocking them backward.

Serena could barely see, her eyes blurred by tears. She bumped into another desk and could go no farther. She didn’t dare move any closer to the glass terrariums. The huge insects inside were smacking their claws against the glass and rapidly scurrying from side to side. The noise from the insect creatures, the clacking and scratching at the glass, was enough to drive her insane.

One of the infected people stumbled in her direction and she just sobbed helplessly, unable to move or do anything. The other two went for the man, who swung a stool at them like a lion tamer in a circus trying to fend off a ravenous lion. He ran at one of them and pushed them back into the other one that was still writhing on the floor. It tripped and went over backwards, and the man swung the stool into the face of the one still facing him.

It was the security guard. Holding him at bay with the stool, the scientist reached down and tried to grab the pistol from the holster at his hip. Together they struggled against each other and finally he managed to get the gun loose. The security guard shoved the stool out of his way and grabbed for the man with his teeth bared, and the man had to put his hands out to stop from getting bitten. Serena watched the two of them circle around like wrestlers, the infected guard trying to bite the man, and the man trying to aim the gun to shoot his assailant.

She finally broke free of her paralysis and shoved the infected person coming at her. She shoved him in the chest with both hands and he staggered back but remained standing. Serena actually recognized him then. He worked in one of the other labs, but she had seen him once or twice in the break room. The front of his blue dress shirt was soaked in blood, and his hands were bloody as well. Someone had bitten off three of his fingers before tearing out his throat.

The scientist with the gun swung the security guard around and got enough separation between them to aim the gun and pull the trigger. He shot the guard right in the face four times and his head rocked back, blood splattering across the floor as he toppled over.

The scientist stared in shock, the gun nearly falling from his hands. Shooting at such close range, blood had sprayed over him. He had drops of blood on his face. Frantically, he grabbed his shirt and tried to wipe the blood clean before it got into his eyes or mouth.

Serena screamed again, and he quickly swung the gun back up to shoot the infected person coming at her. The bullet struck him in the side of the head and he flopped over sideways, his hands just a few inches away from grabbing her.

But Serena wasn’t screaming at that. She had screamed at the terrariums. When the man shot the security guard, at least one of the bullets had blown through his head and struck a terrarium, and the glass was now cracked and split in a spiderweb pattern. The mutated creatures inside slammed against the glass and the crack split even longer, until half the glass was cracked and broken.

The scientist stared in shock and raised the gun.

“Look out!” Serena cried.

He spun around and shot one of the other infected people, who had gotten up and was shambling towards him. The fourth infected person was on his hands and knees, trying to get back on his feet.

The glass cracked even farther. An insect bashed its head against it furiously, and a chunk of glass broke free and clattered to the floor. One of its claws poked through the opening and scratched at the glass as it tried to tear more of it loose.

Serena could not wait any longer. She ran for it. When she reached the doorway, she jumped on the infected person’s back, slamming him into the floor, and bounded off into the other room. Behind her, she heard more gunshots and spun around to watch in horror as one of the terrariums shattered apart and the giant insects inside leaped free. The next thing she heard was the scientist screaming.

She ran all the way back to the room where she had been hiding in the first place, and tried to swing the red doors shut. Through the narrow space between the doors, she glimpsed the other insect creatures break free and start running towards her, their claws clicking rapidly on the tile floor. Scrambling backward, she cried out in despair. There was nowhere she could hide in the room, and if she ran into the hallway, she knew she couldn’t outrun the insect creature. It would chase her down in seconds.

Insanely, her mind recalled the scene in “Jurassic Park” when the velociraptors chased people around in a kitchen. But this wasn’t some fancy Hollywood movie, and the monsters chasing after her were even more terrifying than velociraptors. She knew that if they killed her, she would become infected with the virus and soon rise up again like the others.

How had those people escaped the dinosaurs in the movie? She backed away and looked up at the ceiling. Above her were plain white foam ceiling tiles. If she couldn’t outrun the mutated insects, maybe she could get above them. The idea was crazy, but it was the only way out.

She hurried over to the same desk that she had been hiding under before and climbed on top of it. She jumped up and knocked one of the ceiling tiles loose. She didn’t even know if the ceiling would support her weight, but she leaped up and grabbed on with both hands, hauling herself up with strength fueled by adrenaline and fear.

The red doors crashed open, one of them breaking clean off the hinges and sliding across the floor. One of the huge insects skittered inside and immediately dove after her. She pulled her legs up just as it slashed at empty air and crashed over the desk.

Serena crawled through the narrow space, coughing and choking as dust tricked down around her, trying to keep her hands and knees firmly on the narrow supports that held the ceiling tiles in place. The entire frame seemed to groan and creak under her weight, but it held.

Another insect ran into the room and made a terrifying screeching noise. The other one jumped onto the desk and leaped up after her. One of its claws knocked another tile loose and it fell to the floor. Serena slipped and her hand broke through another tile, but she pulled herself back up and kept going. The creature tried again to jump up after her, but it couldn’t get high enough to climb inside the narrow crawl space. The other creature screeched again and ran out into the hallway in search of easier prey.

Serena just kept going, even as the ceiling sagged and threatened to collapse under her. She scraped and cut her knees on the metal bolts that held the ceiling frame together, and as she got farther away from the missing tiles, the crawl space got darker and she fumbled blindly in the growing darkness. Below her, the creature jumped and slashed at the ceiling over and over again, trying to reach her.

She had no choice and nowhere else to go, so she kept crawling in the hopes it might lead her to somewhere safe.

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