Belize

Chapter Nineteen

Njabulo held up his rifle. “I’m out,” he said dejectedly.

Shen just shook his head. “We don’t have any more mags. Ditch it.”

They were currently holed up in a small break room area with some tables and chairs and a pair of vending machines. Rebecca didn’t trust getting water from the sink, just in case the water supply had somehow become poisoned with the virus, so while the soldiers reorganized their ammunition, Billy smashed the front of a vending machine with his elbow and reached in to grab some drinks. Serena gratefully took a bottle of water and tried to drink some, but her hands shook so much that some of it spilled down her face.

She coughed and looked sheepishly at Rebecca. “Sorry. I was so thirsty. That duct I was hiding in was so dry and it was all full of dust.”

“Just take your time. Drink it slowly,” Rebecca said. “I want to use some water to clean the cuts on your legs and hands, but I’m afraid it will just make them start bleeding again. We’ll have to wait until we make it back to the surface.”

Serena took a deep breath and carefully sipped from the bottle. Her hands still trembled a bit, but not as badly as before. When they had first reached the break room and Billy had set her down, Serena’s whole body shook and she could hardly stand. Thankfully, she had pulled herself together relatively quickly. No one judged her for being scared. Even Marco, who had yelled at her when he found out she didn’t know the way to the elevator, had apologized for his outburst, although Rebecca suspected that Shen made him do it.

“Thank you, again,” Serena said. “For helping me. I was in those ducts for awhile and I didn’t know if I could find my way out again.”

“It was a good place to hide,” Rebecca admitted. “It was a miracle we were able to find you. Billy’s the one who heard you yelling.”

“I heard the gunshots, so I just started yelling as loud as I could. I was lost and couldn’t find my way out. I was scared I was going to be stuck up there forever.”

“It was a ventilation shaft or something?”

Serena drank more water and shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. There were metal pipes and things like valves. It went all over, like a grid system above the lab. I was up there for awhile, crawling around and trying to find my way out.” She sighed and drank some more.

Rebecca had a feeling she knew where Serena had been hiding. A system of ducts that encompassed the entire lab complex seemed like it was probably part of the decontamination system. If Serena had been trapped up there when the system activated, she would have been the first to die.

Rebecca didn’t tell her that, though. Instead, she said gently, “Serena, are you absolutely sure you don’t know the way out of the lab? I mean, does this break room look familiar? Do you think we’re going the right way? Do you know where we might find a map?”

Billy stood beside them, looking out into the hallway. “You’d think we’d have found directions to the emergency exit by now. I thought you had to have stuff like that posted by law.”

“In America, maybe,” Rebecca said with a shrug. “Besides, what does Umbrella care about obeying the law?”

Serena finished the water and sighed. “I’m sorry, I don’t know. I got all mixed up when … when I first ran away. I think I went into Green Lab, but I was so scared, I wasn’t really looking at signs. And then I crawled into that maintenance duct and now I have no idea where I am.”

“We can’t be far from the elevator,” Shen said, coming over to them. “Think about it. We only went down one hallway from the elevator when we got attacked by those things. Since then, we’ve been moving generally in the same direction parallel to the elevators.” He pointed down the hall. “I think I have a pretty good sense of direction, and if we keep going that way, I’m sure we’ll get there. Or at the very least, get to a part of the lab that Serena recognizes. But we’ve got to hurry.”

“Why?” Serena asked.

Rebecca, Billy, and Shen simply shared a look between them, and then Rebecca said, “It’s hard to explain. But we need to get out of this lab.”

Marco brushed past them on his way into the hall. “Yeah, let’s stop talking and get moving. Clocks running, you know what I mean?”

He and Njabulo were armed with AR15s with one magazine of ammunition each. Shen had already given his sidearm to Rebecca, so he carried Njabulo’s pistol instead. Serena was the only one of them without a gun, but she didn’t know how to use one anyway.

As before, Marco and Njabulo went in front. Rebecca walked with Serena in the middle, and Shen and Billy brought up the rear. As they made their way down the hall, none of them spoke. It was futile to pretend they were being stealthy, since they had already made so much noise that every zombie in the entire lab had probably heard them. But at least if they were quiet, they might hear something coming. Although Rebecca dreaded to think what they would do if they encountered another mob of zombies, or even worse, one of the insect creatures.

Shen stepped up to Serena and said softly, “If you recognize anything, tell us right away.”

“I will, I promise.”

Rebecca wished she shared Shen’s confidence, but the truth was that she was hopelessly lost in the maze of hallways and rooms they had gone through so far. She tried to mentally map out in her head where they had already gone, but it was no use. Umbrella didn’t build their labs according to any logical blueprint, it was all a jumble of random rooms and twisting hallways, as if they were specifically designed to turn people around. The lab complex in the Arklay Mountains was the exact same way. The only reason the surviving S.T.A.R.S. members had found their way out of that doomed place was because they found a map. Otherwise, Rebecca was sure they all would have died there, lost in a mind-bending labyrinth of identical labs rooms and gleaming white corridors. And if they didn’t get lucky soon, the same thing might happen here.

“So you’re a nurse in the hospital, right?” Serena whispered. “Why are you here in the lab at all? How did you even get down here?”

“The soldiers brought me,” Rebecca said. “They made me and Billy come with them. It’s stupid, I’ll explain later.”

“Billy works in the hospital too?”

“No, he’s my boyfriend. He came to see me at work and we got dragged into this mess.”

“God,” Serena muttered. “This is all so terrible. How could this have happened? I heard a rumor that the lab was being shut down, and then … Dr. Garcia, he …”

“Don’t think about it,” Rebecca said gently. “You got away, and that’s all that matters.”

“We shouldn’t have been stuck down here at all,” Serena hissed, anger edging her voice for the first time. “We could have escaped right when it all started. Antonio took the elevator without us, the bastard.”

Rebecca was surprised, but she said nothing. That conversation could wait until later. Instead, she put her arm over Serena’s shoulder and said it was going to be okay. They would get out of the lab and make it to the hospital, although she said it for her own benefit as much as for Serena’s.

She turned and noticed that Billy was looking at her. He smiled a little bit and gave her the slightest nod. Rebecca remembered that smile, it was the same kind of mischievous, fatalistic smile that Billy had given her a few times back in the Arklay Forest, the last time they had to fight for their lives. It was a smile born out of desperation, stubbornness, and sheer spite. It was strangely reassuring to see it on his face again.

“We’re gonna make it out of here, babe,” he said softly, so only she could hear it. “Just like last time. They tried to kill us before and couldn’t do it. They aren’t going to kill us this time either. We’re gonna get out of here, I promise.”

This morning, she had been trying to build up the courage to sit down with Billy and have a long talk about their relationship, the conversation that they had been putting off for weeks. Now, she wondered if they even needed to have it. Looking into Billy’s eyes, she saw the intensity and dedication that had been missing ever since they came to Belize. Once again, Billy had a sense of purpose.

Rebecca suddenly realized that it wasn’t their relationship that was in need of reinforcement, it was Billy himself. Ever since they came to Belize, he had been aimless and unfocused because for the first time in his adult life, he had no real direction. Every day was the same. He trudged to his boring job at the marina and just tried to make it through the day. Rebecca should have realized that a job like that didn’t give Billy the kind of meaning he desired, it didn’t fulfill him or help him achieve his ambitions in life. But she was so worried about her own job, and all the other little things that were going on, that she never really thought about Billy’s job.

From now on, she decided, she was going to make sure that Billy had a worthwhile job that gave him the same sense of accomplishment that she had with hers. He was made for so much more than a basic labor job, and she was going to make sure that he found it.

“Hey,” she whispered back. “Do you still want to watch that movie tonight?”

The smile on his face got a bit wider, a bit more natural. “You know I do.”

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