“And what’s on the other side of this door?” Malcolm asked, motioning toward a third door that looked like it led outside.
“No idea,” Julie said, “but it’s not good news. If it leads outside…”
“Can’t we just open it and see?” Ben asked. He walked to the door, pushed the horizontal bar on the front of it, and found it to be locked. “Well, there goes that option.”
“It doesn’t matter, now,” Julie said. “That door, and the one at the end of the hallway, leads outside.” She pointed at the lit exit sign hanging above the door. “That means we’ve defaulted to another protocol.” She slumped down into an office chair that had rolled into the gap between two cubicles.
“‘Another protocol?’” Ben said. “What does that mean?”
“It means those guys are going to start shooting as soon as they get these doors open.”
As if on cue, a pounding bounced through the small office.
“They’re here,” Malcolm said.
“Why will they start shooting, Julie?” Ben tried to get her to explain what she was talking about. “You heard it, right? He asked if they should engage, and the other guy said ‘no.’”
“Because, they’re operating under distress protocol for containment breach situations in the event of a possible outbreak.”
Both men stared blankly back at her.
“That means they’re operating according to CDC Threat Assessment standards. If there’s a possible breach in a contained facility — like this one — they move to contain the threat. If they can’t, or they believe the threat to be ‘imminently plausible,’ as it’s written, they move to eliminate the threat. Since these doors lead outside, they’ll move to close down our escape routes.”
Ben still didn’t understand.
Malcolm picked up the thread. “It’s a utilitarian decision.”
“Exactly,” Julie said. She was no longer paying much attention to the conversation, instead focusing on the barriers between them and the men with guns.
“A what?” Ben asked.
Malcolm answered. “It means we’re now the threat, Ben. They’re going to try to prevent as many long-term casualties as possible…”
“…By eliminating the threat,” Ben finished.
“Yep,” Julie said. “It’s in the playbook. We’ve got the virus running through us. Keep the total death count to a minimum, you know?”
It was a tough reality, but it made sense. Ben nodded, suddenly taking a serious interest in their defensible position. “Do we have anything in here we can use as a weapon?” He looked around, but couldn’t find anything worth trying. Computer mice, keyboards, monitors…
“Okay,” Ben said to the others. “They’ll probably split up — five in all, three armed. So expect one, maybe two guys with guns to come through each door.”
The pounding continued, now coming from behind each of the two hallway doors. Ben stationed himself against one door, with Malcolm and Julie behind the other. Julie reached up and flicked a light switch on the wall next to her, plunging the room into near darkness. He watched as his door pushed in a little more each time the man pounded into it.
With a final crash, the man fell forward into the office room, his body almost completely covered by the hazmat suit.
That’s my edge, he thought. The man’s suit covered his head as well as his body, blocking most of his peripheral vision.
Ben maneuvered around the filing cabinets, stopping when he was almost behind the opening door. The man entered the room and brought his gun up, searching for a target…
…Just as Ben smashed the door forward as hard as he could with a solid kick. The door rocketed toward the man and caught him in the back and head. The man yelped and flew forward, dropping his gun and falling to the floor.
A second armed man entered the room behind his comrade, but Ben had already moved around him. The man stood up just as Ben pointed his gun at him.
“Stay there, sir. I will shoot you.”
The man’s eyes were visible through the suit, and Ben focused on them. He steeled himself, not daring to flinch. The man finally relented, dropping his gun on the floor and raising his hands above his head. Ben heard another crash behind him — the third gunman had broken into the room.
The man in front of Ben flicked his eyes up and away from Ben, then back.
Shit.
Ben anticipated the shots, not a moment too soon. He dove toward the unarmed man in front of him and fell to the side, just as two shots rang out behind him.
“Ben!” he heard Julie yell from the other side of the room.
He was on the ground, groping around in the dark, looking for the gun he’d felt slip out of his hands. The second man to enter the room was on him in a heartbeat, wrestling Ben to the ground.
Ben was helpless. The man on top of him was larger, heavier. He wrestled Ben’s hands behind his back and grabbed a fistful of Ben’s hair.
Another gunshot.
Ben flinched, but the man’s hand released his head, and he felt the weight lifted off his back.
He rolled over, raising his arms to defend a blow he knew would come, but instead he heard another gunshot.
This time, a cry rang out from the third gunman who’d entered, and he watched as the man fell to the ground. A third and fourth gunshot sent Ben’s wrestling partner into the filing cabinets against the wall.
Ben looked up to see Julie standing over the third gunman’s body, her jaw clenched in rage, holding a gun.
“You okay, ranger?” she asked.
He did a mental check of his muscles and bones. Finding everything to be in working order, he sat up and nodded. “Yeah, I’m good. Thanks.”
“No, thank you,” she said. “Thanks for throwing the gun my way. Good thinking.”
He stood. “Uh, yeah. No problem. Where’s Malcolm?”
“The door hit him when that guy busted it open. I think he just got knocked out.”
“Same thing happened to this guy. He’s probably going to wake up soon, though. We’d better get out of here before he does, and get you back to your office.”
She frowned at him as he walked over to check on Malcolm. “Ben, we’re not going to the office. Didn’t you see those other two guys?”
Ben suddenly remembered that there were five men in the hallway pursuing them. Three were sprawled out on the floor in front of them, but the other two…
“Who were they?”
“It was Livingston. And Stephens.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“What’s next?” Julie had assumed her usual air of confidence as she looked up at the two men.
Malcolm and Ben stared across the table at Julie. They had just stopped at a hotel near the hospital and were sitting in a room Malcolm had booked under his assumed pseudonym, ‘Roger Ebert.’ The fact that Roger Ebert was the name of a famous movie critic who’d died only a few years before elicited only a shrug from Malcolm. “I’d always thought his reviews were terrible anyway,” was his response.
The plan was to stay there until they’d formulated a better plan.
“We need to get a bomb crew out to Yellowstone,” Malcolm said.
“Whatever other departments are on this have most likely already done it, so it would be a waste of time to try to call it in and set one up ourselves. Julie can call and make sure on the way.”
“On the way where?” she asked.
“We need to get you help. Obviously we can’t go back to that hospital, but there has to be somewhere else that’s set up a quarantine.”