“Yes. After we found those records on the wrecked plane, you were all excited. You said that we saved the world.”
Joe rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, well . . .”
“Well . . . what? We gave them Dr. McReady’s research notes, so why can’t they help Chong?”
“It’s complicated. They’re running into some speed bumps with those notes.”
“Like what?”
“Look, kid . . . you know that Doc McReady was ready to crack this thing, right? Her lab up at Hope One was where the real cutting-edge research was being done. Out there in the field. Out where the Reaper Plague was mutating. She was sending reports back here to Sanctuary, so they were following her lead, but they were a couple of steps back. It’s not like the old days when data could be shared via the Internet. When Hope One was evacuated, the transport plane was supposed to bring back everything McReady had. All of it, right up to the minute so the bigger lab at Sanctuary could finish her research and actually beat this thing.” He paused and shook his head. “Think about that, Ben. We were that close. We were ready to beat the plague that destroyed the whole world.”
“So . . . okay, it’s a shame that Dr. McReady died when the plane crashed—or maybe the reapers got her, whatever—my point is that if her research was on the plane, then how come the scientists in the blockhouse can’t just, I don’t know, finish it?”
“Because,” Joe said quietly, “not all the research was on the plane.”
If Joe had reached across the table and punched him in the face, Benny could not have been more stunned.
“I went over the cargo manifests,” continued the ranger, “and there’s a reference to the D series of boxes. We found series A through C. Nothing marked with a D. And based on the time Hope One was evacuated, there was nothing dated later than a month before she left.”
“Did they somehow leave the stuff up at Hope One?”
“No way. The manifest says that it was packed. It should have been on that plane.”
“Then where is it?”
“Well, gee, kid, if I knew that, I wouldn’t have gotten paralytic drunk last night, now would I?”
Benny felt his face grow hot. “You’re telling me there’s no clue at all?”
Joe sighed. “I don’t know. There was a single reference to Umatilla, but no notations. Nothing to say that they stopped there.”
“What’s Umatilla?”
“The Umatilla Chemical Depot is an army base in Oregon. They stored chemical weapons there. Stuff like GB and VX nerve agents. Bad stuff that was scheduled for destruction. The base was closed in 2015. Not sure what happened to it after that, but there’d be no reason for the transport plane to stop there, and certainly no reason to offload the D-series notes there. Whole area was overrun during First Night. I only mention it because it’s the one thing in the records we can’t account for.”
“Are you going there?”
“Me? No. I sent word to a couple of my rangers to head up that way. It’s a long shot and probably not worth the effort.”
“Look,” Benny said angrily, “even if you don’t have that last month’s worth of stuff, what we found had to put you pretty far ahead. That should be worth something.”
“It is,” Joe conceded tiredly. “Some of the clinical data in those boxes is responsible for your friend Chong still sucking air. The metabolic stabilizer and a few other treatments. That’s what’s keeping him on the happy side of being dead.”
“Chong spoke to me today.”
Joe cocked an eyebrow. “What did he say?”
Benny told him.
“Ouch,” said Joe. “Look, this thing’s gone off the rails. I was out there all day yesterday, but I couldn’t find the missing notes. I got to tell you, Benny, this isn’t the ending for all this I’d been writing in my head. For the last couple of years that plane’s been the Holy Grail for us. It was our silver bullet. We find it and find Doc McReady’s notes and bam, the mad scientists in the blockhouse cook up a cure and we all tell our grandkids how we saved the world. But . . . the doctors over there can’t seem to figure out where Doc McReady was going with her research during those last weeks before Hope One was shut down. There were samples of a mutagen, but there was also a reference to a workable treatment code-named Archangel. But the name’s all we have. There’s not one scrap of data on what Archangel is or does. Those boxes are the key, and they’re missing. We lost our last chance to beat this thing.”
“Don’t say that! There has to be something else we can do. There has to be a way to find that stuff.”
Joe simply sipped his coffee.
“Joe, are you going to sit there and tell me that you just give up? You? You’re Captain Ledger, for God’s sake. You’re a hero of First Night.”
“Sure, kid, it says so on a Zombie Card. It must be true.”