71
THIS THING SHOULD HAVE BEEN over by now.
All the walkers should have been dead by now.
Benny actually felt as if Dr. McReady’s words were physical blows that pounded him in the heart and over the head.
“Are you . . . serious?” asked Nix.
“Of course I’m serious,” barked McReady. “You think I’d joke about something like that?” She nodded to the plastic containers of Archangel. “Why do you think I came here? This base is the best biomaterials production facility west of the Rockies. Ten times better than the setup at Sanctuary, but even a lunkhead like Jane Reid should have managed something.”
Joe sighed. “Without the D-series notes, all she managed to do was make the metabolic stabilizer and a very, very weak version of Archangel. She tried it on a few walkers and got mixed results.”
McReady closed her eyes. “Save me from idiots.”
“Listen, Monica,” said Joe. “How’d you even know about this place? I sure as heck never heard of it.”
McReady snorted. “There are half a dozen bases like this you never heard of. Places nobody ever heard of unless they were on the right lists.”
“I was supposed to be on every list.”
“Oh, cry me a river,” said McReady. “There’s always another level of secrecy, don’t you know that? I know about this place because I wrote the protocols so they could build it. Just like I wrote the protocols for the redesign and repurposing of the Umatilla Chemical Depot in Oregon.”
“Why?”
“Because the United States of America needed to stay safe, and we couldn’t afford to let naive international chemical weapons treaties hamstring us. Every third-rate country who couldn’t afford a nuclear weapons program but got a Junior Chemistry Wizard set for Christmas was cooking up bioweapons and nerve agents. What were we supposed to do? Wait until someone launched something and then complain to Congress that we had no response because our funding was cut and our charters revoked? Grow up, Joe.”
“I guess that worked out really well for you,” observed Nix.
Dr. McReady gave her such a lethal and venomous look that Benny thought Nix would drop right there; but Nix narrowed her green eyes and gave it back full blast.
Before the two could explode into an argument, Benny asked, “Where’s the rest of the staff? We saw some bodies. One guy in his office . . . ?”
“Shotgun?”
“Yes.”
“Dick Price. He was the last. No great loss.” The scientist gave another derisive snort. “The rest are dead. Most of them killed themselves. Cowards.”
Benny felt sorry for the scientist, but it was getting harder and harder to like her.
“By the time my team got here,” said McReady without a trace of remorse, “more than two-thirds of the staff were already gone. Before and after we got locked in. The staff who’d been here were torn up by speculation as to whether some of the biological terrors they’d helped to create had been used to destroy the world. Might be true, too. There were suicides . . . murder-suicide pacts. Heart attacks from stress. A couple just wandered off into the badlands to let the desert or the dead have them.” She shook her head in disgust. “We’re struggling to save the world, to preserve life, and these idiots can’t wait to catch the bus out of here.”
“That guy, Mr. Price, left a message,” said Benny. “He wrote, ‘May God forgive us for what we have done . . .’?”
“?‘We are the horsemen. We deserve to burn,’?” finished McReady. “All very dramatic.”
“If he killed himself out of guilt,” she said, “what were you all guilty of?”
McReady’s eyes didn’t blink or waver. “If you’re asking me if I participated in the development of the Reaper Plague, then no.”
“I’m sorry—”
McReady pointed down the hall toward Price’s office. “He did. The people here did.”
“They started the plague?” asked Benny, aghast.
“Don’t be an idiot. Why would we release a doomsday plague? We’re scientists. We research, we develop—we don’t implement. Other people—politicians and generals—take science and turn it into a weapon. I expect Captain Ledger here’s been filling your head with his left-of-liberal antimilitary propaganda.”