novelraw Chapter 452: Something Needs To Be Done
Chapter 452: Something Needs To Be Done
The stairs went down farther than Sera expected.
She was sure that the concrete was cold under her boots, but either way, she didn’t feel it. Each step held the same careful rise and depth, built by hands that thought measurements and right angles made things ’government’ safe.
The alarm above them muted as they descended until it became a dull hum pressed into the ceiling.
Around them, the air seemed to thicken.
The smell of bleach, old infections, and stale sweat greeted them. Sera wrinkled her nose, more than familiar with that particular scent. It was the same that Adam’s lab had in her last life.
Her creature tasted the air and went still in a focused way. They buried their mistakes. Too bad they did not bury them deep enough.
The emergency lights came first, thin strips running along the bottom edges of the walls. Red bands painted the corridor in short pulses. The overhead lights flicked on a second later, humming in an uneven rhythm.
At the bottom of the stairs, a heavy door waited. Reinforced metal. Observation glass at face height. A keypad beside the handle.
And still, Sera did not slow.
She reached the door, looked through the glass, and saw a control room beyond. There were two consoles and four empty chairs.
One technician lay unconscious on the floor with a smear of blood under his head. Another crouched in a corner, arms wrapped around his knees, eyes wide.
He stared right back at her, his lips moving, but not a single sound came out.
Her creature watched his panic with disinterest. He is not the problem. He is decoration.
She gripped the handle. The lock resisted her for one breath, then snapped. She shoved the door open. It hit the wall with a hard, flat sound that made the crouched man flinch.
None of them paid him any attention.
Metal rails along the far wall held a row of screens. Half showed camera feeds from the yard above. The rest held images from deeper in the underground facility. Corridors. Cells. Small labs with stainless tables and trays.
One feed showed a heavy containment room that did not match the rest.
She looked at that one.
It had what looked to be solid bars dividing everything. Then came the reinforced glass and the straps on the floor and walls. Looking up, Sera could see the pressure vents along the ceiling. The sound from below seemed to come from there, even through the screen.
Her creature pressed close behind her eyes. That room. That is where they put him.
Aerenyx stepped closer to the console and breathed in through his nose again. "Most of the live strain is below that level," he said. "They concentrated it."
Alexei tracked the camera angles. "We need to know the path," he said. "This place is a maze by design."
Alexei tapped through the feeds with quick, efficient movements. The corridor labels scrolled past in clipped letters, each one showing the level markers and the sector numbers.
He stopped on a layout map.
"There," he said, pointing. "We are here. The containment cell is three corridors down and one level lower. The intermediate section is cages."
Sera’s creature warmed at that word. They caged things that wanted to spread. They thought bars would matter.
The crouched technician found his voice at last. "You can’t go down there," he rasped. "It is not stable. It is not under control."
"Your people took him from the homestead," Sera said without looking at him. "You turned him into this. You had your chance to keep it under control."
"We were trying to build a countermeasure," he protested. His hands shook against his legs. "We needed a live carrier. We had to push the strain or the region was going to fall."
Her creature wrinkled with contempt. They always say they were trying to make the world a better place. They never say they were wrong. Not even when things blow up in their face.
Sera turned away from the screens and walked to the inner door. Another lock. Another keypad. Alexei reached for the keys before she could tear it.
"Quiet this time," he said. "If they built any automatic responses, we have already tripped enough."
He stripped the cover from the keypad with one smooth motion revealing the wires that lay in a tight cluster beneath. Lachlan leaned in, hummed under his breath, and delivered a small pulse into the exposed lines.
The panel flickered, shorted, and unlocked.
Sera pushed the door open and stepped into the lower corridor.
The sound met her fully now.
Laughter. Mutters. Words half-formed and then twisted into something that was not language anymore. It bounced off the concrete and metal, layered on itself, hard to tell how many voices were making it.
Her creature listened. Too many. Not all from him. They have more toys they wanted to play with.
The corridor walls held thick glass sections at regular intervals. Behind each pane, even more cells waited with their bars reinforced the inner side of the cages. There were even stainless floor drains sat in the middle of each concrete square.
Some cells were empty.
Some held metal gurneys with straps.
Some held people.
Sera walked past the first cell and looked in.
A man lay on a narrow cot, his eyes were open and glassy. If you looked close enough, you could see the parasites moving under the skin of his arms in slow waves. His jaw had fused into a stiff mass where dried blood had crusted along the corners of his mouth.
The monitors on the wall beeped in a steady rhythm that did not match the irregular twitching of his body.
He tracked her with his eyes.
They held confusion and a thin thread of hope.
Her creature examined him. He is already gone. The parasite runs his heart for its own use. Nothing worth eating left.
She moved on.
The next cell held a woman strapped to a gurney. Tubes carried fluid into one arm and out of the other. A clear tank beside her showed a smaller parasite suspended in liquid. Its tendrils flexed slowly, testing the glass. Her belly swelled in a way that did not match her frame.
Aerenyx’s voice came low and precise. "They are incubating in host tissue," he said. "Trying to see how many strains they can grow in one person."
Zubair’s hands balled into fists. "They are not even pretending this is about a cure anymore."
Lachlan’s jaw tightened. "How long do you think before something inside her eats its way out?"
The woman’s eyes rolled toward them. Her lips moved around the respirator mask.
Sera did not stop.
Her creature’s opinion did not waver. Too far gone. Spoiled. All inedible. If this keeps up, there will be nothing for us to eat anymore. Something needs to be done.