Fine. Logic. Logic dictated that the generators hadn't gone down on their own. Logic dictated that the prison was under attack. He could still hear screaming. Was it closer?
Vikram was already in the Ops Room when he arrived, looking concerned, his beard matted to one side where he'd probably been sleeping on it. He had a sidearm strapped to his belt. Clark's hand involuntarily went to his own weapon.
'The troops are letting in the people from outside. The story they tell is not good,' Vikram told him. The Major started up one of the computers. It would drain emergency power but not much of it and it would let them see what was going on. Vikram called up some views from surveillance cameras around the facility. The main courtyard was clear, swept by searchlights that showed nothing. The helipad on the roof looked fine.
The western fence was mobbed by the dead.
Their faces were blanks in the low-light view, their hands pale blobs that picked and tore at the barbed wire. Clark couldn't see their wounds or their blank expressions but he recognized instantly the way that they moved, the slow, remorseless march, the dragging but unrelenting way their arms lifted and fell and pulled and ripped and beat.
'Where did they come from? How did they gather so quickly? We expected a few of them at a time, not an army. The dead don't surge, Vikram. The dead don't surge. That takes conscious planning.' Which normally they didn't have. Yet they'd shown some measure of it when they escaped the detention facility in Denver. The girl locked down in the pub showed plenty of it herself.
This was a directed attack. A raid.
'Get some men with crew-served weapons up on that wall. I don't think the infected can get through the wire but I don't want to give them time to try.' Clark rubbed at his face. 'Get the Stryker crews mobilized, I want to cut this off from the rear before it can turn into something significant. Are all of the survivors inside the gate?'
Vikram peered into a computer monitor and puffed out his cheeks before answering. 'Yes. All of them that still live. They say the dead attacked their shantytown, first.'
That would explain the screaming. It was definitely closer now.
'Fine.' Clark went to a boxy terminal bolted to the wall by the door of the room. It looked like an antique next to the ruggedized laptops and industrial strength cabling that Vikram had installed in the Ops Room. It was the control terminal for all of the prison's facilities and systems. Clark booted it up and paged through a main menu until he found what he wanted:!!!EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN!!!
'Step away from that door,' he called. Vikram was a good ten feet from it but he stepped away anyway, like a good soldier. Clark hit theENTER key and an alarm sounded throughout the entire prison for two seconds. Moving silently on electromagnetic servos the door swung shut and clicked three times. It was locked tight. The clicking seemed to go on for minutes as nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine other doors throughout the facility shut themselves and locked automatically.
For a long time Vikram and Clark just looked at each other and waited for something to go wrong. Nothing did.
'There. We're safe,' Clark announced. 'Now we just have to decide what to do next.'
The two second alarm sounded again and the door of the Ops Room ghosted open.
Clark's heart started beating very fast. Too fast.
'Bannerman,' Vikram began, but Clark held up a hand for patience.
He studied the terminal in front of him. He hadn't touched anything. He called up an activity log and saw that nine seconds after he'd given the order to lock the prison down, someone else had given the order to release the doors again. All of the doors, including all the gates. Even the exterior gates. There was nothing to stop anyone or anything from just walking into the prison.