At the reception station, they paused to examine the attendant signs of disuse. The control panel was coated in dust.
Jacobs indicated a bank of monitors. “See if you can bring the lights up while I find the medical bay. I need to get some supplies together.”
Grace nodded again. Her skin was prickling with adrenaline, but this was not the time to go jumpy. There would be warning. There always was.
When she accessed the backup system, the lights came up sluggishly on the generator, hazy and dim, like being underwater.
She stood in the reception area and waited. The time that passed was deep and faceless and full of sound.
When an unwieldy figure came toward her down the hall, she raised her pistol, but it was only Jacobs. He wore a biohazard suit, fitted with a portable respirator and a curved Plexiglas face-mask. With one gloved hand, he gestured her to follow.
He led her through a maze of corridors to the medical wing and ushered her into a glass-fronted observation room. Grace maneuvered between counter tops and stasis chambers to peer through the long window into an adjacent exam room.
The girl was in bad shape, skin discolored, covered in welts and scratches. She was smiling the smile, gleeful, manic. Grace watched her make a circuit of the room. Eight or nine years old. Must have belonged to one of the technicians, maybe a project manager. The girl had been someone’s daughter.
Jacobs turned from a cooler at the far end of the room. Cupped in his hands was a white rat.
“Is it dead?” Grace asked.
Jacobs shook his head. He had to spit out the mouthpiece before speaking. “They’ve got hundreds in there, in stasis. I’d say we’ve got five, maybe ten minutes before it revives. I need to see what she does.”
Grace touched the rat’s side. Its fur felt cold and matted.
Jacobs secured the face-mask again, then motioned her away from the exam room door and entered, carrying the rat.
The girl reacted with no particular venom to Jacob’s presence.
When he offered his gloved hand, she took it without looking up. He lifted her and set her on the edge of a gurney. He left the rat resting beside her.
Back in the observation room, he took off the headpiece and set it on the counter.
“Now watch,” he said, leaning towards the glass.
The girl sat where he’d left her, swinging her feet, smiling the deranged smile. Beside her, the rat lay peaceful and motionless.
“Right now, its body’s still retaining carbon dioxide, but as it comes up, the emissions will be transiently high. It’s going to be a little CO2 bomb in a minute.”
The rat twitched violently.
When the girl moved, it was with unexpected ferocity, snatching up the rat and sinking her teeth into its side. Blood ran copiously, soaking into the front of her dress.
As Grace watched through the glass, the girl’s eyes turned up to meet her gaze. She was holding the animal to her mouth with both hands and then she let it fall. Blood was dripping from her chin and the rat lay motionless and red on the cement floor.
Jacobs had pillaged a battery-powered tablet from somewhere and was making rapid marks with the stylus, murmuring to himself.
There was a low, industrial whirring as the fans came on. Grace flinched as the ventilation system roared to life. Jacobs only stood with his head bent, tapping at the little screen.
On the other side of the glass, the girl began to pace frantically, scraping at the walls with her fingers.
“What’s she doing?”
Jacobs glanced up. Above them, ducts ran along the ceiling, their shining planes punctuated by vents.
“She’s just got a whiff of us,” he said. “The air’s circulating again.”
In the other room, the girl was scrabbling at the floor vents and then at the edges of a broad grate in the wall. It occurred to Grace that if the DEET worked like Jacobs said it did, then the girl wasn’t responding to it. That she must be smelling something else. Or maybe the DEET didn’t work after all, but was only a placebo. She did not know whether Jacobs had intended the fallacy to comfort her or himself.
“Are they really mindless?” she said, with her palms against the glass.
Jacobs looked at her strangely. “You mean, did they experience brain injury? If we could mitigate the reaction to incidental levels of CO2, we’d be certain. But no, I don’t think they’re stupid.”
The lights failed then, and the room lapsed into blackness except for the flicker of the tablet. Without ceremony, Jacobs lit the xenon lamp and continued his notations. Grace reached for her sidearm.
Out in the corridor, footsteps echoed. Multiple people—eight, nine maybe—and coming closer, but they were unattended by the manic sounds of laughter. Grace moved so that her back was to the wall.
Jacobs still scribbled on his tablet, letters slanting down in a frantic scrawl before the CPU converted them to type. He was talking to himself under his breath, alive suddenly, animated. His intensity had become frantic, bordering on possession, and it frightened her.