Anna came to with the sound of the explosion. The ceiling outside the lab had come down and shaken her awake.
She stood slowly, limbs shaky. She drew a deep breath and let it out again. She was light headed and more than a little euphoric.
Anna felt as though she had just pulled through a thousand major illnesses all at once. She had walked in the valley of the shadow of death and climbed out to bask in the sun. She wanted to burst into laughter and tears at the same time.
The virus had shown her death and transformed her body. She heard a ringing in her ears. No, not in her ears, in her whole body. So much sensory information was suddenly flowing into her. Things that she would never normally know about.
She could taste and smell every surface in the lab, all at once. Feel the bodies of every rat, spider and fly in the complex. Anna heard the bacteria in the guts of every person and felt the chemical electricity crackle through their brains.
She was no longer human.
The virus's millions of endlessly replicating microbes were spreading throughout the complex. Each one sending back information along a complex chain to the nexus of their activity. No wonder they had to rebuild her normal human physique. If, in fact, her physique had ever really been human.
Anna reached out with her mind in a hundred different directions to find a way out of the laboratory. The way she'd come in was blocked but there was a further series of rooms beyond these, that led to a staircase.
Anna found the doorway. She didn't need to see in the dark. She had thousands of extra senses now. The door was locked. She felt the static hum of electricity coming off it. Strange, Anna had thought all the electricity to be down. She reached out in search of another source and found a smaller back-up generator, channelling energy to only a few parts of the complex.
Anna concentrated and was able to cluster a whole culture of microbes around the wiring of the lock, eating it away until it shorted and the door slid open. The minute she stepped inside the room she knew she didn't want to see what it held.
This was where the thick blanket of sorrow, the air of death and clinical cruelty that pervaded the whole complex originated.
The rooms were full of corpses. Deep frozen corpses, dissected corpses, disease ridden and putrefying corpses and, in the ovens out the back, the ashes of burned corpses. It was the age of the corpses that troubled Anna. She could tell from all the information she was receiving what they were. But she did not want to admit it.
In the last of the connecting rooms Anna felt life of a kind. Sickened by so much dead flesh she instinctively moved towards it.
The room was filled with preserved body parts, limbs, internal organs and bones. Many of them had been sliced open for inspection. All of them belonged to children no older than eight years old. Many came from unborn foetuses.
At the far end, beyond a series of midsections sliced from infant brains and placed between perspex, were three incubators. Anna came closer, hardly wanting to see what they contained. She was not pleased when she did.
Inside all three incubators were four month old babies. Their expressions were entirely vacant. Their limbs twitched one at a time in an ongoing pattern, like they were puppets or automata. Over two thirds of each child's skull was missing. Their brains were exposed and a complex array of micro-circuitry was fused to them. Wires ran from the circuitry out of the incubators and into a series of monitors and displays.
A door hissed open behind her and Anna turned to see four figures enter in bio-hazard suits. She had been so engrossed and repulsed by the children in the incubators she had not noticed their approach, although she was now aware that her microbes had been alerting her for some time. She just hadn't acknowledged them.
The figures removed their head gear. It was Sinnot and his cronies Roth, Bennet and Joe Blackfeather.
"I see you've been admiring our handiwork," said Sinnot. "Impressive aren't they?"
"What in God's name are you doing to them?" said Anna, barely able to control her anger. "What is this place?"
"Ah, I believe it's time to admit our guilty little secret. You see Anna, everything you see around you is a testament to our failure and your uniqueness."
"I don't understand."
"And neither do we. We don't understand you. How your biological composition works and, more importantly, how to replicate it. You see we're missing the original research team that created you, not to mention all their research. For a brief while, just before The Cull, it was necessary for us to hide from our employers. We hid in splinter cells to avoid detection and we took everything we had done with us. That was when we left you with the Amish.
"Or rather when our colleagues did. They left you to grow up there. Monitoring you and the five others like you from afar. Then The Cull hit and we lost contact with our colleagues. Lost everything they knew. Our old employers took us back, we began working on the project again. But try as we might we could never create another host for the virus. Not without the original research.
"We tried of course. We've been trying for years. At times we've come close but never close enough. All our efforts have ended in failure. The subjects have always died, often quite painfully."
"You mean," said Anna. "All these children…"
"Complete failures everyone. It's quite tragic when you think about it. We've created the perfect biological weapon. The single most effective way of dominating a global population that has ever been conceived. And yet we just can't seem to find the last piece of the puzzle."
Anna could feel her anger at these cold little men rising. The offhand way they discussed their atrocities enraged her. Her fury spilled out like a wave across every interconnected micro-organism in the complex.
"And what," Anna said, pointing to the incubators. "Are you doing here?'
"Ah yes, those," said Sinnot. "Now that's a little project we are rather proud of, something that hasn't ended in failure and frustration. You see, when they came to understand our project fully, our employers wanted more than a host for the Doomsday Virus. They wanted something they could dominate entirely. It wasn't enough to condition the child from birth to obey them without question. They had to have complete control over it. To make it something that would answer their every whim.
"So we began to experiment with mind control. Every mental process of the creatures you see behind you is controlled by our equipment. There is no function of their brains that we don't control."
"When you were scanning my brain, this is what you were planning to do to me wasn't it?" Anna said.
"I'm afraid you're right. But it wouldn't have worked anyway. Besides, that's all rather academic now, wouldn't you say?"
"You admit all this to me without any regrets?"
"Oh I have plenty of regrets. Years wasted following fruitless paths of research. It would make you weep if only you knew."
"Don't you know what I could do to you? Don't you know what I've become?"
"Oh yes Anna. More than anyone left alive we know what you've become. That's why you won't do anything to us. You need us. No-one left alive knows more about the virus, certainly not that pathetic fool Greaves, You see Anna we four are the closest thing you have to a real father."
That was what sent Anna over the edge. That was what made her unleash a fury she'd been bottling for years. That they could liken themselves to a man as gentle, wise and compassionate as her poppa. These evil little men who had murdered and tortured so many children and animals. All to satisfy their appetites for forbidden knowledge.
Now they were going to pay.
Greaves fired his last shot and yelped as he burned his hand on the muzzle. He dropped the pistol and dived behind the bureau they were using as a barricade. Bullets thudded into it.
The others were nearly out of ammo too. The elite bodyguard firing on them weren't. And those men outnumbered them nearly three to one. Everything was falling apart.
Greaves had begged them to go back down for Anna in the lift, but Colt and Hiamovi had over-ruled him. Especially after the gas went up. So they'd ridden to the top and come out in the luxury accommodation of the shadowy figures who ran the whole operation.
For all the fear they had instilled in Greaves and his colleagues over the years, they weren't very impressive close up. They were just fragile old men whose wizened faces had twisted themselves into permanently evil expressions, like gargoyles carved out of flesh. Looking at them made you shudder, but not with fear, with revulsion. Like looking at a famine victim or a dying animal that's clinging on to life out of sheer cussedness.
Their bodyguards were another matter. They were impressive, terrifyingly so. After an initial exchange of fire they were now pinned down by about ten of them. They were in an oak lined study and were firing from behind a mound of priceless old European furniture.
One of the Native Americans next to Greaves, tried to make a break for the door behind them. What was his name? Hasty something. Hastiin, that was it. He got halfway before catching a bullet in the throat.
He dropped the two shotguns he'd been carrying and put his hands up to the wound. Around ten more bullets hit him and he fell face first to the floor.
Simon Peter tried two crawl over to Hastiin's body to retrieve the weapons the brave had dropped. A bullet to the shoulder put a stop to that plan. It spun him round and he caught another two in the face.
The other Native American, Akecheta, seemed to snap under the pressure. He let out a scream like a war cry and unsheathed two mammoth hunting knives. Leaping over the barricade he charged the guards. He only got half way to their position before a hail of bullets slammed into his torso, pushing him back. His body lay slumped in a thick red pool while the echo of his cry reverberated around the room.
It was desperate. They were all going to die. Greaves never thought it would come like this. After everything he'd survived. He'd been so close to seeing the new dawn of mankind. He could only hope Anna would know how to use the virus properly.