Henry: Part III
XII.
“Wake up, Doc – one of the staff has gone missing.”
“Then call security,” she mumbled, only half-awake as she turned to face the wall.
“Come on, Judith. Please.”
A hand touched her shoulder, and confusion and agitation flashed across her face like shadows as she sat up. George spent his waking moments projecting an aura of ill-concealed menace, but she noted the dilation of his pupils, heard the rapid, shallow gasps of inhaled breath, observed as he bounced restlessly on the balls of his feet. He’s afraid, Judith thought, preparing himself for an ambush. She glanced at her watch – half past midnight – and inhaled deeply as she performed a slow ten-count to steady her nerves.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
“I found an anomaly in the security footage.” George sat at the foot of her bed, his laptop open, and he paused to cast a nervous glance toward the open doorway. “I was up late, checking the fourth-floor camera – see the janitor? One minute he’s moving down the hallway, and the next, he’s gone. Never reaches the elevator, never shows up outside the biosafety lab.”
“Okay…” Judith closed her eyes and tried to think. “How do you have access to the security cameras?”
“The CDC is not the only government entity with an interest in this place, and those other agencies wanted someone on the inside to keep an eye on things.” George opened another window on his laptop. “That last image of the janitor is what I downloaded onto my own device. Now take a look at the time stamp on this one – see that?”
She shook her head. George was leading her somewhere, but the second image revealed only an empty hallway, and if there was any method to his madness, its logic eluded her entirely. The biosafety lab did not operate at night, and under normal circumstances, there would be no building maintenance at this hour. He finished his work and left, she thought, and if the janitor had taken a little longer to mop the floor and empty the wastebaskets, it was hardly surprising to find the hallway empty –
She glanced at the bottom of the screen, and her eyes widened in sudden recognition.
“The time stamp,” she whispered. “These shots were taken at the same time.”
“Correct,” George nodded. “Someone is erasing the security feed.”
They stopped on the third floor before proceeding further, and George unlocked one of the supply closets. Judith watched the hallway until he emerged, a shotgun draped over one arm and a pistol tucked into his belt. The third floor was a maze of hallways, and he led her through a series of turns, checking every corner and blind spot as they proceeded. Moving like a predator, she thought. Like Henry would move. When they reached the elevator, her finger hovered uncertainly over the call button.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Scrubbing the security cameras, stealing samples from the biosafety lab? No one has that kind of access, except for Desmond himself, and why would he undermine his own project?”
“How much time did you spend with Henry?” he asked.
Judith shrugged. “Two days a week when we were doing the blood draws. Everyone wants a piece of his waking hours, so I had lowest priority until…”
“Until Desmond put you to work on the saliva sample.” He saw her expression and grinned. “Don’t look so surprised, I’ve been reading your e-mail. I already told you that Henry has an effect on people, and Desmond spent a lot of time around Henry’s enclosure. He carries plenty of weight in the CDC bureaucracy, but half of Washington is scared shitless about his mental state, and over the last few months, Desmond has shown increasing signs of cracking under the strain. There are concerns that he could do something irrational.”
“Like what?” She said, suddenly aghast. “You don’t think he’d let Henry loose, do you?”
“That,” George said, “Is what I’d like to find out.”
They found the janitor in the biosafety lab, his throat torn away and his uniform soaked with blood. Judith gaped at the corpse, wide-eyed, and her hands began to shake as she looked away from that blank, dead stare. A security breach would have triggered the alarms and flooded the containment room with ultraviolet light, but if Desmond – or someone – had altered the security footage, God only knew what they could do with the alarm. The dumb waiter was empty, so she checked the freezer, rummaging through frost-covered vials of blood, and when she found nothing, she raised the glass door of the fume hood. A large solvent can (DANGER – FLAMMABLE, the label warned her) rested in the center of the cabinet, and she moved it aside, wrinkling her nose as the pungent odor of denatured alcohol assailed her sinuses.
“They’re not here,” she growled. “My samples are gone.”
The lights flickered and died, and Judith yelped as the shrill cry of a warning klaxon rang in their ears. The alarm wailed for another thirty seconds and fell silent, and they stood frozen in place until the emergency floodlights kicked in, bathing the entrance to the biosafety lab in a dim, eerie glow. On the first floor, the doorways to the outer world would already be sealed, barring their escape.
“Do you have your phone?” George asked.
She nodded, and he rummaged through a desk until he found a dark laundry marker. Taking her arm, George scribbled a telephone number and a long series of digits onto her skin. When he was finished, he pressed the shotgun into her hands.
“The safety is here, the switch on top of the receiver. Flick it forward, and when you see the red dot, it’s ready to fire. The magazine is loaded with six slugs of reactive metal alloy, and there’s an oxidizing agent at the core of each slug – they’ll light off when they strike their target, and the resulting fire will burn through anything that you hit.” He pointed to her arm. “This is your last line of defense. Call the number, give them that code, and a pair of F-35s from Eglin Air Force Base can be here in twenty minutes. Don’t use it unless you run out of options, because those planes will drop enough napalm on this place to leave nothing but ashes. Stay here until I come back.”
“Wait!” she cried out. “Where are you going?”
“To the roof. If the coast is clear, we might convince a helicopter to pick us up.” George pulled the pistol from his belt. “If not, maybe I can find Henry and kill him before he does any more damage. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
His footsteps echoed as George made his way up the empty hallway, and Judith sat on the floor of the biosafety lab, the shotgun cradled in her arms, as she tried to work through the night’s insanity. The warning klaxon implied a containment breach, but then Henry was most likely dead, killed by the enclosure’s security system. Then who, or what, killed the janitor? And why had the alarm sounded after the janitor’s death? “One side-effect of the disease is his impact upon weak or pliable minds,” she remembered, thinking of the doctored security footage. “We suspect that he gives off some variety of pheromone, one that we have been unable to isolate and characterize, and the effect upon the staff is… one could almost say, hypnotic.” Paul Desmond had worked with Henry for months before her arrival: feeding him, teaching him to present his arm for the blood draw, observing his every movement. Understanding slowly dawned in her mind, and with it came another certainty. She checked her watch – George had been gone for fifteen minutes, and perhaps he had lied, abandoning her to her fate as he exited the building through some secret egress, or perhaps Henry had been lurking beneath some empty staircase or lying in wait behind a darkened doorway as he made his way to the roof.
Perhaps George was already dead.
She rose and moved into the hallway on stiff, aching legs. Judith was tempted to check Henry’s enclosure on the fifth floor, but the safer path lay downward – the building occupants would assemble on the ground floor, hoping for safety in numbers as they waited for help to arrive. Ahead of her, the elevator chimed, and Judith sighed in relief as she heard the mechanical whir of an opening door – George had not abandoned her. She walked a little faster, thinking that it perhaps it would be good to check Henry’s enclosure, and they could do it safely if they went together, and –
“Hello Doctor Liu.”
Judith stared, wide-eyed with fear, as a figure, shadowed by the semidarkness of the hallway but clad in a distinctive white lab coat, emerged from the elevator. The eyes reflected redly from the glow of the floodlamps, and it smiled with long teeth as Judith stood rooted to the spot, frozen in place by terror. Finally, adrenaline surged through her limbs, and she ran, retracing her path down the hallway as Paul Desmond watched with unblinking eyes. He waited a little longer, then followed, his steps unhurried, his thoughts incomprehensible.
XIII.
Her footsteps echoed in the narrow confines of the hallway as she ran, and George’s shotgun was tightly cradled in one elbow, a half-forgotten child which, in the extremity of her panic, she had not even thought to cast away. The entrance to the biosafety lab was still open, and she sprinted across the threshold, pausing for a backward glance – at the far end of the hall, Paul Desmond advanced at a leisurely walk as he closed the distance between them, and she remembered the weapon. No. The hallway was a hundred paces in length, and she had no confidence in her aim; it was better to retreat behind the heavy door. She pulled it shut behind her and breathed a sigh of relief as the lock snapped into place.
She retreated into the interior of the lab, stepping carefully backward, the muzzle of the weapon pointed toward the metal door. Judith doubted that the retinal scanner would recognize a diseased eye, and she prayed that Desmond had forgotten the numeric code for the keypad. A trickle of sweat ran down her forearm, and she blotted the skin against her shirt, working carefully to preserve George’s numeric code. She checked her phone – no signal. What now? She could shelter in the biosafety lab until sunrise, but Desmond, thwarted by the steel door, would simply move on in search of other prey. How many people in the ground floor dormitories? What if he finds George?
Something heavy battered the far side of the door, and Judith screamed as the frame bowed inward. The biosafety lab had been designed in accordance with rigorous safety standards and constructed to withstand an assault by human intruders, but with dawning horror, she realized that the heavy steel could not withstand the inhuman strength bestowed by Henry’s disease. More dents appeared, and she retreated deeper into the bowels of the lab, stumbling in the twilight glow of the emergency lights, banging her shin against a solvent can. She hid in the kneehole of a desk and waited, biting her lip to stifle her own weeping as the door buckled, gave way, and fell to the floor with a resounding crash. A shadow, backlit by the floodlights, darkened the open space of the entrance.
“You never understood your own work,” Desmond said, and his voice was distorted, a mere simulacrum of the living man. “We knew that Henry is resistant to injury and disease, but your findings promised so much more – immortality. I worked for months to pry the secret from him, used every conceivable trick and threat, every punishment that my mind could devise, and all for nothing. But you came along, and he trusted you. Wanted to please you. And when you succeeded, I took your samples and injected them directly into my veins. The effect, as you can see, is nothing short of remarkable.”
He passed through the lab with heavy footsteps, peering into the fume hood, checking behind the solvent cans, and pausing for a heart-stopping instant by her hiding place before moving onward. He’s toying with me, Judith thought, like a cat with a mouse. Enjoying the thrill of the chase. She gripped the shotgun tightly and eased off the safety. Her first shot went high, crashing through the glass of the fume hood and igniting against the far wall, and Desmond cried out in surprise at the sudden flash of light. Judith stumbled for the doorway, clumsy with fear, and as her ankle twisted beneath her, the shotgun flew from her arms and clattered across the floor. She hobbled forward, desperate to reach the weapon, as Paul Desmond brushed the dust from his lab coat with a theatrical flourish.
“You can run if you like.” The shotgun was a handsbreadth beyond her reach, and he treated her to a hideous grin. “The building is locked down, the power is cut, and I’m afraid your chances of survival are not very good. In fact, if I were a gambling man, I would place a bet on your dying right about… Now.”
He leapt, moving with an athlete’s grace as he cleared the distance between them in a single bound, and his fingers snagged her ankle as her own hand closed around the grip of the shotgun. Judith was dragged backward with astonishing force, but her grasp held, and as the muzzle of the shotgun swung about in a wild arc, a brief, desperate prayer ran through her mind as her index finger found the trigger. The projectile struck just above the pelvis, and though Judith crashed to the floor as he released the grip on her foot, the effect was underwhelming – Paul Desmond staggered, then rose, staring at her in confusion, as he clutched loosely at his abdomen with one hand. Then, the slug ignited, and he stumbled backward, bellowing in rage and pain as white light and intense heat erupted from the wound. Beneath the white lab coat, the burning metal reacted to produce elemental hydrogen from the tissues of Paul Desmond’s own body, and the gas ignited upon contact with the ambient air, splitting the skin from pelvis to sternum as the blaze intensified. A stew of cooked entrails spilled onto the tiled floor of the lab, but even now, he maintained a fragile hold upon life – as the lab coat smoldered and blackened, Paul Desmond fixed his eyes upon her, steadied himself against the wall with one arm, and took a single, faltering step forward as Judith fired again. The shot went high, missing Desmond entirely, but the slug struck the cans of denatured alcohol, and a massive fireball engulfed the room as Judith scuttled away, moving crab-like on her hands and feet toward the open door. The flame singed her hair and burned the exposed skin of her hands, and she staggered upright as the solvent burned away. The building’s sprinklers kicked in, extinguishing a dozen small fires in the hallway, but the biosafety lab was a total loss, and Paul Desmond lay in the doorway, his limbs charred to bare bone and the face burned beyond recognition. The monster, spasmed, twitched, then lay entirely still, but Judith did not remain to witness his denouement – she hobbled toward the elevator on her injured ankle, wondering whether George was still alive.
XIV.
She met George at the elevator, and Judith handed him the shotgun as she ran through the events of the last ten minutes.
“Desmond.” George shook his head. “Son of a bitch built this facility, put elaborate security protocols in place, then blew up the whole thing for a shot at immortality. God only knows what other mischief he’s been up to.”
“Just tell me that someone is coming,” Judith said.
“First, they want me to confirm that Henry is secure.” George glanced at his watch. “If we get to the lab and he’s safely in his little cage, then they might send someone – Hostage Rescue Team or a Tier 1 military unit – to clear the building. It’ll help our case when they hear that you finished off Desmond. Otherwise, my best guess is that someone’s on the phone with Washington as we speak, arranging to kill the power and internet. There’s no way to kill every nearby security camera, but they’ll shut down as much as possible before starting the bombing run.”
“They can’t just blow up an office complex in the middle of a major city.” Judith closed her eyes and tried to will away the possibility. “The whole world would see what they’ve done –”
“For all we know, Henry could be eating the staff on the first floor or crawling through an unsecured ventilation shaft that leads outside.” George paused to reload the shotgun. “The number one priority in Washington is that nothing escapes this building – they’ll pass it off as a gas explosion if they can get away with it, but they’ll blow us up in full view of the world to avoid another outbreak. So let’s get upstairs and pray that Henry’s safe and sound.”
The elevator moved upward with dreadful slowness, its speed reduced to a crawl by the loss of power to the building, and Judith’s fingers did a jagged, rhythmless dance against one thigh as she tried to ignore the pounding of her heart. Everything was going to work out, she told herself. Paul Desmond had made a mistake, and that would likely be sufficient for the whole program to be shut down, but once they could prove that the contagion had not spread beyond its index case, the decisionmakers in Washington would surely see reason. Her thoughts formed a comforting logical chain, which distracted Judith from her real fear; in her mind’s eye, she saw the elevator door slowly opening to reveal Henry, red-eyed and grinning as he fell on them, giving her just enough time for one final scream… The elevator shuddered to a halt, and Judith’s fear was so overpowering that an audible whimper escaped her throat as she glanced at George; his lips were pale, his mouth drawn tightly into a narrow slash above the chin. Beads of sweat trickled from his bald pate to the base of his neck, staining the collar of his shirt. He raised the shotgun, watching the elevator doors with bulging eyes as its maw opened to reveal the gullet of the darkened hallway.
There was nothing. The hallway was empty.
They reached the control room, and the motion-activated lights came on automatically as Judith swiped her badge, but beyond the glass partition, the dim lights of the containment room were not functioning. The gloom of Henry’s enclosure was impenetrable, and Judith stared into the blackness, searching for shape or movement as George placed the shotgun against the wall.
“I can’t see anything,” she whispered. “Maybe he’s hiding from us.”
“Then let’s shed some light.” George sat at the computer terminal and punched a series of numbers into the keyboard. “There’s a manual override for the safety systems, and I’m going to fire up the ultraviolets.”
“No!” she shouted, surprised by her own forcefulness. “You can’t just kill him!”
“Henry is already dead.” George looked up from the terminal, and Judith was surprised by the softness of his expression. “The accountant, the baseball fan, the guy excited at the prospect of a new girlfriend – all of that died six months ago. That Henry would not have wanted to live like this.”
George punched in a code, but the lights remained stubbornly dead, and Judith began to grow nervous. Any tampering with the enclosure should have triggered the ultraviolets, but they had been failed by every safety protocol, and God only knew what mischief the transformed Paul Desmond had left behind. George punched another code into the keypad, and at last, a light began to flicker weakly at the far end of the room. Judith averted her eyes – even filtered through the heavy glass of the control room, the ultraviolets were strong enough to damage the retinae – and held her breath as she listened for the sound of Henry’s death throes. There was only silence, and she looked up, not quite comprehending the sight that unfolded from the other side of the glass: the single working fluorescent, the shattered glass of the ruined ultraviolets, the door of the enclosure standing open.
“It can’t be,” she whispered. “There’s no way he could have gotten out of the room.”
“Never let it be said that Paul Desmond had no gratitude.” George reached for the shotgun. “We need to get to the roof. Call Washington and hope for mercy before the bombs start flying…”
His voice trailed off, and Judith glanced upward, her eyes following his stupefied gaze. Henry was directly above them, his fingers and toes clutching batlike at the mineral fiber of the ceiling tiles. She froze in place, and the next half-second passed with agonizing slowness, as her eyes flickered to George’s face, to the shotgun propped against the control panel, and back to Henry’s emotionless stare as George whispered a single doomed imperative.
“Run.”
XV.
Judith lay on the floor, her vision blurred and a slow throbbing pain radiating through her head. She spat to clear the taste of blood from her mouth – she had chipped a tooth and bitten her tongue when she struck the door of the containment room. George had shoved her away and lunged for the weapon, snagging at the grip with his right hand and flipping off the safety with his thumb as he attempted a desperate shot at the thing that hung from the ceiling. He never made it – whether through some primitive skill or merely the luck of the damned, the drop had been perfectly timed, and George’s arms, still cradling the shotgun, had been pinned beneath the body as Henry landed on his prey. Now, Henry and George lay tangled at the control room door, blocking her exit, and a hideous death rattle mingled with the wet champing sounds of a predator at feed. She swiped her badge and staggered into the containment room.
She retreated to the center of the room, and glass crunched beneath her feet as Judith fumbled for her phone. Henry’s prison, now her own, was separated from the control room by heavy glass, and perhaps that would be sufficient to keep her alive until sunrise, but she was on the top floor of the building and close enough to the window, perhaps, to pick up a signal. Just one bar, she thought. I have to let someone know what’s happening, and all I need is one bar, for God’s sake I don’t want to die –
“Judith.”
She jumped, dropping her phone at the sound of the inhuman voice. Henry was staring at her through the glass, his face smeared with George’s blood, the corners of his mouth turned downward, and for the briefest instant, Judith thought she saw Henry as he might have been, an ordinary man agonized by what he had become.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Desmond… Threatened me. Hurt me. Promised to set me free, if –”
He looked away in sudden abasement as Judith placed a trembling hand against the glass, and the impulse to surrender was so strong that she took a hesitant step toward the door. Then the light vanished from Henry’s eyes, and his expression became perfectly blank, a lion contemplating its next meal, and he slammed into the barrier with such force that a tremor reverberated upward through the soles of Judith’s feet. She fell backward, cutting herself on the shattered glass that covered the floor, and her fingers curled around her phone as a single crack appeared in the barrier. Judith rose, then forced herself to meet the staring eyes. The disease appears to impair the more complex functions of the brain, including memory and cognition, yet Desmond’s mind was perfectly functional. He promised to set you free if you gave him your secret, but he didn’t collect the samples himself. Why? The answer came to her, and though the truth was of no benefit – the die was cast, and she was going to die before sunrise – as she realized the magnitude of her betrayal, Judith felt a pang of sympathy for her tormentor.
“You hated him,” she whispered. “He starved you to keep you weak, to cloud your mind. And you wouldn’t give him what he wanted, so he brought in someone else, someone that you could trust.”
Henry’s expression remained utterly impassive, and Judith retreated to the far corner of the containment room. She held the phone near the blacked-out window and was rewarded with a faint signal – a single reception bar at the top of her screen. Behind her, there was an audible crack as Henry plucked the control room console from its housing and hurled it into the glass, and Judith’s heart caught in her throat as a voice answered on the other end of the line.
“Authorization number, please.”
She read out the sequence inscribed on her arm as Henry leapt again, and a new spiderweb of cracks propagated throughout the barrier. Her voice faltered, then Judith took a deep breath and read the last four numbers of the code. Henry watched from the control room, his face battered by repeated impacts and one arm hanging loosely from a broken shoulder, and when she finished, there was a moment of silence before the voice replied, its tone as neutral as Henry’s blank expression.
“Authorization complete. Jets are inbound, ETA twenty minutes.”
The line disconnected, and she sank into the corner as her legs gave way. Henry began to pace the length of the control room, and she wondered whether his disease-ravaged mind lacked the capacity to understand his own danger – did the possibility of recapture or death elude him entirely, or were his thoughts simply overwhelmed by the trapped prey that tantalized him, in sight but just out of reach? Judith glanced at her watch – she had another eighteen minutes to ponder the mystery of Henry’s existence. I’m sorry too, she thought. In another life, maybe we could have cured you.
She watched as Henry continued to pace, her face as placid as his own, as her ears strained to hear beyond the confines of her prison. Judith checked the time again and listened for the sound of approaching jets, wondering whether the barrier would hold as she counted down her final minutes.