Chapter 13

Repacking the box we’d just unpacked was nothing short of busywork. But if it kept Jacob from crawling out of his own skin, I was all for it. We packed the boxes of floppy disks first, since they formed a pretty good base. And then we carefully stacked in the remaining office equipment and other random crap.

We were getting to the last oddball, weirdly shaped things when Alisha announced, “I gotta pee.”

“You can’t just go gallivanting around the lab alone,” Jibben said, “it’s a security risk.”

“Gallivanting?” she said. I supposed it was even worse than traipsing.

“I’ll take her,” I said, since I was eager to put a little distance between Jibben and me before I said anything I’d regret.

Alisha and I stepped out into the hall and I switched on my pocket flashlight, and the beam flickered a couple of times before it went solid. No doubt there were fresh batteries around here somewhere. Though finding them would be another matter.

We made our way up the hall, and Alisha broke the silence with, “So…you and Cargo Shorts are married, huh?”

“For the record, coming into work today wasn’t on his agenda. He’d normally be wearing a suit.”

“He’s fine. For a white guy.”

“Yeah. I think so, too.”

By the time we reached the restroom, a small and unassuming unisex deal, my flashlight was still holding steady, but thanks to that flicker, I didn’t trust it now. So I switched to my phone.

“Pee fast,” I said, “or else we’ll end up in the dark.”

Alisha hurried into the can to do her business while I considered my phone. The icon for the app I normally used to calm down, a kids’ game called Mood Blaster, beckoned to me from my first screen. But it needed earbuds to work, and my earbuds were back in the car. Probably for the best, given the fact that my battery was now draining faster than our shower after a good solid session with the plunger.

Once Alisha finished her business, we headed back to containment, where the last few electronics were lined up on the table while Jacob puzzled out how to best fit them into the crate. I picked up the emergency lantern to check out the various ports and connections on its side, throwing shadows around the room as I turned it in my hands. “This thing is a power bank, right? I need to charge my phone.”

Jibben wheeled over and snatched it from my hands. “Do you? There’s only so much charge here, you know. And this lantern puts out more lumens than your phone for a longer amount of time. We don’t know how long we’ll be trapped down here, after all.”

Alisha made a small sound of distress.

Jibben went on, “And with the repeater offline, it’s not as if you’re going to get a signal anyway. We’re best off shutting down our phones completely and conserving whatever charge is left.”

While all of that was technically true, powering down my phone made the whole situation seem awfully grim. But I did shut down, and the others did the same.

Jibben said, “In fact, we need to start rationing more than just the power—to catalog everything we could possibly use and see what we’re working with.”

As he paused for a breath, my stomach chose that moment to interject with a long, low rumble.

Jibben said, “We’ll start with the food.”

Leaving the last of the electronics scattered around containment, the four of us trooped off to the break room, where Alisha flopped down on the cushionless couch. She said, “I don’t see why we can’t stay in here. It’s a lot more like a real room.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Jibben said. “Containment isn’t just any old room. It’s special. It’s shielded. So it’s exactly where we need to be…just as soon as we gather our resources.”

In terms of so-called “resources,” the fridge was slim pickings. Two bottles of salad dressing—Italian and ranch, both low-fat. Two creamers: one half half, one soy. Three cans of diet pop. A piece of individually wrapped string cheese. A nearly empty bag of hazelnut coffee. Half a jar of pickles. And a container of hummus with a sticky note on it that said, Toss this and I will hunt you down and kill you. Love, Patty.

Jibben shook his head. “We clean it out on Fridays. It was practically overflowing yesterday.”

“Great,” I said. “Good to know. Now, give me my pickle.”

“This counts against your share.”

“Fine.”

“And it’ll offer you precious little by way of calories. No protein, no fat—”

I reached around him and screwed off the lid. “If it fills my gut, that’s all I care about.”

“But the average adult male requires 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight—”

As if I even knew what a kilogram was…let alone how many grams of protein were not in that pickle. I just knew that the longer we talked about rationing our food, the more I was kicking myself for scarfing down a breakfast that consisted of nothing but a strong cup of joe and a random hamburger bun.

Jibben said, “Too bad the microscopy lab is magnetically locked. The agar culture plates are edible, technically. They’d at least provide a feeling of satiety.”

I didn’t plan on being stuck down there long enough to start chewing on the lab supplies, thank you very much. As I crunched down on a fairly unsatisfying pickle, Jacob wheeled in the delivery cart so we could raid the supply closet and take it all back with us. I was fairly sure we wouldn’t have any use for the emergency foil blanket or the spare lightbulbs. But better safe than sorry.

We did manage to come up with a few helpful things, though. Bottled water, duct tape, a small first aid kit. But very little by way of batteries that would fit my flashlight, other than the ones we managed to pull from a TV remote.

With the remaining break room chairs and couch cushions in tow, we headed back to containment. Jibben immediately started divvying up the food. “We need to take our individual dietary needs into account. Preferences?” he asked. “Particular aversions—”

I eyed him dubiously. “I’ll eat whatever.”

Jacob added, “This level of micromanaging really isn’t necessary.”

But Jibben was in his element. He gave the remaining half-jar of pickles a shake. “High sodium, but some of us might need to replenish our electrolytes soon enough. You can have one more pickle, Agent Bayne.” I reached towards the jar. “One.”

“I’ll try not to eat it all in one place.”

Jacob got a packet of something snacky and Asian—maybe wasabi peanuts, though it was hard to say, as the writing was most definitely not in English. Alisha got the string cheese. The hummus and salad dressing were divided among us all. I silently apologized to “Patty.” I hoped that wherever she was, she could find it in her heart to forgive us for confiscating her hummus.

“Any vegans among us? No? Good. Then this creamer is for everyone.” Jibben rationed it out evenly among small plastic specimen cups, then counted out a granola bar for each of us from the open box. There were originally eight inside—Alisha and I had taken three—and my hoarded granola bar sat heavy against my chest as Jibben got to the last bar and puzzled over what to do with it.

“The hummus, granola and pickles should keep,” Jibben said, “so I recommend you all start with the perishables. The lasagna shouldn’t spoil right away—it’s phenomenally processed—but it may start getting rubbery around the edges. And the creamer is already warm.” With that, he slurped down his hunk of room-temperature lasagna and followed it with a half-and-half chaser.

Miraculously, he didn’t even shudder. Though I did.

Jacob eased up beside me and said, “Did you want my lasagna?”

“No thanks. I’ll pass.”

But Alisha had zero qualms. “If you’re not gonna eat it, I’ll take it.”

Jacob and I both slid our portions her way, while Jibben grumbled about the fact that redistributing our food put a serious dent in his carefully orchestrated plan to keep us all fed.

With nothing else important to do, we ate. And while I can’t recommend half half without any coffee, the combination of pickles and hummus was surprisingly okay.

As I scraped up the last bit of garlicky chickpea paste with the pointy stump of the pickle slice, Alisha announced, “I gotta pee.”

Again? It had only been maybe an hour. Though with Jibben waxing eloquent about dietary requirements, it seemed like a lot longer—and I was eager enough to get away from all those meaningless numbers.

“We’d better hustle,” I told her. “I dunno how much longer my flashlight is good for.”

We hurried back to the restroom, where Alisha paused outside the door and said, “Are you gonna eat that granola bar I gave you back in the lobby?”

I could’ve pointed out that it wasn’t communal food, since it had originally come from the trunk of my car, but I was in no mood to split hairs. “Maybe.”

“’Cause I thought I’d be home by now, and I didn’t eat breakfast….”

“Fine.” I’d felt guilty for not offering the thing up for inventory anyhow. I dug it out from under my hazmat suit and handed it over. “But hurry up and pee before the flashlight goes kaput.”

Alisha went into the bathroom and immediately turned on the taps full-blast. Because she was worried I’d hear her peeing? Or eating? Or…who knows. Maybe she had to take a dump and didn’t want the sound to carry.

In terms of the water, though, was electricity required to keep it flowing, or was it more of a gravity thing? I didn’t know if there was a pump involved, or if it was just forced through the pipes by municipal water pressure.

Maybe there was a secret storage tank somewhere in the building—I wouldn’t put it past Con Dreyfuss to have something like that installed. If so, there’d probably be more than enough water for four people—even if someone insisted on running the tap the whole time they were in the can. Though if someone were to sabotage the FPMP, tainting the secret water tank would be a pretty good way to go about it—

Alisha yanked open the bathroom door. “Let’s get back before your light goes out.”

Multiple bathroom trips, running water. Was she being weird? I didn’t know her well enough to say. And if she had a stomach issue going on—or, god forbid, her period—then I really didn’t need to know.

Still, the perfect time to sabotage the building was when it was running on a skeleton crew.

As we turned the final corner leading back to containment, we were greeted by raised voices. Jibben was saying, “—just because you’re uncomfortable is no reason to break protocol. If anyone should play by the book, it’s the ranking agent on scene.”

Inside, we found Jacob standing with his clean room suit open to the waist, hands on hips, looking sweaty. “You said yourself the room is shielded—and we’ve all handled the shipment by now. What more do you possibly think we’re going to contaminate?”

Jibben swung around to look at us. “What with all this to-ing and fro-ing—” He’d been gesturing to make a point, and ended up backing into one of the steel tables where a 1970s Rolodex from Argus Institute rattled and nearly toppled off the table.

It was getting awfully stuffy in there, but flailing around and arguing wasn’t going to make it any cooler. And it would be a shame if we managed to screw up the shipment we’d gone through so much trouble to preserve. “We’ll keep the suits on,” I said, “for now. But if we start running out of air….”

I’d been exaggerating, obviously. So I was none too comforted when Jibben said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Well, shit. Water pressure might not depend on electricity, but the ventilation system did. I glanced up at a grate in the ceiling as if glaring at it might make a wisp of air come out. I couldn’t feel anything. Although…the blade of the weird fan-looking piece of equipment beside me was spinning in a lazy rotation. So who knows, maybe some other part of the building had power and was pumping breathable oxygen our way.

And if it wasn’t…hopefully Jibben wouldn’t start trying to ration the air.