It wasn’t long before we were all reunited. I kept my Emmisary going, but put her at the back of the crowd and took over the duty of watching…

  Lucas. NovaGen Employee was a property? Did that mean that employees had access coded as part of their nature? Tobias hadn’t had the property, but I suppose he wasn’t exactly part of the inner circle.

  Borys was taking care of the cameras, Kyle and Felicia were watching the other lift and Cloridan was checking out the other rooms. That left a crowd of survivors in the main chamber being of no use whatsoever and Sarotheil in the side room with Lucas and me.

  Sarotheil had fixed his head, at my insistence. Lucas kept glancing at him warily but was far more interested in staring at my breasts.

  “So, Lucas,” I said. That got him to look at my face. He hadn’t said his name, and they weren’t wearing name badges. Procedures must have slipped after the apocalypse. “Why don’t you tell me something about NovaGen? Start with what you planned to do with our unconscious bodies.”

  “Just… ah… tests,” he said nervously, pushing his glasses back on his sweaty nose. “Nothing too bad, just blood samples and scans. Dr Huang didn’t want—I mean, they didn’t want to refuse them.”

  I came really close to using [Charm] to break him. That was how I preferred to operate. Why can’t we all be friends? Of all the social skills, that one had the least blowback, aside from [Bargain], another of my favourites. Even if someone realised that you’d used [Charm] on them, they tended to let it pass, because you were just so nice.

  In this case, though, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Sure, these monsters weren’t really people. The whole “corporation profits from apocalypse” was just a parody calling out the worst aspects of Captalism. And this dungeon floor was a parody of that.

  At some level, I couldn’t bring myself to be buddy-buddy with these guys. Fortunately, I had other options.

  “Sarotheil,” I called. He’d wandered over to the corner where we’d stuck the remains of the zombie corpses. He turned around and ambled back to us with half of a zombie's hand stuck in his mouth.

  “Sarotheil—” I said. Then I stopped myself. He was a more credible threat this way.

  “These ones don’t taste as good,” he told me. “Too many wires.”

  “Lucas,” I said, leaning into the [Intimidate] Skill. He’d been staring at Sarothiel in horror, but his gaze jerked back towards me as he felt the weight of my words. “You want to tell me the truth, or should I give Sarotheil something fresher to eat?”

  “Oh God… please… no…” he mumbled, staring at me. “I’ll talk, I’ll tell you everything. They—they hadn’t decided, what to do. It would depend on the results of the tests.”

  “What sort of options are we talking, here?” I asked coldly.

  “I—I don’t know! Infection perhaps, but not if you were immune. Study, maybe? Or disposal if you were too dangerous.”

  “I think we’ll have to pass on all of those ideas,” I said dryly. “Now. You guys created the zombie virus, yes?”

  Everyone got real interested when I asked that question. It wasn’t the first time that I’d suggested that NovaGen created the zombie virus, but I guess the survivors still weren’t thinking in terms of a video game. No one wants to think that their fellow humans would really cause all that death. Lucas saw the looks and got even more panicked.

  “No! Oh God, you’ve got to believe me! We found it in the wild and studied it! That’s all!”

  “Really,” I said.

  “I swear! This virus… it— it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before! It communicates with itself, it takes actions on the macro scale… we couldn’t build anything like it if we tried!”

  “Huh. And this outbreak has nothing to do with you either?”

  “That… might have been us. There was an investigation at the time, but it was inconclusive. The reason we built the lab here was because the original sample was taken nearby.”

  “And the investigation thought that it could have been a natural outbreak? How convenient.”

  “It’s not like there's an outside auditor available right now,” Lucas said defensively. “When they were doing it, zombies were tearing up our top level!”

  “I don’t need no study to tell me what’s what,” Travis snarled, interjecting himself into the conversation. I could have stopped him, but I let him continue, on not much more than a whim. The ins and outs of how this all started wasn’t that important to me, since I knew that it was all constructed by Axel. The survivors felt differently, obviously. Even if they believed me, they remembered it happening to them.

  “It’s always a lab leak, everyone knows that—assuming it weren’t a deliberate test!” Travis continued. The other survivors seemed to agree, glaring at the med tech.

  Lucas shrunk back from their glares. “I swear! No process failures were identified! There wasn’t any breach of procedure detected!”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Then why’d you keep the cure to yourselves, you bastards!” Travis yelled, right in the guy's face. Travis didn’t lay a hand on the tech, though. Angry as he was, he kept himself under control. That might have something to do with the fact that I remained in arms reach, ready to act if necessary.

  A little harmless venting was fine, as long as it remained harmless.

  “Cure? There’s no cure.” Lucas whimpered. “We’ve been trying, but the virus adapts too fast. That’s why we wanted to… see how you did it.”

  Via dissection if necessary, I translated. Still, no hard feelings.

  “So what are your current plans?” I asked. “You’ve got your zombie soldiers, were you just planning on waiting out the collapse and rebuilding?”

  Lucas didn’t answer me at first, not until I coughed and made Travis back down. Then he stared at me gratefully.

  “The soldiers were a side… benefit?” He said. “Zombies have some interesting advantages for cybernetic enhancement. The virus keeps them alive, but they aren’t, so you don’t have to worry about tissue rejection or… a whole host of issues.”

  He looked around the room and was taken aback when we didn’t seem as interested in him in the cybernetics advancements that were being made.

  “Also, uh, we needed protection from the regular zombies,” he said. “And the rest of the world hasn’t fallen. The last communication that we got said the containment was working.”

  “How long ago was that?” I asked.

  “We, uh, got cut off for unknown reasons, about six months ago.”

  We all looked at him. “It wasn’t because they failed!” he protested. “It wouldn’t have gotten cut off like that.”

  “I’ve got something,” Borys called out. Having taken care of the cameras, he’d moved on to investigating the terminal in the room.

  “You’re… not authorised to use that,” Lucas said weakly. “I’m still logged on.”

  “No you’re not,” Borys said. “To start with, this isn’t a computer. It’s a slideshow.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course, it’s a computer,” Lucas said.

  “What was the last thing you used it for, then?” Borys asked.

  “It was—I was…” Lucas trailed off, thinking. “I’m not sure,” he finally admitted.

  “Really?” I asked. This question was a little bit interesting. “Don’t you use this thing every day? As part of your job? Can’t you remember what you did with it one time?”

  “I… can’t, all right?” Lucas said angrily. “I’m a little bit stressed at the moment, what with being attacked and kidnapped.”

  I let it slide. It was more evidence that he wasn’t real, that he had been constructed only a few weeks ago at most. But it wasn’t like I had anyone interested in reviewing the evidence.

  “So what does it show?” I asked Borys.

  “Personnel records, mostly,” he said, flipping past screens with a common format. They all had a picture in the top right corner, and some text, presumably a potted bio of the person. “But also… this.”

  He stopped on a full-screen image of a map.

  “Extent of outbreak, March 2012,” I read. “What’s the date now?” I asked the room.

  “September 12th,” Evan answered.

  “2012?” I asked, to be sure. He nodded.

  “So, six months ago, like he said.”

  “The area’s not that big,” Borys pointed out.

  “Still too big to fit in here,” I said. “Look Ravensford is on the map, it’s quite close. About fifty miles according to the scale. He needed trickery to make that work and this area is about five hundred miles across.”

  “So… you don’t think its purpose is to lead us out of the contamination zone,” Borys said thoughtfully. “Is it to show other places we can visit?”

  “Maybe. But what place could be more important than this one?” I looked over the map, trying to find a location that stood out. The lab was quite close, but not exactly at the centre of the zone, which was an irregular shape anyway.

  “Maybe it’s there to make us think that there is a world out there, that humanity still has hope,” I said.

  “Apart from us, who’s going to see it, apart from elves?” Borys asked. “I can’t see them caring too much.”

  “There’s these guys,” I said, gesturing at the survivors. “They care at least. Convincing them that the world exists might be something that Axel wants to do.”

  “Maybe,” Borys agreed. “There’s also this.”

  He flipped over to the next slide. This one was also a map, of the facility.

  “Huh,” I said. “Is it just me, or is that a weird design?”

  The first-floor map, now sadly out of date, showed a mostly open plan, with some offices around the edges, and some lightweight walls to box off various areas of the upper office. The second floor was the exact opposite of that, with six areas all completely separated.

  “Is access between the areas only via the third floor?” I asked.

  “Looks like it,” Borys said. “Maybe that’s how they always build bio-containment facilities.”

  “You think?”

  He shrugged. “Security is always a pain, and this looks like a pain.”

  “I’ll give you that,” I agreed. “Lucas, come up here and tell me how accurate this thing is.”

  The crowd parted to let Lucas through and he stepped carefully away from the wall he’d retreated against to join me. Neither he nor the crowd looked happy about it.

  “It’s an old map, but there’s not much that can change,” he told me diffidently. “We’re here, in Quarantine.”

  He pointed to two enclaves on the second level. “This section is where we implant the control systems on the zombies. The other lab is for proper medical work, DNA analysis, that sort of thing.”

  The enclaves were arranged in a rough circle. Or, since there were six of them, an exact hexagon. Lucas pointed to the two enclaves on the other side of the circle.

  “This section is Control. Just about everything runs through there, the cameras, the patrols and communications.”

  “That’s where the woman I spoke to is?” I asked.

  “She’s probably still there,” he agreed. “The other section is infrastructure. Holds the servers, power and air and… access to the water system. I’m not sure about the specifics there.”

  “What’s this one?” I asked, tapping the final enclave.

  “We don’t use that much,” Lucas told me. “Not since the Director died, anyway. It was for management, there’s a board room in there. It’s pretty fancy.”

  “Okay, and the third floor?”

  “Residences at the back, storage here, here and around here,” Lucas said. “But the main thing is the security checkpoints. You have to go through at least one to get to another section, and two if you’re going across the secure line.”

  “And what do those consist of?”

  “It’s mostly about checking for virus shedding,” Lucas told me. “There are decontamination measures, but they only trigger if it detects something. Oh, and the machine guns. They’ll probably trigger when they see you.”

  “Probably,” I agreed. “What about the cyber-zombies?”

  “They’re too much of a pain to get through the checkpoints, so there are some stationed in every enclave. I think you got all the ones in this one.”

  “You know,” Borys said. “If we get into the Infrastructure section, we can probably hijack whatever they’ve got controlling the zombies. Or shut down the power altogether.”

  “You can’t do that!” Lucas protested. “Without the controls, the zombies will rampage! They’ll kill everyone!”

  I looked at him incredulously. “You built a device where the failure mode was murderous rampage?” I asked.

  He had the grace to look embarrassed. “When you put it that way, it sounds bad,” he said. “But the power has never failed before.”

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that this was all a part of Axel’s grand design, and he probably did it that way because he thought it was funny.

  “Let’s not do that,” I said. “We still don’t know what our goal is, and we might need the employees alive.”

  “So what do we do about them?” Borys said. “They’re pretty tough, and if they start arming them with proper guns, we might find ourselves with a problem.”

  “From problems come solutions,” I said slowly. An idea was coming together. “I think we might be able to turn those zombie soldiers into a solution.”

  I turned to Lucas. “Tell me about who’s in charge here.”