Free Immortal by Dean Crawford Page A

laboratory, checking her watch as she ran. She burst into the reception area to see a dozen cages scattered around and a nervous-looking Colin Manx
holding court with a fake pistol in his hand pointed at some thirty scientists cowering on the floor in one corner.
    ‘The cops will be here any minute,’ he wailed. ‘We’ve got the monkeys, let’s get out of here!’
    Saffron ignored him, looking at Bobby. ‘You find another way out?’
    ‘Nothing,’ Bobby said desperately. ‘The labs stand along the back wall of the building. Are we going to be arrested?’
    Saffron didn’t reply. She strode to the glass doors of the reception area, cocking the shotgun. Without a moment’s hesitation she blasted the glass clean out of the doors, the
tearing report of the gun replaced by the shrieking of the chimpanzees in their cages.
    Saffron turned to Colin and Bobby.
    ‘Bobby, get the van. Colin, get the cages out and into the van first, then let these bastards go.’ She gestured to the scientists with a jab of her thumb.
    ‘What about you?’ Manx asked in surprise.
    Saffron scowled at him.
    ‘Just do as you’re fucking told and get out of here. I’ll worry about me.’
    With that, Saffron hurried away down the corridor back to the laboratory, reaching it as the female scientist was gently lifting Eric’s limp body from his seat and folding him into her
arms. She looked up as Saffron burst back in.
    ‘Why are you doing this?’ she demanded. ‘We’re not hurting these animals, we’re helping them.’
    ‘Shut up,’ Saffron snapped. ‘Get out, now.’
    The scientist looked at the grenades in her hands and the computer servers, her face stricken.
    ‘There are almost five years of research on those servers,’ she said. ‘Everything we’ve done.’
    Saffron turned her back to the scientist and Eric, hissing over her shoulder, ‘Get down behind the counter.’
    In the glossy black screen of the computer servers, Saffron saw the scientist stare at her for a moment longer.
    ‘You disgust me,’ she said, and then ducked out of sight. Saffron stood before the computer servers with a grenade in each hand. She glanced over her shoulder at the seat where Eric
had been sitting only moments before. Tears pinched at the corner of her eyes again.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered softly.
    And then she pulled the pins on both grenades before tossing them behind the huge computer servers and diving for cover. The explosives rattled behind them for a second or two, and then the
servers vanished amid a blast of vaporized metal.

12

BIO-SCIENCE DIVISION LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORIES, LOS ALAMOS
    Ethan Warner glanced nervously at Lopez before speaking.
    ‘Hiram Conley was suffering from an infection?’
    Tyler Willis nodded, gesturing to one wall of his office where a series of graphs and charts were pinned haphazardly.
    ‘I tracked the course of the infection over six weeks. Never seen anything like it, some kind of telomere mutating bacterium, not a virus. It shared similarities with Bacillus
permians , but appeared to have evolved differently.’
    ‘Is it transmissible by air?’ Lopez asked, touching her face again.
    ‘No,’ Willis said firmly, ‘this isn’t something that’s easy to contract. What’s fascinating about it is that I was able to extract a genetic profile of the
bacterium, and by tracing its mitochondrial signature I was able to ascertain that Hiram Conley had been suffering from this infection for something over one hundred fifty years.’
    Ethan thought for a moment.
    ‘So, what is it? Was this guy some kind of zombie or something?’
    Willis shook his head.
    ‘No, but that’s not the interesting part. The infection was starting to mutate again, and I was trying to find out what was happening when Hiram Conley was shot.’
    ‘How was the mutation affecting him?’ Lopez asked.
    ‘That’s the really interesting part,’ Willis said. ‘He was starting to fall apart and—’
    Ethan