Free Crisis Event: Black Feast by Greg Shows, Zachary Womack Page B

it was a gold mine. She snatched her backpack off the table and unzipped the top. She folded and stuffed her hatchet back inside, then tossed in the electronic scale. Next she grabbed her flashlight and started snatching bottles of chemicals off the cabinet shelves.
    She pulled out a small bottle of arsenic, its death’s head label warning her not to eat it, and a bottle of acetonitrile and another of diethyl ether. To these she added three small jars containing sodium, lithium, and potassium in mineral oil—after sealing each inside heavy duty Ziploc bags she carried in her pack.
    She was stunned that all the chemicals had been stored together. It gave her a hint of what must have happened here: when the Crisis hit the last professor or graduate student standing had hidden a bunch of chemicals in this room, storing them together in a manner they would have been fined for in the days before everything went crazy. They’d known there’d never be any repercussions for doing so because of how bad things had gotten.
    Maybe they’d thought they’d be able to come back and retrieve the chemicals, but the cannibal freaks showed up and killed them. Or maybe they’d just been hoping someone like Sadie would come along and find them—and know what to do with them.
    When she checked the highest shelf in the cabinet she got the biggest surprise of her day, month, and year. Possibly even her life.
    It wasn’t the iodine Benzaldehyde or the MDMA that surprised her, though those were huge finds in and of themselves. But the dimethylmercury...now that was something.
    The container holding it was a thick hardened glass vial that wouldn’t break if you hurled it against a brick wall. That was because the chemical inside was so dangerous that one drop on your latex glove would go right through and kill you.
        When her class had been learning about the chemical, Dr. Willis told Sadie’s class the story of Dr. Wetterhahn.
    About how she had worked with dangerous chemicals for years but one day spilled a drop of dimethylmercury from a pipette onto her glove.
    She didn’t get the glove off quickly enough.
    “The mercury drove her insane,” Willis said. “After it destroyed her kidneys and lungs and turned her hands and feet and face pink and she lost so much weight she slipped into a coma.”
    Sadie almost left the little bottle where it was. But then the smell of vinegar intruded into the room, overpowering the molten metal stench, and she considered the possibility that in this new world—a world that sent former police officers charging at you with murder, rape, and cannibalism on their minds—maybe she would need a deadly poison.
    She would certainly need the silver foil she found, and the box of fifty dust masks, and the latex gloves. Without hesitation Sadie took the box of a hundred she found on the bottom shelf of the cabinet.
    Sadie smiled, remembering how latex gloves had a tendency to disappear from laboratories when they were full of undergraduate students. Dr. Willis used to scream himself hoarse about it.
    One day, after seeing yet another empty box, he yelled, “You guys go through these gloves like condoms!”
    Sadie drank from her canteen before tucking it inside her backpack. She zipped the pack closed and slid it across the table so she could leave. She looked back and played the flashlight’s beam over the shelves one more time.
    When she was satisfied she’d taken everything she needed, she closed the door and hung the periodic table—just in case someone else came looking for chemicals and knew the value of what she’d left behind.
    Sadie returned the way she’d come in, passing by the meth cooking set-up, retracing her path back to the stairwell, and descending to the first floor. She turned off her flashlight and stood outside the stairwell door until her eyes had adjusted to the dim light.
    Less than ten seconds later she was to the building exit, ready to push out into the storm and run for the