Zompoc Survivor: Inferno by Ben S Reeder Read Free Book Online

when we stepped out of the door. The door beside the one we had just entered opened onto a hall with offices on the left and labs on the right. The next lab looked like a bomb went off, and I was guessing that wasn’t far from the truth. Broken microscopes, shattered Petri dishes, and lots of expensive looking junk covered the floor of the room. There was a pair of radiating blast marks on the tile surrounding two jagged holes that left the crawl space under the floors exposed.
    “Looks like someone sanitized the crap out of this room,” I said. “Used the same protocols we had in Iraq. Dump it all in the middle and drop a demolition charge on it.”
    “Nothing says clean like high explosives,” Hernandez answered. An open door waited at the second lab, this one showing a very similar approach.
    The last room looked like it had been a clean room once upon a time, but someone had gone to great lengths to fix that. A pile of blackened ash lay in the middle of the room. On either side of it lay the metal legs of the table it had probably been on, twisted and melted from a super-heated source. My guess was a thermite charge.
    “What the hell happened here?” Hernandez asked.
    “Somebody really didn’t want their security deposit back?” I asked in mock innocence. I turned and opened the door to the office nearest me. It hadn’t fared any better than the labs. Bullet holes ran in a jagged line across the desk and through the screens of the computers. I stepped inside and looked behind one of the desks to find only a pair of clipped cables and a power cord.
    “Eight minutes!” I heard Kaplan call out.
    The next two offices told the same story: desks shot to shit, computer tower missing. The fourth office only had one difference: a shattered laptop on the single large desk at the back of the room. Just like the other offices, the tower was gone with only clipped cables to show it had ever been there. I stopped for a moment and looked around the room. Something was nagging at me as I looked down at the desk. My brain was telling me I was missing something.
    “Stewart, we only have a couple minutes,” Hernandez said from the doorway.
    “I’m missing something,” I said.
    “Yeah, your ass if you don’t hurry up!”
    “The guys in lab coats…they were shot from behind. Does that strike you as something a tier one operator might do?”
    “Not really.”
    “Someone shot the crap out of the offices, but someone also grabbed the computer towers. If it was one team doing both, kinda schizophrenic, right? But if one team did the shooting, and the other did the grabbing, it makes more sense.” I stepped around the back of the desk and looked down. “Back in the sandbox, special ops teams brought back gear for intel to analyze. Laptops, computer towers, hard drives. So…” I stopped and let my imagination complete the scenario in my head. “Our operators show up and try to take the center. The boys in black hold them off while some of them grab the doctors, take them into the front room, and shoot them. They go through and destroy everything they can in case they lose…which they do. Our boys sweep through and grab anything they can: laptops, towers, thumb drives, disks, whatever. But my gut tells me they missed something. One little thing.” I walked around beside the desk and looked at the office. “Why can’t I see it?”
    “Because you’re standing on top of it?” she said. I looked down. Sticking out from under the black desk was the corner of a black laptop case. Red faced, I grabbed it and unzipped it. My fingers felt several hard objects in the pockets, and a few seconds later I had fished out a thumb drive and two disks in plastic sleeves.
    “You’re a genius,” I told her as I tucked them away and headed for the door. As we came back into the security room, my eye fell on a familiar looking white board beside the security desk. Designed to make it easy to see who was on at any given point in