The Virus Within: Secrets Unraveled (Book 5)

Ch 18: Secrets In The Yersin Lab

The Terror bumped into a few chairs as he slowly made his way over, his earlier mood forgotten. I circled around to the other side of the table as I scanned the notes in front of me. Several folders of paper and three notebooks were labeled "Sanity Serum Refinement".

A couple of pages mentioned potential Terror triggers, and I had a suspicion these papers held the story behind my current companion. If nothing else, Nina would want to see them. I wedged them into my backpack.

The crackling of paper had the Terror coming closer, tilting his head as he focused on the sound. I picked up a blank piece of paper and crumpled it in my hand before rolling it to the other side of the table. As he picked up the strange crinkly object, I grabbed a couple of empty briefcases from on top of a filing cabinet and went back to the first table.

A drone delivery system only had a few uses in this day and age, and a diagram of a canister beneath a large drone had me scooping up all the papers on the table. I didn't even bother checking for photocopies or duplicates. It was Nina's job to sort through all this.

By the time I crammed all the papers into a briefcase, the Terror had grown tired of the paper ball. I drifted between the last two tables as I tried to encourage Mr. Creepy to give me some room. He didn't seem to have any concept of personal space, which was quite strange for a higher-ranking zombie.

The papers on the two tables seemed similar to one another and definitely mentioned triggers a lot, but I had no idea what kind of research this was for. There were a lot of notes. I was going to need more than a mere briefcase to haul all this back to the truck.

I stifled a growl as Mr. Sniffs-a-lot came up beside me. Why was he so bloody obsessed with the smell of my hai-. Wait. Could it be the shampoo Jess made for me? I slipped around the table as the Terror followed. He was getting far better at navigating this room and didn't even bump into the chairs or tables anymore.

I pulled out the shampoo and conditioner Jess had made for me using plant extracts. I grabbed the paper ball off the floor and squirted both liquids onto the paper before rolling it down the table in his direction.

He ignored it, recognizing the sound as the item that no longer interested him. As he walked by it, he paused and sniffed the air, then turned back. He picked up the ball with renewed interest.

While he was preoccupied, I found two large tote bins and dumped out the dusty equipment maintenance manuals. There were a lot of papers on the tables, and it took me some time to fit them into the two bins. I stacked the bins on top of each other and put the briefcase on top before quietly lugging them out of the room.

I set them against the wall in the hallway and went to check more rooms. Most just held equipment, but one had rows upon rows of glass vials with some sort of liquid inside. I checked the clipboards in front.

Fifteen were labeled prototype serum, followed by a string of letters to differentiate them. Five were labeled sanity serum refinement. Only one lacked the bold, red "UNTESTED" label.

I found another tote bin and emptied it. I wrapped the vials and placed them in smaller boxes before carefully arranging them in the tote. I didn't want to carry more than three tote bins through a dense forest, and I really didn't feel like coming back to this Stronghold while its current overlord resided here, so I had to make this trip count.

In a different room, the remains of a man lay in one corner with unused syringes scattered across the floor. Two weeks of decomposition hadn't been kind to him. I avoided the discolored sections of linoleum as I checked the counters.

Three setups along one wall were extremely familiar. A quick check of the clipboard confirmed this was the setup that created the cure, sanity serum, and controlex. A vial rack labeled "Completed" was at the end of each table.