Twenty-Five Percent (Book 2): Downfall Read Free Page B

facility, but found no sign of the doctors they’d left here less than forty-eight hours ago. There were some signs of a struggle in a couple of the laboratories. More telling was the fact that every computer, laptop and tablet was gone.
    They ended up back in the staff lounge.
    “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Micah said, taking a packet of biscuits from the counter in the small kitchen area and sitting at one of the tables.
    Alex nodded. It was the only logical conclusion. “Omnav.”
    He sat at the table and took the ginger nut Micah offered him.
    “So,” Micah said, “they came here for the research, but there are no other bodies apart from Jim. Which means they took Hannah, Dave, Pauline and Larry with them. They must intend to continue developing the new strain of Meir’s and they need their expertise. And that means...”
    “...they’re still alive,” Alex concluded.
    Micah smiled. “Yes.”
    Alex drew in a breath and let it out slowly. They were alive. Hannah was alive.
    He looked at Jim’s body still lying in the centre of the room. It disturbed him how quickly he’d become used to seeing dead bodies. “But for how long?”
    “We have to find them,” Micah said, finishing his biscuit and taking another from the packet.
    Alex nodded and started on his own second ginger nut. He hadn’t had breakfast and now he’d started eating, his growling stomach was urging him not to stop.
    “We should bury Jim,” Micah said, looking at the body.
    Alex nodded again.
    After finishing a third biscuit each, they walked over to the body. It had been less than two hours since Alex received Hannah’s panicked call telling him Jim was dead, but rigour mortis had already set in. He crouched, took hold of Jim’s stiffened arm, and immediately let it go again, a wave of revulsion shivering through his body.
    “What?” Micah said, standing above him.
    “He’s... the body is stiff.”
    “So?”
    Alex stood up. “It’s deeply unpleasant. You try it.”
    Micah rolled his eyes. “Fine. Let the men take care of it, little flower.” He bent to slide his hands under the body’s shoulders then yelped and jumped back, rubbing his hands on his jeans.
    “Oh yes, very manly,” Alex said, smirking.
    “That’s...” He shuddered. “Why does it being stiff make it so much worse?”
    “Probably some ingrained aversion to dead things. Maybe it would be easier if we wrap him in something.”
    A quick search produced a roll of black plastic bin liners and they taped a few together to make a sheet on the ground next to the corpse.
    “Okay, on three,” Alex said from his place at the head. “One, two...”
    He grasped Jim’s shoulders and lifted, scrunching up his face in disgust. Micah did the same with the legs, mirroring Alex’s expression as they moved the body onto the bin liners. Something dropped to the floor and Alex picked it up. It was a phone.
    “Maybe we can find his family’s phone numbers on there,” Micah said. “They should know what happened to him.”
    Alex was studying the smartphone. It had a red case with swirls and flowers on it. It didn’t scream Jim the ex-military security guard. It did, however, scream Hannah the geeky virologist.
    “I think this might be Hannah’s,” Alex said.
    Micah came to stand next to him as he brought it out of sleep mode. He was expecting to be faced with a request for a password or thumbprint, but instead a note appeared on the screen.
     
    [It’s Omnav. Taking us to headquarters outside Sheffield. Don’t know what will happen to us. Please help. Hannah]
     
    For a moment Alex couldn’t breathe, until Micah placed a hand on his shoulder.
    “We’ll find them,” he said. “We’ll get her back.”
     
    . . .
     
    It was the second grave they’d dug in the lawn behind the warehouse.
    Alex carried Jim’s black plastic bag wrapped body from the underground laboratory’s back door, carefully lowering it into the four foot deep hole.
    “He saved our