INFECTED

As Jersey stepped into the darkened laboratory, she felt the hair on the back of her neck stir. Something was definitely wrong here.

She flicked on her flashlight and looked around. In the corner was a large commercial-type refrigerator with a lock on it.

She knelt before the door and picked the lock, opening the door to find it filled to capacity with bottles of murky liquid, the tops sealed with paraffin. She reached into the back of the refrigerator and plucked a bottle from the rearmost row, hoping it wouldn’t be missed, then relocked the door.

“Anna, come on, let’s get out of here,” Jersey said, “I’ve got the goods.”

They went out the front door, and were in the process of locking it behind them when a guard appeared out of the darkness. He dove against Jersey, slamming her against the door she was locking. As he raised his hand with a knife in it, Anna chopped across the back of his neck, breaking one of his vertebrae and killing him instantly.

As he slumped to the ground, Jersey turned around with a look of horror on her face.

“Don’t worry, Jerse,” Anna reassured her. “I took him out.”

Jersey’s face blanched white as she looked at a wet stain on the front of her shirt. “That’s not what I’m worried about,” she said in a hoarse voice.

“What is it?” Anna asked, spooked by the fear she saw in Jersey’s eyes.

Jersey bent and placed the dog tags with Mingo Higgins’s name on them in the dead guard’s hand, then looked up at Anna.

“I think we’ve just loosed the hounds of hell! Stay as far away from me as you can, Anna,” she said, pointing to the stain on the front of her fatigues.

“Is that … ?” Anna asked, a look of horror on her face as she stared at the dark spot.

Jersey nodded. “Yeah. The good news is, whatever the nasty stuff is those bastards are working on in that lab, we now have a sample of it.”

“But that means …”

Jersey nodded, and began to move at speed through the jungle toward a stream that ran along the edge of the training fields. “It means I’m probably going to get it.”

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