Sarah Burks's Arc

Chapter 5 of 8

The medical robot led them down a service shaft, past the collapsed stairs, to a rusted door marked MEDICAL 141 EXPERIMENTS. The panel above it flickered. Cracked glass framed the lab beyond. Sarah held her physician ID to a scanner, and the door ground open. Inside, computer stations still glowed. Records lay scattered across the floor. Zelda's tech, Mary Long, stepped in behind her, glasses catching the blue light, folder clutched to her chest. "Secure it," Sarah said. Logan and the scouts swept the corners. Nothing moved but dust. "Clear," Logan said. He pulled off his hat and studied a live terminal. "This one's still running. Somebody kept it warm." He crouched and read the screen, fingers hovering. "Preservation lockers, back wall. Some coolant lines held. Med supplies in there could still be good." Mary moved fast. She and Zelda's kit worked the lockers, checking seals, sorting vials into a hard case. "Stimpaks. Antibiotics. Blood expanders," Mary called, voice steady. "Most of it's usable." Zelda had spent every favor she owned to stock the field hospital. This lab would refill her shelves. Sarah watched the case fill and felt the trade post's future grow more solid. "Sarah." Logan hadn't looked up. "You need to see this log." His voice stayed flat, but he'd gone still. "System restart timestamps. Whole facility rebooted, over and over, right before the collapse. Something drove the power crazy." He tapped the screen. "Reactor readings spiked, then flatlined. That's what brought the stairs down. Not a raider blast. An accident." Sinclair Feldman came through the door then. The Red Hills recon man kept his rifle slung, but his yellow eyes swept the room like he priced every corner. He was the one who'd sealed the lower levels tight, the man who read danger before it read him. He knelt by an overturned desk and lifted a battered laptop. It still ran. "Found the whole story, gal," he said. He turned the screen toward her. A med-tech incident report. Exploded pressure valve. Radiation exposure. F.E.V. contamination. "Reactor leak set off a chain," Sinclair read. His voice dropped, short and hard. "Then the vault AI triggered the G.E.C.K. as an emergency fix. It went wrong. Mutated everything on levels five and six." Beside the laptop lay a worn notebook. Sarah picked it up. Cramped handwriting filled every page, growing shakier as it went. Fear in ink. The last lines named the fungi, the burns, the screaming below. "Whoever wrote this watched it happen," she said quietly. Sinclair closed the laptop. "Your G.E.C.K.'s down there. So's whatever it made." He nodded at a sealed door across the lab, its lock panel dark, marked LEVEL 4. "That's the only way deeper. And it's locked to level four clearance, not a doctor's card." Sarah stood among the salvaged supplies she'd won and the door she couldn't open. The lab was hers. The way down was not. She looked at the sealed panel and knew the next fight waited behind it.