Page 32 of Night of the Living Manny
“No.” She looked around carefully before lowering her voice to a whisper. “His office is all taped off with caution tape. There was a hazmat team in there at about six.”
“Hazmat?” Now Liam scowled. “What the hell.”
“I don’t know, but I got the impression they waited for you to leave to do it.”
“What did they do? Sterilize?” Liam wondered if Greg had left samples in there.
“No. That was even freakier. They just searched the place, from what I could tell.” Emmy’s lips quivered.
“You know what? Get me all your data, then go home for a while.” He would deal with all this shit. That was his job as team leader and as… what? A spy? A corporate espionage man? That was the romantic way to look at it, he supposed. The pharmaceutical company would call him a terrorist, he was sure.
“Yeah? You don’t mind?”
“Nah. I got this. You might think about having your go-bag ready….”
Whether people wanted to know it or not, every lab like his, ones that worked on highly contagious materials, had evacuation plans in place.
Emmy’s eyes went wide, but she only nodded. “Maybe I should. I’ll get that data to your Dropbox.”
“Thanks. Hey, is Kimberly here?” She was so much easier than Steven to pin down.
“She was at nine. I haven’t been out of the lab since then.”
“Good deal.” He turned on his heel to head up to the executive offices. They needed to shut down the whole operation pending, well, a lot of things. Where the hell was Greg? Why were they still moving on this if the virus was mutating or not following early projections?
The offices were mostly deserted, which wasn’t odd for this time of night, but it was eerie. There was this weird sense of abandonment, just like with Greg’s office. Well, he didn’t see caution tape, at least.
Liam checked Kimberly’s office first, knocking gently on the half-open door. It swung open, and Liam frowned. The lights were off, and the place was deserted. Like, totally. The printer was gone. So was the phone. Every one of Kimberly’s little science toys had been removed, and the recycle and trash bins were empty and possibly scrubbed.
Okay, that was freaky as hell.
Steve was in his office, tapping away at a keyboard, a lab coat on over his khakis and button-down.
Liam raised an eyebrow but knocked instead of asking what the heck Steve was doing pretending to be a lab monkey.
Whirling around, Steve stared at him, eyes wide. “What?”
“Hey. I just needed to check in. Have you seen the latest acceleration rate?” The few printouts he still had clutched in his hand told a grim tale. “I think this particular project is a scrub.”
“It’s too late for that,” Steve murmured.
He let his eyebrows rise again. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing right now. What’s with the acceleration rate?” Steve took the papers he handed over, his face going pale when he saw the numbers. “Damn. Damn, damn, damn.”
“You, uh, mind if I ask what happened to Kimberly?”
Steve’s face hardened. “She quit.”
“Emmy says she was here at nine.”
“Yeah, and it took her less than an hour to clean out her office and scrub it clean. Fucking bitch.”
Okay, whoa. “Steve, what happened to Greg?”
“We don’t know, exactly. He left late in the night and hasn’t come back.” Steve finally looked him in the eye again. “We think he took a sample with him.”
His blood ran ice-cold in his veins. “Christ.”
