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“He’s charming today,” Bryn said, and turned to Pansy. “So you’re doing the work?”
“On this one, yes. ” Pansy held out her hand, and Bryn gave her the thumb drive. “Where did you get it?” She led the way to the area where the computers were located—big, custom-built machines for the most part, but a couple of separate laptops that were running on their own.
“You heard about the explosion and fire today across town?”
“It’s all over the news. Seven dead. ”
“Eight,” Bryn said, and pointed to herself. “But I got better, more or less. The other seven had been dead for days, and the whole place sanitized of data except for this. ”
Pansy disconnected one of the laptops from its moorings. “In that case, let’s take some basic precautions. This is a burner laptop—basic system plus de-encryption programs, no data kept on it. It’s not connected to the network, and there’s no enabled Wi-Fi. If there’s any kind of malware on here, no harm done. ” She slotted the thumb drive in place in the USB slot and waited for the disk image to appear on the screen. When it did, she opened it and studied the apparently random file names, then brought up a new screen of programs. She chose one, and started it running. “Let’s try this first. The pattern looks a little familiar. ”
“I thought it’d be more difficult, somehow. ”
“It depends on who encrypted it, and why. Obviously, the point of coding something is to make sure that nobody unauthorized can read it, but it’s no good if there’s no key. You just need the right formula. Most people don’t create their own encryption; they buy it. Low, medium, Cadillac plan. ”
“Is this the Cadillac plan?”
“Nope. You said seven people are dead, so I don’t think they were paranoid enough, which means they weren’t on their encryption, either…Ahhhh. ” Pansy made a pleased sound when the computer gave a little chime. “First file decrypted. Here we go. ”
She brought up the file. It was tagged with a number, not text, and she double clicked it. It turned out to be a video file, and Bryn stayed very still as it played out. The sound was low, but it didn’t matter. It was loud and familiar inside her head.
She slowly sat down in the nearest chair.
They were both silent for a long, long second, and then Pansy, gone very pale, said, “What the hell is this?”
“Dangerous,” Bryn said. She felt…numb. And terrified, suddenly. “Very, very dangerous. ”
The second file was decrypted. It, too, was a number, and Pansy hesitated, then double clicked.
Like the first file, it was surveillance video, shot from the exact same angle as the first images. Two men in the plain coveralls of janitors rolled a gurney into view. On it, struggling against the restraints, was a man in his fifties, wearing some kind of jumpsuit.
Bryn knew him. “That’s Jason Drake. Former Pharmadene VP of marketing, hooked on Returné in the last days of the push to get everyone aboard. He was having problems coping with the change. He was in my…group. ”
“Your group?”
“Support group, kind of. It’s informal—people drop in and out a couple of times a month. He hasn’t been around since…” She thought back. “Jesus, two months ago. I haven’t heard from him, either, but he said he was going to focus on work. I assumed he’d come to terms with things. He’d signed up for the counseling the FBI was offering. ”
She’d seen the first video, so she knew what was coming and didn’t flinch in surprise, only in horror. Jason was awake, fighting to get free, asking the same questions she would have been asking. What are you doing? What do you want? There was a horrible edge of panic and dread in his voice, as if he knew all too well what was going to happen.
The two uniformed men ignored him. One went to the wall just at the edge of the camera’s view and hit some buttons on a control panel, and a low rumble sounded. It was hard to see details on the video, but Bryn could see a gauge light up, and an indicator begin to climb.
The second man pulled out a silenced semiautomatic pistol and put three bullets straight into Jason’s forehead. It killed him, of course. Temporarily. Bryn held still for that part. She knew how it felt, dying from a head wound. It wasn’t so painful. Stay dead, Jason. Just stay dead.
But of course he wouldn’t. Fifteen minutes or so, and he’d be back.
It took ten for the gauge on the wall to rise far enough that the man operating the controls nodded, and then he and his companion unstrapped Jason’s limp form, hit another button, and a small, square door opened in the wall. A metal drawer slid out from it, and the two men dumped Jason sloppily on it, then pushed it into the square opening.
Before it closed, fire began to roar inside as the incinerator started its work.
Bryn took in a deep breath as the first screams began. Through a small glass window, she could see Jason thrashing and fighting his death.
Pansy stopped the video with a single, fast punch of the space bar and sat back, still staring at the screen. She said, “It goes on as long as the last one. ”
It took twelve minutes for one of the Revived to die in that incinerator, then. Five minutes of screaming that grew softer and softer, and then seven minutes of…noise. Random and desperate noise, u
ntil finally the body just couldn’t hold itself together enough to fight.
Bryn had no idea if the brain was conscious through all that, or if, mercifully, awareness was the first thing that was burned away. She hoped so.
