Chapter 7 - THE DARK FLOOR
Emergency lights flooded the room in red.
Someone screamed in the hallway.
Gunshots followed.
Marcus pulled me behind the hospital bed while Nora covered my stomach with both arms.
My father disappeared into the darkness holding the vial.
“Dad!”
No answer.
The door slammed shut.
Marcus tried the handle.
Locked from outside.
Smoke began leaking through the vent.
“Not fire,” Nora said. “Sedative gas.”
She covered my mouth with a damp cloth.
Marcus smashed the narrow window in the door with a chair.
Through the broken glass, we saw two hospital guards unconscious on the floor.
Tyler was gone.
So were the agents guarding him.
Marcus climbed through and unlocked the room.
The elevator display showed someone descending to Basement Level Three.
The same floor where Vance maintained a restricted research wing.
Nora moved my bed toward the operating room.
I grabbed Marcus.
“My mother is down there.”
“And Tyler.”
“And my father.”
“You need surgery.”
“I need the truth.”
A contraction crushed the breath from me.
Nora shouted for assistance.
No nurses came.
The entire maternity floor had been evacuated by a false chemical alarm.
Marcus found a wheelchair.
“We move together.”
He pushed me toward the service elevator while Nora carried emergency supplies.
Basement Level Three opened into a white corridor lined with sealed glass rooms.
Inside the first room were files.
Inside the second were incubators.
Inside the third were children.
Six of them.
All asleep.
All connected to machines.
Nora stopped breathing.
“What is this?”
My father emerged from behind a laboratory door.
Blood covered one side of his shirt.
“Survivors.”
“Where is Mom?”
He pointed toward the end of the corridor.
“They took her to the delivery theater.”
“For what?”
My father looked at me.
“Karen is pregnant.”
My mother was fifty-four years old.
“That’s impossible.”
“They implanted her eight months ago.”
“Why?”
He swallowed.
“Her child is the backup.”
A door opened behind him.
Tyler stepped out holding a gun against my mother’s head.
May you like
Her stomach was visibly pregnant beneath a hospital gown.
She looked at me and whispered, “Run.”
