Nadya’s Nights: Knight of the Living Dead
Night Five: Virus
Chapter Eleven: Floor By Floor
by Indy McDaniel
Copyright © 2010 Indy McDaniel
There were thirty-two floors in the building. According to Lulu, the antidote was on the twenty-eighth. That meant they were going to have to make their way through four floors before they arrived at the one they were after.
Eh, it beats having to race up from the bottom, she thought. For a moment, she half-expected to hear the familiar inner voice that had become progressively more vocal over the past few months. She breathed out a sigh of relief when it was silent. Apparently, the meds were working.
Things had gotten bad on New Year’s Eve. It started like it usually did, with the pesky voice speaking up and telling her how she was doing things all wrong. That Nadya could deal with. Hell, she was used to it. But when the voice had decided it wasn’t happy with remaining strictly auditory, it had appeared to her as a full on visual hallucination. The annoyingly insightful doppelganger – Nadya had dubbed her X – was wanting to have a major heart-to-heart which might very well have lead to some serious life re-assessment.
Nadya had managed to hold off the chat with her inner self and had quickly found the highest grade, most effective anti-psychotic medicine available. The stuff wasn’t even on the open market yet but Vlad knew a guy. He didn’t seem too happy about drugging her up and had instead offered to foot the bill for a really expensive psychiatrist. Nadya convinced him to go the pharmacological route. Her exact words had been, “I love you like a father, Vlad, but if you send me to a fucking shrink, I’ll send the shrink back to you. One piece at a time.”
Once that had been settled, Nadya got her very first prescription. Like all medications, the pills had side effects. Her already speedy metabolism seemed to have been knocked into overdrive. She’d started carrying a good supply of power bars to go with her ammo clips, and those just kept the edge off. When she wasn’t on the job, she was enjoying the perks of living with a powerful mob boss who enjoyed gourmet food.
She’d never given much thought to food in the past. She liked it, sure. But growing up half-starved gave her a unique appreciation of it. She wasn’t picky. If it was remotely edible, she’d chew it up and swallow it. That had lead to a very disturbing experience when she’d been homeless and had found some strange looking mushrooms.
But now, she found she was developing a different kind of taste for food. She had likes. And even more surprising, dislikes. If someone put a gun to her head and told her she could have one last meal before getting her brains blown out, she’d request chicken vindaloo without hesitation. The hotter the better. The heavily spiced dish was one of the few things that actually kept her feeling full for any length of time.
Of course, if her hypothetical assassin wanted to be a cruel bastard, they’d plop a nice, hot plate of liver and onions in front of her. In such a case, said hypothetical assassin would be cleaning vomit off their shoes along with brains. Serves em right for giving me a shitty last meal, Nadya thought.
All things considered, the excessive hunger was the least of the side effects. Hell, that one was almost a perk. Especially compared to the others. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in… well, to be honest, she hadn’t actually slept during the night for at least a year. But she’d always more or less managed to snag a good six to eight hours during the day. Now she was lucky to stay asleep for more than four. And even that required about two hours of tossing and turning.
There was a kind of ironic humor in the fact that her medicine, which kept her from hallucinating, had insomnia as a side effect seeing as excessive lack of sleep also lead to hallucinations. She was trying to get Vlad’s pill prescriber to get her a sleep aid but the guy wanted to let her get accustomed to her psych meds first. Even the crooked doctors operated under some form of ethics it seemed.
But neither the hunger nor the insomnia were as bad as the third major side effect she was experiencing. She’d gladly shovel down hamburgers and curry whilst never sleeping again if only to get rid of the damn third side effect.
Nadezhda Valentina, ice queen extraordinaire and proud of it, was horny.
It had to be some kind of cosmic joke. The number of medicines that caused decreased libido was a mile long. The ones that caused heightened libido, not so much. And Nadya just happened to be lucky enough to be on one of the few that did.
It had started subtly enough. She noticed certain things more than she used to. Certain things being men. More specifically, certain areas on certain men. The areas had always been there and Nadya wasn’t a stranger to seeing them but she’d never had any kind of sexual thoughts associated with them. Once she realized what was happening, it had been relatively easy to ignore the feelings. For a while.
Then the dreams had started.
Very vivid, very graphic dreams. Most of them involved Ulbrecht and all of them left her soaked with sweat when she awoke. Sweat and another musky wetness that she hadn’t dared mention to anyone. Not even the quack doctor prescribing the pills. Not even Vlad.
The dreams alone had almost been enough to convince her to just deal with whatever hallucinations her damaged brain decided to throw at her. Almost.
Instead, she’d started to become grateful for the insomnia she was suffering through. Maybe she’d retract her request for a sleep aid.
“Hey!”
Knight’s voice drew Nadya out of her reverie. She looked over at him. He had the butt of the AK-47 pressed against his shoulder with the barrel aimed low. She could see beads of sweat on his forehead. Whether it was from the virus or the epinephrine, she wasn’t sure.
“Time’s a wasting,” he said, nodding to the door leading into the building. “We gonna do this shit or what?”
“Let’s go,” Nadya snapped, taking the lead. She slipped the Blue Tooth earpiece in and dialed Lulu.
“Heyo, soul sistah,” the hacker said as she answered. “In position?”
“Affirmative,” Nadya said, gripping her pistol in both hands. “Just about to enter via the rooftop.”
“Right on,” Lulu replied. Nadya could practically hear her grin through the phone. “How was the flight?”
“I’m not splattered over the roadside, so I guess it was good,” she said. “Let’s do this shit.”
“Alrighty,” Lulu said. “Kick ass.”
Nadya pulled the door open and moved through. She turned and aimed her gun down the stairwell. So far, the coast was clear. She didn’t expect it to stay that way for long. “They know we’re here yet?” she asked into the phone.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Lulu said. “I’m not registering any… wait. Shit, you just opened the rooftop door, huh?”
Nadya sighed. “Set off a silent alarm, didn’t it?”
“Ohh yes.”
“Goddammit,” Nadya muttered. “Where on the twenty-eighth floor is this vault?” She started down the stairs quickly. Maybe if she moved fast enough, she could get to the antidote before getting swarmed by a bunch of assholes.
“I don’t got an exact blueprint. Just a general list of what’s on each floor,” Lulu said. “Twenty-eight looks to be all labs. Good news, there probably won’t be too many goons. Bad news, I’m not sure which lab the vault is in.”
“I do,” Knight spoke up from behind.
Nadya reached the landing for floor thirty. “Finally gonna start earning your keep, I see. How do you know this place’ll be like the other one?”
“Floor the virus was on was all labs, too,” he answered. “Sure they weren’t near as fancy as the ones this place has but if the layout’s the same, I know right where the vault is.”
“And if it isn’t?” Nadya asked.
Before Knight could respond, they reached level twenty-nine. And as they reached level twenty-nine, the door leading onto the floor exploded. The heavy hunk of metal flew across the landing just in front of Nadya. If she’d been two feet further she’d have become fatally intimate with the thing.
As it was, the fireball that followed after the door still managed to singe her hair. But she wasn’t on fire or crushed so she raised her gun and fired three quick rounds through the smoke-filled doorway. She was rewarded with a yell of pain and return fire that made her hug the wall to the side of the door.
“Lulu?” Nadya asked into the earpiece calmly.
“Yes, Nadya?” responded Lulu with equal calmness.
“What’s on twenty-nine?”
“That would be security headquarters,” Lulu answered.
“Cock. Sucker,” Nadya sighed. There was a lull in the gunfire so she shoved her pistol around the doorframe and fired four more shots, swiveling her aim. There wasn’t another cry of pain so they’d probably taken cover. How long before they had teams come from above and below and get them totally boxed in?
Just then, Knight stepped past her and chucked something through the doorway.
Nadya looked at him with confusion then spotted the empty space on the bandolier of grenades. “Shit,” she cursed, shoving him away from the door moments before the grenade blew. A second fireball shot out of the already scorched doorway. Once it cleared, Nadya took a chance at taking a peek into floor twenty-nine.
The hall was in shambles and so were the five thugs who’d had them pinned down. Nadya looked back to Knight. “Good one,” she conceded.
Knight gave her a smirk. “Thanks.”
“Now move your ass before more of them show up.” She turned and continued down the stairs, reloading her pistol and then exchanging it for the MP5. She wasn’t as convinced as Lulu that floor twenty-eight would be a total breeze just because it was all labs.
And even if it was, machine gun fire worked a whole lot better than handgun fire for destroying precious research.
