Evasion

Chapter Seventeen

Why had he not been affected?

It only stood to reason that the reason he wasn’t affected might just be because he was the intended target. Yes, maybe that was it. Perhaps he – Scott – was the reason why these people were turned into some sort of mind-controlled zombies and had come after him.

But why?

And who was behind it?

It’s not as if Scott had been involved in anything illegal. It had been almost five years since he had done any contract work for people whose purposes had been nefarious and whose activities had been, if not outright illegal, then at least on the periphery of the law. But perhaps it had taken this amount of time to find Scott. It’s not as if he left any sort of easy to track digital trail behind wherever he went. And, when he had turned his life around, he had completely abandoned the false name and hacker identity that he used for his work.

It would have taken a significant investment of time and the right people – i.e., whose skill at least matched if not superseded Scott’s own hacker ability – in order to trace Scott down. Not that it would be impossible, but he failed to understand just how and why, and who would not only be capable of that, but would even bother.

Besides, it would be one thing to track Scott down, show up at his apartment in the middle of the night to break his legs or put a bullet in his head while he was sleeping. It was quite another to introduce an airborne virus capable of controlling people and turning them into homicidal robots.

Who wanted Scott Desmond dead not only that badly, but in such a way that the death would be difficult to explain or trace back to the originator?

And, almost as importantly, why?

What the hell had Scott done to warrant such a bold and unique attack?

He started crawling away from the vertical shaft, towards a spot about ten feet away where the light shone in from the open vent grate below, the questions rotating through his mind without any sort of answer coming to him.

Scott needed to get to an area with more light, so he could inspect where he’d been shot in the leg, see how bad the damage actually was.  Sure, it burned, and he knew it was bleeding. He could feel where the blood had seeped into his jeans, where it had dripped up his legs while he’d been hanging upside down.

But he couldn’t feel the bullet inside him.

Is that because there’s no bullet there, and the bullet had grazed him?  Or was it because one didn’t feel a bullet, that it entered with a white hot intensity of a hot knife cutting through butter. Or maybe because it exited the other side of his leg.

No, he thought. I’d feel burning on the other side, where it exited. Or, more likely, it would have struck or shattered the bone. And that would have hurt more than a simple burning.

It’s most likely, he figured, that the bullet was either lodged in a somewhat superficial manner in the meat of his leg, or perhaps it did just graze him, causing some fleshy damage, but not nearly as bad as actually being shot.

Not that he would know, of course. It’s not as if a person got shot every day.

Heck, it’s not as if most people had ever been shot at.

And, until this morning, Scott had been a gunfire recipient virgin.

Footsteps could be heard on the concrete floor below, so he stopped just shy of the edge and peered over carefully.

There was nobody within sight of the grate from the angle he was looking down.  He could make out the first floor photocopier, which was at the midway point in the large mostly open office space. Unlike the second floor, which had a series of offices running in two spots in the center of the room, the first floor had a few offices along both walls and an open central area where row after row of simple Ikea-style rectangular desks were aligned for the call agents who worked on the first floor.