To Be A Hero

Chapter 16: Wake Me Up Before You Go Go

"I just meant there's an atmosphere!"

I sigh. "Yeah, well, I think when you get these feelings of worry and unease, you get them for a reason. I understand the need to get useful info, but we have to be careful and make sure we don't do anything that might get us killed."

"We need a sitrep from you guys now," Nadia says. "We can't get into most of the cameras. What are you seeing?"

"Plenty. Look down there!"

Ellie and I slowly walk over to her, and I hesitate at stepping off from the tile floor and onto the glass one that covers half the lab. Veronica doesn't seem worried at all. She actually looks quite ecstatic at what she sees below the glass.

I don't know whether to faint or gasp when I see it.

That's why half the floor is glass. That's why all the floors below this are glass.

"They weren't lying about it being Norse then," Ellie says.

"What is it?"

"Must be five or six levels lower down from us, glassed over so we can see into it. It's a Viking burial chamber."

"We have to get to it!" Veronica squeals, and I feel a mixture of anxiety as well as curiosity bubble in my chest.

Veronica rushes towards the stairs, and we follow. I can hear her muttering excitedly to herself, and I huff out a laugh. It's almost funny how happy she gets over just the thought of learning something new.

We head down the stairs, and the clatter of our footsteps echo against the walls. The stairs don't go directly down to the chamber floor, but instead only takes us down a few floors, and then we have to go to a separate staircase on the other floors to get there. I have to use my keycard again, actually. Maybe it's because of certain clearances or something? I don't know. Comansys always was weird about that kind of thing.

We are all panting from the sudden sprint, but Veronica doesn't stop to catch her breath. We have to just nearly sprint again to catch up with her, with how fast she's going to get to those chambers.

"Ah, yes!" Sam says airily. "I've got a cam on you. Oooh. Wow. I can see it up ahead. Aw, man. Do you-do you think Fimm would be in there, or King Thorsten?"

Veronica presses her hands against the glass door, licking her lips and taking in a slightly shaky breath of anticipation. "The outside of the tomb looks perfectly preserved, and the tech looks Comansys standard. Sigrid will be so amazed when we tell her about this."

"Oh?" Nadia asks curiously. "So the Minister turns out not to know everything after all?"

"She doesn't know everything, but she knows a lot. She's been passing me masses of interesting research the Ministry's done into the zombie virus. They have a lot of fascinating work that goes into why the virus destroys some part of the brain, but not others."

"What do you make of her, Veronica?" Ellie asks, a hand on her hip.

"I think she's very clever, and ambitious. She wants to be Prime Minister, I think, when we cure the zombie virus. She wants to be the one who brought us through all this. She's cold, which is alright with me, because I'm cold too. But she can also be quite aggressive, which I don't like. I've heard her shout at people, and I think she's afraid of something, but I don't know what. She's not as strong as she seems."

"Wow," Sam says after a few seconds of silence, and I give her a raised brow.

"I thought you really liked her."

"I do," She replies quickly. "She's given me what I want."

Sam clears his throat. "Well, I hope I never hear you give a full character analysis of me."