Genesis - Keith R. A. DeCandido [30]
Anna and Mariano moved down the three stairs to the table in the middle of the room to get started on the day's work.
Before she could even set her coffee down, the fire alarm went off.
"Oh, Christ," Johnny-Wayne said, getting up from watching Daffy eat. "Not another fucking drill."
"Great," Anna muttered. "We're already two days behind, now they pull this shit."
Mariano grinned. "Hey, at least now we have an excuse. Our work's being disrupted."
"I'd rather just get the work done."
She gazed almost wistfully at the slides sitting on the desk in the middle of the lab, waiting to be put under the microscope for study. After the frustrations of the previous night—waiting around for Mariano to never show up, then a restless night of very little sleep—she wanted nothing more than to throw herself into her work.
Instead, she trudged back up the three stairs that led to the door.
With a sudden clunk, the sprinkler system activated. Water—ice-cold water—burst forth from the nozzles in the ceiling.
Cold, fear-filled panic gripped Anna, as she thought there was actually a fire in the lab.
However, a quick glance around the room revealed that thought to be absurd. Hell, most of the room and the equipment in the room was made of not-remotely-flammable plastic or metal or both. Obviously that stupid little-kid computer had a glitch.
"Shit!" she exclaimed.
"What the hell's going on?" Mariano asked.
Resisting an urge to ask her partner how she could possibly know what the hell was going on, she instead barked orders. "Get the computers covered! Move it!"
"I'm trying!" Johnny-Wayne said even as he did as she said.
"Get the experiments—move them!" Even as the panic left, replaced by anger and a desire to protect their work, Anna still found herself gripped in cold, and she wondered whose bright idea it was to use water that was apparently brought straight in from the Arctic for the sprinkler system.
By the time she, Johnny-Wayne, and Mariano got the cages, computers, and slides covered in plastic, the water was up to her ankles, her long blond hair was now plastered to her forehead and back, and her white lab outfit would have made her a dandy entrant in a wet T-shirt contest.
She prayed that Mariano wouldn't notice and make a joke about it. As it was, she was suddenly very grateful that she had chosen to wear a nondescript white bra this morning, since her shirt was so wet, an observer would've been able to make out, say, a lace pattern. That, she didn't need.
Last night, as she sat in the train station, trying to come up with imaginative ways to fillet Mariano, she had thought she was at a low point in her life. Twenty-eight years old, living in a high-priced cave, with her only prospects for a relationship being a Britney Spears-loving twit with a cute smile who nonetheless couldn't be relied upon to show up for a date.
Which wouldn't have been so bad if they weren't in a mostly isolated community of five hundred people. If she couldn't even do a relationship right under these circumstances…
And now this.
A totally fucked-up fire drill flooding her lab. If this kept up, they wouldn't just be two days behind. The clean-up of the water-logged lab would set them back a week or more.
Looking up, Anna saw the omnipresent security camera—the Red Queen's eyes and ears. Wading over to stand in front of the thing she yelled over the sound of the water that was still rushing into the lab through several nozzles, "There's no fire here! No fire!"
"The code doesn't work."
Ignoring Mariano, Anna instead repeated, "There's no fire here! No fire! What's wrong with you?"
"The door won't open." Mariano came back down the stairs and walked