Department 19: Zero Hour by Will Hill

Author:Will Hill [Hill, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Juvenile Fiction, Action & Adventure, Fantasy & Magic, Horror & Ghost Stories
ISBN: 9780007505876
Google: qXoTAQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0007505841
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2014-06-04T23:00:00+00:00

Matt Browning watched the numbers at the bottom of the screen tick past midnight, sighed deeply, and pushed himself back from the keyboard. The chair wheels squeaked across the floor of the laboratory as he closed his eyes and tried to slow his racing mind, to force it into neutral, even just for a moment.

Two more minutes, he thought. One hundred and twenty seconds. Then we’ll know.

He had been working solidly for six hours, stopping only to get another Diet Coke from the dispensing machine or to pace impatiently back and forth while the university’s computer network processed a new run of data. It was not an unusual workload, certainly not by the standards of the Lazarus Project, where he would regularly look up from his screen to discover that ten or twelve hours had passed, apparently in the blink of an eye.

It was, however, almost unbearably stressful.

The Lazarus Project had a specific goal, but no fixed deliverables, no benchmarks or timeline checkpoints. As a result, it was largely impossible to end each day with any reliable sense of what contribution you had made. Everyone simply worked as hard as they could, for as long as they could, then came back the next morning and did so again.

What he was doing now, on the other hand, was a contained project that was objectively straightforward, involving a clear series of steps and processes, a fixed timeframe, and a group of people who had no idea what he was doing approaching him with infuriating regularity and asking why it was taking so long.

I’m sorry! he wanted to yell. I’ll just rush the most important specimen collection of all time, one that can never, ever be done again if I screw it up. Is that what you want?

He knew it wasn’t; his squad mates were simply desperate to see whether the operation had been a success, as he was himself. Major Simmons had only arrived at the laboratory with Landsman an hour earlier, having spent the evening dealing with the chaos that had been unleashed at the corner of Geary and Third; from what Matt had overheard, it had eventually taken a call from an office inside the Pentagon to placate the Chief of the SFPD and the city controller, so vast had been their outrage. At the same time, an NS9 containment squad had been flown up from Nevada, and was currently in the process of formally informing the dozens of eyewitnesses that they had in fact not seen what had happened in front of their eyes, and making them sign official documents that said so.

Danny Lawrence had driven Matt straight to the lab, leaving the carnage of John Bell’s final act behind them, and he had immediately got to work. The required tasks were not difficult; by Lazarus standards they were, in fact, almost insultingly easy. But their potential implications were so huge that he had found his hands shaking even as he removed the specimens from his bag.

Stay calm, he had told himself.

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