Reinforced steel from the days when a nuclear warhead sat nearby. A thick rubber seal fitted the hatch tightly into place. I turned the latch and pushed upward. It was clamped from the outside.

I climbed back down. Not a hard climb if I hadn’t just been electrocuted and wasn’t terrified in the bargain. Instead I was as winded as if I’d finished an Iron Woman. I squatted, panting, the pill bottle digging into my thigh.

“We’re trapped, aren’t we? We’re going to die here.”

Cady’s dull, helpless tone so echoed my own mood that I became angry.

“These men are not going to manage our fate in the way that they did Doris McKinnon’s or Dr. Roque’s. We will survive and thrive,” I said fiercely.

I pulled out the pill bottle and stared at it. I’d taken two tablets last night and three today. That left twenty-five, fifteen for Cady, ten for me. Three days’ protection, maybe more if the pills took hold before the infection began, but I was damned if I’d sit down here checking my breathing and temperature every half hour.

I explained the situation to Cady. “I need you to take two of these right now to counteract what you’ve been breathing in here. They’ll make you feel sick on an empty stomach, but that’s better than what could happen to you without them.”

“We could get a soda out of there.” She pointed to the far wall, at a vending machine I hadn’t noticed. “If you have any money. I left my purse in the trunk of my car.”

I found a hammer in a drawer in the lab, which I gave to Cady, telling her to hit the lock as hard as she could. She gave it a few tentative blows and then swung her arm back and started whacking the machine. The lock broke, glass splintered from the front of the case, and cans rolled out around us, but she kept pounding until I grabbed her arm.

“That felt good!” She picked up a can of Sprite, handed me a Coke, and started a little victory dance in front of the vending machine. I high-fived her and handed her two of the antibiotic tablets to swallow.

I gave a hysterical laugh, thinking we were like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, shooting out the Coke machine to get coins for a phone call: now we had to answer to the Coca-Cola Company.

Faded black paint on a closed door by the machine announced it as the launch-control center. I switched on the lights and saw that Roswell had fixed it up as a kind of common room for his research team. There were couches, a couple of small tables where people could eat or talk or inject themselves with germs. A door in the corner opened onto a bathroom with a decontamination shower.