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Mike came back from his reverie, knowing that Timmy didn't understand much of anything he was saying, he was just waiting for the explanation of what a frog was. Upon hearing it for the at least the hundredth time, he nearly choked to death laughing in his snorting and gasping manner. “Am I turning into a frog?” Timmy slurred, nearly incomprehensible.
“No buddy, you're not,” Mike told him guiltily.
“I gotta get going pal...you take care now and I'll see you sometime next week,” he told Timmy. Mike gathered his weathered and dog-eared paperwork. Much of it was fragile and contained in plastic page protectors, as it was all the information they had been able to gain over the years about the parasite. He split the opening of the large canvass tent and was immediately met by two men with assault rifles. He nodded and they both stepped back to allow him to exit, one of them looking into the dark of the tent's interior with unmistakeable contempt.
He moved along the fenced-in walkway, taking note of the layered security leading up to the outer fence, which was guarded twenty-four hours a day. The only time guards actually came inside was when he was working, and they were not happy about having to do it, though Mike found it ridiculous. He had never once had an incident with any of the mutated ones in the camp and many he considered friends. Looking back down into the complex of nearly a dozen, huge canvass shelters and the deformed figures laboriously moving around and within them, he felt the familiar senses of futility and guilt.
“This isn't right,” he mumbled just under his breath.
2
Mike exited the internment camp and proceeded to the entrance of the university medical center, under which, in the basement and sub-levels, their tiny society had been holding out against the elements, natures reclamation of the planet and against the loss of over fifty-percent of the world population to the parasite. Those afflicted were helped, at first, as doctors and scientists suspected a new type of cancer was producing the additional limbs. As more and more became afflicted, they began to become reviled in the community; grotesque physical appearances revolting those still unaffected and instilling a fear of infection.
Many suffering fled to outlying, rural areas to avoid persecution and becoming lab rats, living further and further off of what remained of the edge of society. Eventually, the remaining people took refuge where they could, settling in pockets of humanity in the remains of cities and towns, constantly hiding and defending against other groups needing food, water or just looting as modern day pirates.
He descended several levels and navigated familiar, candle-lit hallways until he was upon an old storage closet in the bowels of the building. This was the office of the unofficial leader of their little group of nearly two-hundred people, Carl West, a former army lieutenant and current dictator-in-training, as Mike often thought of him.
“Mike, what's new?” the large, bald man greeted him.
“Nothing..that's the problem,” he answered. “Nothing is new, at all. I don't know what is going on and I never will...until we start doing something different,” Mike informed him.
Carl stood and walked around to lean against the front of his desk: an abused executive model that had been brought below, as had all of their amenities. One of the many good ideas Carl enforced was staying underground for ease of defense and seclusion, as armed groups of looters were now common. There were also those afflicted with the mutation that had become very violent and unpredictable, though sightings of those had become much more rare in recent times. Most of the dangerous ones now lived and died out in the wild, though some were captured and brought in with the docile ones for study. “Look, until you can show me some proof, some real evidence of what this is and how it works, we aren't changing anything,” Carl told him.
“Give me a lab and a team of biologists and I'll prove it, but without them, you know as well as I do that I can't do that. Let's talk about this again...I know we are missing something here,” Mike pleaded. He couldn't help but notice how clean Carl's military-style fatigues were, in contrast to the state of his own clothing and that of those he passed on his way here.
“You can't just keep those people locked up like that, and you really have to stop the wranglers from just killing them. I can't prove it...but I know that has something to do with why it keeps spreading,” Mike elaborated.
They made momentary eye contact, and Mike broke their gaze first, fumbling through his papers and preparing his defense. “Look, we know this is a mutation of the Ribeiroia flatworm. That organism had a three-part reproduction cycle, involving three different species, and I really think we are dealing with the same thing here, just a different variation,” Mike began.
“You've been flipping those papers around for over a decade now, and they haven't amounted to anything yet. We are continuing with the plan...they have to be exterminated if we are to survive. Show me something different, and we'll do something different. That's it,” Carl stated with finality.
“Those aren't people out there Mike, they're squids. Look at me. Look at yourself. We have ten fingers and toes, two arms and legs, that's a person. Those things are something else...and it's us or them, that's just how it is now,” he concluded.
“But it doesn't have to be that way, is what I'm saying, and you know as well as I do that just as many docile ones are being killed as are violent ones. I've dissected a few with bullet holes in their backs.”
“Would you like to see the ones we've been putting down before hand?” Carl asked, knowing it was his trump card, “I can send you out with the next group.”
“Sometimes I do,” Mike whispered, knowing all too well that if he ever went out with a wrangler group, he would not return; they were not found of him and his criticism of their actions.
“No...no you don't,” Carl affirmed.
Mike organized his papers and prepared to depart. He left the office without pleasantries and walked briskly down the corridor, catching snippets of conversation as he went along. Several of the 'wranglers', as they had come to be known, were on their way down the corridor. These were the groups of men and women who went out to gather food, water and supplies. They frequently came across those afflicted by the parasite in various stages, almost always ending in the execution of the afflicted person.
“No kidding man, it was like it was set up for the coyote,” one of the men walking past said.
“You wouldn't think a single coyote would be able to take down something that big, not all by itself,” another commented.
“Too bad for them, if that coyote had been the only thing out there, the rest of them might have gotten away,” the first man said, then laughed with the others as they exchanged knowing glances.
Mike's mind froze in mid-thought and he stopped in his tracks, his eyes growing large, mouth slowly opening into a gape. “That's it....that's the last part of the cycle!” Mike whispered. He turned and ran back down the corridor, bursting into Carl's office and brushing the woman standing in front of his desk aside. “I've got it!” he stated emphatically.
“Got what?” Carl wanted to know, obviously annoyed.
“I know why it's still spreading,” Mike told him.
“We'll finish this later,” Carl told the woman, and she exited right away.
“We've never figured out why it was still spreading, because we didn't know what the last part of the cycle was,” Mike started.
“We know that something has to be ingesting the parasite from us, but we don't know what. We've always assumed it was birds, like with the original parasite, but we couldn't figure out how it was getting from people into the bird population at such a high rate. I don't think it is just birds, I think it has evolved to complete its cycle in mammals, maybe all mammals, except us. Think about it. Where are they going when they die? They're not burying each other, and their not eating each other. That can only mean that other things are eating the bodies...and completing the cycle.”
Mike met eyes with Carl, and they stared
at each other for a moment. He had expected more of a response from the man and didn't understand why he wasn't more enthusiastic. “Don't you get it? This is how we stop it,” Mike informed him.
“No, it's not. We're taking the vote tonight,” Carl replied solemnly, “and that's how we stop it.”
Mike's eyes again locked onto Carl's. “You can't do that,” he told him, but it was more a plea than a statement. He knew very well what the topic of the vote was: extermination. He also knew that the vote was just a formality, as the majority of their clan agreed wholeheartedly with Carl and wanted them all put down. There were around forty men and women who comprised their security and scavenging details, and what they wanted was what really mattered. Rule of law had given way to the rules of guns long ago.
“I know we don't have a choice with some of them, but you can't just start putting them down like animals. All we have to do is bring them in, then nothing out there will be ingesting the parasite. We cremate all the bodies from now on, every one. The cycle stops,” Mike told him.
“Well, all I can say is, you can bring it up at the vote tonight. Then it's out of our hands,” Carl concluded, seating himself and turning his attention to the papers on his desk.
Mike understood that the conversation was over and that Carl had already assured the vote to go as he wanted. He started back down the maze of sub-levels and corridors, rehearsing in his head what he would say, or what he could say, to sway the vote.
3
Mike walked back to the camp and returned to his dissection, purposefully avoiding his armed escort, but knowing that they would eventually catch up. Just as with all the others he had tried to study, the extra limbs sprouted from the joints and contained very little bone. The muscles and ligaments were thin, weak and severely underdeveloped, all of which rendered the limbs completely useless. “But that's the point, now isn't it?” Mike said to himself aloud.
“Not anymore,” a voice spoke from behind him.
Mike turned to see that four armed men had stealthily entered the tent, and while he knew them all by name, the looks on their faces and their tightly-gripped weapons told him pleasantries would not be needed. “What's going on?” Mike asked them.
“You're coming with us,” he was told.
“Why, what's up?” Mike inquired, trying to hide his nervousness.
One of the men at the back stepped forward and Mike saw a flash of light, reflected off of the handcuffs the man was carrying. His heart rate quickened and his head was swimming. Approaching shock, he watched with wide eyes and an open mouth as the cuffs were put on his wrists. He looked back up and wanted to let the flood of questions out of his head, but he couldn't get his mouth to form the words. Mike was led out of the tent with the four escorts fanning out behind him.
“To the left,” he was told.
Mike stopped for a moment and looked back at the men. To the left was the cages. The cages where the afflicted were held if they became, or already were, violent. He began walking again, trying to figure out what they had planned for him. He knew he wasn't liked by the majority of the people in the clan, mostly because he objected to the treatment of those infected, but he never expected anything like this. The cages were just chain link cubes with padlocked doors. They were kept in the basement of an adjacent building contained inside the perimeter fence, with about fifty cages in all, to keep them out of sight and because of the noise. As they descended, the cacophony from below grew louder and louder.
The stairwell turned to the right, and at the bottom was the door leading into the basement. Carl was standing in front of it. They proceeded down the last stairs, and when Mike was face to face with the man, Carl said: “It's just until this thing blows over.” Carl had a slightly apologetic look on his face, which quickly gave way to an expression of seriousness.
“I can't have you interfering with what needs to be done. I don't want you putting ideas in anyone's head that there is some kind of magic cure. We are not bringing any more of those things inside, and we've already started exterminating them outside the city. There isn't going to be any vote, we are just going to do it. You'll stay here until we're finished, because I really don't trust you,” he concluded, then opened the door and motioned for them to go in.
“You're only going to make it worse,” Mike countered as he was ushered in, but the words were nearly inaudible over the noise emanating from inside the cavernous room.
Once inside the lower level, the group had to resort to hand gestures and nodding. The deformed creatures were moaning and howling, some slamming themselves into the doors of their cages, trying to get out. The open concrete-walled room amplified and echoed it all, reinforcing the din. They were dirty, frightening and difficult to look at, yet, Mike still felt pity for them every time he was in this place.
He was nudged from behind and realized he was at the very back of the row of cages, standing in front of an empty cage that had been pulled away from the others. He was nudged again, much harder, and he turned to make eye contact with his captors. The man directly behind him was motioning with his rifle for him to get into the cage. Mike noticed that the other three men had leveled their weapons at him, with Carl looking on from behind them, and he reluctantly stepped inside. The door was shut and locked with a padlock, and he was left to himself.
Mike was trying to guess how long he had been in the cage. The noise was so loud that he couldn't even hear his own mental voice. His head was beginning to ache from the onslaught of noise. He crouched down on his haunches and cupped his hands over his ears, while clinching his eyes shut. He didn't think it possible, but the noise seemed to intensify a bit, and he thought he could feel his cage vibrating from it.
Then, the side of the cage he was leaning against really started moving, causing him to lose his balance and reach out with both arms to steady himself. His eyes opened, and he was struck motionless at the sight of Timmy standing next to the cage. “Timmy!” he yelled out, though it made no discernible sound.
Timmy smiled and awkwardly and rummaged around in his jumpsuit pocket, eventually producing a pair of heavy-duty wire snips. Mike had used them in the past for some of his dissections. He wanted to reach through the chain link wall and hug the deformed boy. Timmy stuck one of the handles of the snips through a hole and Mike carefully maneuvered them in with him, then began cutting the chain links as fast as he could with the handcuffs restricting his movements. Once out, they both headed back down the line of cages as fast as the boy's defunct leg would allow. Mike carefully peaked out of the door and looked around, before opening it all the way.
With no sign of anyone else in the stairwell, they started up the stairs. After only a few steps, Mike turned to see Timmy struggling to get up each one and scooped him up to speed up their escape. At the top of the stairs, he again opened the door slightly and scanned the area which led to the outer glass doors. Mike was relieved to see that it was dark outside. Must have been down there for a while... he thought.
He looked Timmy in the eye and said, “Look buddy, I've got to get over to the tents. I have to go alone though, I don't want you to get into any trouble, so meet me at the food tent alright?”
Timmy nodded the affirmative and grinned. “You going to play hide and seek?” Mike translated subconsciously, as the garbled words came out.
“Yeah, something like that,” he told the boy.
They exited through the glass doors, and Mike took off in a crouching run, keeping close to the side of the building and disappearing around the back side. He ran to the back of his research tent, continuing a rip in the canvass that had started long ago. Once inside, he ran to the linens and grabbed as many sheets as he could carry and still see where he was going. He snatched up his file folder and left through the same tear in the tent, cautiously making his way around the back of the other tents in the camp, until he was at the back of the largest tent in the complex, the food stores for the camp.
He slipped around the far side and in thro
ugh the open flaps of the entrance. He dropped the bundle of sheets and turned to release the flaps and close the tent. Several dozen people were inside, moving about, stacking and organizing the pathetic stores of food they were given. The vast majority of the supply was dry food, such as oats and rices, rarely did they see any type of meat or vegetables. Mike knew them all and scanned the area until he saw the long, greasy silver hair of Kevin, the unofficial patriarch of the camp. Mike walked briskly over to the man sitting at the end of a picnic table, with Timmy by his side. Even now, as many times as he'd seen it, it still momentarily shocked him to see the deformations.
Kevin was not quite as bad as most, he merely had grown several new fingers and toes, turning his hands and feet into morbid bundles of digits. He kept his feet wrapped in layers of cloth to protect them, since any type of shoe was out of the question. His left hand had grown three additional fingers, though they had no fingernails or joints, which looked like tentacles flopping about when he moved. The right hand was a ball of twelve malformed fingers and nearly twice the size of the other hand.
“Kevin,” Mike began, “we've got a real problem coming. They want to put you down... all of you.” He spoke loud enough to grab everyone's attention, letting the words sink in before continuing. He explained what he had been told, his captivity and what he had told Carl about stopping the parasite, while allowing those that wanted, the opportunity to review his notes as he told them his theory.
“Well that all makes great sense, but how are you going to get them to do that, and how do we keep them from killing all of us?” Kevin wanted to know.
“I've got a plan, I think,” Mike told them. “We need to round up anyone who can sew. We have to sew these sheets together and make an air bladder. Sew two sets of four or five sheets together, and then sew those two layered pieces to each other, with a small opening on one end.”
“What are you going to do with that?” Kevin wanted to know.
“Fight back, hopefully,” Mike said.
“How are we going to fight back... and with what?” Kevin inquired.
“Leave that to me. Just get that bladder together,” he told the older man.
Mike began to look around at the stacks of food in the tent. Searching back and forth until his eyes settled on the word 'flour', written on the side of a fifty-pound bag. Making a mental note of the find, he began to walk around searching again, stopping to stare at the flue pipe on the wood burning stove, as a smile grew large on his face. He wrestled the pipe loose and dragged it over to the table where Timmy still sat. The process made more difficult due to his still cuffed hands.
“Look buddy, I've got a real important job for you,” he told the boy, and explained what he needed him to do.
Mike and several others assembled the contraption and propped the pipe up at an angle, just outside the tent. He gathered the make-shift air bladder and ran around with it draped out behind him, looking like a cape that was much too big for the man donning it. As soon as the bladder filled with air, he hurried over and attached it to the end of the pipe, lashing it in place with twine. He retrieved the flour and carefully poured the entire bag into the pipe, as the others looked on with skepticism.
“Shouldn't we try to run or something?” a voice asked.
Mike replied: “That will only get it started sooner. Besides, where are you going to go if you did make it out?”
“Do you really think this will stop it, I mean, stop the mutations?” Kevin asked.
“I know it will,” Mike replied immediately, locking eyes with the man.
Popping sounds in the distance brought them to a silence. Muffled as they were, it was more than obvious that it was gunfire. They were executing the ones in the cages. Mike sprung up and tried to help hurry the others along, moving them to group together on either side of the entrance inside the tent. More distant popping.
“It won't be long now,” Mike whispered, then walked to the front of the pipe, now full to within a few inches of the top with flour. He struck a match and lit the bundle of twigs and paper, which sat on top of the flour, then moved to stand behind the assembly.
He could hear the sounds of gates being unlocked, squealing as they swung open, and he could just make out the shadowy outlines of figures moving into the camp. He tried to count, and while he wasn't positive, there looked to be at least two-dozen people coming. As they got further into the camp, Mike could follow their movements easily, and he could see that every one of them was carrying a weapon.
It didn't take long for them to notice him and stop their tent by tent search, realizing that the tents were now empty. He recognized Carl at the front of the group, and the man smiled at him, almost as if he expected to see him there. “I'm only going to say it once, Mike, get out of the way or you can go down with them,” Carl shouted.
“I can't let you do that. These are still people and we can stop this,” Mike retorted.
Carl brought his weapon up, and the others followed his action. Mike took a couple of steps to his left and looked over his shoulder, up at the top of the tent. The armed group followed his gaze and found Timmy clinging to one of the mast poles at the top of the tent. He let go.
The misshapen boy slid down strikingly fast, hitting the curved area of the tent edge, which launched him like a ramp, almost straight up in the air. His limp limbs flailed wildly in the air, then stopped and changed direction as his upward momentum fought, and then lost to, the force of gravity. The boy came down fast and hard, right on top of the air-filled bladder, expelling the entire fifty pounds of flour into a fine mist that immediately engulfed the group of would-be executioners. Mike caught sight of Carl's face through the cloud, the precursors of a grin growing across it, when the fine mist of powder began to ignite. A ball of fire grew rapidly and intensely, rising to nearly one-hundred feet in the air, illuminating the entire complex in an instant.
The intense heat and light had forced Mike to shield his face, and once the fireball subsided he yelled, “Go, go, now!”
He ran out to where the armed party was now writhing on the ground, moaning and crying, their faces burnt, their hair and clothing singed and smoking. The entire area, fanning out and away from the food tent was covered in a thin, tan crust, still sizzling and popping. Mike ran as fast as he could, the crusty material crunching with each step, and began gathering up the weapons and throwing them beyond the reach of the attackers. He was soon joined by those inside the tent, those with the best mobility securing guns, those with less mobility tending to the victims.
The burns were superficial, and while extremely painful, they were not life-threatening. The fireball had two purposes: defense and to get the attention of the rest of the clan, who quickly came to survey the situation. Mike began checking the pockets of those on the ground, until he located a handcuff key. As he was freeing his hands, clan members began arriving on the scene to investigate.
Nearly the entire clan descended on the camp, stopping a safe distance away from the now armed mutants that faced them down. Several clan members had brought their own weapons, and the sounds of clanking metal rang out as they were cocked and readied for use. “Wait!” Mike called out. “Just wait a minute. We don't have to do this anymore. There is a cure,” he began.
While certain that no one other than himself and Carl knew of this, the murmurs meandering through the growing crowd confirmed it. “Look, we all know this a parasite that we ingest. We know that it's in the fish, amphibians and mammals, so we can't avoid ingesting it. It has a three-stage evolution, and we are the second stage. Just as with the original parasite, the third and final stage starts when something else ingests, well... them,” he told the crowd, motioning to those behind him.
“We have to stop casting those afflicted out, and we have to bring those that we can inside with us. If their remains are no longer being ingested, therefore incubating the last stage of reproduction, the parasite itself will eventually die out completely. Do you understand?” Mike profe
ssed.
“It's really simple. All we need to do is start treating them like people again, and we can have our world back. No more cages and no more camps. We can't get it by touching them or interacting with them. They can't even reproduce, so there is no other way to pass it on. If you want to shoot, go right ahead, but know that if you do, this is the way it will stay forever. We have a chance to stop it if we can just put our paranoia aside and treat each other like humans again... It has to start somewhere.”
Mike dropped the rifle in his hands and turned his back on the crowd, returning to help with the burn victims. As he helped wash out eyes and cover blistered skin, he noticed several pairs of legs assembling around him and the others. He looked up to see that the clan was slowing mingling in amongst the mutated throng, some just staring, but a few began to engage in conversation and before long, a laugh was heard. Mike got up and walked over to Timmy, draping an arm around the boy's shoulders.
“Id it tory dime ow?” came from Timmy.
“Sure thing, buddy, it's story time.” Mike said, smiling down at him.
“And this one has a happy ending...”
The End
*****
“I write because I'm terribly unhappy if I don't...” - W.P.
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Breaking the Cycle Page 3