by Dan Yaeger
Word had spread about those two dinners and the Rock was buzzing like a beehive. The buzz was that the Doc was a cruel fake, an idiot of a man that was losing control. And so it was.
Back to my cell and the company of Barlow a little while longer.
Chapter 9: Dungeon Master
After Jesse had been dropped off to Barlow, Rob had taken a detour. Rob tested the waters with Barlow, wanting to see if the jailer had noticed the missing key or would ask Rob about it. No acknowledgement of the basement key was made. Rob was concerned that it was either a red herring or so important that Barlow didn’t want anyone knowing he had lost the key for fear of exposing something of the greatest importance.
The well-mannered farm boy was nervous and walked away from the path he should have trodden. Being a rule-breaker and rebel wasn’t something he was used to. The lure of the Doc’s faux pas, the reference to friends in the basement, was too much. He was a simple man of a simple life but he wasn’t stupid. The situation in that place and the indiscretions of the Doc were too much for Rob to ignore. The sense of good in him had to see something for himself that would tip the young, conservative farmer’s son into being truly good and right again. He had a suspicion people were down there. The odd noises he was told were pipes, the nights where he woke and could have sworn he had heard moaning and screams; it all pointed to people being held down there. Rumours about what was down there, the secrecy and the fact he had only known the biggest sickos in the place had been given keys meant there was something awful to hide. The Doc’s own slip-up had cemented that.
Rob looked into his hand: a dozen units of milk he had swiped from the milk cupboard, given the abundance. The tubes of milk, rich with human stem cells may be of use to someone down there. While Rob didn’t understand the science behind keeping the virus at bay, he knew the result; keeping precious people alive. He wanted to make things right if he could, if it wasn’t too late.
Rob leaned against the heavy, sky blue doors and looked around to see if anyone watched him. Satisfied he was alone, he inserted Barlow’s roughly-cut key. At first he thought he had the wrong key but the crude machining of the key eventually engaged the last tumbler and the lock clicked open. The heavy doors groaned, breathing, and Rob crept into the stairwell, a former fire-escape. Like he was fox hunting on the farm, Rob crept like a commando, checking that no-one watched him as he disappeared from the world he knew into the unknown.
The stairs led down into darkness; Rob felt trepidation and adrenaline surge through his system. Rob turned on a head-torch and continued down the stairs. There were dull noises as well as the sounds of his own foot-falls. Rob stopped for a moment and put his hand up to his ear, trying to amplify the sounds but it was hard to determine if it was from above or the subterranean level he had ventured into.
There was a sudden movement and Rob’s narrow view of torchlight did not reveal what it was or where it was moving. He panicked and dropped his knife; he didn’t realise his old-school American Bowie knife was in his hands. His hands shook and he looked, up front the dull blade and around sharply, trying to see what was there. It was then that he saw it; a rat scurrying into the dark ahead. He looked down at the weathered and well-used blade that had once been his father’s. “Sorry Dad, he said. He remembered his dad to be the most strong and upstanding man he had ever known. All he had ever wanted were the few words of praise the man had uttered over the years. “I’m gonna do good, I promise.” He said, committing to be better, knowing what the Doc was and the institution of the Rock were was wrong.
In remembering his father, he recalled a rat-plague they had on their property when he was a boy. He said his father’s words aloud; “Rats need somewhere to live and somethin’ to eat. Simple.” He nodded, thinking slowly but surely that the rat held an important meaning. “There’s somethin’ to eat down here,” Rob said almost triumphantly.
He crept further forward from where he had emerged into what appeared to have once been the underground carpark. Rumour had it that the Doc had had a work crew dump cement rubble, bricks and concrete to seal and block the whole area in. The air was still flowing and Rob attributed it to the solar panel and exhaust fan system that sat at ground level, clearly marked “Sub-Floor”. There was a little airflow and Rob realised, due to his fear, that he was ignoring his sense of smell that was almost hit in the face by the smell of death. Road-kill, dead animals, the worst of smells from his memories sparked his olfactory senses. “Ugh! Like a dead ‘roo,” he thought to himself as he recoiled a little and put his hand up to his face. His torch wasn’t the best and he could see a gloom ahead, something like a wall, but he wasn’t sure what. He squinted, trying to make out what was before him.
Rob kept going forward, slowly and with caution, nervous at what he would find. A short distance in, he found an improvised workshop bench, trestle tables and a few lock-up cupboards, adjacent to a large metal roller door that partitioned the area from deeper within. He could also see a little area on the floor that had been used in cooking; a little gas camping stove up on concrete bricks and a couple of camping chairs around it. One of the trestle tables was covered in blood and had a cleaver and carving knife, clean enough, on top of a chopping block. Rob could tell the place was regularly visited but not much maintenance or effort had been put in in recent times. It was as if the focus on what was down there had diminished. “Maybe this is where the Doc has been having dead people dumped, from the Squads or those attackers we used to get?” Rob was trying to work out what this place was and why the substantial smell of death. The smell was bad and seemed to get worse, the deeper he proceeded. With a cut from his knife and that satisfying ripping sound, Rob carved a piece off his shirt and wet it from the bottle he had strapped to his belt.. Wrapping it around his face in the form of a mask, the shirt piece was almost like a piece of the puzzle Rob was reverse engineering as he made progress. “What the hell is this place?” Rob said aloud, muffled by his mask. The sudden reaction helped him cope and compose himself. Rob was breathing hard from nerves and perhaps an involuntary reaction to the lack of air and smell of death. The mask, if nothing else, helped the young bloke calm a little and shut out most of the smell. His breathing slowed and he approached the workbench and what appeared to be a book. The book was an old-school vinyl covered journal with Doctor Penfould’s monogram. Rob wiped off some dust with his rough hands and opened the book to read what secrets it may hold. The notes within were somewhat clinical and, at first, made little sense to him. Then he began to see patterns in things; “TS” was the abbreviation for “Test Subject”. Viral maturation was something he had to think about but got the gist of; “This is how far along going zombie someone is,” he said, scanning the book with interest. Then, all those patterns and meanings gelled and he could see what was going on. Words like consumption, feed-rate, “the viral maturation rate of the ingested sample” – “Holy shit! Terrible fucking experiments: he was feeding someone zombie meat?!” Rob felt ill and dizzy at the horror of one of the worst aspects of the experiments he was reading. He had birthed cattle and sheep, gutted deer and goats and shot more rabbits and foxes than most. He wasn’t precious nor squeamish but the revelation, coupled with the smell, caused him to vomit.
Just moving the mask in time, Rob spewed up what was undigested of his meagre lunch and his water intake onto the floor. The unmistakable sound was loud and made him feel even sicker as he heaved and tried to compose himself with the sound echoing in his ears. He was not the only audience, however.
With the back of his hand and shirt cuff wiping his face, Rob froze. “Hello?” he heard. That familiar adrenaline came back again and he was stunned. There were droning groans, zombie-like too. “Hello? Please?!” came the voice again. “Shut up,” came a whisper, almost a hiss from another.
Rob knew what was going on and he felt the gravity of the Doc’s sick mind. “Yes, I’m here. I’m not like the others,” Rob said hurriedly and ashamed as he rushed over to the roller-door,
where the voice had come from. Amongst the groans it was hard to discern but he thought the person he spoke to was roughly on the other side of the roller door.
“Over here,” came another voice, weakly. “Where?” Rob didn’t know how to open the roller or where they were. He looked around frantically for a chain or a button or some other device to get the roller door moving and open. As if in a moment of shared understanding, the weak voice said. “Please- there’s a door in the door.” Rob scanned the roller-door and found the outline of the portal he was looking for. Just like the one in the cell of Barlow’s Den, Rob recognised the work of the Doc’s designated dirty workman. The same make of door had been welded into what had once been a partitioning roller door in the carpark. He realised the large roller door was sealed and there was just one door into whatever was inside. “Fucking Barlow!” Rob seethed amongst the fear, shame and uncertainty of what he would find.
The weak voice moaned, “Barlow, no, not him, please no,” it drifted off as if in despair. “No, mate, I ain’t him, I ain’t nothin’ like him,” Rob said, frantically trying to get the door open. “I promise I will look after you.” Like lightning through the air or a definite clarion, something dramatic had occurred in the young man. Rob had forged a new path for himself. He would never be part of something like the Rock. He would end it or die trying.
The heavy door was a one-way portal and opened from Rob’s side with a loud click and metallic creak. It opened to silence.
Rob tried to look through before stepping in. He fell backwards with a mighty jolt as a group of zombies spilled forward. Zombies were adaptive automatons, working on behalf of the Divine Virus. Normally, the infected populace of the Rock didn’t attract too much attention in the open world. The infected were ignored as hosts. That is, until the food supply of other hosts with a greater viral maturity was limited or not available. Less infected hosts would be fed on. Rob was to be a meal, now caught up in one aspect of the Doc’s sick experiments.
Rob kicked his legs and drew the Bowie knife. A zombie that was emaciated fell onto Rob. He stabbed into the skull, killing it with the first blow but ensuring the job was done with multiple efforts. Its rancid blood seeped onto him and spattered into his eyes. While he was a disgusting mess, there was little blood in the walking corpse. Its weight was less than 20 kilos; not much for what had once been a middle-aged man. Rob easily rolled it off himself and leapt to his feet.
He shuffled n his toes like a fighter and stood ready with his knife. The other two shambling messes came at him at once, not quite with the same vigorous push the other had opened with. He stabbed one through the middle while the other clawed and took a bite at him. The bite was glancing and the clothes tore at his skin without too much effect; a hammer-blow using the pommel of the knife went through scalp and bone and ended the zombie. The last zombie, seemingly rendered paraplegic from the knife-wound that went into its spine, crawled forward, dragging its useless legs on the concrete with a scraping sound. He looked at it, ready to strike when something unexpected happened. Emerging from the door was a human form, not shambling in the same way as the zombies had. It was a man, unwell, sick and emaciated but a man. He came forward and knelt down to the zombie. “Prasad, you have had enough. I am very sorry my friend.” He gently stroked the zombies head. There was a pause and he looked up to Rob, squinting at him in the torchlight. Rob muted the LED beam with his hand and he let the man gaze upon him in what was the equivalent to a weak lamp-light. The man looked up with deep brown eyes offset by bright whites, despite his condition; all too human. This man gestured to Rob “Please sir, end him, he is now gone.” He said it with calm and humility, despite all he must have been through. The zombie, devoid of all its humanity and without independent thought, gnashed its teeth, executing its programming to attack sources of protein.
Rob nodded and came forward, unceremoniously bringing his knife down in a brutal stroke that spattered rancid black blood everywhere.
The man fell backward with exhaustion and emotion and tears glistened down his cheeks in the intense torchlight, with Rob’s focus on him once more. It would have been one hell of a loss; someone who had lived and suffered alongside him would have been like a brother. The young bearded man sobbed. Rob regarded him for a quick moment more. He was young, only in his twenties, of perhaps Indian background and would have been once healthy and strong. A thick beard and a shock of dark matted hair hid what was once there. He was a shell at the hands of the Doc. Rob held some anger within; the Doc would pay. He would never follow the Doc so blindly ever again. So he took action.
The young farmer’s son noticed an LED lantern next to the camp stove at the centre of a circle of chairs. He turned it on, its batteries must have been recently inserted and a strong but eerie light was cast about the area. He turned off his head-torch and returned to the young man, who looked delirious.
“Let’s get you up,” Rob said, extending his hand. The young man gripped it, with whatever fortitude he had left; he was lifted to his feet. The young man didn’t weigh too much by Rob’s reckoning and his ragged shirt fell open to reveal a nasty, wide scar from his abdomen up the right-hand pectoral and over his neck; claw-marks.
The man was covered in black veins, akin to the varicose veins of older folks, rarely seen after the Great Change. Rob knew, as did anyone still sentient, that this was the hallmark of someone in a very advanced state of infection. He wanted to do the right thing and rescue this man from the horrors of what the Doc had put him through.
Rob asked, perhaps as a gesture of kindness as much as a restoration of dignity and self-determination, “Can I sit you down there?” Rob’s gaze and torchlight shifted to where the camp-chairs were. The former hostage said “Yes,” and patted Rob’s shoulder, as if to indicate the need to move. Rob delivered the dishevelled young man into the chair as gently as he could. The man being rescued smelt terribly but, unlike before, Rob’s senses were dulled by that immutable urgency to help a fellow human being in need.
What’s you name?” Not sure if he was too late for this man, a response came, strong, proud but humble; “My good name is that of my father; I am Shiva Banerjee.” The man said in excellent, slightly accented English. “There are others in there, please!” he implored Rob but did not beg.
“Yes, I’ll get to them in a minute,” Rob said, thinking that there would be more like Prasad. “Sorry mate, I had no idea you were down here. I’m Rob. Rob Chisolm.” He said, looking away, not for fear but of shame. Rob returned his gaze, with a sense of purpose, to know more. “Who did this to you?”
Shiva responded well; “To us. There were many of us. You need to help the others.” The man gestured weakly at the door from which he had emerged. “There were bad people who tricked our group and hid us away in this mess. A Doctor and nasty woman called Maeve, someone called Leon and Barlow-“ the man was awfully affected by the last name uttered.
“Did they do torture, or experiments and things to you?” Rob asked, needing to hear it for himself. “Yes, you will never know,” the young man replied to Rob, shaking his head.
“Here,” Rob retrieved a few units of milk. “Drink this; it will slow the zombie virus,” he said tipping the young man’s head back and pouring the liquid down. “Ahhhhhh. Good,” the man said simply. “I have mostly tasted that awful meat for months. The milk is always welcome.” Rob had that cold, nape of the neck feeling once more: meat? His interpretation of the log book was right. He felt like throwing up again.
“Did you have to eat THAT meat?” Rob gestured at the dead body. Shiva looked at him with an intensity and anger “Yes, we did. Or death.” He got back to drinking the milk. Rob cringed at the thought of human meat, much less infected, rancid zombie flesh. It had all been part of the Doc’s experimentations. He had been trying to work out if eating zombie flesh accelerated infection.
“Are there other’s like you? Not like your mate, here,” he tried not to be insensitive. “Yes, I keep saying!” Shiva said,
exhaustedly and with a little despair.
“Sure, but you said there are others in there. Are they bloody zombies or are they folks like you?” Rob asked. Before he could receive an answer from Shiva, a sharp, lucid voice answered him from within the room. “Yes, two more,” the voice said simply. A thin man, with hollow eyes and a dark stare glared back at him; on the verge of turning. He was also in ragged clothes but held an improvised weapon made from human bone, levelled at Rob. His voice was very clear but heavily accented. “I’m Rob Chisolm, I’m gonna get you out of here.” Rob nodded at him as if to offer an olive-branch to the armed man who he had not established was friend or foe. The shiv was still aimed at Rob as the man spoke again.