The Night

by Steinwachs, Mark

  George’s eyes were wide, “Are you telling me you shot Agent Betzon when you were in Portland? But—how did you—I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  Randall put his hand up to stop the host from saying anything else and then continued. “He died saving Dr. Boshifski. She darted through the fence and had enough of a lead on the Zs. She would make it to SUV and we would be driving away while they were trying to get up the hill. I yelled for Pasek to get in the driver’s seat and get it started.

  “But the fucking rain. Bosh slipped on the hill. Just as I had. She slid back into them. There was nothing I could do. She screamed as the first two of them sunk their teeth into her. She kept yelling, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ as more of them got to her.”

  Randall stopped talking and took a deep breath. “I took aim once more. I fired one round. Then I unloaded a full clip into the fuckers, but it didn’t matter.” Randall stopped talking. He sat in the chair, a defeated man, not looking at anyone.

  “How—how is that possible?” George stumbled over the words. “Agent Betzon and Dr. Boshifski died in a quarantine break in San Antonio. That’s what ...”

  Randall shook his head no. George pressed on. “There were pictures. You said they died. Dr. Ayers was there with you. He confirmed it.”

  Randall looked up. “No. What I said then was a lie. Now I am able to tell the truth. To tell America about how Federal Agent Pat Betzon and Dr. Janice Boshifski gave their lives. Their true sacrifice needs to be known.”

  “Why? Why the cover-up? Why lie about it?”

  “We didn’t know who was watching. If anyone was watching. We almost had all the proof we needed, but if the Chinese government knew we were close, they could have destroyed everything. A month later we raided their facility and got all the proof we could ever want.

  “The sad thing is, it didn’t matter. President Lansing showed the world what China did to us. But it was too late, the world had changed too much. And here we are, three years later. They are gone, but if I have anything to say about it, they will never be forgotten.”

  The Quiet Moment

  One of the toughest things for me to deal with is knowing that people behind this virus are doctors like me and many of us in this room. Even worse, is the knowledge that the man who led the project was a doctor that I had worked with.

  I will never forgive him.

  Excerpt from “The Decade”

  Dr. Rudolph Graham

  Over the years, I had been at USAMRIID hundreds of times, but today the guards ushered me through such a labyrinth of hallways and elevators that I totally lost my sense of direction. When the last elevator door closed, I was left alone. There was only one door at the end of the hall. In the room behind that door, Dr. Lee Shattuck awaited my arrival.

  When I got to the end of the hallway, I hesitated for a moment and watched Lee through the one-way mirror. His finger traced the lines in the table, following the twists in the grain. He once told me that nothing is truly random. There is a reason for everything in this world, it was our job to figure out what it was. I never would have guessed that the man I was looking at created the virus that nearly destroyed the United States of America.

  I hadn’t seen him in a decade. The ring of hair around the back of his head had gone from brown to white and he didn’t have glasses the last time we talked. He wore jeans and a dark blue polo shirt, unique attire for someone imprisoned by the US government, but I imagine in a case like this, most of the usual rules don’t apply. He didn’t look to have put on much weight in the years, a rarity for a man who spent most of his time in laboratories.

  I opened the door and stepped in. Lee stood and walked around the table to greet me. It was the two of us, a table, and two chairs in the small interrogation room. Us, and the multitude of hidden cameras and recorders. Lee stood tall and put his hand into mine, his grip still firm after all the years. He looked down at me and smiled. “Rudolph, it’s good to see you. It’s been too long.”

  I stood there, my hand in his. I squeezed it tighter, muscles tensing. It had been five years since the outbreak and I thought I could keep my emotions under control. I was wrong. My face got hot, and I yanked my hand free. He spoke to me like we were old friends getting ready to enjoy a beer; not like a man who had killed tens of millions of people.

  I closed my hands into fists. “It’s good to see you?” I pulled my right arm back, ready to strike. “My nephew. My sister. I still don’t know about my parents. And it’s good to see you? Fuck you, Lee.”

  “Go ahead, Rudolph, hit me. Will it help you? Do you think you would be the first person to do it? Do you think it helped the others?”

  I wanted him to hurt. I wanted to make him feel pain. But he was right, it wouldn’t help anything. I slowly let my fists drop. “Why? It doesn’t make any sense, Lee. Tell me.”

  “Sit, Rudolph,” he motioned to my chair. “Let’s talk. Like we used to.”

  I sat, my mind reeling. Pinging from one extreme to the other. Wanting to learn all I could from him. Wanting to beat him. Wanting to find out why he created Z-422. Z-422? Nobody calls it that. They call it what it is: The Zombie Virus. Nightmares turned real. A virus created in a lab, by people. No. By a person.

  “Rudolph.”

  I looked up.

  “I know this is hard,” he said. “Everyone has the reaction you did. I’m used to it now. You look like you could use something to drink. Do you want anything?”

  “Water,” I said, while trying to regain control of my emotions.

  He looked away from me, to nowhere in particular, and said, “Can we get a water and a Diet Coke, please?”

  I watched him, trying to read his body language. He sat straight and composed, without a hint of the slouch of a prisoner, defeated and waiting to be executed. Was he defeated? The virus was out there and we couldn’t stop it. Not yet.

  The arrogance that had always radiated from him was gone, replaced by an aura of control. Even locked away he was still in control. He was the one that wanted this meeting and the army made it happen. He never let his emotions win over his scientific mind. That’s why he was one of the best.

  “Why, Lee? What did you gain?”

  “I didn’t gain anything, Rudolph. It’s what we gained, what the human race gained.” His voice was quiet, almost hypnotic.

  “What did we gain?” I said.

  “The same thing we always do. Knowledge. We learned.” He leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. “I did not set out to teach the world a lesson, one which it sorely needed, but it’s what I ended up doing. I came to the realization that some humans have evolved. A select few have used what we have learned and taken the next step. There are a few of us that have used modern technology to make us gods. I am a god, and you are one too, Rudolph.”

  I sat back. “Gods? I’m not a god. I’m a human being, just like you.”

  “You are so much more, Rudolph. Not all of us are just human beings. You and I and many others have made the leap. Tell me, what is your definition of God?”

  I let the question linger, taking my time to answer. There was no rush. He was on borrowed time and the government wanted me to get him to talk as much as I could. Since the meeting was Lee’s idea, they thought he would tell me things he hadn’t revealed yet. With the government’s blessing we could talk for hours or days or even weeks. I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it.

  Lee jumped back in. “Can you tell me what a god is? Or who God is?”

  Even with all the preachers on TV spouting their rhetoric, it had been a long time since I thought about questions like that. I thought about the bodies I’d dissected, each one with part of its head torn off. The live zombies that were captured for me to study, each of them mindless but instinctively focused on one thing, tearing the flesh from my body. I opened my mouth and this time words formed. “A colleague of ours—who died because of you—told me God is dead. I believe her.”

  His shoulders sagged and for the first time
he looked vulnerable. “Dr. Boshifski. She was one of the best the CDC had. Like us, she had power that people couldn’t understand. I was devastated when I found out she died.”

  “Devastated?” I said. I grabbed the edge of the table, my body tensed but my rational mind caught up just in time to stop me. I gritted my teeth. “You killed her. Not only her, you killed other people like her. Like us.” The last two words, venom from my lips.

  He looked up and leaned back, crossing his arms.

  “I know what I did, Rudolph. I knew how many people would die. We had done the tests and ran the numbers. Ten percent doesn’t sound like a lot. But that’s thirty million people that turned into zombies in one night. Plus the millions that were turned before the country realized what was going on. I knew some great minds would die, but we must sacrifice to advance. That didn’t stop me from being hurt when I heard the news.”

  I cut him off. “Stop saying we and us. I’m not with you. You did this with the help of other people. Not me. Not anyone in this country.”

  He put up his hand and I stopped talking. “You don’t have to agree with me yet, Rudolph. But before you leave this room, you will.”

  I pushed the chair back from the table and got up. I shook my head before I turned and headed to the door.

  I was done. Fuck him.

  As I reached for the doorknob, it opened inward, nearly hitting me. I stepped back, my heart skipping a beat. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breathing as the guard entered the room.

  “Set the drinks on the table, please,” I heard Lee say.

  I stood and waited for the door to close. The interruption grounded me. I opened my eyes and turned back.

  “Rudolph, please sit down. I’ll go about this in a different way. Do you have your phone on you?”

  Once more I followed his instructions; I sat across from him but looked at the bottle of water and a can of Diet Coke, the warmth of the small room making them sweat. “I have it.”

  “Show it to me.”

  I put my hand in my pocket. He had me guessing again. He was in control, always in control. I pulled the phone out, holding it up.

  “That device, that object the modern world takes for granted, is one of best examples of technology making us gods.”

  The last two words made me cringe and I hoped it didn’t show. Unfortunately Lee’s next statement proved it did.

  “Not us, as in me and you. Us as the collective. We’ve become a society ruled by technology.”

  Lee paused and I interjected, which is probably what he wanted me to do. “How is this new? We were ruled by fire before we knew what it was. You could say the same thing about the wheel and the combustion engine, to name two more. New technology has always been crucial in the advancement of the human race.”

  Lee opened the can of soda, the familiar pop followed by the hiss of air rushing out. “We have moved to a point where the masses are ruled by technology they don’t understand. That is the difference.” He took a sip, a cue that it was my turn to reply.

  I clipped my tone, trying to provoke a reaction. “I stand by my previous statement, Lee. We have evolved because a few have broken from the many and forged ahead. This does not make us gods.”

  “There is one thing you are not seeing, Rudolph.” He let his words roll off his tongue, seemingly not drawn in. “Think about it for a minute.”

  I tried to figure out where he was going with this. I bought some time by taking a drink. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was until the cold water ran down my throat. I finished half the bottle before I recapped it and resumed our conversation.

  “I don’t see a difference.” I let the words float in the air between us.

  Once more he didn’t bite at my attempt to trip him up. He said, “In the last couple of decades everything has changed. Everyone knows it and everyone says it. But people haven’t stopped to think what it means. You are correct, Rudolph. We have always been dependent on things that the masses don’t understand. Except, all of those things were tangible. I don’t need to understand how an engine works, but I can see that it does.”

  He paused. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. What he said made sense so far, and that scared me.

  Lee continued. “Humans can no longer see or touch what they are dependent upon. That’s the difference. You can’t see Wi-Fi. You can’t see the Internet. You can’t touch the human genome or grasp how vast the universe is.”

  He looked at me. I had no answer. He was correct. Sort of. You couldn’t see Wi-Fi or the Internet, but you can touch the human genome, and there are people that can grasp billions of years. I was being set up and I didn’t know where to go or where he was going.

  “What you said is true on some levels,” I said, trying to feign confidence, “but not on others. I know you better than that.”

  Lee smiled. “What I said is true on every level. You can’t see it.” He paused and cocked a half-smirk. “Yet.”

  I didn’t like the way his words hung in the air and decided to try and change the subject. “Why did you do it, Lee? Did you even mean to do it?”

  Lee slowly stood up and took a few steps around the room. He looked back at me. “I meant to do something. You know I did. I told you I was going to. Don’t you remember?”

  I tried to think back to our last couple of conversations so many years ago. The nights we sat and talked after our shifts. Those were in the break room at the hospital, not on a US military base. Nothing came to mind about him trying to destroy the United States, or even anything that seemed out of the ordinary. As usual he was watching me and jumped in at the perfect time, like he could read my mind.

  “It wasn’t at the hospital, Rudolph. It was after I left. We were at MacAllister’s Pub. At the conference on cancer and stem cell research.”

  He nodded as recognition flashed across my face. “I remember talking with you but I don’t remember you saying anything about creating a virus that turns people into zombies.” It was my turn to give a little smirk, although I didn’t feel any confidence behind it.

  He stood behind the table and put his palms on it, leaning closer to me. “Do you really think I said that? Do you think I even knew that was what was going to happen back then?” His voice cut into me, each sentence slicing deeper.

  “Tell me what you said. What we talked about. You still haven’t told me anything.”

  “I’ve told you everything. I’ve told you why. You refuse to believe it. You aren’t letting yourself believe it,” Lee said.

  I pushed myself out of the chair, standing up quickly. “You did it because you think you are a god? Bullshit, Lee.” My voice rose. “Try again. You aren’t a god. You’re a scientist, one of the best.” I slammed my hands on the table. “Fucking Christ, tell me. Why the hell did you do it?”

  He never flinched or backed away, just let me rant. When I finished, he stepped back from the table and put his hands in his pockets. “I already told you, Rudolph. You choose not to believe me. I said nothing about creating a virus that night. I did say that a virus was going to overrun the Earth in the next fifty to seventy-five years and wipe out half of the population.”

  “You said that many times, Lee. That’s nothing new. So you decided to create one to prove your point?”

  “Do you think I set out to create this virus?” He said.

  “I sure as hell hope not, Lee. But you did. You and everyone else over there who helped you.”

  I sat back down and Lee followed suit. Neither of us said a word. Time ticked by. I looked at the table, then closed my eyes. I willed myself back to that night at the pub, sitting in a booth with Lee. What was it, thirteen years ago? Details began to flood my memory—enjoying the first round of drinks with Dr. Boshifski before she headed back to the hotel. Irish music played in the bar. Looking out the window into the rainy Portland night. I didn’t remember what was said, though; only images and sounds. Dr. Boshifski’s laughter as she walked away from us at the bar, her voice trailin
g, “… women inherit the Earth …”

  I opened my eyes. “I really don’t remember much. Only that we were there with Dr. Boshifski and she left before us.”

  “What else?” He said.

  “Nothing. I remember we talked a lot about books that night and her laughing as she left, but that’s it.”

  Lee was smiling. “That is your subconscious talking. Do you know why?”

  I sighed. “No, Lee, I don’t. Is this about how authors are gods?”

  “Some are geniuses and people ahead of their time, but they aren’t gods. But I know some would agree with me. There is much more to humans than is understood. Fiction can be written in a way that makes it easy for the average person to get a glimpse at concepts they could never understand.”

  I opened my mouth, but feeling Lee was on a roll, I closed it to see if he would keep going.

  Lee obliged. “Fiction is laced with truths that most people don’t realize are there. Authors foresee the future that we are creating. Look at the great science fiction works. So many have played out in this world as they have on the page.”

  I put my hand up and he stopped talking. “You keep dancing around things, Lee. Do you want to make a point or should I leave? You called me here. You’ve got this all planned out. I’m done with the games.”

  “This isn’t a game,” he shot back. “You need to see it yourself. You need to believe it. You will. You will see it like I do.”

  I shook my head. “You call yourself a god. We spoke of technology, cell phones, and authors. It doesn’t add up.” I was losing control of my tone again; this time I didn’t care. “None of it leads to you creating the zombie virus. None of it points to why you did it.”

  “Your subconscious made you think of Bosh. Why, Rudolph?”