Pandemic Collapse - The First Horde: An Apocalyptic GameLit Thriller

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by Leif Kennison


  I searched for building 14, but it’s not on the map

  She texted me directions, and I made my way there.

  As I approached the building, I took a look at it and thought that there was something strange about it.

  See, most of the buildings in Brooklyn Navy Yard look modern, sturdy, and industrial. They had straight lines of glass and steel, with concrete columns and black-framed windows. They had a certain stylistic logic to it—sleek with long vertical stretches.

  This building, on the other hand, was like a big block of concrete that just got dumped onto the lot. And it was right next to a school building.

  I walked around the building until I found what looked like it could be the main entrance. I looked around and didn’t see Nyla anywhere, so I waited there. But then a few minutes passed and she still didn’t show up. I got a little nervous. I was afraid that something had happened to her.

  Then, I heard a hiss.

  “Psst.”

  I looked left. Didn’t see a soul. Looked right. Nobody. Then I heard the hiss again. It was coming from the scaffolding above me, so I looked up.

  It was Nyla.

  “Hurry up, get up here,” she rasped. She offered her hand. I grabbed it and, scrambling on the steel bars, got up with her help.

  We were crouched up in the crawlspace in the scaffolding. Except for the exterior wall of the building, we were covered from all sides with plywood that had been painted blue. She was dressed in a dark gray leather jacket and tight fitting leather pants, and she had a black backpack strapped onto her back.

  “Finally,” said Nyla. “What the fuck took you so long to respond? You’re a jerk.”

  I gave her an annoyed look. “Look, I’m here, aren’t I?”

  Angrily, she snapped at me. “I really needed you. And you weren’t there for me.”

  I was about to yell right back at her that she wasn’t my girlfriend anymore, but she didn’t give me a chance to speak.

  Instead, she sighed with exasperation and said, “Anyway, let me explain what’s going on here.”

  I kept quiet.

  “There are soldiers who are dying in training,” she said. “I’ve been in contact with military wives and other sources. The military is using something called STESIS. I’m still not exactly sure what it is, but it’s supposed to be some virtual training device that hooks into the brain. The military is using the technology even though it’s unsafe. And we don’t know why.”

  I laughed.

  “Because the military is evil?”

  She frowned at me.

  “Don’t be immature, Wayne. You don’t understand. Soldiers are expensive to make. Even your run-of-the-mill soldiers who aren’t skydiving into enemy territory. The government has to train them, feed them, clothe them, take care of their medical issues. And even if the military was evil, it’s bad for business to have your soldiers die unnecessarily. The elite soldiers, like NAVY Seals and Special Forces, they’re costlier to train. The military sees them as assets, and they’re not going to push them to go through training that’s life-threatening unless they saw a huge benefit.”

  I could see what she was saying.

  “So what is this building?” I asked Nyla.

  “This is the Kimberland facility.”

  “It looks strange,” I commented. “Actually, it looks pretty ugly. I couldn’t even tell where the main entrance was by looking at it.”

  “Yeah, the building was originally a school. But then a lot of it burned down. Kimberland bought the property and used what was left of the building as the framework for the building. From what I can tell, it was a rush job. I guess they just wanted to use whatever was still standing.”

  “So what’re we doing here?” I asked.

  She looked me in the eyes. “We’re breaking in.”

  I sighed.

  “Look, let’s not get caught. I can’t afford to lose my job.”

  Nyla rolled her eyes at me.

  “Job, job, job…” she said in a nasty tone.

  “Hey, what’s your problem? I’m here helping you.”

  She sighed. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Look, I found a window grate that’s a little loose. We can pry it open if we do it together. It’s around the back.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “Once we get inside, you’re going to find a workstation to log into. We need to snoop around and find whatever we can and download it onto this drive.” She slid an external hard drive out of her pocket to show me before she snapped the pocket back up. It was one of those rugged, rubberized ones.

  We got into the building and as soon as Nyla got her bearings, she looked around and scouted the immediate area. We were on the ground floor. Some lights were on, some were off. There was nobody inside, at least none that we could see or hear.

  Crouched down by a railing overlooking some open space, we looked at one another.

  “I don’t know,” Nyla said. “Something feels...off.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “This is feeling too...easy.”

  I shook my head and shrugged. “How so?”

  “There’s no guards. Inside or out.”

  I shrugged. “I guess we have free reign to do whatever we want in here, then.”

  The interior of the building was like a strange mix between a warehouse and an office building. The center of the building was open from the ground floor up to the eighth, where there was a skylight. There were tall metal shelves filled with pallets that were wrapped in plastic wrap. The edge of the building was lined with offices and meeting rooms. It was hard to tell, but it felt like the building was smaller on the inside compared to how it looked from the outside.

  When we got up on the second floor, Nyla found what looked like a manager’s office. There was a whiteboard on one wall with some diagrams. Another wall had an expansive eInk display mounted on it going from one edge of the wall to the other. It displayed charts and tables of information, and when I dragged my finger across the display, markings showed up.

  Nyla motioned to me to get on the computer, and I sat down in the chair and got to work.

  The computer wasn’t logged out, so I was able to get onto the intranet without any problems. I snooped around until I found a vice president’s unsecured personal email that was forwarded into his local inbox folder. That’s what happens when you downsize information security, I thought. After reading through his emails, I was able to guess the password. It was his wife’s name and birthday. A real romantic, that guy.

  “Wayne, make sure you copy everything you can,” said Nyla, connecting her hard drive to the computer.

  I kept digging and digging until I found a folder full of unsorted PDFs. I opened each one. They were scans of a lot of printed emails, and they hadn’t been run through an OCR program, so I had to scan each one with my own eyes.

  I don’t know how long I spent reading the files...maybe half an hour, maybe two.

  Then, I found something.

  “Nyla, look,” I said. I was excited.

  “What is it?”

  “Looks like an important memo.”

  She pushed me aside and leaned onto the desk, burying her face in the monitor.

  MEMO

  To: Upper Management

  Subject: [INFO] - STESIS Threat Evaluation, Internal

  The STESIS system has been evaluated. The Training Safety Team recommends shutting down the program and ceasing all simulated environment immersive training activities immediately. Further use of the system may result in further death or permanent injury.

  The following exercises were analyzed:

  IRTEX-AR00205-NER918

  IRTEX-MC00389-PAR514

  IRTEX-AF00191-GLR850

  IRTEX-NA00190-SWR293

  In each of these exercises, when the subjects experienced repeated grievous bodily injury inside the synthetic environment, their bodies suffered permanent neurological damage and other irrecoverable traumatic brain inju
ries. We believe that this is caused by the intensity of the signals that are simulated and transmitted by STESIS. Some subjects experienced epileptic seizures in response to life-threatening injuries inside the simulated environment, indicating that synapses may be misfiring.

  We will be conducting further research into the root cause of the issue. Potential risk factors to investigate include: voltage regulation of system-generated impulses; modulation of individual-generated impulses; synaptic health of the individual; neuronal density of the individual; frequency and duration of trauma-generated impulses.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What does this mean?”

  “It means that the system simulates trauma to the body,” said Nyla. “When someone gets shot or gets their leg blown off in the training simulation, signals are being sent to the brain to simulate that. But there’s something unexpected that happens. Maybe there’s no physical feedback, I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. But I think it means that the brain basically short circuits or something, and they might go brain dead.”

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  “Wait,” Nyla said. She noticed something and her eyes lit up. “This is dated a few months ago. Now, look at the log I got here.” She showed me a thick binder. “Look at the way that number goes up—779, 780, 781...and look at the dates. It looks like they ran even more exercises faster than ever. These three happened in one day.”

  “That’s not right,” I said, shaking my head. “They knew that there people could be dying from this, but they kept going anyway? And doing even more of these exercises?”

  “There must’ve been a good reason,” Nyla said.

  But we didn’t have any time to figure out what it was.

  The main gate in the building crashed open.

  We quickly snuck out of the office and looked down to see what was happening.

  Squads of soldiers flooded in. They flowed from one space to another like water, each one sweeping his rifle left and right. Everyone moved in a coordinated way. They were clearly well-trained and well-rehearsed, prepared to dominate the spaces they occupied. It was scary.

  “They’re sweeping the building,” she whispered with wide eyes. “We need to get out of here.”

  Panicking, I asked in desperation, “What the hell are we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know, don’t you play all those tactical games?”

  She was right. I did.

  My heart was racing faster than my mind could, but I remembered a few things.

  “We should get up to the roof,” I said. “There’s no way we can stay hidden in this place forever, and they’re going to clear the building systematically from bottom to top.”

  Crouched low, Nyla and I broke out into a quiet run to the glass stairwell leading up to the third floor. We found an emergency door that led to a stairwell. I was about to go through it when Nyla grabbed me.

  “Don’t,” she rasped. “You’re gonna set off the alarm.”

  “So what the hell do we do?”

  “Let’s look for another way up. Maybe there’s a maintenance stairwell, there’s gotta be one.”

  “They’re gonna be up here any second,” I said urgently.

  “That’s why we have to hurry the hell up.”

  We ran up to the top floor as quietly as we could. Then, we heard someone downstairs shout.

  “There’s someone in here, continue the sweep!”

  My heart started racing even faster and sweat pricked all over my face. “How the hell did they know?”

  “I think they found the open window grate, who knows.”

  With an urgent fire lit up under our feet, we tried different doors, hoping that they’d open up to a janitor’s closet with a window or something that led outside. Then, we heard a voice under us sounding off just a floor below,

  “The scan picked up two potential infecteds! Be on the lookout for two individuals.”

  The soldiers continued their systematic sweep of each floor, room by room. And so did we.

  Nyla and I finally found a maintenance exit. There was a rusty metal ladder that led up to a hatch.

  We both sighed a huge breath of relief.

  “Thank God,” said Nyla. “Go.”

  I started climbing up when I heard the hurried motions of the soldiers. Nyla handed me her backpack and pushed me up the ladder. I flipped open the hatch and Nyla was right on my heels as I got out onto the roof.

  Then, the door burst open in a loud bang.

  A soldier filled the doorframe.

  “I got one!” the soldier said. He leaped up and tried to grab Nyla by the ankle, but she kicked his hands away. She looked right at me and bugged her eyes out. Her expression meant one thing: get the hell out of here.

  And I did.

  It felt like the most unnatural thing to do. Leaving her, I mean. And to do it quietly when every instinct in my body was telling me to run as fast as I could as far as I could. Knowing that the soldiers were going to swarm her and take her made me clench my fists.

  I hid by nearby, behind the ledge of the skylight. The voices were muffled from there, but I could make out most of it.

  “Is there anyone else with you,” a soldier asked firmly. “Do not lie to me.”

  Another soldier climbed up and poked his head around, but he didn’t spend long looking.

  “We’re overtime, c’mon. You know how the doctor gets antsy about the concentration in the air. They’re gonna burn the place down anyway.”

  Burn the place down? I needed to find out what the hell was going on. And I had no clue how I was going to do that.

  Up there on the roof, I hid until I heard the soldiers vacate the building. When I heard noise near the main entrance, I snuck towards the edge of the roof and took the camera out of Nyla’s backpack. It had a long zoom lens on it, so I used to watch what was going on. Down on the ground, they had tied up Nyla in zip-ties and threw her in the back of one of those big military cargo trucks, the ones with the tented back. I could’ve sworn I saw someone else in there too, but I couldn’t be sure. It was too dark.

  The truck started rumbling away in a convoy of Humvees. My heart plummeted.

  The woman I loved was getting taken somewhere.

  And I had no idea where.

  FIVE

  Room 550

  I walked around inside the building, with thoughts running through my head.

  The sun had set completely, and the entire building was lit in an eerie glow. The night cast the building in a dim dull blue light. I was searching for something—anything—that might give me a clue. Just one clue. That’s all I wanted.

  I spent the evening going from office to office, searching for computer files related to the military and whatever this STESIS thing was. I didn’t get much. The few files I found, I couldn’t make any sense of.

  When I walked by a server room, I noticed that a few of the ethernet ports on the network switch had lights that were off. I took a closer look at it and saw that the cables had been cut. Not all of them, just a few. It sure didn’t look like an accident. Must’ve been the soldiers. I don’t know why they cut it, but if it was important enough for them to do, there was something for me to investigate. Heh, I’m thinking like Nyla now.

  I looked at the labels on the cables and tried to make sense of them. It was a headache. I had no clue which cables ran where. I spent a tedious amount of time going from office to office, noting down the label of the ethernet ports in the room and what devices connected to what.

  After doing that for a few offices, I started noticing a pattern in the labels. The blue ethernet cables were just Cat 5e cables—100 megabits, standard stuff. Those ran to the offices. But there were yellow cables that were Cat 6—10 gigabits. And also red cables that were Cat 6a, which had better distance. I figured that they were trying to be as efficient as possible by using the cheapest cabling necessary for each function. That meant that the important stuff—machines that needed more bandwidth—was further away. />
  The cables corresponded to offices in a logical way. I just had to follow the offices by sequential numbers, which were associated with the sides of the building. On the north side of the building, there were rooms numbered ten to nineteen. So for example, room 310 was on the third floor, on the north side of the building. On the east side, you had room 320 to 329. Then on the south side, it was Room 330. Room 340 was on the west. Each side didn’t have more than ten rooms; or if they did, the rooms would have letters attached to it, like Room 410A. It made sense.

  But I checked out the red cables—the fastest ones that led to a fiber optical terminal—and they corresponded to strange room numbers. They ran to what was supposed to be Room 550. There was no fifth side of the building. I’d walked around with my eyes glued to the numbers for each room, and made what must’ve been five laps on each floor, looking for Room 550.

  Then, it hit me.

  I’d read an email that said something about the new wing of the building.

  I was stuck thinking that, with just how systematic the building was built, there couldn’t be any logical place for Room 550 to be in—there are only four compass directions, so what was the fifth side?

  But I remembered walking past these double doors. When I had peered into the window of the doors, I didn’t see much. I did try pushing the doors open casually, but it seemed to be locked.

  I went to the double doors again, and this time I took a closer look. This time, I shined the flashlight of my cellphone through the window. There was a lot of glare, but I could make something out. There was a set of double doors straight ahead, and another to the right.

  I tried pushing the door. It didn’t budge.

  I pushed again, harder this time. It still didn’t budge.

  Third time’s a charm. I backed up one big step, braced my shoulder, and rammed into the door.

  It still didn’t budge. And I hurt my shoulder.

  I cursed under my breath. I needed to find a way to open the door.

 

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