Apocalyptic Beginnings Box Set

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Apocalyptic Beginnings Box Set Page 22

by M. D. Massey


  I wasn’t so sure the McAllen story would pan out to be anything unusual. Although it appealed to the side of human imagination that liked to entertain itself with vampire and werewolf legends simply to scare itself half to death or to prepare itself for real-world survival, chances are there was a more reasonable—although still horrifying—explanation for what had happened. Jaguar and coyote attacks weren’t unknown along the border. Although jaguar sightings were rare, a few of the more eccentric humans living in shacks and double-wides out in the isolated desert where rules were lax had been purchasing and raising various species of big cats as pets. Things didn’t always go according to plan. In exchange for feeding and care, hugs and wrestling, the feral part of the wild cats’ brains sometimes flipped on, leading them to eat their caretakers. Escaping their pens, they’d been known to terrorize the neighbors.

  I ran through the possibilities in my head, to prepare for the story. The shocking murders and evisceration of bodies could, of course, be related to drug and gang violence. Not necessarily from a Mexican drug cartel, however. It could have been a deranged drug dealer or gang member from either side of the border. Or a mentally ill person unable to pay for hospitalization and responding with violence to their own inner psychosis.

  This story was going to be huge, though, no matter who the players were. I felt it in my gut. And I was rarely wrong about these things. I knew how to sniff out the essence of a story and I usually knew how big it was going to get. This one had too many of the ingredients that made Americans salivate for it not to go completely viral: shockingly gruesome murders along the United States-Mexico border in a Wild West section of Texas, a state whose current governor was already batshit crazy over illegal immigrants, in bed with the NRA, and rumor had it looking to make a name for himself to run for higher political office in the near future. Not only had police departments received military-grade equipment from the federal government and private contractors in Texas, so had a number of school districts.

  Yeah, this story was going to explode. As I got onto U.S. Route 59, I felt the adrenalin flood my system. I pushed down on the accelerator.

  When I reached McAllen, I headed on over to the crime scene before checking into a hotel. Already late to the breaking news story, I needed to get into the thick of it before all the evidence was taken away and people’s first impressions had morphed into biased opinions. I grabbed my camera and my reporter’s credentials out of my suitcase. I grabbed my passport, too, just in case more bodies were found across the border in Mexico. That happened a lot: violence spilling over from one side to the other.

  I went first to the home that had been shown on TV, where the friend of seventeen-year-old Alejandro had been found dead in the backyard. I reminded myself to keep an open mind. With recent events piling on top of poverty and immigration battles, McAllen would be a town so full of paranoia, it was likely to infiltrate the air as profusely as drought-stricken dust. People would be jumping to conclusions. I reminded myself to take everyone’s eyewitness reports with a grain of salt. I also knew I needed to see the crime scene for myself.

  I waved my press badge in front of the detective leading the investigation at the house. He let me go straight on through to the backyard. That was way too easy. I guessed he had orders to open up this especially gruesome story to the press, let us snap lots of photos, let us write about anything. In other words, let us scare the shit out of an already nervous public, making it easier for the authorities to control them. And for the gun dealers to sell them weapons. Well, I work for an indie news organization. I don’t regurgitate hand-fed stories. I’m a pain in the ass. I always question the authorities as well as the public. How else are you going to find out the whole truth?

  In the backyard, police detectives were bustling about, doing their job, gathering forensic evidence. The body was there…what was left of it.

  I turned and walked quickly over to a flowering bush. I inhaled. And retched. I kept dry-heaving. I had to think of other things in order to stop myself from throwing up. I didn’t want to lose this assignment. I told myself to pretend this was a movie set. Just make believe I was looking at nothing more than strawberry jam, spaghetti, gelatinous candy worms. I picked a couple of flowers. I shoved them into the top of my shirt in an attempt to mask some of the nauseating smell floating across the backyard.

  I decided to start by taking photographs. That was the most important thing, anyway: to get pictures—visual evidence—before the body was removed. Concentrating on my professional responsibility, I worked on getting the right angles, framing the photographs to most effectively tell the story without words, lighting the images correctly.

  The view through my lens was haunting.

  The victim’s face had been ripped away. The skull lay in pieces, like a coconut shell cracked open to offer the sustenance of milk inside. The brain was mostly gone. All that remained were leftover coils of brain…I reminded myself: spaghetti and gelatinous candy worms…splashed around the head area like someone’s demented idea of a halo.

  The stomach was the same. The abdomen had been ripped open, organs removed like a cesarean section meant to extract life from the host itself. All the major organs were gone: heart, lungs, liver. On the ground, a few sections of intestine had been dropped, looking like uncooked sausage.

  Concentrating on the technical aspects of getting decent photographs calmed me down. There were a few police officers guarding the perimeter of the scene. I asked the closest one, an overweight officer with a thick moustache, if I could ask him a few questions. He agreed. Ghosts of moonlight danced in his vigilant, troubled eyes.

  I started with a broad, open-ended question: “What do you think happened here?”

  His answer: “I don’t know. I really don’t know. A wild animal or some very fucked-up individual. We have a lot of trouble down here. But…this…this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m now twenty years on the force.”

  Chapter 7

  Emma Johnson: The Liberia Treatment and Research Camp, West Africa

  I slept a full twenty-four hours. When I woke, the fog in my brain had cleared. My senses had become sharpened. I could see things in more intricate detail and in more saturated colors than ever before in my entire life. My hearing had intensified. Whereas I normally had to strain my ears to hear what the guards at the prison desk were saying, I could now overhear them easily without even thinking about it.

  I hoped this meant that Mutation Z-2 had boosted my immune system to the point where it would completely eradicate all traces of Ebola in my system. I wanted to return to good health. I wanted to return to work. And, eventually, I wanted to return home healthy enough to get a job as a nurse in a U.S. hospital.

  A guard walked over to my cell. The tag on his shirt said his name was Harry. Sweat had formed in half-moon shapes around his armpits. There were a few beads of sweat on his forehead.

  Through the bars of my cell, he announced: “Emma Johnson, you’re scheduled for an appointment with the prison psychiatrist.”

  I stared at him, speechless, for a couple of seconds. When I found my voice, I asked, “Why? I don’t go to a psychiatrist. I’m a nurse here, an employee.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Dr. Tovar’s orders. He said you’ve been through a lot and psychiatric treatment will help with your recovery.”

  I asked for time to change. He told me to just throw on a bathrobe because the psychiatrist was on a tight schedule. Then he told me he needed to handcuff me, so the prisoners would just think I was one of them as we passed by their cells. He said, “It’s for your own safety.”

  Embarrassed, wearing a pink bathrobe and fuzzy slippers supplied by the prison, I slopped down the hall handcuffed to the guard. I felt like a total mess. This had to be some kind of power trip on Tovar’s part. Strip me of all my dignity, make me feel totally insane and then probe my mind. What the hell did he want from me, anyway? I just wanted to get back to working as a nurse, helping those affect
ed by West Africa’s Ebola crisis. That’s why I came to Liberia in the first place.

  After turning a few corners and reaching the end of a hallway, we came to a door marked: Psychiatry. It was so blunt, spelled out on a cold metal plate like that. Psychiatry. It might as well have said: Shrink or Brain Control Doc. It felt all the same to me, being escorted there without much of a choice.

  Harry rapped on the door with his knuckles. Then he turned the knob, pushed it open and told me he’d be back in an hour.

  That was it. I was on my own.

  My hands trembled. I couldn’t control them. I worried it was a side effect of the tranquilizer…or the tranquilizer wearing off. I ran facts about tranquilizers through my mind. Oh, my God. I figured the shakes most likely meant I needed another dose of medication. The psychiatrist and a therapy appointment scheduled at the exact moment the tranquilizer was wearing off. This had to be a setup by Tovar. If I was declared insane here in Liberia, would I be institutionalized in West Africa? Would I just disappear forever here in this country, far away from my home and family?

  I stepped into the waiting room where I was the only patient. No one else but a secretary on display behind a glass window. Sliding the divider open, she asked me to sign in. I picked up the pen attached to the desk by a chain. I signed a shaky version of my signature on the patient schedule form.

  A couple minutes later, I was ushered into the office of Dr. Charlene Fitzpatrick.

  Wow. Her office. It was richly decorated, nicer than any other room I had seen in the entire camp so far, except maybe for the rooms inside the concrete building where the mandatory Meet and Greet had been held back when I was a newbie.

  Dr. Fitzgerald sat behind an impressive mahogany desk. A seat upholstered in brightly colored African fabric waited for me on the other side, directly across from her. A matching couch…not a regular couch, but one of those Freudian counseling couches…had been set along a side wall. There were shelves filled with African statues. Paintings of African animals hung on the walls.

  Dr. Fitzgerald asked me to be seated.

  I followed her orders. My hands shook. I felt incredibly cold.

  The doctor looked at me with concern. “Are you feeling OK?”

  My voice came out with a tremor. “No. No, I’m not.”

  Dr. Fitzpatrick started the session. “What seems to be the matter?”

  My mind cracked. The room blurred. I could no longer tell what was real and what was imagined. Surely the things I did last night had been imagined. I must be experiencing psychosis. Maybe from the Ebola and all the meds something had just snapped in my brain. If it was all just in my mind…like the hallucinatory dreams that come with fever…then I hadn’t done anything wrong. The muscle memories of having attacked and cannibalized people were false. Lies. Tovar was trying to drive me crazy. Why? Why would he do that? Because he was a sick son of a bitch. Or maybe the camp wanted to get out of paying me for the time I had worked as a nurse before getting sick with Ebola. Or maybe because I had been looking at Akachi’s records. Akachi had died and I knew it, and Tovar didn’t want me telling anyone about it.

  Dr. Fitzpatrick looked at me with concern. “Emma? Emma, where did you go just now?”

  I rubbed the arms of the chair to keep my fingers from trembling. “Nowhere. I’m right here.”

  She insisted. “Your mind wasn’t here just now.”

  I remained silent.

  She tried again. “I understand you’re recovering from Ebola. How are you feeling?”

  I thought of my enhanced sight and hearing. “Quite good, actually.”

  Dr. Fitzpatrick leaned forward. “How are Ebola and all the medicines you’ve been given affecting your mind?”

  My will crumbling, I broke down crying. “Not good. Not good at all.”

  Dr. Fitzpatrick asked, “Are you experiencing any false memories?”

  I quieted down. I stared at her. Slowly, I asked, “What do you mean by false memories?”

  She explained, “Memories of things that never happened, but you think they did. Events that are so vivid in your mind, you’re convinced they’re real. But when you think about it, you know they never could have been.”

  I reported that I had had nightmares of cannibals roaming the jungle outside our camp last night, and of me going into the jungle to find them. I didn’t admit that I had been one of them.

  Dr. Fitzpatrick said, “But you were never outside in the jungle, Emma. You’ve been inside the camp since you got sick. The guards told me that you’ve been mostly asleep for the past forty-eight hours.”

  Chapter 8

  Journalist Hunter Morgan: Trouble Along the U.S.-Mexico Border

  I went back to my car. Checked the radio for breaking news stories. The Texas governor was expanding upon his fear-mongering. Earlier, he had implied that the eviscerated bodies were the deranged acts of either mentally ill illegal immigrants or members of a Mexican drug gang. He had suggested that enemies of the United States were planning to send terrorists infected with Ebola across our border. He had said, “I think these dead bodies are just a warning, something to scare the living daylights out of us.” Now he was ramping up the terror. He was saying, “Where’s the CDC on this? Why won’t the President of our great U. S. of A. send the CDC down here to inspect these bodies? You know they could be infected with Ebola. This could be a Trojan Horse sent into our land by enemies on the other side of our border, Ebola-infected bodies secretly transported right into this great country of ours. And Good Samaritans that we are, we’re gonna take care of these bodies, clean ’em up, give ’em a proper burial. A lot of people who handle these bodies are gonna get sick.”

  God. I switched off the radio. With all his mixed metaphors, the governor was implying that the bodies actually do have Ebola and people are going to get sick. And this was on a fairly moderate radio station. God knows how the story was being spun on the more extreme 24-hour cable news channels. I figured I’d catch up on that later.

  I headed toward the U.S.-Mexico border to investigate what might be happening on the other side, try to get a jump on any potentially related story over there.

  Palm trees stood like scarecrows along the sides of the road, dark hulks whispering in the wind under the stark light of a nearly full moon.

  As I entered the section of lanes on the Anzalduas International Bridge that funneled into the inspection booths for Customs and Border Protection, I realized things had been ramped up far beyond normal border security. It looked like a war zone. Helicopters and drones flew overhead. Like the wings of monstrous-sized bats, helicopter blades slashed through the night, displacing air, creating sound wave pulses that kept everyone below on edge. Intermittently, a drone passed overhead—taking video with its cold blank eyes, I supposed, seeing everything and never blinking. Military SWAT teams patrolled the area on foot and in a variety of special operations vehicles. MRAP—Mine Resistant Ambush Protected—armored vehicles sat along both sides of the road, waiting.

  Soldiers on foot were dressed in full riot gear, armed to the teeth with assault and sniper rifles. Like humans with insect eyes, a few watched the traffic through dark black goggles.

  The sun had begun crawling up into the sky, painting bloodred smears across the billowing clouds. The moon was little more than a pale ghost now.

  The lines of civilian vehicles weren’t long. I drove up to a booth, expecting to be ordered back into the States. I flashed my journalist credentials and my passport. A woman with brown eyes widened with intensity waved me through to the next set of inspection booths leading directly into Mexico.

  One thing was clear: the authorities wanted every grisly detail of the eviscerated bodies shared with the general public. They wanted the average citizen to be hiding in their house, peering out through trembling curtains, willing to do whatever the authorities recommended.

  Driving up to the next set of inspection booths, the ones controlled by the Mexican authorities, I noticed the same type of po
licing as on the U.S. side. Here, too, the heavily-armored U.S. military presence patrolled, working side by side with the Mexican Army.

  But again, despite the serious military control, I was waved straight through to the other side.

  I drove into Reynosa, Mexico as the early light of day began to infiltrate the landscape, making it easier to see the world around me.

  Members of the U.S. and Mexican militaries patrolled both sides of the road. I also noted uniformed persons moving throughout the desert.

  Driving a couple more miles, I decided to act on the hunch that once I flashed my journalist credentials, I’d be allowed to proceed wherever I wanted to go.

  The instant I pulled over, a SWAT team surrounded me, assault weapons trained on my car windows, focused on me from every angle.

  Instinctually, I put my hands up. A police officer in military gear shouted at me to open the door. As I complied with directions, he aimed his weapon directly at my head.

  Pulling the car door completely open, he ordered me to get down on the ground.

  I followed orders, going quickly to my knees and then flattening myself against the ground with my hands over my head. I felt extremely vulnerable.

  With a gun to my head, the officer asked me where I was going. When I explained that I was a journalist, he ordered me to get back up and show him my credentials.

  After that, his tone changed. The same guy who had just scared the shit out of me suddenly offered me a smirk, revealing the dimple in his chin that probably made him quite the ladies’ man back home. He explained things to me. “Look, I’ve been told by my superiors to let all the journalists through. Everyone else needs to get the hell out of here, just keep on driving. This desert out here is one huge crime scene. The drug gangs went all evil out here in no man’s land.” He lowered his gun. He looked me straight in the eye, piercing straight through to whatever was left of my mind. “You ever been in the military?”

 

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