“But you can’t do that yet, right?” I asked. “Not until you know the vaccine works.”
“Right,” Dr. Sampson replied. “Not until we know the vaccine works. Until then, we’ll stay in contact with him. We’ll go get him after your brother comes home from his little trip in a few days, healthy and happy.”
Meanwhile, here on Earth, we have work to do.
We arrived at Labrador City this afternoon to find only 97 people alive. Of those living, 68 showed signs of illness, and it’s quite possible that the remainder have already been infected. Of course, we vaccinated them all. We’ll soon know what happens, but not from personal observation.
We’re going to continue to move, hoping that we might reach more people before it’s too late. We spent too long getting to Churchill, and too long in Churchill. That almost certainly cost the lives of some of the people there, and here. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to stay to watch the results when whatever happens will happen regardless of where we are. So, we’ll move on in the morning. We’re headed to Baie-Comeau, where Mike has seen evidence of life. We’re leaving 600 doses of the vaccination here.
June 15, 2093, late morning—Baie-Comeau—Shift
“Where’d they go?” Street asked.
“They just disappeared,” Angel replied.
“They didn’t disappear,” Street said in exasperation. “That’s impossible.”
“Is it?” Angel asked, with a slight twitch in the corner of her mouth.
Anta and I sat there quietly listening to this exchange. Dr. Angel Robertson is one of the leading researchers in what has lately been called “supernatural” genetics. I doubted that anybody alive really understood what that term meant, apart from Angel. I certainly didn’t. But I read some of her published research weeks ago in the bunker. She believes that there are various genetic mutations within our society that may cause certain individuals to exhibit physical capabilities beyond the “normal” limit of human ability.
“Anyway,” Street continued, “whatever happened to them, they’re not here anymore.”
None of us could argue with that.
Late this morning, as we pulled into a town called Baie-Comeau, on the northwest coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, we saw people in the distance, running. We sped after them, but by the time we arrived at the place we’d last seen them, they were gone. We searched all of the buildings in the area to no avail.
Then, and now, I can’t understand why didn’t they answer our calls or come out to greet our vehicle. Surely we didn’t all have the same errant vision of the existence of human life in the distance. They did exist.
June 15, late evening—Baie-Comeau—Shift
“Hey guys, we got your message about the disappearing people,” Mike said. He looked excited about something. John was sitting next to him, legs bouncing.
Tonight, after losing sight of those people, and searching Baie-Comeau in vain for them, we found a seaside hotel towering over every other building in town. Street broke into the stairway leading up to the roof. We spent a warm evening on the roof looking for signs of human life in the streets below. I sent Mike a message, telling him about what we saw, and asking him to give me a call when he had a minute. We wanted to know whether he could figure out what happened to everybody here.
“Yeah, weird stuff,” I said. “What are you two so excited about?”
“Actually, we’ve been seeing disappearing people for a couple of days, but until now, I couldn’t decide if I was seeing glitches in the system or reality. Now I think its reality.”
“What do you mean?” Angel asked.
“Well,” Mike continued, “we’ve observed human activity in your area, as you know, and we continue to do so. That’s why we sent you there. But we’ve been unable to get an accurate count of the numbers of living. The strangest thing is not that the people seem to disappear, but that our surveillance continues to pick them up and then lose them over and over again.
“Baie-Comeau doesn’t have cameras, so we’ve been relying on satellite imagery, which is very detailed and can pinpoint an individual on the street with ease. But the people we’ve seen there will appear on the street, and then, rounding a corner, disappear. Maybe they go into a building; but I don’t think that’s always the case.”
“Why not?” Anta asked.
“It just seems like there are too many people getting away from us. Every time we see a new person, he or she comes onto the screen, rapidly, and then, just as rapidly, he or she is gone. It’s not like they’re moving into a building where we lose sight of them. They just get away. One guy actually seemed to just disappear, right off the street—a real big dude.”
“Do you have any theories?” Angel asked excitedly, rocking slightly on the balls of her feet.
“Not really,” Mike replied. “But some of the people we’ve observed appear to have strange gait patterns and other bizarre movements too. Some of them have been very quick, running faster than I’ve ever seen a human run. And lots of them are a bit on the naked side.”
“What did you just say?” Anta asked, as if she hadn’t actually heard what we all just heard.
“I said some of them aren’t wearing much clothing. They’re mostly naked.”
“Mike, didn’t we tell you about that guy a few days ago, who Street saw eating a woman?” I asked.
“Yeah, you did,” he replied.
“We must not have told you about him being mostly naked,” I said.
“No, you didn’t. How interesting.”
“Interesting?” Street said. “I’d call it more than interesting. The dude was naked. And he was fast. He totally ate that chick. We’re probably not safe, right?”
“This is kind of creepy,” I said. My arms were covered with goosebumps, like when I was a kid hearing ghost stories around the campfire during scout camps in Colorado.
After that conversation with Mike and John, none of us can sleep. I’m not too comfortable here, knowing that there are super-fast, disappearing, human-eating people around. It seems too much like a horror story—too much like a zombie movie.
Of course, zombies aren’t real. There’s no scientific (or spiritualistic) basis for the premise that a human can die, and then come back to life, but not really be alive. Nevertheless, these are the things that keep running through my mind as I sit here tonight watching for these people from the roof. None of us dare go out into the town, and none of us dare go to sleep. We barricaded the door to the roof from the outside using furniture from downstairs. We’re scared enough to be more watchful and cautious.
June 16, 12:35 AM—Baie-Comeau—Shift
“Look down there,” Angel whispered excitedly. “People.”
“Where?” I asked, scanning the dark street below. Angel handed me her binocs, pointed to the park, and then ran over to wake Street and Anta who were trying to sleep nearby, here on the roof. “I see them,” I said, looking through the binocs.
Anta, Street and Angel all arrived back at the wall I was huddled behind, just as I pointed to where I could see movement on the grass next to the street. There was a full moon, so with the binocs we could easily see two men as they walked around, in and out of the shadows of a dense tree near the road that wound around the city park. We wouldn’t have necessarily known that they were men from this distance, but they weren’t wearing shirts, and they didn’t look very womanly.
“What are they doing?” Anta asked, wiping the sleep from her eyes. She must have finally dozed off.
“They look like they’re just talking to each other,” Angel said. “Are they wearing sunglasses? In the middle of the night?”
“Strange,” Street said. “And they’re both bald.”
As we continued to watch the men in the park, a manhole cover in the middle of the road next to them opened up. Two more men and one woman ascended from the depths of the sewer system—all wearing sunglasses, in various states of dress, and all bald.
“The sewers,” Anta said.
She was now wide awake and was looking through her binocs, too. “That explains Mike’s mystery of how they get away from him so quickly. They just drop into a hole.”
“Holy . . .” I caught myself. I try not to cuss.
We watched in disbelief, none of us speaking, as the last man to rise from the sewer—a huge man—effortlessly dragged an apparently-lifeless human body behind him with one hand. His strength was remarkable—to be able to drag a human up a ladder from below the street, one-handed.
After a few seconds, one man dove at the body and began to bite at it.
“Whoa! That’s what I saw before,” Street whispered, as if we needed reminding.
We watched in horror as all five of them began to gnaw and chew on the body!
“What the hell is going on?” Angel asked, trying to whisper, her voice betraying disturbing emotion. “Who are these people? Are they even people?”
It was strange to hear surprise and turmoil in Angel’s voice. She had handled the events of the last few days with grace, like she knew it could happen. But now, as she watched human cannibals attack another human, her excitement seemed to give way to fear.
“Whatever they are, I’m sure that I don’t want to meet them,” I replied very quietly.
As we watched the scene below, we made certain to stay as concealed as possible, and I don’t think we were seen. Unfortunately, it’s nighttime. We have agreed to wait until morning to take our leave from Baie-Comeau. Our goal has suddenly changed. We just want to get away from here, alive.
While we wait tonight, our friends back at the bunker have begun to research and search for similar patterns of human activity elsewhere in the area. What is going on? Why were they in the sewer? Why were they bald? Why were they all wearing sunglasses? Was the body dead or alive? And why were they eating a human? I hope Mike and John can make sense of it. I’m freaked.
June 16, 6:05 AM—Baie-Comeau—Anta
“Anta, get the others up. We have something very important to discuss,” Dr. Yurgi Shevchuk said.
It was my turn to be on “watch”. That word makes it sound like we’re in some kind of horror or war movie, but we’re not—this is real life. The fact that somebody is actually on “watch”, or that we have to be on watch, is daunting. It had started to rain. A light sprinkle partially obscured my view of the street below, but I hadn’t seen anything all night.
I kicked Street and nudged Shift gently. Angel was a light sleeper. I knew my words alone would wake her. “Hey, wake up. Mike and Yurgi are on the coms.”
Shift, Street and Angel were asleep on the roof, using blankets and pillows we procured from downstairs before blocking the roof access door.
“We’re here guys. What’s going on?” Shift asked moments later, trying to cover his head with a blanket to keep the rain off.
“We’ve been tracking the people you saw,” Mike replied. “We’ve tracked them back several days. We know where they came from and Yurgi has a theory about why they may have behaved the way they did.”
I’m rather unfamiliar with how Mike’s tracking systems operate. Shift tried to explain it to me a while back, but I was too busy watching him to pay attention to what he was saying. I love to watch him “lecture”. That’s when he’s in his element, and he seems to really love it.
Anyway, Mike explained again how he hacked into and reprogrammed existing surveillance systems to locate human movement. When human movement is registered, the system locks onto that person and follows him or her. That is how he’s been able to tell us when the human life in a city has decreased before our arrival.
It’s not a perfect system. A person has to move outdoors or stand in a window or doorway in order to be seen in the first place. Then, if the person goes back indoors or moves out of sight, he or she is lost. But the system locks onto the building the person entered, waiting for movement to begin outside again. Thus, they’ve been able to track these five people fairly well.
“Don’t keep us in suspense Mike,” Shift said.
“Okay. Sorry. All five individuals came east together just south of the United States border with Canada, from Toronto.”
“Toronto,” I said under my breath.
“They were vaccinated on May 23 by one of the original Toronto groups in a suburb just south of the Toronto bunker.”
“So, did something go wrong with the vaccination or what?” Shift asked.
“Well, the vaccination process went smoothly enough. But over the next few days, their movements became more erratic. They began to quarrel with each other. But they still traveled together, eastward.
“In a recording from May 29, we saw their first approach toward another human body—a dead man. The surveillance system recorded a couple of them licking and nibbling the fingers and other various body parts of the deceased man. But they soon moved on, leaving the body relatively intact.”
“That’s messed up,” Street said, wrinkling his nose.
“It gets worse,” John said as he moved into our view on the screen for the first time.
“Yup,” Mike said. “On June 2, they attacked a lifeless body and ate portions of it. Since that time, they’ve become faster and more animated in their movements. They’ve gained tremendous strength, pushing doors down and dragging bodies down the street. On June 3, some of them first began to abandon some of their clothing and wear sunglasses, for no apparent reason. Over those days, they were all losing their hair too.”
“That’s incredible!” Angel said, “And rather disturbing.”
“Yes, Angel, it is,” Dr. Shevchuk replied. “But in this case, ‘incredible’ does not denote a positive situation.”
“So, what’s your theory Yurgi?” Shift asked.
“Remember, it’s just a theory at this time, but we will be contacting Toronto to discuss it with them. I believe that the vaccination strain used by the Toronto bunker may not be exactly correct. It is, perhaps, saving the lives of the people into whom it is injected, but perhaps the lives it is saving are not worth living.”
Mike picked up where Yurgi left off. “In any event, they certainly aren’t ‘zombies’ Shift. I’m sorry to let you down like that.” Mike smiled. Shift smiled too. But the joke wasn’t very funny.
“They haven’t died and then reanimated,” Mike continued. “They’re human, and they never died in the first place. They were some of the lucky, or maybe unlucky survivors of AE.”
Mike and his team will continue to monitor the progress and movement of these five whatever-they-are. More importantly, however, they are now going to begin tracking the movements of the three original Toronto groups and all those whom they’ve vaccinated over the past four weeks. Yurgi also hopes to enlist the help of the Toronto folks to try to figure out what, if anything, went wrong.
I hope—we all hope—that these five humanoids are the only beings of their kind, and that Toronto has not erred in some terrible way. Of course, since Street already saw similar activity five days ago, a long way from here, and Mike observed peculiar movements in others yesterday, I’m afraid these five are not alone.
June 16, 2093, 9:20 PM—La Malbaie—Anta
Today, we continued our travel in a generally southwest direction along the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, toward Quebec. There were no major roads, so our travel was relatively slow and we weren’t able to make as much progress lacking the constant charging from embedded pulsar energy modules in the streets. We only got as far as La Malbaie, where we had to stop to recharge our craft.
We saw no human—or “subhuman” as we’ve begun to refer to the five humanoids—activity as we left Baie-Comeau, and I’m not complaining. Angel, on the other hand, seemed quite disappointed to have left town without another glimpse of the skin-headed humans.
Angel seemed to have forgotten her fear from last night. As we passed the town limit, she expressed her desire to see more of “those people from Toronto”. She actually wanted to talk to one of them. I was not in her camp. I hoped that those fi
ve were all there were, and that we may never see them again—although I had a bad feeling that Toronto, in their quest to save lives, may have altered our human existence again. So few humans are left, and my fear was that some of them were receiving, or had received vaccinations that are transforming them into some new species of human. My fear was well-placed.
We received a com from the bunker as we were just settling in for the night tonight. John, Mike and Dr. Shevchuk looked at us from the lounge area of the bunker. Several people were around, and every one of them was paying rapt attention. The looks on their faces told us that the news was not going to be good.
“We’ve found several of the groups of people injected with Toronto’s version of E-rase, and, unfortunately, in each case, the general progress has mirrored the progress of the people you saw in Baie-Comeau,” John explained.
“Not good,” I said.
“No, Anta, not good at all,” John said. “Toronto’s vaccination appears to be errant. And what’s worse is that each person ‘vaccinated’ was given dozens, or even hundreds of doses of the same vaccination and instructions to freely inject every person they came into contact with. That’s a logical instruction given the current state of the population of the world, and we knew that was happening. Unfortunately, it can now be presumed that the abnormal vaccination is continuing to spread through Canada and the northern United States.”
“Are the crazy suckers still vaccinating others?” Street asked, confused.
“No Street,” Yurgi said. “They’re not. But they have several days between the time of injection and the time they go crazy. It is during that time that they continue to vaccinate. Before they even know there’s a problem.”
“Dr. Shevchuk has contacted his counterparts in Toronto and all the other stations and informed them of the situation,” John continued. “At first, Toronto was defiant, insisting that their formulations were correct. Even seeing footage of the people we’ve seen, and studying our data logs, didn’t convinced them of any error.”
Tomorrow We Rise (The Killing Sands Book 2) Page 5