by Welker, Wick
Currently, Stark was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wondering about a sound. There were soft silent sounds all over the lab, but cutting through was a surreptitious clunking sound originating from somewhere beyond the walls. He had tried in vain to figure out the direction of the sound, but it seemed to emanate from everywhere at once. It was a soft clunk in the distance with almost a rhythmic pulse and he couldn’t tell if it was getting louder or if he was just becoming more aware.
Brushing the sound off, he returned to the kitchen area and cleaned the dish he was using in the sink. Sighing deeply, he watched the soap in the sink swirl around as it sunk down the drain. He leaned on the counter and continued staring into the black drain as the rest of the soap washed away. The sense of purpose that his hurried lab work had been giving him was fading now. Without the resources, staff and time, he silently admitted that there was no reason to keep working right now. A thought then struck him. Is this the time that I need to start contemplating my life? He always figured that as a person got older and was close to death that at some time they had to sit back and think about all the memories of their life. A person needed to stream the living memories of high school, college, marriage, career and personal relationships into a beautiful film in their minds before they died. He never thought that he had to figure out some sort of life purpose at the end, but he always thought a person should recollect the sum of their life.
An idea instantly flooded his mind, and he started opening every cupboard, looking under the sink and drawers. Then he found it in the freezer: a bottle of Grey Goose. Pouring a little into a green plastic cup, he lumbered over to a lab bench and sucked down the cool liquid. He tried to start the reel going in his brain but no footage was coming. Normally, there should be a movie running of his marriage but so many repeated attempts of blocking his ex-wife from his mind had probably deleted all the files. He had never had any children so there were no cliché shots of a child learning its first steps. He tried thinking about professional colleagues and the relationships that he had with them, but not a single person was standing out since he had been in a research lab for the last decade. There was his secretary, Denise, who he had for twelve years. He had always liked her snippy attitude with him. She did make his job a little bit more enjoyable. He had loved his career in magnetics and later in medicine, but both of those two fields had completely fizzled out for him. He had been a failure in the two areas that he loved most. There were a number of girlfriends throughout the years since his marriage, most of which were brief relationships spawned from Internet dating. He did like Julie, a warm and kind woman who ended things with him.
Before he could process the emotions, he was sobbing. Not over Julie, not over his career, not even over the virus. He was crying because there was nothing to cry about. He couldn’t find anything to supposedly cherish in his last days.
The sound of his quiet sobs echoed around the lab and bounced back to him as if he were hearing someone else. It felt like he was standing aside from himself, examining this crying man in front of him that he pitied yet wanted to comfort. After a few moments, he stopped himself and realized that he was only imposing the ideal of recollecting all his memories before he died. I don’t have to, he thought. I can just sit here and enjoy my drink with an empty head. I’ll go all Zen or something, he thought.
All throughout his metaphysical crisis, the same sound coming from all the walls was growing louder and stronger. It sounded dull and metallic at the same time; a burst of a rapid series and then followed by a rest. Whatever it was, it was getting closer. Probably just the sick managing to get into the walls, he thought, banging their heads through the sheetrock and weighing their bodies into the walls until they collapsed.
Out of only a mild interest now, he looked out the small lab window into the hallway and saw the same crowd walking in the hallways, not seeming to notice or care about him cooped up in the lab anymore.
The sound was so loud and so close now that he moved about the lab, again trying to pinpoint its direction. Walking around, he could tell that the sound was starting to have a focal point back in the kitchen. Standing silently, he waited for the next series and heard it best behind the refrigerator. Putting his shoulder to the side, he slowly slid the refrigerator out of its place, making black tracks on the green tile. He put his ear to the wall and could hear the sound almost perfectly now. It was just beyond the room, a repeated thudding sound.
He was sure of it now. It was the infected finding their way into the lab. Placing his weight on the other side of refrigerator to return it to its place, he suddenly stopped when he heard the sound of voices. He put his ear back to the wall and heard muffled voices coming from the same location as the sound. It then came to him what the sound was. It was an axe. They were trying to rescue him. The SWAT teams or whomever had finally showed up to get him out. His indifference about dying suddenly disappeared and he felt ridiculous about crying earlier, smiling to himself.
He got the coffeemaker going and brewed a cup as he waited for them to come, feeling a little drunk. The voices were much louder now although he couldn’t quite distinguish what they were saying.
“Hey!” He yelled out, “I’m in here!”
The voices stopped suddenly and then yelled back at him. Stark thudded his flattened palms on the wall to draw their attention. “This way!” He yelled out again.
After another fifteen minutes, the voices were just on the other side of the wall. He tried talking to them but they were still not clear enough to understand. He backed up on the opposite side of the kitchen and sipped his coffee mug, waiting for them to come.
The people on the other side had now stopped and were talking back and forth; Stark was certain one of them was a woman. They seemed to be deliberating and they had stopped trying to get through the wall.
There was a moment of silence and then a metal point suddenly stuck out through the wall, breaching into the room. It sat there a moment, disappeared and returned through the wall blowing out chunks of sheetrock.
“Hey, hey there!” Stark spoke out.
A woman’s voice answered from the small hole. “Who are you?” She said in a sharp, accusatory tone.
“I’m, I’m Dr. Stark. I work here in the facility. Who are you?”
“Shit!” She said and was whispering to another person.
“I, ah…who, who are you?” Stark adjusted his glasses and sat his coffee mug down.
She spoke up again, “What lab do you work for?”
“In a facility just a few floors up. Look, who are you? I’ve been trapped in here for hours. Are you with the police or…? What is this?”
“No, we’re not the police. We’re your guinea pigs, you piece of shit. I hope you rot in there.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly who we are and you’re just trying to get us to come out.”
Stark shook his head. “I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m the only person in this lab. I don’t even normally work on this floor. I just got trapped in here from all the infected people that are now all over the building.”
“So, the virus did get out?”
“Yes, of course. Where have you been this whole time? It’s all over the building, and there’s no way out right now. I’ve just been trapped in here.”
“What have you been working on?”
“Well, I really can’t disclose anything. It’s all classified. You’re going to have to tell me who you are.”
“Tell us or we’re leaving.”
Stark was almost certain that this woman was full of empty threats, seeing that she was trapped inside a wall with what appeared to be few options, but he decided to play along. “I’ve been investigating this virus. You know, the one that’s taking over New York?”
“New York?”
“Yes, New York.”
“The virus is in New York?”
Stark stared at the small, rectangu
lar hole in the wall and began to wonder who these people really were. “Yes, for the last day and a half.”
“Oh,” she said quietly.
A man’s voice now came out from the hole, “So what have you been doing down here?”
“What’ve I been doing? I’ve been doing some lab work on the virus that has gotten me nowhere. I’ve been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with vodka and I’ve been watching the infected outside in the hallways. Believe me, I’m not the person you think I am. Oh, and I also discovered that I might have leukemia so it’s been a pretty great day for me.” He let out a laugh and rubbed the back of his neck.
“You have a leukemia?” The man asked.
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t really matter. What I’m wondering is how you two have managed to know about the virus yet seem to have no knowledge of what’s going on in New York, something that the entire world knows about by now. Care to explain?”
After the man and woman whispered to each other a moment longer, the woman spoke out, “Hang on, and we’ll finish hacking this down and come in.”
The axe continued to thrust through the wall for a moment and sunk into the thin sheetrock after being brought back into the darkened interior of the wall. Stark could now see a small flash of artificial light that the two had managed to carry with them that seemed to swing with their movements. After a three-foot hole had been carved out, a young girl’s face peeked through. She had long black hair, covered in dust and a small amount of dried blood around her nostrils.
“Oh, uh, hello,” Stark spoke to her.
She looked at him with a grimaced expression and stayed silent.
Stark cleared his throat, “Please come on in. It’s pretty safe in here.”
Her expression was blank for a moment longer and then she blurted out in a skeptical tone, “You really have leukemia? I mean, is this a joke?”
“Well, I’m really not so sure. Look, an infected child bit me, but then I didn’t develop any symptoms. So I rushed down here to do some of my own blood work and I saw that my white blood cell count was insanely high. I mean it could be high given that I’ve just been infected but the level is much higher than that, generally around the levels at which someone has leukemia.”
The girl backed out and disappeared into the hole. “When did you get bit?”
“Relax, like five hours ago. Nothing has happened to me.”
“And you have no idea who we are?”
“Honestly, no. I really don’t, although I’m now extremely curious.” Stark gave a small, unappreciated laugh.
The man and the girl finished their work with a hole large enough to crawl through. The girl came to the entrance again, lifted her leg up and out over the rim of sheetrock and came into the kitchen. She was fairly tall with slender arms and a wiry body. Following after her was an older man, Stark guessed in his forties, with a big blond mustache and sandy hair. The both of them were covered in white, powdery dust.
“How long exactly have you two been stuck in the walls?” Stark asked, stepping back from them into the lab.
The man swiped his palm down his face and responded, “It has been hours, hours in there. We had to get out of our cells fast. All of the other people we were being held with were all turning into those monsters, man. They had bitten a bunch of the researchers and started to escape. It was like some crazy chain reaction of people getting infected and then biting another person and so forth.”
“There are other infected people here in this building? And they got out?”
“Oh, yes. How do you not know this?”
“When did they get out?”
“Just a few hours ago.”
“Hey!” The girl turned to him, “we still can’t really trust this dude, so stop telling him everything.”
“What’re you trying to do? Play detective and try to figure out if he’s playing mind games with us. This is a huge facility, I’m sure he’s telling the truth and had nothing to do with those bastards.”
They both looked at Stark, waiting for a response from him while he just stared back, sipping coffee, and still feeling a little tipsy.
“Hey, well, can I get you guys some coffee?” He said, delaying the probing questions until the girl trusted him more.
“Yes, and some food please.”
Stark went about unwrapping Pop Tarts, bread and macaroni and cheese boxes for the two and began boiling some water. “Here, just munch on whatever you can find in the kitchen. There’s plenty of food and I’ll start making some mac and cheese for you.”
“Thanks,” the two said in unison.
“I’m Reggie Stark, by the way.”
The blond hair gentleman grabbed a small lab stool and sat down to undo his shoelaces. “Well, I’m Don Craze.”
“I’m Eli. Spelled like the Jewish name E-L-I but not pronounced that way. Okay?” Eli said.
“Okay, well it’s nice to meet you both,” Stark replied while stirring a pot.
“We both have leukemia, too,” Eli said quietly.
Stark stopped stirring and turned around to them, “Say that again?”
“Not joking, we’ve both had it for about six months now. Well we did, I guess it’s gone now.”
Stark stopped tending to the boiling pot and then went to sit down in a padded office chair, the two watching patiently. In a frenzy, his mind was trying to make connections, trying to tie things together, but there were so many holes in the story that he was creating.
“There’s something else you should know.” Don walked over to the pot of water and dumped in two opened boxes or raw macaroni. “I don’t know why, but we’re going to turn sick soon. I mean real soon, could be a matter of minutes, we don’t really know. I’m thinking you will too since you were bitten.”
Suddenly, Stark’s train of thought caught hold on something and he blurted it out, “You’re from Medora, aren’t you?”
“Dammit!” Eli yelled. “I told you he already knew all about us. He’s just the same as all the other people who’ve had us caged up all this time.”
“No, no,” Stark insisted, “I only knew that you existed but that’s it. I had no idea where you were; not a clue that you were in this same facility. What have they been doing with you this whole time? Have you been… caged?”
“Well, no, not exactly,” Don said, “but we have been held against our will with no contact with the outside world for, oh, I don’t know, a month now?” He turned to Eli.
“Yeah, over a month.” She went to the counter and started to unwrap a granola bar.
“We’ve been unable to talk to anyone, not our family or friends. They’ve kept us in these glass walled rooms. There’s about thirty of us. Well, there were thirty of us, but the rest have all gotten sick just like the rest of Medora.”
“So you’re from Medora. Are you residents?”
“No, no, I’m from Florida.”
“Then I don’t understand.” He turned to Eli. “Are you from Medora?”
“No, I’m from a tiny town in Utah,” she said, grabbing her second Pop Tart.
“Then how did you both end up in Medora?”
Don spoke up again, “We were selected for a medical trial of a new drug that would help treat our leukemia. We all have leukemia, everyone that was in Medora together. They flew us in from all over the country.”
“What is it called?”
“What?”
“The drug, do you know what the drug is called?”
“Oh,” he snorted, “Virulex. Supposed to be some miracle synthetic nano-drug that was going to cure our cancer.”
“A nano-drug? Like they really used nano-technology?” Stark scratched his chin.
“Man, I don’t know, I just took the injections. It was something new though, something very new. It was this huge secret too. We had to sign about a thousand papers to consent for the treatment and a thousand more non-disclosure papers, too.”
“So why did you sign up for it?”
&n
bsp; “Because no treatment was working for us. The whole bunch of us had the cancer really bad. Like, we were all pretty close to death.”
“You look pretty healthy to me now.” Stark acted as if he was surveying Don’s appearance by moving his head from side to side.
“Well, yeah.” Eli poured in a bright orange powder into the now strained noodles and followed it up with a stick of butter. “Virulex worked. They told us it was some virus capable of delivering chemo directly to our cancer cells. It worked for a while at least, I guess. They told me my leukemia was totally gone at one point.”
“Oh, yeah I’ve heard of that type of therapy, although I didn’t know anyone was actually doing clinical trials with it. Well, so, what happened to Medora then if it worked so well for you?”
Eli poured herself a bowl of macaroni and sat cross-legged with her back against the refrigerator. Stark guessed that she was probably nineteen. “Man,” she said, “all that stuff seems like it was years ago now.”
“Whatever happened,” said Don, “the doctors had no idea what they were doing. They didn’t expect a thing, the big jerks.”
Eli interrupted again, “After a few weeks, they let our family and friends come visit us, which was really nice. That was the last time I saw my brother. He brought me a quilt that my mom made me.”
Don looked at her and then at Stark. “The virus got out and immediately infected everyone that didn’t have leukemia. It must have mutated or something. The whole town went under in like a day, not that we would’ve known. They kept us under lock and key the entire time. Once they learned that there was an outbreak, we essentially lost all our basic freedoms.”
“So you have immunity. That makes sense! That’s why I’m not having any symptoms either!” Stark said, becoming more animated. “Now this is something!”
“Yeah, well hold your horses, because it doesn’t last long, about two weeks by our estimate. We’re the only two people who haven’t turned yet. You wondering where everyone else is from the Medora clinical trials?” Eli looked up at Stark who just looked back at him. “We left them about five rooms back. They all turned over the course of the last day. Not a coincidence that we’re getting infected. It’s just taking the virus some time to work on us.” She smiled and lifted a spoonful of macaroni to her mouth.