The tips of his fingers dug into the leather cover of his holy book. He muttered something low and deliberate under his breath that became a determined chant as he turned the corner and made his way through another labyrinth of workbenches and research equipment.
He reached a clearing where a stainless-steel medical table stood, bathed in a blue light that projected from the canopy in the ceiling above it. A fresh, thick coating of blood filled the shallow confines of the table’s surface. Some had spilled over onto the floor.
A bloodied bone-saw rested on the trolley next to it, gristle and bone fragments still clinging to the cruel teeth of its blade.
Averting his eyes from the gruesome remnants of the autopsy, Edwards noticed a pile of dirty clothing on the floor in the corner, but there was no corpse or body parts. They must have been taken elsewhere.
He had an overwhelming sense that if he persevered, swallowed his fear and reached the back of the room, he would encounter something far more shocking and revelatory. The priest had always learned to trust his instincts, and yet again, they did not let him down. Although, this time, he wished that they had.
Sitting upon the workbench set against the wall was a box-shaped container made from Plexiglass. A myriad of wires had been fed through holes in the top of the glass, connected to monitoring equipment nearby. There was a large screen which displayed graphical imaging of what looked like a human brain.
Edwards edged closer to the box, his bible now sliding around in his sweaty grasp.
Inside, mounted on a plinth, was a particularly decomposed head. At least twenty electrodes were attached to its scalp. As he’d anticipated, the head was alive—or at least alive in the new sense of the word. The reanimated head had a gaping triangular-shaped hole where its nose used to be and its complexion seemed almost green under the glare of the lights.
Its neck muscles flexed under its skin, but the plinth that ran through its centre prevented it from turning. Instead, the creature rolled its eyes back and forth, trying to get as much of a view of its surroundings as possible.
Recovered from his initial shock and revulsion, Edwards tentatively approached the glass. The head became aware of his presence and fixed its gaze on him. It stopped grimacing and focussed on the contours of his craggy face.
Edwards felt as though it was examining him—trying to understand him. There were no traces of its ravenous hunger for flesh and blood, even as he took his right hand from his bible and placed his open palm onto the surface of the Plexiglass. He stared deep into the creature’s eyes and thought he caught a reflection of its inner torment—its need to end, knowing that eternal rest was currently out of its reach.
His empathy for the pathetic state it was in caused a lump to rise in his throat.
‘Where did you come from, my friend? Where are you now?’ he whispered softly.
The creature pursed its lips as if it were trying to speak, and instead hissed a low, non-threatening gargle.
Edwards removed his hand from the glass so he could flick through the pages of his book. Once he had found the section he wanted, he began to read aloud.
‘Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus travelled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into the village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!”
‘When he saw them, he said “Go, show yourselves to the priests”. And as they went, they were cleansed. One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising god in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.
‘Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well”.’
Edwards gazed up from his bible and smiled. The reanimated head took one more look around the lab and closed its eyes.
7
As Salty, Osgood, Jason and Foster turned the corner leading towards the rec room and canteen, they saw Ethan leaving with something in his arms.
‘You guys go on ahead. I’ll be there in a minute,’ Salty said.
He left the others and quickened his pace to catch up to Ethan.
‘Hey, Twilight. Hold up.’
When he got to him, he noticed that the items he was ferrying from the canteen were a collection of chips and candy bars he’d acquired from the vending machines.
Ethan looked over his shoulder at the curls of damp red hair clinging to Salty’s forehead.
‘If I’d known about the Pilates class this morning, I would have joined you,’ he said.
‘We just collected some more specimens for their lab,’ Salty said.
‘You’re on staff now?’
‘Earning our keep is all. We’re about to make breakfast if you wanna join us.’
‘No. No, I don’t want to join you. I’ve got all that I need, thank you.’ Ethan said, clutching his haul.
‘I was thinkin’ we could catch up.’
‘You mean, you wanted to press me about your conspiracy theory.’
‘If you wanna call it that.’
‘Don’t waste your breath, Jake. I picked up nothing from your magic pen.’
‘Nothin’?’
‘That’s right. Not a thing. Sweet fuck all,’ Ethan said.
‘You certain?’
‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe… Maybe you just weren’t holdin’ it right,’ Salty said.
‘Weren’t holding it right?’ Ethan scoffed. ‘You an expert on ESP now?’
‘It ain’t like you were keen on the idea when I came to you about it. You ain’t been keen on much of anythin’ since we got here.’
‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to forgive me. I’ve got far more important things on my mind than your paranoia because you can’t reconcile the fact you now have air con in your room.’
Salty’s expression soured and he lost his uncharacteristic affable demeanour.
‘Y’know what? I was right the first time I met you. You really are an asshole.’ He tugged the beak of his cap in frustration and turned to head back down the corridor.
‘Hey!’ Ethan shouted. He awkwardly transferred the pile of confectionary to one arm so he could reach into his pocket. ‘I know this doesn’t belong to you, but I don’t want it.’ He tossed the pen over to Salty, who caught it. ‘The pen doesn’t belong to Grant either.’
‘Huh?’
‘Its original owner was someone called Henrick Fause. Might mean something, might not,’ Ethan said.
‘And who in the Sam Hill is that?’
‘How the hell should I know? I told you, I didn’t get a read from it.’
‘But how did you—’
‘Before you hand something to a psychic, probably best to check it over first,’ Ethan said.
Salty rolled the pen with his fingers and there it was—written in liquid paper on the side of the casing. The lettering was small, but it was still legible. In his eagerness to get it to Ethan, he hadn’t spotted it.
Ethan retired to the living quarters and left Salty to contemplate the new information.
8
Raine leaned against the outer rail of the platform and took another swig from the expensive bottle of whisky. She stared into the distance at the baying herd crowded around the northeast corner of the access road.
They hadn’t moved since McCaffrey had first brought her to the lookout post. The exterior door to the holding area was far too strong for any amount of bodies to break it down, but it would never dilute the dead’s resolve to get inside.
Over their groans, she heard the metal thuds of someone climbing the ladder to the walkway behind her. She couldn’t be bothered to turn to see who it was. She just wet her lips with another shot of liquor.
‘I was startin’ to wonder whether you’d bailed on us,
’ Salty said, as he made his way out into the fading light of late afternoon.
‘Wonder no longer,’ Raine said, with an inebriated half-smirk.
Salty tilted his head to read the label on the bottle she was holding.
‘Whoa. Where’s the party?’ he said.
‘Right here.’ Raine took another large gulp from it.
‘You better go easy on that, cowgirl.’
‘My doctor said I should drink more.’
‘Of course he did. That’s some fancy shit. Where’d you get it?’ Salty said.
‘Courtesy of our new friend for helping them out last night.’
‘Yeah? Between us, I’d say we’ve more than earned our keep. At least until the kid gets back on his feet again.’
‘That’s all the time we need,’ Raine said.
‘Mind if I give you a hand with that?’ Salty gestured towards the bottle.
‘You trying to protect me from myself?’
‘Hey, that’s your own business. I just wanted a taste. I haven’t seen whisky that good in years. Never thought I’d see any nowadays.’
‘Be my guest.’ Raine passed the bottle over to him and he moved up next to her, looking out towards the large herd.
‘I was thinking about what McCaffrey said when he brought us up here—about taking them out,’ Raine said. ‘If Crawford dropped the three of us onto the access road, we’d have enough firepower and ammunition to cut them to pieces.’
Salty contorted his mouth as the rich liquor hit his palate. ‘If we’re leavin’ anyway, why does it matter? We don’t owe these folks any more than we’ve already given.’
‘Because it matters. Every time we put one of those fuckers down, it matters.’ Raine’s mouth tightened and she almost spat the words out.
‘Help me understand somethin’ here. You’re asked to take a trip to check out a distress signal, you nominate Twilight, of all people, to go with you and you don’t tell me why. Then, you get back and seems like he’s thrown in the towel, aside from being royally pissed at you, and now I find you tying one on and plannin’ some half-assed killing spree. What the hell happened out there, Miller?’
‘I’m sworn to secrecy,’ Raine said.
‘And here’s me thinkin’ we were past all that shit.’
‘We’ve all got our little secrets, Jake. Take you, for example. No one else knows about that stuffed bunny you shoved in your backpack before we left the lighthouse.’
Salty shook his head and took another drink. ‘You don’t miss a trick, do ya?’
‘Attention to detail’s my thing,’ she said.
‘You ain’t half-bad at deflection either.’
‘It was nothing. I tried to call Ethan’s bluff and I ended up putting him in danger in the process. It isn’t the first time I’ve hurt someone because I mis-read a situation. It won’t be the last.’
‘Seeing as you ain’t really gonna tell me what went down last night, let’s try an easier one. That Bone Frog tattoo you got on your arm. I don’t understand why you would have that. It’s the mark of a Navy Seal. They usually get them when they lose a man in active duty.’
‘I know why they get them,’ Raine said.
‘I could tell pretty much from the moment we met that you’d served, but I know you ain’t served as no frogman. They’ve never had a woman in their ranks in their history.’
‘The training program was opened to women before the outbreak, but they never had a female applicant. Would’ve only been a matter of time though,’ Raine said.
‘Don’t get me wrong. I ain’t sayin’ there’s no women out there up for the job. Still don’t explain why you got that ink.’
Raine opened her mouth as if about to speak, but instead she gestured to him to hand the bottle over, so she could take another large swig before beginning her story.
‘It wasn’t my idea, I can tell you that. I started out as a combat engineer in the marines. I’d achieved the rank of Major when my unit came under attack during my first tour of Afghanistan. It got real tight and we were forced to engage the enemy at close quarters. When I returned home, they awarded me with the Silver Star and my career took off. They said I had “special personal skills”. That’s how they put it—an unusual degree of calmness under fire.
‘I was approached about enlisting in a covert special forces training program. The political pressure on the military to include women in more combat units had already started and they wanted to test the water in certain areas without any major PR disasters. They chose me as their guinea pig.
‘They were so impressed with how I coped with the training, I was sent out with a unit to provide support to Columbia’s Anti-Drug Brigade.’
‘I heard that operation didn’t turn out so well in the end,’ Salty said.
‘You heard right. All that blood and we ended up right back where we started. Drugs always wins the war on drugs. Not that it matters now.’
‘This is fascinatin’ and all, Miller, but it don’t explain your tattoo.’
‘During my time with special forces, I made some pretty interesting connections. The military was fighting with the idea of opening SEAL recruitment to female applicants—even back then. They knew it would have to come eventually, and some senior members were looking to prevent it. I think some of them wanted to prove that it was a non-starter. What better way than to see an elite female soldier fail the basic training.’
‘They put you to the test?’
‘Obviously, it was all under the table. They were only going to break the story if they felt any more pressure further down the line. The boys were resistant when I first arrived. Some of them went out of their way to make me unwelcome.’
‘I guess that didn’t go so well for them,’ Salty said.
‘I guess it didn’t. I mostly kept my head down and did what I always did—worked hard and focussed on the goal in front of me. I spent three months with them. One night during an exercise, our amphibious landing vehicle caught fire. Seven of us went into the water—one so badly burned he lost consciousness. I managed to get his head up and carried him to shore. I had to resuscitate him, but I got him breathing again. There were too many eyes on the whole incident after that. I was transferred back to my regular unit.
‘It was weeks after when I caught up with the Seal team. Josh, the guy who I pulled from the water, insisted we all get tattoos. Because they said Josh wouldn’t be alive without me, they convinced me to get one too. I was even more drunk than I am now and they wore me down.’
‘And that’s why it took you so long to pick up a weapon again—because of the shit you’ve seen?’
‘No. Because of the shit I’ve done,’ Raine said.
‘War is war, Miller. No one is gonna judge you for that—especially not me.’
Raine swallowed hard and set her cold stare on him. ‘Judgement requires deliberation. There’s no need for deliberation to understand what I did.’
She lifted herself from the rail, shoved the half-empty bottle into Salty’s grasp, and staggered down the walkway to the ladder.
Salty was left to ponder her last words amid the distant groans of the herd.
9
His coat still bloodied from his latest vivisection, Doctor Grant stood hunched over a microscope in his private lab. The airwaves were filled with the first act of Romeo and Juliet from his MP3 docking station.
He peered through the lens and watched the operatic dance of the Necro virus as it invaded healthy cells with its spiked prongs and used their genetic materials to manufacture new copies of itself before moving on to infect the next one.
Grant admired the parasitic poetry of its behaviour—its ability to co-opt and transform whatever it touched. The cellular movement seemed to fuse with the angelic vocals of the opera and Grant imagined himself at one with the virus, dancing to its pathogenic rhythm.
When he eventually lifted his head from the microscope, he saw McCaffrey ent
ering the room.
‘How many times have I told you to knock?’ Grant said.
‘I did. You obviously couldn’t hear me over the music,’ McCaffrey said.
‘Then I suggest you knock louder.’ Grant huffed and plodded over to his MP3 player to place it on pause.
‘I brought you the hard drive I recovered from the observatory. I’m not certain, but based on what you told me to look for, I think the data for a more advanced sample is on here.’
Grant rushed to him to take the hard drive out of his hands.
‘Why didn’t you deliver it this morning?’
‘I didn’t know what I had until I checked it out. It wasn’t just that. I had to do a lot of thinking,’ McCaffrey said.
‘You should leave the thinking to others. That’s not the reason you’re here.’
‘This is important, doctor—important for you to know, I think.’
‘Well, come on, man. Spit it out!’ Grant said.
‘It’s the British guy—Ethan. He’s different from the others—unique.’
Grant’s curiosity furrowed his brow.
‘What do you mean, unique?’
‘When we were out there, separated from the chopper, we lost radio contact. He told us exactly where Crawford was, and where she was going to be. He did all this just by touching the flare gun that had been onboard before we landed.’
‘What on earth are you blathering about?’
‘He has some kind of extra sensory perception. Prior to the outbreak, he did consultancy work for the police force back in his own country and then here in the US. He was even on the TV.’
‘A psychic?’ Grant said.
‘I know how it sounds.’
‘Sounds implausible, yes, but not impossible.’
McCaffrey was shocked by his reaction, shocked that a man of science like Grant hadn’t just dismissed the notion out of hand.
‘There’s more. He also told me that Crawford was thinking about leaving, that she almost left us stranded out there. After we got back, I confronted her about it, and it’s true. There’s no way he could have known that—no one, except for Crawford, did. If she were to split on us, it would be the end of the project, everything we’ve worked for. It would be the end of us all.’
Everything Dies [Season Two] Page 14