by Wilson, David Niall; Brown, Tonia; Meikle, William; McCaffery, Simon; Brown, TW; T. A. Wardrope
* * *
I kept my mouth shut about the effects of Green-6 and the incident at Phu Bihn Valley. Violating my nondisclosure could have meant a life sentence in a military prison. And who would have believed my story? Would you?
I was offered a plum job in agricultural sciences at Dow Chemical, but I resigned from SOG. I spent most of my adult life teaching chemistry at a quaint little university in a modest Midwestern city. The kind you might drive through and think is pleasant enough, but not enough to explore except for topping off your tank and a quick meal. I married my girlfriend and she bore us two sons. Barbecued on weekends and attended Friday-night football games. Professor Harris––a regular Mr. Chips to my students. I am still on the faculty today––department head, in fact. And yes, the company paid me a discreet visit in the summer of 1977, wondering if I was interested in helping recruit talented young men and women. I politely declined.
I did develop a serious case of adult claustrophobia and fear of the dark. And I had terrible night terrors for many years. Bethany knew that I had served as a scientific advisor for the Army in Vietnam, and she didn’t press me for details.
Many times when the dreams return, I feel torn between slaughterhouse screams and hysterical laughter. Those giant radio-tracking collars with VC serial numbers.
They’d had their own version of SOG, too.
STEVE RUTHENBECK
Lyceum
The attack happened a little after 1:00 p.m. on a Wednesday.
Thomas Beckman slouched in the bleachers of the Oak Lake Central Gymnasium, one body among the student body. A motivational speaker sat on the half-court line below. He spun a basketball on the index finger of each hand, another ball on top of his head, and two more on the tips of his shoes.
“Follow your dreams,” the man said. “I did!”
A vague tightness formed in Thomas’ chest that might have been shame. Graduation loomed, and with it, the end of procrastination. Classmates talked about colleges they planned to attend and careers they planned to pursue. Thomas’ dreams went no further than getting White Space 2 when it was released next Tuesday and asking Danielle to prom.
Currently, Danielle sat two rows below Thomas. Dark hair hung halfway down her back, and he could see the curve of her cheek. The feelings that rolled through him were as close to growing up as he had ever felt. Otherwise, he viewed adulthood as some rough beast stomping closer. It had nothing to do with him stepping out on his own.
“And whatever happens in life,” the man with the basketballs continued, moving the ball on his head to his nose. “Remember, put a positive spin on it!”
The gymnasium roof peeled back, and a gigantic simian face peered in, red eyes burning. The creature’s matted black fur had fallen out in places, revealing mottled skin. A Volkswagen-sized hand reached, pushing a great stink and a cloud of flies before it. The paw picked up a clump of screaming students, and the beast bit into them like an apple.
“ZK attack!” Mr. Jablanski cried.
The rush for the gym exits carried Thomas along with it, even as its undertow pulled others down and cries of pain rose above the cries of fear. The evacuation piled up at the doors, where teenagers bottlenecked into a mass of straining limbs and strident shouts. A basketball ended up among their feet and was kicked back and forth.
The ZK pushed its head and shoulders through the roof breach. The edge of the wall acted like the back of a chair when a person performs the Heimlich Maneuver on themselves, and the monster spewed vomit over the scene.
Drenched, students behind Thomas fell to the floor and writhed. The stink grew unbearable. Tears and gagging plagued the throng. Thomas stumbled through the door and into the hall. He unknotted himself from the kids around him and gasped for fresh air until his lungs and eyes cleared themselves of the foulness. He caught a glimpse of Danielle. She had made it out, as well. For a moment, their glance met…
What are you looking at?
That’s what she had asked him that day in Literature Class. Thomas had arrived early and stood staring out the window. The sun shone on green grass. A breeze made the trees throw dappled shadows. Danielle came and stood next to him.
Nothing, Thomas replied, but his eyes were opened regardless. That moment was the best he had ever had, standing there and looking out on a just-right spring day with a girl who was interested in knowing more…
Alarms pierced Thomas’ eardrums.
A steel gate descended over the school’s main entrance. Similar gates would fall over the building’s other doors and windows, Thomas knew. All state buildings were mandated to be equipped with lockdowns in the event of Zmergencies. Since the early-warning system failed to alert them of the ZK’s approach, it didn’t surprise Thomas that the lockdown would trigger in error. It was meant for Z sieges, not ZK attacks.
Now they were trapped instead of protected.
Something grabbed Thomas’ shoulder. He spun and found himself face-to-face with Andrew Gardner. Soaked with ZK vomit, Andrew had turned Z. His bluish lips stretched wide as he lunged for Thomas’ neck. Crying out, Thomas pushed his one-time lab partner away. Andrew was clumsy with death, and toppled onto his back like a tree going over. His skull clunked on the tiles.
Other students who had been transformed by the ZK vomit (faster than normal, it seemed) flooded out of the gym and pounced on their fellow OLCC Wolves with clutching hands and gnashing teeth. Their clothes hung in tatters, dissolved by the vomit that wormed its way through flesh and into bloodstreams.
“Look out!” Mr. Jablanski bellowed. The math teacher shoved his way through the jammed hallway. Sweat slicked his bald head and his tie hung askew. He fumbled a key out of his pocket and opened a cabinet marked with a flame symbol. He grabbed the red canister and twisted a valve. “Get down!” He pointed the flamethrower toward the Zs staggering through the hall, and a jet of fire blossomed into a cloud.
Thomas dodged down a side corridor and followed other teenagers seeking safety. Danielle was among them. Her hair flowed over her shoulder as she ran. Thomas put on a burst of speed, weaving in and out of people like a football player.
The ZK’s hand punched through the wall, snatching Mark Muller and pulling him out of sight. The wall was a load-bearing structure, and a section of ceiling collapsed. Blocked, Thomas tried to go back. Flames shot through the hall he came from, and the shouts of Mr. Jablanski echoed. Meanwhile, students behind Thomas had been bitten, and they staggered toward him with a hungry gleam in their otherwise blank eyes.
Thomas picked his way through the hole made by the ZK’s paw. The beast laid on its stomach, gnawing its meal. One of its legs still stuck out of the ceiling (its foot was caught in the rafters). Thomas tried to sprint past it, and a monster hand slammed down in his wake. The ZK attempted another grab. Its fist brushed Thomas as he dodged into the lunch line hall. The force of the blow caused him to stumble. He rolled away from the seeking fingers and pushed his way into a bathroom. He shut himself inside the corner stall and locked its door. He sat on the toilet tank, feet up so they wouldn’t be visible beneath the door.
How many doors had he passed through in the last five minutes?
Thomas thought of an essay by Siegbert Becker. God didn’t carve a person’s path through life in stone. He gave them freedom of choice, but sometimes directed their path through the opening and closing of doors. A person might try something and be shut down; or they might try something and make progress. If they found themselves in a place where a decision had to be made and they didn’t know what to do, they considered their gifts, circumstances, right and wrong, and made the best choice they could.
Outside the bathroom, muffled screams and roars reached Thomas’ ears. A few gunshots blasted, probably from teachers.
What am I going to do?
Presently, Thomas worked for a commercial gardener, picking strawberries in the summer and chopping rhubarb plants into more rhubarb plants in the winter. It paid for video games and little else. It woul
dn’t work as a career.
As for college, Thomas hadn’t applied to any because his grades weren’t stellar, nor were his goals. He supposed he could attend the local community college, but that seemed like giving up––doing something just to do something. Still, it was an avenue to try, and filling out an application to see what developed wouldn’t hurt anything.
Nor would applying at Agri-Verse.
The wheeze of a pneumatic hinge announced the opening of the bathroom door. Thomas froze as footsteps shuffled inside and stopped in front of his stall. Its door creaked as someone pressed against it. Thomas’ heart pounded. A pair of hands appeared below the door as the person went to their knees to peer through the gap. The face belonged to a seventh-grader. Drool fell from his purple lips as he spotted Thomas.
Thomas erupted off the toilet tank, pushed aside a ceiling tile and pulled himself into the crawlspace. He managed to worm on top of an air duct, which squeaked and shook, but held his weight. An additional problem presented itself––the crawlspace was filled with smoke, which stung Thomas’ eyes and made him cough.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire…
The flamethrower Mr. Jablanski used was meant for the porthole at the front entrance, not the interior of the school. Thomas guessed insulation in the crawlspace ignited, and the fire would burn through the whole building, not reducing it to cinders, but filling it with poisonous fumes. Even now, Thomas felt his head go light and nausea uncoil itself in his belly. He hurriedly worked his way down the duct until he guessed he was over the hallway. The smoke grew thicker even in those few moments. Holding his breath, Thomas rolled off the air duct, broke through the ceiling tiles and dropped back into the lunch-line hall.
Mr. Jablanski stood before him.
Speak of the devil, Thomas thought.
Mr. Jablanski had a hard time standing on his shredded right leg. The flamethrower’s gun dangled from his hand, ending in a torn hose. The man once had given Thomas purpose. Thomas appeared in Mr. Jablanski’s physics class at 10 a.m. Monday through Friday. Reading assignments and problems followed. Now the dynamic was reversed. Thomas gave Mr. Jablanski purpose. How quickly things changed. Mr. Jablanski lurched forward to take a bite. Thomas darted back and then around Mr. Jablanski’s flailing arms.
The halls were starting to fill with smoke now. Thomas avoided three infected students and headed for the band room. It was a designated rally point. Coughing, he turned by the library and reached the goal moments later. Thomas banged on the band room door. A slot opened and a pair of eyes looked him up and down.
“Are you bit?” the owner of the eyes asked.
“No.”
“Do the drill.”
Sweating, Thomas dropped his pants and pulled his shirt up around his neck. He turned in a circle, eyeing the Zs staggering closer, closer…
“Okay, you’re clean.”
The band door opened, and Thomas ducked inside. The place was packed with perhaps forty kids. Thomas quickly scanned the faces and was grateful to see Danielle sitting on the far side of the room with a group of friends.
“Anyone else coming?” Larry Berlin asked.
“No,” Thomas shook his head. “And we need to get going.”
“The rules say we wait for help.”
“We can’t this time.” Thomas pointed at the smoke that had started to spill out of the ceiling vents. “The crawlspaces are burning. We’ll be poisoned.”
Murmurs went up among the students.
“But we can’t get out,” someone said querulously. “We’re in lockdown.”
“There’s a way,” Thomas insisted. Before panic could spread roots into the group’s psyche, he explained. Once he presented his idea, everyone agreed to it.
As a member of the Student Zmergency Council, Larry took charge and ordered the students to dismantle the room’s music stands. This left them with narrow pipes about four feet long. Besides clubbing, the weapons could stab soft things.
“We’ll move like a circle of wagons,” Larry directed. “Everyone with a pipe will be on the outside. Unarmed people will keep to the middle. Before we go, does anyone have a gun? I know you’re supposed to check them in at the office, but I won’t report you.”
Three boys raised their hands.
“Save your bullets for the target,” Larry advised.
The group exited the band room in a serpentine line that tripled up in the hall. Drills allowed them to move fast even though the smoke made it difficult to see. Many of the students had removed T-shirts and tied them around their faces. Thomas tried to stay close to Danielle. She was unarmed; he held a pipe; and they were running the gauntlet.
Hands reached out of the smoke as Zs converged on their still-living classmates. Shouts. Moans. Flailing clubs. And screams as some were dragged into the smoke. Rebecca Meyer advanced, a pale apparition whose skin was almost invisible in the cloudiness. She snagged the shirt of the girl next to Danielle, and Thomas beat the clutching limb away. The train of them stayed in motion, to stop was to have their ranks overcome.
The group reached the gymnasium relatively intact. The ZK still lolled on the floor with the remains of its hunger. It had tried to free its ankle of the rafter, but succeeded in doing no more than breaking it; a bone jutted out of the joint like a snapped tree limb. Gunshots rang out as the armed students went for the ZK’s eyes. Nine-millimeter bullets wouldn’t penetrate to its brain, but maybe they could at least blind the monster.
Thomas joined the team jabbing their makeshift spears at the ZK’s face. It reminded him of a Ray Harryhausen movie––One Million Years B.C., where the characters fought a giant purple turtle. The beast’s teeth chomped, and its great paws swept. One assailant was thrown against the wall with bone-crunching force. Somehow, Curt Johnson found an opening and charged. Instead of an eye, he stabbed a nostril. Thomas saw what was going to happen and dove out of the way. The beast, still governed by reflex even if it was dead, sneezed. Rotten snot doused several boys, and they ran screaming, trying to rip their clothes off before the fluid soaked into their system and infected them.
Meanwhile, the unarmed students stood caught between a rock and a hard place. The battle with the ZK happened in front of them while Zs simultaneously attacked them from behind. A few kids with spears tried to hold the infected teenagers back, but Thomas could see it was a losing battle. Danielle was tossed back and forth as the unarmed kids tried to move as one to stay out of the way of everything.
The clock in Thomas’ head ticked into the red. Screaming, he ran forward, ducked a giant hand, rolled away from the other and come up in front of the ZK’s face. The monster’s breath seemed bad enough to sear his skin. Ignoring it, Thomas plunged his spear into the beast’s eye and shoved it as far as he could. The ZK roared, going rigid like bolts of electricity shot through its body. Then it simply went limp and stopped moving.
“Come on!” Thomas shouted.
The students scrambled onto the ZK’s back. They climbed its snagged leg, using the monster’s fur as handholds, and onto the school roof. By the time Thomas joined them, some were already filing down the fire escape.
Determined, Thomas sought out Danielle and budged into line behind her as she climbed onto the ladder. “Danielle,” he said.
She looked up, all beauty and possibility. “Yes?”
“Would you go to prom with me?”
Danielle paused, and Thomas felt like he lived a hundred lifetimes in that few seconds of silence. Finally, she answered, “I guess that would be okay.”
“Great!” Thomas smiled. “Call you tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Danielle nodded and descended. She reached the street, walked toward home and disappeared around a corner.
Thomas remained on the roof. The sun shone down, and trees threw dappling shadows. There was the water tower, the church steeple, Main Street, the pool and softball fields. The town’s volunteer militia was finally organized and heading toward the school in fire trucks and APCs. Surrou
nding the town were corn and soybean fields. Farm sites stuck up like odd rock formations, and ZKs wandered on the horizon.
As Thomas watched, another began to stomp near…
ADRIAN LUDENS
The Elephant In The Room
I.
“A Fly on the (Circus Tent) Wall”
“Hurry, hurry! Step right up, friends! Beyond this point you’ll find everything you’ve ever dreamed about and so, SO much more! Dare to meet the Human Piranha! Cast your eyes upon the Two Thousand Pound Albino! Arm-wrestle the World’s Strongest Dwarf! Just five dollars, ladies and gentlemen; don’t delay!”
Simmons paused to mop his brow. The Louisiana humidity had soaked his tattered tuxedo and pasted it to his skin. He felt claustrophobic, constricted by his own clothes. He was about to renew his pitch upon the jaded masses when Hobart, a roustabout for the Freak Show, came hurrying up from his left.
“Mr. Simmons, sir, Mr. Quincy wanted me to pass along an urgent message.”
“Well make it quick, man,” Simmons hissed. “I’m making my pitch.”
Hobart put his mouth up to the barker’s ear. “Quincy says not to mention the gorilla act because the gorilla has up and died.”
“Oh Christ!”
Plato the Gorilla was always a good draw. ‘Smarter than most men’, Simmons would say of the old silver-backed primate. Plato accounted for at least twenty percent of tickets sold. The wheels spun in Simmons’ brain. As he rose to face the street again, those wheels found traction.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I have just been given some very sad news.” He paused for effect. “Our beloved friend and performer, Plato the Gorilla, is DEAD.”
A few of the animal-lovers in the crowd murmured in dismay. Simmons felt the eyes of the crowd on him, waiting for an explanation.