"When will you let him out?" Gant stepped closer to Waters as he spoke and quickly felt a rifle barrel against the back of his neck.
"I'm sorry, what? Oh, the test subject? Once he destroys the unit. At that point he will receive a short rest period, then he will be placed in a room with two units."
"What?" Stacy gasped. "You mean he has no chance? What is the point of this?"
Costa threw the creature off once more, this time using all his strength to slam it against the wall. Some dried blood flaked to the ground, but Miss Clemons kept coming.
Gant answered Stacy's question in a voice akin to a growl, "This is a tactical analysis. Agent Costa has some understanding of these creatures, the way a police officer, a soldier, or even a civilian will, a few days into an outbreak. They want to know how effective a person with that knowledge would be in an unarmed encounter with one of their units."
"Wait a second." Stacy turned away from the battle inside the room for a moment and asked the major, "So you're saying they've been telling us about the organism to set us up for a test? To see how … to see how we will respond with more details about the parasite?"
"Exactly," Waters answered.
"Then what was the point of Tioga? Didn't you learn enough there?"
Again Gant answered, "That was to test speed of infection under ideal conditions. Isolated location, no serious opposition. That is why they are wondering how long we were on the island and the specifics of our encounters with their zombies. They have to know how much we skewed the results."
"Yes, yes of course," Waters said. "Our version, Major, of a shooting range."
"He's getting tired," Monroe said, directing their attention back to the test chamber.
Gant saw that their host was right; Costa was starting to loose strength. He kept the creature at bay easily enough, but it would not stop. If the agent did not do something the thing would simply wear him down.
"Fight it, man. Fight it," Gant muttered.
The Secret Service agent did just that. As Clemons came in for another attack, Costa slammed a side thrust kick into her knee. The join bent backwards and cracked like a piece of wood snapping in two. This time the creature dropped to the floor.
While not terminated, it was at least partially immobilized. It tried to stand and lost its balance, choosing at that point to crawl toward its victim.
Costa took the opportunity to kick it again, this time directly in the skull. The head whipped back and then side to side as if only a band of rubber connected it to the shoulders. But it remained animated.
At that point the test subject approached the two-way mirror, banged on it, and shouted, "What the fuck is this about? What is it you want me to do? Open the damn door and let's talk."
Stacy turned away; Gant did not. He watched everything unfold. He watched so that he could learn from Costa's experience because it was quite clear that the major would soon face a similar "test." Furthermore, he watched to see how Waters and Monroe handled the test. If he studied and learned, perhaps he might find an out to avoid what was clearly to be the agent's fate.
The creature reached for Costa's leg but he easily avoided its grasp, walking away and circling, but looking once again at the glass and the door, as if searching for an avenue of escape now that the immediate threat had been somewhat neutralized.
Then the animated body of Miss Clemons stood, wobbling and shaking as it rose to its feet.
Costa saw and muttered, "What the hell?"
Stacy surmised, "It repaired the knee?"
"A minor injury on a body that was in good shape, relatively speaking, when the infection took hold," Waters explained. "The post mortem on the unit that we'll conduct after this test should reveal a sort of wrapping around the wounded joint. Just enough, mind you, to make it mobile again."
The creature walked with a serious limp and seemed ready to topple with each step, but the fact that it could even stand seemed some kind of hellish miracle.
"This is impossible," Stacy said. "You can't just engineer something like this out of the blue. There would have to be a hundred steps between the fungus and this result, all of which would be major medical breakthroughs. There is something you're not telling us."
Waters turned on her, and his watery eyes seemed particularly crazed.
"Make no mistake, Dr. Stacy, there is a lot I am not telling you. You will know only what you need to know to help further my research. I appreciate your intelligence, but you are a two-legged lab rat to me." He pointed to the glass. "I am taking medicine to an entirely new level. Me. I have done the work here. These results are my doing."
Monroe spoke what came across as an afterthought, "This is about saving the planet. None of us are as important as that goal. Tell us what we need to know, or, um, you'll be going in there next."
It seemed to Major Gant that Monroe might pull the big strings but Waters controlled the labs and research. This meant that if Waters planned to use them in an experiment, any confessions to Monroe would be a waste of breath.
Inside the cell, Costa grappled with the walking corpse, holding its wrists and swinging it against the wall.
"Die, you fuck … just die!" And he slammed its head repeatedly.
Gant realized that the man hoped to find the weak spot in the skull. His only chance of defeating the creature was to expose that core and crush it, probably with a stomp or repeated blows against the hard wall.
But Costa had grown tired while the zombie seemed unfazed by the beating it suffered.
"Let him out," Stacy pleaded. "Please."
What happened next happened fast.
The thing inside Miss Clemons nipped Costa's nose. Not much, just a little. Just enough to cause him to instinctively smack her face away … releasing her left arm in the process. That left arm came around and raked across his cheek, splitting open the skin and sending a sprinkle of blood splashing onto the two-way mirror.
He reached for the wound and tried to back off, but she dove in with her teeth again, latching on to his chin and chewing off a patch of flesh.
Stacy gasped and sobbed. Gant squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.
Both of the unit's arms came around and dug into Costa's shoulders. He tried to fight them off but the thing's jaws kept working and the nails dug deep. It barely noticed as he rammed a knee into its gut. Its head shook but did not retreat when Costa blasted it with an elbow strike.
The endgame came when the agent lost his balance, falling to the ground with the parasite-infected body on top, clawing and biting.
"He put up a good fight," Waters remarked coldly. "This was, of course, an optimal situation. The unit's central core was invisible, deep inside the throat of the cadaver, and the body itself was perfect for hosting, in that it was intact and recently deceased."
"You are a sick man," Stacy said as she averted her tear-soaked eyes and her face scrunched into an expression of revulsion. "To stand here and watch … you're not human."
"You must detach yourself." Waters's response sounded very familiar to Thom Gant.
Stacy turned to Monroe and walked over to him. Gant saw that Monroe had also averted his eyes.
"What about you?" she asked and wiped her cheek on the black sleeve of her BDUs. "This is your solution to population control? You're going to allow innocent people — children even — to be attacked and murdered like this? To be torn apart?"
"No, I hate it," Monroe responded. "But this is the best weapon we have to win this war. It meets every need. It is perfect for the task. Yes, messy, and horrible, but it fits the need."
Waters — his eyes still staring at the carnage inside the test chamber — spoke his thoughts aloud as if no one else existed in the room at that moment: "I must admit, sometimes I do get caught up in the emotion of it all. Yes, to realize that we are dealing with a new organism that holds so much promise."
"That makes me wonder who gave it to you," Gant said.
Waters answered fast, "This is mine. All min
e. I took the translations and grew it … nurtured it … into what you see here."
"Translations?"
Monroe halted any response to Gant's question by telling Stacy, "Why don't you talk to your soldier friend about weapons and the messes they make. How many children were killed by American smart bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan? How many times did our heroes get the bad guy but also kill families? In war, things are messy. And in this case, I don't have any other choice. This is the smartest of all weapons, gift-wrapped perfectly for our needs."
"So many other, more conventional means of biological and viral warfare and you choose this?" Gant asked.
Monroe responded, "None as perfect as this, and this has the added benefit of not being on anyone's radar screen. The response will be shock and terror, and that means there will be no response. Stockpiles of vaccines and medicines will be of no use because this will be something no one has ever seen before. On top of that, cultural and religious considerations will make this a difficult infection to stop even when the means might be available."
Gant remarked, "I see that. Terror is as much a part of this weapon as the parasite itself. That makes you a sadistic son of a bitch."
"This is an opportunity," Monroe defended, but the tone in his voice confirmed Gant's suspicion that the men in this laboratory were not the originators of the organism. It sounded very much like Monroe viewed the parasite as a serendipitous gift, not the result of research and hard work. "For every negative you can point out, we have found a dozen positives that will ensure it will do the job we require effectively and fast. There will be pain, yes, I regret that. But this organism will perform exactly as needed."
"A real monster," Waters mumbled as a tear born from his condition rolled along his dark cheek. "The biggest monster of the them all."
"And you hold its leash," Stacy spat. "What happens now?"
Waters looked to her, then back into the room and tapped the glass.
"Just wait and see."
Monroe and Waters wandered to a corner of the room and whispered. Gant heard snippets of their conversation, phrases like "increasing rate of response" and "unforeseen adaptations" and — most curious of all—"beyond what we expected from the initial equations."
However, Gant felt fatigue setting in, to the extent that he slid to the floor and sat with his back against the wall. His knee hurt like crazy and he felt a pang of pain from his shoulder, both leftover reminders of his painful experience in the bowels of Red Rock back in Pennsylvania. Gant wondered what kind of scars this mission would leave him with, assuming he actually survived.
Stacy slid down alongside Gant. He noticed that she tried very hard to hide her tears. It dawned on him that these were not tears of fear, despite how afraid she — and he — were. Instead, these were tears of empathy and anger at having watched a man die in a brutal laboratory experiment.
Thom sometimes wished he could feel that type of sadness for the victims he came across in his line of work. Yes, watching Costa die had elicited anger. That was a much different response than sadness.
At the same time he wondered how long it would take — if they did survive — for Annabelle Stacy to grow the same shell he wore. She would need it for this line of work, but would lose much in the process.
"I can't understand why they are doing this," she said quietly as the guards looked on. "They can't be this stupid. Creating animated corpses as a means of population control? What do they expect is going to happen?"
"This is not exactly the first idea I would think someone would come up with," Gant answered. "I believe there is something more at work here."
"What? You think these guys are lying about all of this?"
"No. But there is another factor. Something else at play. It comes back to this parasite they have developed. You seem to know these two men better than I. What do you think?"
She ran a hand through her short dark hair, huffed, and then answered, "Waters is crazy. He's probably just having fun messing around with this organism. I don't think reason plays much of a factor in it. Monroe, well, he was an idealist who got more and more radical. Maybe he's frustrated. Maybe he really thinks he's doing right."
"Or maybe," Gant said quietly, "these two make the perfect puppets for someone's bigger game."
"What do you mean?"
"You have been listening. You heard. It is obvious that the fungus parasite did not originate with them. They got it from someone and have modified it, sure, but this all started as someone else's idea."
"Another government?"
"Maybe. Possibly. I do not know. The source of this parasite is the key. Since we got here, we have been given the impression that these two created an infection to serve a specific purpose; in this case, a radical idea to support the environment by reducing population."
"Okay, so?"
"What if we have the order of things wrong. What if they discovered this organism first and have simply found a convenient excuse to deploy it."
"Isn't that the cart before the horse?" She asked.
"Yes, but that is human nature. Waters is clearly obsessive, and would play around with anything like this, regardless of ultimate goals. What you said about his research in Africa is proof of that. He is the poster child for doing something for no reason other than that you can."
"And Monroe?"
"Also obsessive, but around an idea; a movement. Probably easy to manipulate."
She asked, "So what do we do about it?"
He shrugged and said, "We survive, Dr. Stacy, as best we can, and along the way we do anything we can do to disrupt their plan."
"I think Waters plans on putting us through a test or two. We may not get a chance."
"Yes, well," Gant considered. "You probably have a point."
"Look here, look at this," Waters spoke excitedly. "This is the fastest turnaround yet!"
Gant and Stacy stood, although Thom felt a bolt of pain in his knee as he did.
The female zombie — Miss Clemons — wandered about the room, bumping into walls like a toy robot programmed to switch directions when encountering an obstacle. Since killing Costa, she had not paid the body any attention.
Costa, however, had undergone a transformation. What had once been a member of the Secret Service was now something else. The corpse staggered to its feet and stood fairly tall and straight, mimicking the posture of the human being who had formerly controlled that body.
His eyes, however, now matched Miss Clemons's in color, and a bulging white sphere the size of a golf ball protruded from his chin where his attacker had bitten off a chunk of flesh.
"Nine minutes!" Waters shouted and turned to Monroe. "Time from death to animation has dropped by more than fifty minutes since our first test runs! This is incredible."
Monroe said, "With the counter-agent effective and the propagation models turning out to be conservative compared to the field applications, we should be ready for the third round of testing. The sponsors have already suggested a target."
"With the rate things are proceeding, that animation time lapse may drop further." Waters faced the two prisoners and said. "We'll see how the next batch of tests go."
Monroe put a hand on Waters's shoulder and told him, "I'm going to chopper over to the mainland this evening and arrange a meeting with our contacts to update them on our progress. We need more data on the blocking serum. That is of critical importance."
"You will have it by tomorrow afternoon."
"Good. I'll be back by then and will expect a full report."
Gant could see that the two men had been so enthralled by Costa's fast transformation that they had essentially forgotten about the prisoners in the room. That changed.
Terrance Monroe stepped over to Thom and told him, "At this point, Major Gant, I believe any further inquiries into your situation would be pointless. As for you, Dr. Stacy, I'm sorry that someone as intelligent as you is caught up in all of this."
"I could say the same about you."
Monroe took it in stride.
"I'm sorry that something so horrible as this has to happen, but sometimes you have to make hard choices for the greater good. Goodbye."
Terrance Monroe left the room.
Waters approached the two prisoners.
"You will be taken to a place where you can rest."
"Can we get some food? Something to drink?" Gant asked as he realized his stomach was completely empty.
"Of course. You need your energy, Major. Tomorrow is going to be a big day for you."
17
General Albert Friez wore his class A blue dress uniform complete with hat and sat on a military-chartered Learjet flying west fast enough to stay ahead of nightfall.
A few members of his staff sat in other seats, most reading magazines or working on laptops and computer pads. Friez gazed out the window, catching a glimpse here and there through the clouds of the American Great Plains passing below.
Sights like that one that made the enormity of his job and responsibilities hit home. Down there and stretching for miles sat the United States of America and a population of over three hundred million souls. Beyond that, billions more around the globe.
They went to work, lived their lives, and grew old never knowing the tenuous nature of their existence.
The events at Red Rock a few months ago had emphasized that point. A powerful entity — or rather, a powerful entity under the control of a sick man — had nearly been loosed upon the Earth. Given the events inside the "Hell Hole," the entire world might have been turned into a demon's playground.
On top of that, Friez's people had captured alien creatures invading our airspace and dealt with all manner of scientific monstrosities run amok, without the public ever knowing exactly how many nightmares waited out there, ready to pounce.
We stand on the line between what they know and what they fear.
"What's that, General?"
Friez responded to Lieutenant Colonel Thunder's voice on the other end of his cell phone. He added a sharp tone in his reply meant to admonish himself for allowing his thoughts to drift in the midst of an update.
The Cannibal Virus Page 17