The Cannibal Virus

by Anthony DeCosmo

  Stacy bolted for the exit. Another shot rang out.

  "Stop!" The young man with the black hair yelled as he regained his balance, pushed aside his undead assailant, and tried to beat the prisoner to the door.

  Dr. Annabelle Stacy had run cross-country in school … as well as the hundred-yard dash. She beat him to the door in time to slam it shut behind and spin the wheel, locking the research assistant, both guards, and four living dead inside the compartment.

  She heard more shots ring out from the other side, but only as muffled pops, thanks to the soundproofing. She did not hear suits being torn open, flesh being bitten into, and the death screams of the three men. But only because the door was shut tight.

  20

  Major Gant pressed his ear against the door for about the fifth time in the last ten minutes. He waited … listened … and then heard the shuffle of feet and the sound of papers being gathered.

  Finally.

  After escaping from the test room, Thom Gant had managed to advance a grand total of some twenty yards when the sound of approaching voices had forced him to hide in an unlocked maintenance closet.

  That is where he had spent the last ten minutes, tucked away behind a shut door across the hall from an alcove used as a lounge area by the facility's personnel. More specifically, by one researcher and one of the guards, who now sat ten feet from his hiding spot drinking coffee and looking over paperwork.

  Thom had considered bursting out and using the Makarov pistol to dispatch the two, particularly since his bladder felt about ready to explode. However, he realized that the gunfire in the test chamber had not been heard due to a little luck and a lot of soundproofing. The hall offered no such protection, and, in fact, added the extra element of a security camera. Any aggressive action here would bring the entire garrison down upon him.

  So he had pissed into a mop bucket and waited, hoping that the occasional growl from his nearly-empty stomach would not give away his position. Finally, he heard the two men gather their items and move off. He wondered how long it would be before someone discovered the two guards he had already killed.

  He thought that moment had arrived when the automated address system called out across the entire base: "DOCTOR WATERS, REPORT TO SECURITY."

  As he waited, he considered his predicament and his priorities.

  Under normal circumstances, he would focus on finding an exit. True, Dr. Stacy was in danger somewhere in this complex, but given the nature of what the Global Health Protectorate was brewing down here, his first obligation was to warn the outside world.

  Unfortunately, he knew they were trapped on a private, secret island. Escaping from the building might improve his odds of survival, but he was no pilot, so he could not steal a plane or chopper and make his way to the nearest mainland.

  What to do?

  Again, finding and releasing Annabelle Stacy seemed like the obvious choice but, again, his military mind crafted a different set of priorities. He needed to locate a transmitter of some kind, even a satellite phone. Anything to get a message to Pacific Command.

  Despite his newfound respect for her, as well as a chivalrous streak, Major Gant knew that Dr. Stacy's safety was the lowest of his priorities. Besides, he knew he was running out of time. Any minute now his escape would be discovered, the base would go on lockdown, and any hope of summoning help would end with a bullet to his head.

  Gant felt a pang of disappointment in himself and silently sighed. His military programming — that robot in the uniform — once again overrode his sense of morality. He wished he could think of it as an inner conflict, but the truth was that there was no conflict; only the training. The programming.

  He opened the closet door, pressed against the wall so as to slip beneath the security camera's arc of vision, and moved off.

  * * *

  The elevator doors opened and out walked Lieutenant Colonel Liz Thunder with Corporal Sanchez a step behind. The pair strolled a concrete hallway on sublevel one, talking as they moved.

  "He really said zombies?" Sanchez asked, repeating the information on Wells's debriefing that Thunder had just relayed.

  "Yes. So let's think about that. Assuming Wells's wires aren't fried from all the heat, what could that really mean?" She held up a computer tablet she carried and went on. "I've been Googling zombies, walking dead, animated corpses, and the like for the past hour and I've come up with a lot of possibilities."

  "Like what?" he asked as they rounded a corner to their left and came upon the office row.

  "Well, let's start here with toxoplasmosis, a condition or disease caused by a parasitic protozoan that mainly hits cats, but — get this — it starts out in rats and mice. It actually changes the behavior of the mouse to cause it to go and find cats so that it can be eaten and end up in the cat. Isn't that pretty?"

  "It makes the mouse offer itself up for dinner?"

  "Yeah, now here's the stunner. This thing is in a lot of humans. One third to upwards of one half of the world's population may have this already in them."

  Sanchez's face scrunched a little and his hand touched his belly.

  They reached the door to her office, which she opened. General Friez stood inside, speaking to someone on the phone. Liz and Sammy continued their conversation in the hall in more subdued voices.

  "Then you've got voodoo zombies; people who've been drugged first with neurotoxins to simulate death and then are subjected to a lot more drugs that turn them into mindless, well, zombies. That has really happened in places like Haiti."

  Friez's voice told someone on the phone, "Yes, Campion has full authority over the strike force. Why? Because he's the man on the scene. Sir, I don't need to remind you of the type of situations my people deal with. There isn't time to come up with a consensus and follow ten steps in the chain of command."

  Liz glanced at her paper again and told Sanchez, "Point is, Corporal, that zombies may sound rather far out, but it seems they are not quite as far out as I once thought."

  "And who would screw around with that type of thing? And why?"

  She glanced back at Friez.

  "Yes, sir, our initial reports are sketchy, but something very unconventional has happened on Tioga Island. That's why we require this type of freedom of action."

  Thunder told Sanchez, "People like us, Corporal. There's a reason we have all those containment cells downstairs. We don't just fight this weird stuff; we bring it home, study it, and see if it can be useful."

  "Seems to me," Sanchez replied, "that this type of stuff would be useful only if you wanted to wipe out the whole of the human race. I don't think the Russians and the Chinese, or even most terrorists, would want to mess around with that."

  "I guess that's the big question now, Sammy. Who exactly is behind all this? And why?"

  * * *

  Annabelle Stacy turned off the main corridor at the first side passage. She noticed a security camera at the intersection, so she moved as fast as possible, hoping the wrong eyes were not watching that particular monitor at that particular moment. When no alarms sounded, she assumed she had passed unnoticed. The lack of alarms also meant either that the three men she had locked in the test chamber a few minutes ago were still trapped or that their deaths had not yet been discovered.

  Still, she felt as if her body might shake apart at any second. Her legs quivered, her intestines felt ready to burst, and she found it difficult to calm her breathing. Some of those shakes came from knowing she had probably — almost certainly — indirectly killed three people. The fact that they had been planning to kill her — or worse — did not change that fact.

  Voices in the back of her head kept reciting fantasies about how she could have escaped in some other manner. That perhaps she could have left the door open or negotiated the reopening of the door in exchange for a head start toward escape … something, anything, to have avoided trapping them inside; to avoid the blood that was most assuredly now on her hands, righteous or not.

&
nbsp; Furthermore, while not quite as scary as being rushed by rotting, parasite-controlled corpses, sneaking through the facility pushed her nerves into overdrive. While some of those symptoms might be side effects of whatever concoction they had put into her veins, she knew that most came from her lack of experience at this type of thing.

  Truth was, she did not know what to do now. Should she run for the exit? Despite finding the idea of immediate escape appealing, she felt a sense of responsibility for Major Gant. At that moment he might be undergoing the same type of sadistic test Waters and Monroe had subjected Costa to yesterday. Thom might be in the midst of fighting off zombies and fatigue. She could not abandon him.

  "DOCTOR WATERS, REPORT TO SECURITY."

  The automated announcement system's computerized voice caused her to jump, and she spat an exhale so hard that the wind scraped her throat.

  Ahead of her a door opened. Stacy panicked like a deer in the headlights. She saw no place to hide, no alcoves or unlocked doors, no pieces of furniture in the white, featureless hallway. So she did the only thing she could do: she pressed herself flat against the wall and held still.

  If Waters had exited the room and stepped to his left he would have seen her. Instead, he turned to his right and stopped, propping his cane against the wall while he made notes on a small pad and mumbled something to himself that sounded as if he were working out a complicated problem in his head.

  After a moment he stowed the pad in his lab coat and moved off away from her.

  Stacy waited until he had rounded a corner and then approached the door from which Waters had come. She expected it to be his office, but instead found it labeled "STORAGE AREA A."

  Using the security card she had stolen from the young technician, Annabelle swiped the lock and caused a bolt to retract. She then proceeded inside, in the hope of hiding for a spell.

  Instead, she came upon a sight that was so different from what she could have possibly expected that her mind — not her eyes but her mind—took three whole seconds to properly compute the room's contents.

  Up to that point, she had seen Monroe's little hideaway as a high-tech laboratory, not unlike a CDC containment complex or a military research facility. Yet while "Storage Area A" was constructed from the same building blocks as the rest of the place, the contents were of a different nature. It seemed to Dr. Annabelle Stacy that she had walked out of the lab and into a museum.

  A trio of big tables occupied the center of the room while the walls were lined with bookshelves and display cases. The air felt dry by design, and odorless save for a whiff of ancient dust tickling her nose.

  On the tables rested a line of artifacts, broken only by the occasional computer, which made for a contrast in eras measured in millennia.

  She saw a chunk of jagged rock that appeared to be a surviving piece of an otherwise destroyed bas-relief with the image of a bull clearly distinguishable above several lines of chiseled script. She saw a pair of clay figurines depicting persons emerging from a type of barrel with crowns on their heads, a colorful but fading fresco of several slender ladies on a slab of plaster, and many more such trinkets all sharing a common lineage that, for the moment, eluded her recognition.

  Given the fact that one of Dr. Annabelle Stacy's three doctorates was in history, the collection fascinated her but her failure to decipher their origin caused her to let out a frustrated grunt as she examined a block of clay and the strangely hypnotic language carved therein.

  In between more chunks of history sat a computer and a stack of papers. She gave up on accessing the PC when a password prompt appeared. However, the papers included lines of mathematical equations as well as molecular structure diagrams, the purpose of which was unclear, particularly when included in a room clearly devoted to history, not science.

  Her eyes drifted around the collection, finding one of the bookshelves first. There she saw an eclectic collection of worn leather-bound books and scrolls alongside modern texts and binders. Again, a clash of centuries — maybe longer.

  Suddenly, one of the display cases caught her eye. No, grabbed it; pulling her attention in like the grip of a black hole's gravity well.

  Inside a square case set upon a metal pedestal sat a disc made of fired clay covered with a spiral display of stamped symbols. Slightly larger than a compact disc, this was the one object in the room that finally managed to spur her memory to recognition.

  Stacy approached it cautiously, not out of fear but in awe. She knew exactly what this was, but knew it should be a world away on display at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.

  Unless … unless there are two?

  Like a child gazing in the display windows of FAO Schwarz, she pressed her nose to the glass and ran her eyes over the tokens and signs crowding the disc's surface. As far as she knew, no one had yet deciphered the inscription, despite its slight resemblance to Anatolian and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  Still, it seemed so incredibly out of place. Why would they gather ancient tablets and art in a storage room deep inside a covert bioweapons research facility?

  "Wait a second," she again mumbled to herself. "Wait one damn second."

  The papers next to the computer drew her in once more. She pulled out the top sheet, then the next, then the next. She set them on the tabletop between a recently released Pentium G2120 computer and a piece of broken tablet containing a language thousands of years old.

  Mathematics and molecular structure diagrams. Mathematical biology.

  "They are translating mathematics into molecules. But where does the math come from?"

  Memories of an earlier conversation floated to the surface of her thoughts. After watching Costa die, Major Gant had confronted Waters and Monroe about their fungal parasite.

  "That makes me wonder who gave it to you," Gant had said.

  Waters had insisted, "This is mine. All mine. I took the translations and grew it … nurtured it … into what you see here."

  Translations?

  Stacy stepped back. No, she stumbled back and away from the pages and pages of mathematics meeting biology. Away from the tabletops of artifacts that dated to more than a thousand years before Christ.

  The room grew in size. Doubled. Tripled. Stretched off into the infinite.

  Yesterday the most amazing thing to happen in her life had been jumping from an airplane from six miles high. She had seen the whole world from the edge of space. The size and scope had enthralled her imagination, making her feel small before the vastness of the universe, but in a way she found exhilarating.

  Now she fell again, this time her mind in free fall, and there was nothing but fear. How could it all connect? How could it possibly connect?

  There, under the glass in the display case, was one of the greatest archeological mysteries of all time. Outside the room — around her — was a madhouse of bio terror. Somewhere, somehow, there was a link between the two. To even consider such a connection felt like the beginnings of insanity.

  It seemed that she was, after all, still in the laboratory.

  21

  Dr. Waters answered his summons to the security station, walking along one of the main halls until arriving at the raised room that resembled a press box at a sports stadium. He climbed the three stairs leading to the side door, swiped his security keycard through the magnetic strip, and opened up the door.

  Inside, two men in military tunics sat at a console in front of thick glass overlooking the base's primary passageway. One of the men was of European decent, the other Asian.

  The console sported panels dealing with everything from ventilation and power to containment and fire response. Two rows of small monitors lined the top of their work station, displaying video feeds from around the complex.

  "Dr. Waters, Mr. Monroe is on the line," the European man said, nodding toward the rear wall of the small chamber.

  Back there stood a cabinet containing a communication station as well as a circular round portal that resembled a miniature bank
vault door or perhaps an oversized torpedo tube hatch from a submarine.

  Waters picked up a big, bulky phone that could have been mistaken for an early model cellular unit from the 1980s. In reality it was a sophisticated satellite transmitter.

  "Yes, Terrance? Are you returning soon?"

  "I should be arriving within the hour, but this couldn't wait. I just received permission and funding from our sponsors to proceed to the next phase."

  "I am surprised," Waters admitted. "I never thought they would actually move forward."

  "It's like I told you. They see things from our perspective and realize that we are very nearly at a point of no return. As difficult a decision as this is, we have to get to the next testing phase as soon as possible if we're going to keep to our proposed schedule of full release in three months. I think they understand that if we want to save this planet, we have to act now."

  Waters rolled his teary eyes but kept his tone sincere. "Of course, Terrance. It's good to be working with people who have such vision. Refreshing, actually."

  "It is, isn't it? Listen, the reason I'm calling is to find out about the test on the blocking agent. That's the final piece in all this. Without it, the sponsors will back out."

  "I understand. It's important that they are safe and sound when the outbreak occurs. However, I am waiting on the test results from Pearl. I should have definitive information by the time you land."

  "Good. Keep on it."

  "Oh, and Terrance, I thought you might want to know that our guest managed to survive the first round of his trials. Rather impressive, actually."

  "He's dangerous. I wish we knew more about him."

  "Your sponsors couldn't help?

  The only sound that came over the phone for several long seconds was the noise of a running engine and what might have been whirring helicopter rotors.