Sick Bastards

by Shaw, Matt

  A knock on the door distracted us both. Before we’d a chance to hide ourselves, the door opened a crack and Mother stuck her head through. “I’ve been calling you for hours!” she moaned. “Put your sister down! Dinner’s ready.”

  I pulled out with my vinegar stroke ruined; a jet of sticky white semen splashing across sister’s stomach. Sister looked just as frustrated as I was. My orgasm ruined by the appearance of mother and her orgasm denied completely right at the last minute.

  Thanks Mum, thanks a lot. Great timing as usual.

  “You owe me,” my sister huffed as she pulled up her French knickers, ignoring the cum trickling down her belly. I flashed her a wink as if to tell her she’d be getting it later and threw my trousers on, followed by my shirt.

  I’ll repay her when I get her out of this hellhole. I feel as though our time is coming. It won’t be hard to get her to come with me. Not after hearing the conversation she had with Father. Not now I know his brainwashing techniques hadn’t won her over...

  PART SEVENTEEN

  Now

  A Few Home-Truths

  I shoved the man into the cabin no sooner had he opened the door. He fell to the floor, tripping over his own feet, a pathetic mess. He had tears streaming from his face and clearly he feared for his life. If he had been one of the people (in the second cabin) watching the monitors then he had every right to fear for it too. He knew I was a killer. He knew I tasted human flesh.

  I looked around the cabin. More monitors, some computers, and a few cabinets but nothing which stood out and explained to me what was happening, despite the man’s promises.

  “You said you’d tell me what was going on!” I hissed at him. I stood over him as though I were ready to clobber him. In truth there wasn’t much between us - height wise - and he was much stockier than me so I’m sure that, if it came down to it, he’d have beaten me in a fight. Especially whilst I was so hungry. Not that I wanted him to realise as such.

  “Second cabinet down!” he said, pointing to the filing cabinet from where he lay, sprawled out on the floor. I followed his finger to the cabinet and walked over to it. As instructed I opened the second drawer down. A large collection of CDs. Four stacks of varying amounts bound together by elastic bands.

  “What is this?”

  “There’ll be one in there of you!” he said. “It will say your name on the front of the top case.”

  My name?

  John Burley.

  I pulled all four stacks out and turned to the man.

  “Get up!” I ordered him.

  He did so. He took the piles from my hands and placed them on a sideboard next to one of the computers. I watched as he opened the computer’s CD drawer on the tower unit and slipped a CD from the case of the batch which contained my name. He turned one of the screens on and it flickered into life. My face was onscreen. I was sitting at a table in a room I didn’t recognise.

  A female voice off screen spoke to me, asking me questions. Despite it clearly being me onscreen, I didn’t recognise any of this.

  “We’re going to ask you to confirm some details before we continue, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you confirm your name?”

  “John Burley.”

  “And your date of birth?”

  “September 30th, 1980.”

  “Mother’s maiden name?”

  “Osborne.”

  I tried to remember my mother but couldn’t. Not the one pretending to be her, back in the house, but my real mother. My birth mother. My head pounded as though telling me that part of my memory was off-limit.

  “Thank you. Can you confirm why you’re here?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. I’m just replying to an advert.”

  “Can you confirm the advert and where you saw it?”

  “I saw it online. It mentioned a series of scientific tests but not a lot else. Other than a substantial pay to those who completed it.” Onscreen I laughed. Why do I remember none of this?

  I turned to the man who wasn’t watching the screen as intently as I was. He was nervously watching my reaction.

  “Turn it off.”

  He did as he was told.

  “You signed up to this. You all did.”

  I looked at his name badge again. Michael Bray. The name didn’t ring a bell.

  “Signed up to what?”

  “Please, I’m just paid to work here. This isn’t my idea. None of this is. They just employ me.”

  “Signed up to what?” I asked him again. I went to hit him, to try and get him talking, and he fell back against the table of screens with his arms raised.

  “A test!” he shouted. “It was a government test. We didn’t tell you exactly what was involved. We kept it secret from you until after you had signed the contracts...”

  “I wouldn’t have signed without knowing the ins and outs of something!”

  “The money! That’s all people seemed to care about, the money...”

  “But what about the bomb?” I asked. “The end of the world!” Michael Bray started to laugh. I wanted to hurt him so bad that I felt the adrenalin surge through my body. “What’s so fucking funny?” I screamed at him.

  “None of it was real! Don’t you see? The whole thing was set up to see how you’d cope...”

  He fumbled with the CDs that were in his hand still. He dropped all but one.

  BRIAN BIGELOW.

  He tore the first CD from the packet and put it into the computer tower after taking out the previous CD. I just stood there, dumbstruck, as he kicked it into play.

  “This is the man you thought was your father...”

  * * * * *

  Father (aka Brian Bigelow) was sitting on what looked to be a chair similar to the kind you’d find in a dentist’s surgery. He was rocking backwards and forwards as though trying to free himself from the restraints which bound him to the chair; one on each wrist and one on each of his ankles. A contraption was around his skull. Mean looking metal prongs at the front of it seemed to be pinning his eyes open so he couldn’t look away from a large screen which played various images in front of him.

  The camera filming him seemed to be operated by a person. They first looked to my father and how he was secured into the chair and then they turned their attention towards the large screen in front of him. The camera settled for a minute, maybe two, so we could get an idea of the various things they were broadcasting directly into Father’s unblinking eyes despite his screaming and protests.

  “He’d be kept in that chair for up to eight hours at a time. All the lead subjects went through the same. They would be kept in the chair and they’d be drip fed with various psychedelic drugs. Eventually - even though the films stopped playing - they’d believe what they saw was true. In this case, and the other cases in Zone B, Mr Bigelow believed a bomb went off and destroyed the world you knew.” Michael’s voice whispered in my ear as I continued to stand in the present, watching the scenes play out on the video.

  The images rotated between ones of an Atomic Bomb being detonated (and the mushroom cloud it threw into the air), people being torn apart by the radioactive blast, the photograph of Mother, Father, Sister and me, people looting and tearing up the streets.

  Father continued to scream for them to stop but still they continued to play.

  * * * * *

  I was mesmerised by what I was seeing play through on the screen; the disturbing images with the picture of (what I thought to be) my family spliced into it all. I’m guessing pictures of the family were there to try and turn Father’s way into thinking we actually were part of his life...

  Father...I need to stop calling him that. He isn’t my father. Mother isn’t my mother and Sister, dear Sister, she is nothing to do with me either. Part of me was hugely relieved, considering what we had gone through, but another part of me just felt as though my world had crumbled beneath me even more so than what I had originally thought.

  Suddenly th
e pictures on the screen turned to images of me fucking my sister. One minute we were in the bedroom. Then we were in the dining room, over the table. Sister was replaced with Mother. Still fucking. Mother replaced with Father. Banging me hard and fast. I stumbled back against the wall and covered my hands with my eyes with a scream of despair. By the time I pulled them away again, Michael was just staring at me as though I had gone mad. The screen, still playing the CD, was still rotating images of explosions and looters. My imagination obviously decided to kick up guilt for what had come to pass.

  “Turn it off!” I told him, before I saw any of my own images come back to haunt me some more. The man did as he was told. “We were all brainwashed?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Why do this? What could you possibly benefit from it?”

  “It wasn’t me! I just work here!”

  He was trying to refuse to take any responsibility for what was going on here but, the way I saw it, he was the only one here (seemingly alive) so it made him one hundred percent accountable. With a sudden rush of energy, I crossed the room towards him with a speed which even surprised me. Before I knew it, or he knew it, I had him by the throat and against the table. I started to apply pressure.

  “Why?!”

  He gasped for air and was trying to say something so I released my grip a little. Not a lot but enough for him to be able to force some words out with a little effort.

  “They wanted to see what would happen if a nuke did go off,” he spluttered. “It’s just a test to see whether it would be worth setting up teams to scour the war-torn areas looking for survivors or whether it would be better just to cut their losses and consider everyone dead.”

  “Who’s they?” I demanded.

  “The Government!”

  I released my grip completely and backed away from the technician, surprised by what he was saying.

  “Of the people in Zone B, your family are the only ones left alive. The first couple, the ones you found in the house, they killed themselves. The man killed the woman and then turned the knife on himself. He bled out in her dead arms. They waited as long as they could, for someone to come and find them, but decided they didn’t want the pain of starving to death when the food ran out. They took what they perceived to be their only option...Another family, they were killed by the infected groups when they tried to leave...They were trying to find help. They were only a mile or so from your house when they were attacked...The two girls died instantly but the men...They made it to your house when your father killed one of them with an axe and...”

  “I remembered what happened!” I hissed. I remembered them alright. The second man, the one whose legs we broke, he didn’t even try and tell us what had happened. They weren’t looters, as Father had suspected; they were just another version of us. I felt sick to the stomach. My head was reeling with all the information I was trying to absorb. All I kept coming back to, though, was that the government planned this. They made it happen. They wanted it to happen. Even when we were killing each other. They didn’t care. They didn’t try and stop it. They just left us in there, to rot. “And what did these fucking tests prove?”

  The technician struggled to look me in the eye so I made him, by grabbing him around the throat once more. “That it wouldn’t be worth looking for survivors if such an event took place. It’d be more productive to spend the time, and money, on starting the population again with what we had. Your family would be too damaged,” he said, “there’d be no place in society for a family such as yours. Finding people like you, it would be more trouble than it’s worth. Other zones have similar families I heard...You aren’t the only ones to have lost your mind. Although you are one of the only ones to still be standing...”

  I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to tear the man’s face off. I wanted to stamp on his head until there was nothing but blood and brain underfoot but I did neither. I just stood there completely dumbstruck by what he was telling me.

  “But those things,” I managed to stammer, “in the woods. The radiation poisoning...”

  “Poisoned, yes, but not radiation. Just a potent mixture of chemicals. A biological weapon.” He didn’t wait for me to question him about it. He simply moved to the mouse and keyboard, on the computer, and selected a file - hidden within various other files - on the hard-drive and pointed me to the screen.

  It was a laboratory (on the video now playing). A man, in what appeared to be a prison uniform, was stretched out on a hospital bed with doctors standing around him. A timer-counter in the corner of the screen was reset to zero and then another doctor entered the frame with a syringe in his hand. There were no words. He simply walked over to the man on the hospital bed and injected the syringe into the arm. I could see the man was screaming but there was no sound. For that I was thankful.

  No sooner had the syringe pierced his skin, the timer started to count up.

  “The laboratory isn’t here. It’s in the middle of town. They run the tests there but release the test subjects in the various zones. They’re easy to control, and contain, there but they also serve the additional purpose of keeping the other experiment’s subjects - that’s you and your pretend family - in place.”

  I watched on-screen as the man on the bed arched his back as though in a substantial amount of pain. His face was contorted and his mouth wide open. He was thrashing around violently. The timer on the clock hadn’t even hit twenty seconds.

  Michael pressed stop on the video. With the image frozen, both on the screen and in my mind, I could see the man’s face. His skin had discoloured, his eyes looked to have changed and there was black stuff coming from his mouth. It took twenty seconds to turn him from human to monster.

  I collapsed onto the chair near to the table. Everything was so overwhelming. A million different thoughts buzzing around my head; my headache seemingly getting worse.

  “We were monitoring them after release. They’re extremely efficient killers. They seem to stay alive, like you did, by feasting upon the flesh of the things they killed. Deer, rabbits, even some of the prisoners we released into the area. At the moment this needs to be injected directly into the bloodstream but they’re working on turning it into a gas. Imagine the destruction of populations if a gas, which did this, was released into war-torn areas. The people would tear themselves apart. Eventually they’d mostly starve to death and even turn on each other. Those who survived, the military could go in and clean up. They’d get control of the lands without needing to drop any nuclear devices and without losing any of their own men. At least not to the scale of a full-blown war...”

  “What’s wrong with you people?”

  All this time I thought it was my family who had turned. My family who had lost their souls. All this time I was wrong. It wasn’t. They were just surviving - as Father had said. All this time, I thought they were the sick bastards but the sick bastards were the ones out here, watching us and testing us to see how we’d cope.

  I put my head between my legs to stop myself from passing out. I wished I could put the clock back. I wished I could go back and tell myself not to follow-up on the advert I had supposedly found.

  Did I really agree to this just because they had offered a little money?

  I shook my head.

  We wouldn’t sign up to this. Not for any amount of money in the world.

  “You lied to us. You lied to get us here.”

  “I don’t know all the ins and outs of what they told you,” he said, “but some things would have been kept from you, yes...”

  I rubbed my head. Damn it’s hurting.

  “Headache?”

  I nodded.

  “What’s to be expected. Withdrawal.”

  “What?”

  * * * * *

  Before

  Silver Lining

  Mother, Sister and I were sitting at the dining room table. Father was sitting at the head as per usual. The mood was glum. Between us, on the table, were empty boxes which had on
ce contained food.

  We knew this day was going to come. It was inevitable. We’d all just hoped someone would have come for us by now. Was this a sign that no one was coming? Was this a sign we were alone?

  “We’ll go out. Son and I. We’ll go out and see if we can find some help or some food. Whatever we stumble across first. If it’s food, we’ll bring it back here and go out searching again - each day - until we also find help. If it’s help...Well, we’ll be fine.” Father’s words were comforting although he wasn’t really giving us some answers. He was just stating the obvious plan of action. One we would have done even if he wasn’t here, sitting at the head of the table. He turned to me, “We’ll go out first thing tomorrow.”