by Rick Chesler
Her eyes had not yellowed or taken on the vacant, distracted look like those infected with the zombie agent had. They appeared her same vibrant blue, and yet while they seemed healthy, they also looked somehow…different. Not something he could put his finger on, though, only a vague feeling that her eyes were not quite the same. Perhaps he was mistaken, he thought, turning his attention to her skin.
It, too, lacked the characteristics he feared he might find. No sickly gray pallor or yellowish streaks. No breaks in the skin oozing bodily fluids. Nothing unusual at all, just his mom’s pale skin, unbroken and unblemished.
Alex hated that she had to be here, methodically scrutinized like this after so much time away, but he was sure that once they established that she was free of the prions she would be free to go. Even if she had been somehow infected at the Grenada facility, she should have been symptomatic by now.
“It’s okay, Alex. I’m fine.”
He eyed her dubiously.
“I feel great, really.”
“Mom, bear with me for a minute, okay? I need to try and understand what’s happening based on my experiences from Adranos Island. To do that I need to ask you some questions.” They had given him the list of questions after he had argued she might be more amenable to his asking them than a bunch of nameless others. “It won’t take long…okay?”
“Okay, son.” She smiled lovingly at him.
The CDC brass exchanged quick glances and then Alex began questioning his mother, for her own sake, and that of society at large.
“Mom, I know these questions may seem silly, but this is…for the record.” He glanced at the trio of CDC men at the end of the table.
“That’s fine, honey. I understand.”
Alex took a deep breath and began. “Once you got to the Grenada facility, did you ever leave until I got there?”
She shook her head. “I was there the whole time. They wouldn’t let me go anywhere, as you saw, and I was in no condition to try. I suspect that even if I did, I would have been politely but forcefully returned to my quarters.”
Alex nodded. “While you were there, what kind of treatments did they give you? Drugs? Surgeries?”
“There were drugs, antibiotics mostly is what they told me, but no surgeries. They did use a different type of treatment on me, though, one I wasn’t expecting.”
“Oh? Like what?”
“Like psychotherapy.”
Alex appeared confused. He looked down at the CDC guys, who were paying close attention. “Is that the same as just…therapy?”
The CDC guys nodded silently. His Mom shrugged. Alex went on.
“So they were asking you personal questions and stuff? Showing you ink blots?”
Elsa smiled patiently. “I didn’t get a Rorschach Test, but yes, they engaged me in sessions where they…” She paused as she recalled her memories. “They didn’t ask me questions so much as they…I don’t know, it’s silly, I guess.”
Alex shook his head. “No, no, no, it’s not silly, Mom. What did they say to you?”
“They were sort of…hypnotizing me, I guess, for lack of a better word.” She ended the sentence with a girly giggle that she licked her lips at the end of. At this, the CDC professionals stopped their smartphone pecking and eyed one another intensely.
Alex decided to get on with it. The sooner whatever was going to be the result of this meeting happened, the sooner he and his mom could get out of here.
“You mean like, you are getting sleeeeepy, kind of stuff, dangling a watch in front of your face?”
She licked her lips again while she remembered. “It was more like a lot of repetitive statements, spoken to me in soft, soothing tones. I thought it was more like meditation therapy, biofeedback or something like that. Relaxing words and ambient music.”
“Do you remember any of the statements?”
“They told me I wouldn’t be able to remember any of them, but one time I decided not to take the pills they gave me beforehand. I put them into my mouth along with the cup of water they gave me, but I didn’t swallow them. I spit them out a couple minutes later when I pretended to sneeze into a Kleenex.”
“Why didn’t you want to take them?”
“They had nothing to do with my antibiotics or preventing the prion infection. I knew it had to do with the hypnosis stuff and so I wanted to see if I could remember better if I didn’t take the pills first.”
“And could you?”
She nodded slowly, eyes narrowing. “They would say things like, ‘You will follow the commands when you receive them,’ or maybe, ‘The new sensations you will feel in your head are normal and good for you. Do not fight them…’ Over and over and over for I don’t even know how long. They never had any clocks on the wall and they confiscated my watch and phone upon arrival.”
Alex looked over at the CDC contingent, all three of whom stared at his mother with rapt attention, and suddenly he was sick of it all. This was outrageous. His mother had been through a traumatic experience. Simply having cancer in the first place was bad enough, but then she had undergone some hyper-experimental medical procedure out of country to boot? There was nothing more he needed to learn here. He stood up and stared directly into one of the low profile dome cameras he’d noticed recessed into the ceiling. He figured it was just a regular videoconference camera. This was the lion’s den for the CIA, after all, and if they wanted to put cameras in here that were undetectable to the human eye, he was sure they could do it. Maybe they did do it. He didn’t know and he didn’t care. He just wanted to get his point across, so he shouted it at the top of his lungs.
“She does not have the virus, or the prion, or whatever the hell it is! I’ve seen the symptoms, seen them dozens of times on Adranos, and this…“ he pointed dramatically at his mother. “…Is. Not. It!”
His mother smiled at Alex and licked her lips again, this time accompanying the action with a small yet perceptible nod of the head. Alex wanted to tell his mother to stop doing that, if this was her idea of a joke it wasn’t funny in the slightest, but he didn’t want to call attention to it in case it had gone unnoticed by the CDC and all the other invisible flies on the wall in here. He just wanted to get her out of here, to take her home.
“How was she cured, Alex? That’s all we’re trying to find out.” The voice startled him, not because of the words it carried, or the fact that it came from a speaker somewhere on the table, but because of who it belonged to.
Veronica. She sounded calm, matter-of-fact. He had no reason to doubt her. She continued.
“Go ahead and take a break. You’ve given us good information. We have a blood sample from Elsa that technicians are analyzing now. Just give us a few more minutes, Alex. I’ll be in shortly with the test results.”
Alex thanked Veronica and immediately the CDC men began conversing in near-whispered tones, clearly not wanting Alex or his mother to hear what was being said. After a few seconds, they stood and told Alex they’d be in the next room, that he and his mom should feel free to “catch up on things.”
Alex waited until they walked out of the room and the door had closed behind them to start talking, even though he supposed they were being monitored, probably even recorded in here. They were as alone as they were going to be though, so he reached across the table and took his mother’s hand. And her skin felt different. He hadn’t thought to actually feel her skin earlier, he had only looked at it. But holding it now, it felt…you know the word, admit it…it feels slightly…just a little bit…scaly.
He wasn’t sure if his mind was playing tricks on him, like how he’d heard that if you imagined things for long enough they would start to seem real even though they weren’t. He clasped her hand with his other hand, just to refresh the tactile stimulation and hopefully trigger a new sensation, one of normal, smooth human female skin. But it still had that hint of scaliness.
Yet she looked…be honest…she looked good for someone who had until very recently been in the grips of ad
vanced stage cancer. But deep down a nagging worry needled his consciousness. What if the cancer wasn’t responsible for how she looked now? What if she had been cured, but somehow altered in the process? She had been taken, after all, to some foreign facility where FDA laws may very well not apply. He imagined a coterie of overzealous researchers guinea-pigging his mom to death in some sterile laboratory…and then bringing her back. Maybe he’d seen Pet Sematary too many times as a kid, but even as she talked to him now, asking him if he remembered that cottage where they went on vacation twenty years ago, but without waiting for an answer, something just seemed off about her.
He decided to redirect the conversation. She seemed to be a little more normal when he’d been questioning her. Or was that because she’d known that to exhibit symptoms of whatever it was she had in the presence of the CDC would be detrimental to her freedom, and now that they were no longer staring her directly in the face she felt like she could let her guard down a little? Or maybe she had to let her guard down, as if it had taken all of her limited reserves of energy to pull off the charade.
“Mom? Let me ask you about Dad, please. I know you didn’t get to say goodbye. I didn’t either, well…not really, not the way I would have liked, but at least I did have some last words with him.” He flashed on the insect larvae pouring from his father’s mouth during his final moments on that godforsaken island, how they had impeded his speech, and he shuddered involuntarily. If his mother noticed the movement, she didn’t say anything. “You didn’t get that chance.”
Elsa smiled that slightly vacant expression again. “I’m at peace with your father.”
Alex thought about this for a few seconds. She had to be just saying that not to make him feel bad. “That’s good. I know he would have wanted to say goodbye to you. It’s terrible he didn’t get that chance. He told me on the ship in Antarctica that he wished I would call and visit you more.”
Elsa Ramirez suddenly tensed, her expression going slack, eyes blank, one of her hands gripping the edge of the conference table.
“You never should have let that asshole tell you what to do. I never did, that’s for fucking sure.”
Alex sat there, not even breathing as he stared at his mother. He’d never heard her talk like this before, ever. He wanted to ask her if she was all right, or maybe if there was something that happened in the past he didn’t know about, but “Mom?” was all that came out.
“He can rot in goddamned Hell for all I care.”
Again, Alex flashed on his father’s diseased mouth and reptilian teeth, the maggots and the Herculean effort he’d required to fumble out his last words.
Alex stood, his chair toppling onto the floor. “Mom! Stop talking like that!”
“Or what?” Elsa Ramirez leaned forward over the table.
Alex was speechless.
“What’s my little Alex going do about it? Nothing, that’s what. ‘Cuz you’re a pussy, son, just like you always were. Can’t do shit.”
He stared, incredulous, for another moment, then backed away. “That’s it. I’m out of here.” He turned and walked around the fallen chair, speaking as he went. “I went through a lot of trouble to come here to try and help you, and this is how you thank me?”
As he rounded the chair and began walking toward the door, he got another look at his mother’s face. Her eyes were definitely yellowish now. Not a faint, jaundiced kind of yellow, but a crisp, electric yellow, and not across the entire orb but only part of the iris. It was weird. He could swear her eyes weren’t like that before…before…before all this happened when everything was normal. He wanted to go back to that period in his life, but there was no time for that kind of nostalgic longing now, because Now was obviously so very different from Then, when the woman sitting across from him made him chocolate chip cookies and read him stories and tucked him into bed at night. Now she was cursing and leering at him in a CDC/CIA hybrid facility with yellow eyes, and…
And jumping up on the table! She leapt, lips parted in a feral, instinctive gesture. Alex sidestepped her attack and she landed on two feet against the wall, then sprang off with cat-like speed. He stepped forward. In an ordinary fight, his next move would have been to duck under the wild attack and try to get a punch in hard to her face and then maybe pin her to the floor as she dropped. But even as he interlaced the fingers of his two hands, one in front of the other to deliver a hammer blow, he knew he wouldn’t be able to do it.
Gone-crazy freak or not, she was still his mother, the one who had brought him into this world, as unpleasant as that world had become. He could not will himself to physically harm her, so he ducked out of the way, spun and raced toward the door. He reached it and flung it open.
Two soldiers were posted immediately outside, and they both spun, caught off guard at his wild appearance. He grabbed the doorknob and slammed the door shut behind him, leaning against it as something crushed into it from the other side.
“What the hell was that?” one of them asked.
“The CDC guys?” Alex hissed. “Where are they?” He had questions for them. Boy, did he ever.
One of the soldiers spoke softly into a speaker microphone mounted on his shoulder. As he did so, his associate tapped him on the arm and pointed at the window into the room, where Elsa Ramirez had backed up, then raced lightning-fast toward the door. It burst open, frame shattered in her wake.
She bull-rushed the guards, reaching Alex first but shoving him out of the way. One of the guards moved for his weapon but the pistol hung up on the holster catch as he tried to remove it and she knocked his hand away. The other soldier, thinking he’d have an easy time with this old woman, crazy as she may be, pinned her against the wall. She wryly slid under his grasp, shoved him aside with surprising strength.
“Jesus! Get her down!” the soldier who had tried to calm her said. Both soldiers jumped on her but she was like a Tasmanian Devil, a whirlwind of chaotic thrashing, flailing and random movement that was impossible to stop.
“She on meth?” one of the soldiers gasped, staring up at Alex from his position on the floor, where he’d been knocked to his back.
“No! Just hold her!”
Elsa wriggled a hand free and then struck—jamming a narrow index finger with a huge elongated nail into one of the soldiers’ eyes. He promptly cried out, shrieking in agony and clutching his bleeding eye socket as Elsa then turned her fury onto the military man who already lay on his back. Alex was there in a second, leaning in to break it up, pulling his mother’s head back as her mouth was open, jaws snapping at the air with a vulgar sucking sound. Alex stood up, shoved her back, then realized too late that he had let himself get much too close.
She turned and made eye contact with him and blinked—once, twice. Alex noticed that those eyes suddenly shifted and seemed to look more normal now. A little yellow, but not so much.
“Love you, son,” his mother rasped, and then she coughed, a guttural, violent, bloody sound. She shuddered, and as the guard on the ground got up, freeing his weapon, she took off, running smoothly down the hall. The three men wearing suits who had been inside the room came skidding around a corner, sound-suppressed pistols drawn. Apparently they’d been monitoring the situation as it unfolded. They glanced at the guard with the hole in his eye, whose mouth was moving but with no sound coming out, and then at Alex, who was way beyond a mere loss for words, half-standing-half-kneeling, completely dumbfounded by the sudden chain of events.
One of the CDC guys said, “Sector 7 Hallway, heading East,” into a radio and Alex heard the footfalls of multiple men come running from a hallway off to his right. Beneath him, the penned guard gasped, shuddered and went still.
His mother had killed someone, and—Alex had to finally accept—was most certainly infected, and free around this facility.
That fact somehow disturbed him less than the sudden suspicion that her release from Grenada, complete with the staged guard’s reactions, had been planned from the beginning.
&nb
sp; Planned to get him to bring her here.
He shuddered and ran, chasing after the men. Chasing after her.
14.
Veronica left the control room in a rush. Where was her backup? Where was the support?
Alarms were going off everywhere, sounding like echoes from air raid sirens, as if enemy bombers were incoming and everyone had to flee to shelters. However, she wasn’t fleeing. Not a chance. Instead, she listened, focusing on the loudest source of commotion. The next hallway over, where she heard trampling feet, shouts and—gunfire!
She drew her 9mm and raced around a corner to find two servicemen in a bloody heap on the floor, with three more guards standing around them, one reaching down to check for a pulse.
“Stop!” Veronica yelled, aiming and trying to get a lock on the corpse’s skull. “Step away from them!”
The would-be helper glanced back, fingers on the dead man’s neck—just as its eyes opened. Yellow eyes, Veronica saw.
“Down!”
Too late, the dead man-turned-zombie lurched up, grabbed the living man’s neck and turned him around as he locked his jaws on the man’s neck. His shocked eyes locked on Veronica’s and froze her for a moment, a moment that in hindsight didn’t matter. Once bitten…
They were both goners, and Veronica hastened their end. Two shots: the twitching, dying man in the center of his forehead, the zombie through its right temple. The two other soldiers backed up, drawing their guns, aiming at Veronica, shocked and in utter confusion, with the alarms, the gunfire and the sight of their friends just put down with headshots.
Veronica raised her arms, but then pointed to the other dead man (was he killed by Elsa as well? Had to be… oh God, how did they let this happen? And where was Alex?) The thought drove an ice stake through her heart, but action called her back to the present. She dropped, aimed and fired low, just missing the head of the other zombie, clipping its shoulder. About to bite one of the soldiers, his friend reacted faster, or by sheer instinct—and drove the butt of his automatic rifle down against the thing’s head, knocking it back, dazed.