Backwoods

by sara12356

  In a flash, it was upright again, whirling about and charging back at Andrew, using its deformed hands and feet to break into a wide, frenzied gallop. Andrew staggered backward, keeping the gun raised.

  “Shoot the heart,” Moore cried out, and when the screamer leaped at Andrew, hands outstretched, it left its upper torso a wide-open, vulnerably exposed target. Andrew’s index finger flexed inward, and again, the pistol bucked against his palm. This time, when the bullet dropped the creature, it stayed down.

  “Jesus,” Andrew whispered, shuddering as he stumbled back into the wall for support. He couldn’t bring himself to lower the gun and stood there, arms outstretched, shaking like a leaf.

  “Daddy!” Alice flew down the hallway into Moore’s arms.

  He scooped her up, letting her legs lock around his waist, her arms around his neck as he hoisted her to his chest. Looking past the tangled mess of her hair, he said to Andrew, “Did you get it this time?”

  Limping forward, cautious, Andrew prodded the fallen screamer with his foot, turning it onto its back. He could see the bullet’s point of impact left of the sternum, the putty-colored flesh puckered in and peeled back around the sunken, bloody crater.

  “Yeah.” At last, his arms drooped and he turned, meeting Moore’s gaze. “I got it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “We need to keep moving,” Moore said grimly. Obviously not trusting Andrew at his word this time, he’d checked out the dead screamer personally, satisfying himself that the nine-millimeter slug had indeed punctured its heart. Standing, he wiped his hands on his pant legs, then reached for Alice.

  “What the hell was that?” Andrew asked. “You know, don’t you?”

  Moore didn’t answer, but when he tried to brush past Andrew, hauling Alice in tow, Andrew caught him by the shoulder and shoved him back against the nearest wall. “What was that thing?” he demanded again. “Was it one of the soldiers like O’Malley?”

  Moore tried unsuccessfully to shrug away. “It’s part of what’s left of Alpha squadron.”

  It took Andrew a moment to remember. “The ones Prendick sent home? The ones with Rocky Mountain spotted fever?”

  Moore nodded. “They weren’t sent anywhere. They were the first test subjects.”

  At these words, test subjects, Andrew felt his skin crawl uneasily. “For what?”

  Moore didn’t respond, his brows narrowing stubbornly, and Andrew pushed him into the wall again. “Answer me,” he snapped. “Whatever happened to O’Malley, is that what happened to those poor sons of bitches, too? What did you do to them?”

  “It’s complicated,” Moore said.

  Andrew shoved the gun into his face. “Try me.”

  “Do you know anything about bioengineering?”

  “No. Try me anyway.”

  Moore sighed. “They were infected with a retrovirus, a specific, synthesized microorganism that can imprint its own genetic sequencing into a foreign cell, transforming that cell into one that’s like the virus. It’s a complete transformation, erasing whatever genetic code it’s replacing and proliferating until the entire host organism is overrun.”

  “You mean a germ did that?” Andrew asked, pointing with the barrel of the nine-millimeter at the dead screamer.

  Moore awarded him a glance that suggested he felt like he was trying to teach one of his chimps or Siamangs to play Candyland. “A highly specialized, man-made germ,” he replied. “One that affects only a specifically targeted segment of susceptible hosts.”

  Between you and me, this is the strangest assignment I’ve ever had.

  Dani had told Andrew this and her words came to his mind now.

  We’re all a hodge-podge of different units, different companies, different regiments. I didn’t know any of these guys up until two months ago when we all got here.

  “The soldiers,” he said. “That’s why they all came from different units, why there are so few of them. You’re saying they were hand-picked to be here.”

  “From their medical records, yes.” Moore nodded. “They were each identified as a potential host.”

  A host. The term was cold, brittle, callous. Expendable, Andrew thought. It sounds like something expendable.

  “Why them?” Unspoken but even more desperate, from inside his mind: Why Dani?

  “Because,” Moore said. “According to their medical records, none of them have ever been exposed to human-specific varicella zoster virus. Chickenpox.”

  Andrew blinked, surprised and bewildered. “You’re kidding, right? You made some kind of mutant form of chickenpox?” This sounded as asinine and preposterous as Suzette’s assertion O’Malley had been stricken by some kind of side effect from strep throat.

  “No,” Moore said. “But what I made shares similar enough properties that if introduced into a subject who has been exposed to varicella or its vaccine, they won’t be infected. Which, for the record, does not include you.”

  Startled, Andrew blinked. “What? How do you know if I’ve had chickenpox or not?”

  Moore smirked. “Because Prendick let you live. You can’t be naïve enough to believe that he’d have let you survive even a night at this compound if there wasn’t some reason for it, something in it for him. There’s a fairly simple blood test that shows whether or not your body has the varicella antigens, a type of immunological memory cell, you could say, that helps prevent future infections. And if you’d tested positive for those antigens, Prendick would have shot you himself.”

  Suzette had drawn a blood sample from him on his first night at the facility. He hadn’t understood why at the time but it hadn’t even occurred to him to ask.

  Then he remembered something, a flash of childhood memory, his mother taking him to a neighbor’s house for a party.

  “Whose birthday is it?” he’d asked his sister.

  “No one’s,” Beth had answered. “It’s a chickenpox party. Billy Cramer’s got it and they think you’ll catch it, too. Then you won’t have to worry about it later.”

  But although Andrew had spent the afternoon playing with Billy and the rest of his friends, he hadn’t caught chickenpox. In fact, he’d made it through at least two such parties in his youth unscathed and had never been infected.

  Which means I could still get it. Horrified, he looked down at his shirt, splattered with virus-laden gore. Chickenpox spreads through contact.

  “Don’t worry.” Moore made a chuffing sound, dismissive and derisive. As if reading Andrew’s mind, or at least, the stricken expression on his face, he said, “I specifically engineered the strain to control its communicability. You can only be infected when it’s directly injected into the cerebrospinal fluid or cranial sinuses.”

  “You were going to do that to me?” Andrew asked. “Make me one of those things, too?”

  “Do you have any idea how rare it is for an adult in this day and age to have had no exposure to either the varicella virus or its vaccine?” Moore asked, again with a smug sort of glance that suggested he thought Andrew wouldn’t have much of an idea about anything. “You, Mister Braddock, are among a very select tier of the American population, one of only five percent in the entire country.”

  And of all the backwoods in all the world where I could’ve run my damn Jeep off the road, I wind up in this one, Andrew thought. Lucky me.

  “If I’m so rare, why would the government want a weapons-grade chickenpox virus?” he asked. “You said if someone’s had it or been vaccinated, they can’t catch your bug.”

  “Because it’s the host that’s the weapon, not the virus itself.”

  Alice uttered a small, birdlike cry. They’d been walking past a room in which the door had been left standing ajar, and as Andrew followed her horrified gaze, he recognized the rows of animal cages lining the walls. Now those cages lay tossed and scattered, the pale tile floor splattered and stained with something dark.

  “Alice,” Moore exclaimed as the girl darted away from them and into the room.

&
nbsp; “Alice!” Andrew shoved past Moore and hurried after her, skittering to a halt just past the doorway. It looked like an F-5 tornado had ripped through the chamber. The door hadn’t been pushed open as much as plowed through, and listed now on its hinges, the metal crumpled inward with deep pock marks and craters. Animal crates had been tossed about with haphazard brutality, the sides dented and battered, the metal grates twisted and torn loose of their moorings. The monkeys and Siamangs that had been kept inside were all dead, some little more than bloody entrails or limbs left scattered across the floor.

  Alice, meanwhile, had raced across the room. When she poked her head into the playroom, she shrank back from the doorway with another wounded cry, then rushed inside.

  Lucy, Andrew realized.

  Alice had found the Siamang lying half-way beneath the table at which the three of them had played Candyland. Alice had fallen onto her knees, folding herself over the lifeless primate.

  There were no emergency lights in the playroom, the only illumination coming from the dim recessed bulbs in the storage area beyond, and it wasn’t until Andrew drew near that he saw what was left of Lucy. Mangled almost beyond recognition, her arms and legs had been torn loose from their sockets, her gut torn open, her face battered and bloodied.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. He went to Alice, kneeling beside her.

  “They killed her,” she said, stunned. “Lucy…she’s dead.”

  Something had attracted the screamers to that store room. They had either heard the monkeys or smelled them inside. Something, Andrew thought. They knew they were here and they bashed their way through the locked door to get them.

  Oh, God, what if they’ve done the same thing to Dani?

  ****

  “Why does the government want things like the screamers?” Andrew asked Moore. He’d thought that Alice would weep with the discovery of Lucy’s remains, but instead, the girl had simply sat on the floor beside the dead Siamang, her eyes distant and vacant as her mind had slipped into whatever fugue-like cocoon her autism sometimes allowed her. “You said your virus made the hosts the weapons. What did you mean?”

  “It’s altered their DNA,” Moore replied. Unlike Alice, he seemed unmoved by the carnage as he surveyed the playroom. Moving idly, he’d started picking up fallen books and game boards, placing them back on bookshelves or countertops. “You’ve seen it for yourself. They’re faster now, stronger, more resilient. The virus allows them to produce growth hormones that facilitate healing more quickly, making them relatively impervious. The limbic system in their brains have been enhanced, so their natural aggression levels have been heightened, intensified. They’re tough as nails and meaner than hell. They are, in essence, super-soldiers.”

  “Not too super,” Andrew remarked. “O’Malley was blind. Those tumors on his face, they’d grown over his eyes. That one in the hallway, its head was being covered up, too.”

  “A human’s immune system can fight off a viral infection, but only if it can interrupt the virus’s reproductive cycle,” Moore said. “If allowed to replicate itself, a virus can overtake its host. That’s what happened to the men in Alpha squad. They were given too much of the retrovirus too quickly. Instead of enhancing their physiology, it overwhelmed them.”

  “It’s made them monsters,” Andrew said. “You made them that way.”

  “Not me.” Moore glanced at him, seeming surprised by the accusation, if not somewhat stiffly offended. “It was Prendick’s call to administer the higher doses. I tried to warn him of the side effects, the risks involved, but he was impatient. He didn’t want a gradual transformation. The United States government is a results-oriented organization, that’s what he told me. And he wanted to give them results. He wouldn’t listen to reason, not from me or Lieutenant Carter, not from anyone.”

  “Carter?” Andrew said. Dani had told him the lieutenant had been sent home shortly after Alpha squadron, suffering from Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Except Alpha squad didn’t really have Rocky Mountain spotted fever, he thought. “Did he become one, too?” he asked. “One of the screamers?”

  At first, because Moore remained silent, Andrew thought he wouldn’t respond, but at length, he sighed heavily. “He threatened to go above Prendick’s head, to report Prendick trying to speed up the testing timeframe. Prendick turned the Alpha squad loose on him in the woods. Have you ever seen a wolf pack cull their prey? They separate the weak or sickly deer from its herd. Then they keep upwind of it, tracking it by its scent, before splitting up and chasing it until they exhaust it. When it’s beyond the point of resistance, they attack together, a collaborative effort.”

  The corpse in the woods, Andrew realized, because at the time, he’d seen a rank insignia affixed to the tattered remnants of its uniform. A silver bar, a First Lieutenant’s insignia.

  “They killed him,” he said and Moore nodded grimly. “The screamers, Alpha squadron. They chased him into a snare trap, then once he was hanging there, helpless, they killed him.”

  And the same thing would’ve happened to me, he thought with a shiver. If my rifle hadn’t fallen, if it hadn’t discharged when it hit the ground and scared them off, they would have killed me, too.

  “That’s what animals do,” Moore said. “That’s what they are now, what the retrovirus has done to them. It’s made the most primitive, predatory areas of their brain grow in size and dominance. It’s made them animals.”

  “And we’re the prey,” Andrew whispered, aghast.

  Again, Moore nodded. “Exactly.” Abandoning the books scattered on the floor, he approached his daughter, hooking his hand beneath her arm to pull her onto her feet. “We need to keep moving.”

  As much as Andrew wanted to get the hell out there and find Dani, he found himself bristling. “Give her a minute, will you?” he said, planting his palm on Moore’s shoulder, jarring his grip on Alice loose. “Lucy was her friend. She’s grieving.”

  “Lucy was a Siamang,” Moore replied drolly, shrugging away from Andrew’s hand. “And she’s not grieving. She doesn’t know how.”

  “Bullshit. She knows how to cry. Not an hour ago, both of you stood in the hallway at the barracks, acting like it was some kind of miracle.”

  “It was,” Moore said simply.

  He reached for Alice and again, Andrew caught his arm, stopping him. “You know that thing wasn’t just a monkey to her. You taught Lucy to play Candyland. I doubt it was so you could sit around and play with her. Yeah, it might’ve all just been part of your experiment, but still.”

  His voice abruptly faltered. Wait a minute, he thought, remembering the soft spot in Lucy’s skull. Her brain grew too big for her head. That’s what Alice had told him. It’s part of his experiment.

  He’d felt similar soft places along Alice’s own scalp.

  The medicine makes new nerves grow, Alice had told him. It fills in the missing places in my brain. It makes the electrical signals get to the right places.

  “It’s the same,” he whispered in horrified realization. “You gave that shit to Alice?” He gave Moore enough of a shove to send him stumbling back a step. “The same virus you put inside Lucy? Inside O’Malley? Are you out of your mind? She’ll turn into one of those…those things!”

  Moore reclaimed his footing, then bared his fists, squaring off against the younger man. “In small enough doses, your body can regulate the virus on its own. I used Lucy to calculate those proper doses to correct the neurological defects that caused Alice’s autism. Look at how much progress I’ve made.”

  “Progress?” Andrew nearly spat the word. “You’ve been carving holes into her skull!”

  “She was crying,” Moore snapped back. “You saw her—crying and laughing. Crying over you, and laughing because it’s the first time in her entire life that she’s shed tears at the right place and time. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be autistic? To have an autistic child?” He managed a bark of laughter. “No, you don’t. And spare me your bullshit, half-assed symp
athies about how you can only imagine how hard it must be, because you can’t, Mister Braddock. You have no earthly idea.”

  He shoved his forefinger out, pointing to Alice. “Look at her. She’s not grieving. She’s disassociated. Whenever she’s challenged too hard to think or feel or reason, this is what she does—she tunes out, turns off, disappears somewhere inside of herself so deeply, there’s no way to reach her. Nothing you can say, nothing you can do, not until she wants to, not until she chooses to emerge from this self-imposed psychological exile.

  “By the time she turned three years old, she’d stopped smiling. She’d stopped laughing. She didn’t cry, she wouldn’t look at you when you called her name. It was as if something somewhere inside of her had come unplugged, some vital electrical circuit that made all of the other circuits in her brain work properly. And without it, she became a hollowed out shell, a life-sized, living, breathing doll.”

  His brows furrowed and the corners of his mouth wrenched down in a frown. “Autistic catatonia, that was her diagnosis. She was so developmentally disabled and neurologically impaired, the doctors told us the most she could ever hope for was a lifelong regimen of medications. Do you know what it was like to hear that, Mister Braddock? To hear that your child is going to be afflicted with the mental capacities of a nine-month old infant for the rest of her life? To know that although you may have won a Nobel Prize for unraveling the secrets of the human body’s immunological processes, you couldn’t offer the same insight or capability to benefit your own flesh and blood?”

  His voice had grown ragged and strained, his eyes glossy in the dim light. “Do you have any idea what that’s like to know your daughter will never look at you and be able to say I love you, not just because she can’t find the words, but because she can’t feel it? It’s hell. An unending, relentless life sentence in hell. It drove a wedge between me and my wife from which we never recovered. She left me. And when she did, she took Alice with her. Less than a year later, she had Alice institutionalized.”