The Chronos Plague (Book 1): No Time Left

by Talluto, Joseph

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Are you nuts? It will take way too long to get in there,” Conner said.

  “Maybe.” I went over to the sink and found a leftover bread knife. I went back to the wall and dig away at the drywall surrounding the lock. After a minute, I made a hole large enough for my hand to pass through. I reached around and found the back of the panel. There was a small box back there, and I used the bread knife to open it up. I had to be careful since I didn’t want to cut any wires. Once inside, I tripped the maintenance switch and the door swung open.

  “How in the hell did you do that?” Firch asked.

  “Take notes, junior. Worked with a guy who worked with a guy who installed these. Learned a few ways to bypass them. Can’t do it in a hurry, but if you have the time, it can be done,” I said. “Shall we take a look?”

  The stairwell was dimly lit by a single bulb, and it descended into complete darkness. It was telling that between the three of us, all intelligence agents, that no one was really in a hurry to go down those stairs.

  Finally, Conner stepped up. “For Christ’s sake, fucking nerds went down these stairs all the time,” he said suddenly. “Let’s go.”

  Firch and I shared a look, and we followed down the stairs. I pulled a small penlight out of my pocket and waited for Conner to stop. He did about two floors down, and that’s when I turned the light on.

  “Think the nerds got scared of the dark, too?” I asked.

  “Nerds are people, too, you know,” Firch said. “They just want to be loved like anyone else.”

  Silently, I gave Edmund an A for sarcasm on that one. Conner wasn’t so nice. He glared at us both and pounded down the stairs, determined to be first to find whatever was lurking down here.

  We went down enough stairs to get past the fourth floor, and still we went down. I figured, by counting the steps, we went another two floors, although we didn’t pass any doors to floors. Finally, we hit the bottom, and there was a large steel door to greet us with imposing silence. We were surrounded in darkness, and even looking around with the meager light I had, I could see there were very few lights down here. It would be very dim around here even with all of them on.

  “Well, Elliott, you planning on knocking or will you just go right in?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you go first, since you’re the brainiac with the light in his pocket?” Conner asked.

  “If you say so,” I said. I tried the door handle and it opened easily, swinging wide.

  The first thing that hit us was the smell. It was the sickly sweet smell of decay, but it wasn’t overpowering. It was just kind of there in the background, like a lot of things had died in this area, but they had managed to get the stench under control. I walked into the room and shined the light around. The first thing it crossed was a large table. It was a specimen table, but it was larger than any I had seen before. It had a drain and water supply, and large lights were suspended from the ceiling. There were large Velcro straps hanging off the sides, and it was the sight of those straps that really gave me pause. What were they holding down on that table?

  “Mac, shine that light over here,” Conner said.

  I did as he asked and suddenly there was dim red light everywhere. Conner must have found a light switch of some kind. I’ll have to say the red light didn’t make the place look better. There was a set of cabinets along the far wall, and four workstations that had computers on them. One had a laptop, and Firch saw it first so he took it. On the far wall, there was another steel door, and this one had deadbolts on it.

  “Wonder what’s behind door number three?” I asked rhetorically.

  Firch walked over to it and I saw by Conner’s small wave he managed to find something to look over when we had the time. Firch looked through the small window, and waved us over.

  “There’s something moving in there. Do you see it?” he asked.

  I looked through. “Nothing I can see. You sure?”

  “Only one way to find out.” Edmund unlocked the door and pushed it open.

  The smell hit us harder, almost a physical thing that pushed us back. Conner coughed and Firch shoved his sleeve into his face. The decay was harsh, but wrapped in the stench was an emptiness I had never experienced before. It was as if the room had loosed a hopelessness, rushing past us and racing out to the world. I had the crazy thought that perhaps we should just close the door and leave. But since we were so close, we may as well see the last thing this place was hiding.

  Firch walked through the door first, and I followed, Conner staying out in the lab area. The room was vast, with a large open area in the center. All along the wall were large cells, big enough for five men each. There were no facilities, no beds, nothing that would indicate they were for people, so I wasn’t sure why they were needed. Maybe they were large animals. That would explain the specimen table.

  “Oh my God, there’s people here!” Firch exclaimed. “Look, in that cage! That must have been what we heard in the air vent!” He went over to the far corner where it looked like two people were sitting down with their backs against the wall. When Firch approached their cage, they looked up shakily.

  “Firch, wait!” I called out. “This a bio lab! You don’t know why they are there!”

  My warning came too late. Firch opened the door and stepped in, walking over to the two. From where I stood, it looked like they were a man and a woman. Outside of that, the light was too dim and red to make out any details.

  He went over to the two of them and squatted down in front of the woman. Both of them put their arms out toward Firch and he patted their hands as they gripped his shoulders.

  “It’s going to be okay, we’ll get you out of here,” Firch said.

  The woman looked up at him and then lunged forward, pulling him toward her at the same time. The man did the same and both of them bit deeply into either side of Firch’s neck.

  “Aaaaahhhhh!” Firch screamed, trying to pull off the two of them. He was off balance, and tried to stand, but he wound up falling into them, which only increased their grip on him. Blood sprayed all over, adding a deeper red to the walls.

  “Firch! Jesus Christ! Conner!” I called out, running over to the cage. The man saw me and climbed away from Edmund, standing up. He locked eyes on me and started forward, slapping his feet on the ground and he did.

  “Son of a bitch!” I said. I put two bullets in his chest, throwing him backward. He went down and I shifted my aim, putting a bullet in the woman. She let go of Firch and he slid to the floor. From where I was, he was already dead, bled out from two gaping holes in the sides of his neck.

  Conner came rushing in at the sound of gunshots and skidded to a stop outside the cage, his gun was out and eyes took in the scene.

  “What the hell? What happened to Firch? Who the hell are these people?” He fired off questions faster than he could wait for answers.

  “I have no idea, but they took out Firch like…like…” I started to answer but I was distracted by the fact that the two people I just shot were getting up off the floor.

  “What the fuck?” Conner asked.

  I closed the cage door and slide home the bolt. The man came walking toward me again, and stopped at the bars. His companion came forward and joined him, reaching through the steel, trying to get at us. Her teeth were black with blood and her eyes stayed fixed on me. I could see the bullet hole in her chest, and her male friend sported two. One was right where it should be, over the heart. Neither of these two should be standing.

  “What the hell am I looking at, Mac?” Conner asked.

  “I have no idea. What the hell were they cooking up down here?”

  “Why aren’t those two dead? I see the shots. That man should be deader than Edmund, no pun intended.”

  “Something is seriously wrong here,” I said. I looked closer at the woman, staying out of her reach. Her skin was pale, mottled under the red light. Her eyes were the thing. They looked at me but there was nothing th
ere. There was no light, no intelligence, nothing that told me she still had a soul. Her eyes were dead.

  I slowly raised my gun and put another bullet in her. This time, I deliberately aimed at her heart. She fell back, the .45 hollow-point obliterating her heart. I waited with my breath held and let it out slowly when she started to get up again.

  “Holy hell,” Conner said. He went over to the man and this time he put a bullet in the man’s head, sending a nine millimeter through his melon like a thunderbolt. The man’s head fell back and the rest of him followed, falling like a cut tree. We waited for ten minutes but the man never got back up.

  I looked over at Conner. “Okay, well that’s a relief of sorts.” I put a hole in the woman’s forehead and she dropped to the ground, never to get up. I figured it was the least we could do for Edmund Firch.

  I looked at the other cages. How many more had been in here? How many were here against their will? I was starting to see why this place was so secret. There was no way any government would allow for any sort of human experimentation.

  “Mac?”

  I turned back to Conner and he was facing the cage where we had left Firch. The two bodies in there were where we had left them, but another person was standing. Edmund Firch was on his feet, standing by the cage bars, looking at Conner.

  “What the fuck?” I asked.

  “Christ, look at his eyes!” Conner said.

  I’d seen the same look in the woman’s eyes, and they were as dead as hers.

  “How is this even possible?” Conner asked. “I mean, this is completely against all laws of nature. Nothing comes back from the dead! Nothing!”

  “Calm down. There’s got to be an explanation for this. But we have to get out of here. I don’t know how any of this is transmitted, but I’m hoping like hell it’s not contagious or airborne,” I said.

  “What do we do about Firch? We can’t leave him here,” Conner objected.

  “He’s dead. That’s not Firch anymore,” I said. “May as well put a bullet in him so he’s no longer a danger to anyone else.”

  “I can’t do that. How are we going to report this?” Conner said.

  “Maybe you’re right. We should just leave him here and call it in, letting them know what happened and where they can find him,” I said.

  Conner let that one sink in. “Okay, maybe this might be pretty hard to explain.”

  “I’d say we get our facts right, figure out what the hell was going on here, and then let people know after we’re back on friendly soil,” I said.

  “Deal. Let’s get out of here,” Conner said.

  I grabbed the laptop Firch had secured and we went back through the experimenting door to the other room. The specimen table looked a lot more sinister now that we had an idea of what they were creating. The lingering questions were of course how, and why.

  We went back up the stairs and did another sweep of the facility, looking for anything that might give us an idea of what had been happening here. I found a small bank of lockers and in one of them I found another flash drive. This one I think might have more answers than anything else because it was taped to the top of the locker. Someone with nothing to hide didn’t do that sort of thing. I did wonder why they didn’t take it with them, but the easy explanation was they never got the chance. Everyone might have gotten the call the same day – Don’t go to work, you’re all fired. Go home.

  Conner and I left the facility as the sun was starting to flirt with the evening sky. We had spent nearly the whole day underground. As we drove in silence, I was running the gambit of questions about what had happened. What were they doing down there? What had they created?

  Most importantly, though, was a single question.

  Did we just kill two very real zombies?

  Chapter 7 – 7-8 Months ATEOTW

  There are those who will tell you that walking beats riding, that taking the time to look at the world as it slowly moves past allows you to appreciate the beauty of the world.

  Those people are idiots.

  I had spent enough walking in my lifetime to know that most of the time you just get to where you are going that much slower. A ride is a ride is a ride, and at my age, I appreciate them all.

  My current ride, obtained after a successful stakeout of a high-rent subdivision of Alpharetta, was taking me toward the northern end of Georgia in style. I’d never driven a Cadillac SUV before, and I had to say, they were nice. This one had lots of appreciated bells and whistles, and I really enjoyed the full tank of gas. I could have chosen the other car, a three-series BMW, but this one suited me a little better. I did have to shoot a family of zombies to get it, but I’d been doing that for a while now. My boat took me to Route 23, then I had to ditch it since I ran out of water. I spent the next week heading north, grabbing what rides I could, taking them as far as the gas in their tanks would get me, and then getting another. A motorcycle took me the furthest, and that was only a hundred miles. But it got me to the outside of Macon, where I managed to get a decent meal at a Waffle House. The batter was still good, and lighting a fire under the iron made the thing work, sort of.

  I didn’t trust the smell of the pecans, so I had to go without. This apocalypse was truly hell.

  I’d spent the better part of a week and a half getting around Atlanta, and in all honesty, the highways choked with cars wasn’t much different now than it was back when things were less zombified. Even the corpses in the cars somewhat resembled the commuters of the past.

  I had learned that the highways around major cities were usually choked with cars and death. People trying to get out, accidents causing delays, tempers frayed to the breaking point by fear and frustration, and the whole thing goes up. People were armed and would kill each other. I think more people died on the roads from other people than they ever did from zombie attacks.

  I was on the side roads, working my way through the subdivisions and towns of northern Georgia. It was a literal maze of roads leading all over the damn place. It didn’t help that it was hilly as all get out, and forward progress was marked by a lot of up and down. It was also a lot of going around cars, zombies, and the occasional animal.

  I didn’t see much in the way of organized communities; they must have either retreated into the hills or they were actually all dead. I was driving through a wealthy part of the state, with the houses being the four-car-garage variety. There were several estates that were obvious by the gated driveways, and the horse farms were easy to spot with the fences all around. I didn’t bother going see if there was anything available at one of those. In their rush to leave, people left their animals to starve and I wasn’t in the mood to see that. I’d seen enough of it already. I was looking forward to finding a place for the night, and maybe picking up some supplies. I was okay, I didn’t need to ration, but anything extra would have been welcome.

  I pulled off on a side road, into what looked like some larger homes. I went to the back of the subdivision, where I could see people coming if needed. I didn’t see any zombie activity, but that meant nothing these days. It seemed like more and more they were hiding themselves, coming out when prey walked by.

  I pulled up to a large house, partially hidden by trees. I left the car and approached the home, taking my time, walking around slowly, checking the house and windows to see if there was any activity. I saw some furniture moved around, and it looked like there were some bags on the counter, but everything looked quiet. I tried the downstairs door and found it open.

  So far so good. The basement level was finished and it looked like this was an entertainment room of some kind. There was a bar, a large screen television, and even a couple of stand-up arcade games from the eighties. I snagged a bottle of good bourbon from the bar and took a quick look around. There was a guest bedroom and bathroom, and a utility area where there was a deep freeze. I knew better than to look in there.

  Upstairs, I found a house that had all the signs of a struggle of some sort. Furniture was moved
where it shouldn’t be and there were dark spots on the wall that looked like they could be blood. I looked in the bags on the counter and found a literal treasure trove of canned and dried goods. I left them there, and decided to go look upstairs.

  The staircase wound upward in a long spiral, and I noticed small dots of blood that went up the stairs, and as I got higher, the blood spots became blood splotches, and then there was blood all over the floor. It covered the carpet, parts of the walls, and even the doors.

  I pulled my carbine up and checked the magazine. The first door I tried was a bedroom, and yielded nothing more than more blood. The next door was the same, and the final door, the one all the blood trails led to, was the one I was actually nervous about opening.

  I pushed the door open with the barrel of my gun, and took a step back. I was expecting a mess, but I wasn’t expecting an abattoir. There was blood everywhere, which actually surprised me in that there was any left. Two small corpses lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, and in the bed was the sprawled shape of a man. The mother, or what might be left of her, was in the bathroom, her legs sticking out of the doorway. Bits of flesh and blood decorated the walls, and I was pretty sure there was a finger on the dresser that probably didn’t start life there as a decoration. The copper smell that one never gets used to was nearly overpowering.

  I exhaled the breath I was holding. “What a mess,” I said out loud.

  I immediately regretted my noise when all four corpses stirred, turned their heads to look at me, and slowly started getting to their feet. I didn’t wait for them to get themselves set. I put a bullet in the two kids on the floor; they were the slowest getting up. The dad crawled toward the edge of the bed and promptly fell off onto his face. I put another bullet in the back of his head then turned my attention to the mother who was charging me. I pulled the door closed and let her scratch and bang at the door for a moment. I turned the knob and then quickly forced the door in, knocking her back to the floor. She was quicker than I was used to and I barely got my rifle in line to pull the trigger. The bullet caught her on the side of the face, and tore a large chunk out of it. She survived and tried again, only this time I got close and shoved the rifle into her eye, pulling the trigger and sending her over the divide.