by A. Giacomi
“Are you sure they’re here, Dr. August?” Agent Murray asks looking perturbed by the body contact. She clearly liked her space and I remove my hand quickly.
“I can’t be sure, but Williams mentioned that they were still here. Why would he say it otherwise? He wished me luck in finding them and it will indeed be difficult, this facility is much bigger than I had imagined.”
Agent Murray calls two of her men over and calls up a map of the facility on one of the computers in the lab. She directs them to take their teams to opposite ends of the facility and that she and I would take the middle portion of the CSIS building.
***
After about an hour of searching nearly every room in the middle portion of the facility, we had encountered two zombies and no Eve.
I decide it might be time to converse, and thought it best to start with the truth. “Agent Murray I have a confession to make.”
“Well I’m not a priest, Doctor, but go ahead, shoot,” she says with a small grin.
“It’s not that sort of a confession. I’m not looking for penance; it’s more of a heads up.”
“I’m listening,” she says furrowing her brows once more.
“If we do find my dear friend Dr. Engel, you might find him a tad…” The next words are harder to say.
“Go on…” she says impatiently.
“Well, I had made him a promised. He wanted to end his life. He didn’t want to be the thing he had become and a cure was looking…well…hopeless. So I was tasked with ending his second life so that he may be free…” I hesitate again.
Agent Murray begins tapping her foot impatiently. “And?” she says sounding positively annoyed.
“And he’s going to be very angry if you find him. I didn’t exactly keep my word.”
She shakes her head at me. “I would be mad at you too, Doctor, you say he’s your friend and then you won’t help him escape his misery? Seems cruel to let him suffer further…and why? So that you won’t have to live with the guilt of killing him?”
I ponder her words for a moment and realize that the undoubtedly answer is, “Yes, I thought it would spare me my guilt…yet the guilt is still there. I let him down, of course, I know that, but that doesn’t make me any braver and if I was tasked with it again, I’m not sure I would do it even then. I am exactly as you see me, Mina, a coward.”
She pats me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, if we find him…I’ll finish this.”
That was exactly what I feared she’d say.
CHAPTER THIRTY
EVE
As I walk through a familiar hallway I see family photos upon the wall. This hallway feels endless, the pictures excessive. It feels as though I would need a decade to reach the end of this hallway. Each step reveals a new photo; I find one of my favourites, and stop to admire it. Here I am at age three playing in the dirt, ruining my father’s garden, and yet he smiles in the photo, simply pleased I had taken any interest in his garden at all. Continuing down the hall I see one of our professional family photos. The Brenner’s all dolled up and looking their very best. Winston sits like a ball in my lap and my parents stand on either side of me. We were the perfect picture of happiness.
My hands tremble as I reach for the frame. I want to take it with me, but once I catch a glimpse of my hands I lose interest in the photo entirely. The nails are black and blue, and not from the application of one of my favourite polishes, my skin is gray and green in some spots. The colour is unnatural and doesn’t match the skin tone in the photos before me, or does it? As I look closer at the photos they begin to change, my little family begins to rot and Winston is reduced to bones. I race down the hall and every photo I pass turns into miniature portraits of monsters.
Just as I begin to think the hallway will never end, I reach the kitchen. The smell of rotten meat fills the air. My mother stands by the stove frying something in a pan, it smells rancid.
“Mother?” I call out, and it seems to echo.
She does not turn, instead, she continues to cook. I approach her slowly and place my hand on her shoulder gently, trying not to startle her. When she still refused to turn I decide to spin her toward me.
“Mother, look at me please…” The face before me is no face at all. It had my mother’s eyes, but the flesh had been ripped away revealing what lies beneath all of us. I don’t scream, no, fear is not what I feel. I feel despair. The woman in front of me was, in fact, dead, I already knew that.
A scream from the garden distracts me from the partial skeleton before me. I feel a need to wave goodbye to her, and although she doesn’t speak, she gives a slight wave as I exit the kitchen and rush into the backyard. My father sits in the flower beds holding his chest and blood pours from a wound. A man stands before him holding a bloodied knife into the air. My heart races as I approach the man in a gray blood splattered suit. It looked much like he had been on a murder rampage in the past few hours. He wore more blood than just my father’s. As he turns to greet me my eyes grow wide, it’s Cam!
He stands there looking as gray as his suit, and there is deep space where a heart used to be. It seems as though it had been carved out. Gone.
“Cam, what have you done?” I cry out.
“I need a new heart, Eve. I’m dying, I’m so hungry. Please just let me have his heart.” He points to my father. “I need it. You ate mine; it’s only fair you give me a new one.”
Cam looks near psychotic as he stares at the bloody knife in his hands, but there was also something deeply sad in his eyes. I did blame myself for hurting him. I had broken his heart so many times, it might as well be gone.
“Cam, you can’t have my dad’s heart. That’s not right. I would give you mine, but it doesn’t really work anymore does it? Would you settle for an unbeating one? I’ll gladly give it to you.”
“You would?” he says pathetically.
“Of course, I would! Here take it,” I say bravely as I hold out my arms leaving my chest unprotected.
“You mean it?” he asks a second time.
I close my eyes. “Yes.”
A stabbing pain erupts in my chest and I cry out.
In that moment I am not angry or scared, I am grateful. If I could do one last thing for someone I would gladly do it before reaching my final end.
***
I bolt upright smacking my head into a pane of thick glass. My hands rush to my chest, it was still intact, for now. As I look around I notice I am encased in some sort of coffin? Box? I felt like Snow White after she had eaten the apple. Am I to find a prince next? Wouldn’t that be a lark? As I begin to chuckle I notice someone hovering above me, someone was watching me. Hands rub against the glass case removing a layer of condensation and a man comes into view. He stares at me hard and I eye him with just as much scrutiny. Who is he?
His hair is very light and his eyes burn like mine. We were of the same species it seemed. He attempts to tell me something, but the glass box seems to be soundproof. I shrug and point to me ears outlining my dilemma. Then man then begins to making a pushing motion, which only confuses me more and so I shrug again. He nods and disappears momentarily.
When he returns he has a large metal cylinder in his hand. He points to the cylinder and then taps the glass above me. He was going to break me out. I ready myself for the explosion of glass. The first hit is loud, but only a small crack appears above me. He hits again, harder this time and it cracks a little further, the third hit does it. Glass pours down onto me, a piece catches my cheek and leaves a small gash, but it would heal. I was free, but who was my unlikely hero?
He helps me out of the case and dusts me off as he continues to stare at me. I stare back, why had I not met him in the facility before? You think they would have introduced me to all the zombies down here. The man looked fairly young; my guess would be that he was in his late thirties, early forties. Just as the silen
t staring contest starts to become awkward he finally speaks.
“Eve I guess?” he smirks.
My confusion sets in and I forget to speak.
“I know what you’re thinking, how do I know you? You’ve never seen me before...right? Well, we do have something in common. A friend. Doctor Walther Hugo August, I take it you’ve heard of him?”
The mystery man had a faint accent. German perhaps? And then it dawns on me.
“Vincent?” I say nearly gasping it.
He nods. “That would be me.”
“But, but how are you here, Vincent? Does Dr. August know?”
“Yes he knows, and he owes me a very big explanation. You see last time we spoke he had promised me something very, very important and he did not keep that promise which leaves me feeling very…upset…I think that is the nicest way to put it.”
“What did he do to upset you?”
Instead of telling me, he shows me, turning the side of his head toward me. There is a small slice in his scalp just above his ear. He digs into the wound that seems to go a lot deeper than it appeared. When he finds what he’s looking for he begins to pull it out from the loose scalp flesh. A shard of glass emerges and he stares at it viciously as if it had done something to him.
“This,” he says pointing the crimson shard of glass, “was supposed to end it all. I asked Walther to press this through my ear and into my brain. It’s a long enough piece, it’s sharp enough, and I doubt he would be stupid enough to blunder it. So that means one thing…he ducked out.”
“I think you mean chickened…never mind. Look, Dr. August isn’t best known for his bravery, and if you’re his pal as you say, you’d know that he couldn’t kill you. All these years he’s been looking for you, praying for the day he could cure you. What makes you think he would end your life just when he has you back? He cares about you!”
Vincent smashes the glass shard to the ground causing me to jump. “If he cared about me then he should have done as I asked! It was a small favour to end my pain! I can’t go back to my family. I can’t go back to my old life, and I’ve already lived in this skin long enough. Eating the living is not something I want to do any longer! I hate myself!”
His screams fill the small room and his grow wilder. I knew that look, he was getting hungry.
I decide to change the subject. “Vincent, listen to me, you being here is a godsend. You may not believe it, but I need you. We need to get out of here and save my friends. If you hadn’t been here I might have been stuck in that glass case until I starved to death.”
“Can that happen?” Dr. Engel says overly elated.
“Yes, and you shouldn’t be excited about it, it’s painful, and before you can starve to death you become one of them. You know the real sort of zombies, the ones that only think of feeding, not what you and I are. We still have the ability to reason.”
“I’m not sure I truly believe that. Reason left me long ago. You’ll see, Eve, what I am is a monster, I can’t control my hunger as you say. It was a blessing to hide all those years,” Dr. Engel says shaking his head.
“To be frank with you, Vincent, I’m going to need that ferocious part of you to get out of here. So right now I only see a positive to that. Get hungry and get ready because I’m cracking that door open now!”
I don’t await his answer, I expected him to help me, why would he set me free just to leave me. If he was half the man that Dr. August described, then his desire for adventure wasn’t dead yet.
The door to this small room full of blinking buttons looked like it was made of solid steel. Looking around the room you might believe we were living on a spaceship. I feel around the door, it was solid alright. Bashing through it would not be an option. The keypad beside it would be my next guess. There were numbers and letters and the combinations seemed endless, I didn’t know how to crack codes, that was Marcus’s territory. The thought of him made me cringe. “Bastard,” I say under my breath.
Vincent gives me an angry look.
“No not you, Doctor, just that ass who put us in here in the first place.”
“Ah yes, that Agent Williams fellow…I think the proper word for him is…dick? Yes, he’s a dick.”
I chuckle, “You know, Dr. Engel, I like you already.”
After trying a few different codes like a zombie, or virus, or even our names, I decide that figuring out the code would not be possible. I was no genius when it came to this. Angrily, I make a fist and smash it into the keypad. Sparks fly as the buttons on the keypad burst and break. I managed to make a good dent where the keypad used to be. After a few more sparks and sputters, the steel door glides open. “Well, that seemed far too easy,” I say to Vincent.
We cautiously enter the hallway; surely there would be guards nearby? Yet the halls are dark and not a soul guards the entryway or the halls. It is unnervingly silent. I ask Dr. Engel to follow me even though I had no idea where out was. This was a new wing of the facility for me as well. Slowly, and stealthily we round every corner looking for company.
“Eve, everyone’s gone,” Vincent says in shock.
“That can’t be. They wouldn’t leave us. They need us.” Or so I thought.
I’m about to argue further, but a scraping sound soon fills the halls and Vincent and I are left trying to find its source. It sounds as though it is coming from everywhere. As we scan the area something begins to pour on top of me, a warm and slimy dark goop covers my hair and shoulders. My eyes dart toward the ceiling as heavy breathing and more goop follows.
“There’s something in the ceiling,” Vincent calls out.
“No shit Sherlock,” I say impatiently.
Soon the heavy breathing grows louder, it appears that there were more than one of these things hiding up there. We back away but ceiling begins to buckle under the weight. You could see it bending until the ceiling resembled a hammock and then all at once bodies began to spill from the ceiling.
“Looks like it’s raining zombies,” I say as I ready my fists.
Surely they didn’t want to eat us, we were like them, but there was something territorial about these zombies. Black ooze poured from their mouths and their grayish flesh showed their accelerated decay. They didn’t heal like we did, they didn’t act very human, in fact, they seemed very ape-like in their approach.
One by one, more zombies continue to drop from the ceiling. How many were up there anyway? They glare at us angrily.
“Vincent, I think you better get ready to smash some heads. I don’t think they like our company one bit.”
He nods and we brace ourselves for what will inevitably come next. What surprises me most is their howl before charging toward us. They sounded something like a dinosaur mixed with a banshee. The sound could get under your skin and make it crawl.
Vincent and I continue to back away as the zombies continue to charge, there would be no escape, they wanted a fight, then I guess they were going to get it!
The first gooey zombie that reaches me claws at my arms trying to remove flesh from them. I head-butt him and his forehead becomes concave rendering his body limp. The other zombies walk over him, unfazed by one of their own’s demise.
“Some loyalty,” I spit out at them.
Vincent is fighting off five of the zombies at once. He seems to be handling himself nicely, bashing brains left and right, it became clear to me that Vincent enjoyed this. Violence made him feel better somehow. The next two zombies to approach me spit black ooze into my eyes, leaving me blind for a moment. They are able to take me down and I feel something tearing at my arm as though they want to pull it off. I free my other arm and wind up to punch one of them in the head. I suppose I put too much force behind it because my fist ends up blowing through the zombie’s head and getting stuck. I try to free my hand from the zombie’s skull, but with my other arm being pinned down it was difficult to shake
free. Since I couldn’t free it, I decide to use it, smashing the other zombie’s head with his buddy’s skull.
I shake their limp bodies off of me and rise to find Dr. Engle standing in front of a pile of extra dead zombies.
“Well done,” I say as I pat him on the back. This wasn’t his first rodeo.
I retract my hand when I see that he is seething, he needed food and fast.
Before I can figure out a meal plan, Vincent is running uncontrollably down the hall. I try to keep up, he must smell something.
Up ahead Vincent bashes through security doors and voilà what do we have? A pair of guards looking mighty flabbergasted. They aim their guns at Vincent, but Vincent is far too stealthy. He knocks both of their guns to the floor without much effort or force. One guard, looking perfectly petrified, turns to run, the other is not so lucky.
I try to plead with Vincent to stop, we could have gotten information out of him, but there was no use pleading with Vincent. He was vicious in his feast, like a wild animal at a roadkill party. I watch Vincent as he slurps on the security guard’s guts and organs. He looks positively intoxicated.
“Are you quite finished?” I say in an annoyed tone trying to shield myself from the splatter zone.
He wipes his mouth with his forearm. “Nearly, yes.”
“Good because that guy you let gets away probably could have helped us get out of here! We have to get out of here fast! We’re running out of time, Vincent.”
He nods and rises to his feet.
“I understand, let’s go,” he says without hesitation, and we begin our sprint through the facility.
We halt again when we find another batch of zombies feasting on some other security guards. Bodies are strewn around everywhere; some are just pieces of what was once a human being. The white walls are coated with blood splatter.
The scene is gruesome, but at least they were occupied.
“Let’s go.” I signal to Vincent.
We walk through the bloodied carcasses and into the next sector of the facility.