by James Somers
There is a door at that end. I did not consider it because of the distance, but Holly is closer. She screams her head off now, trying to make a run for it. The creature runs after her in the dark. If it had any trouble seeing her, the screams take care of the problem.
In my mind a new dilemma emerges. A woman is in danger. Sure, but she is one of them. She works for MI6, the same people who are basically holding me prisoner. I don’t owe her anything.
However, this isn’t just a nameless face. I’ve come to know her a little. Holly is the only one who is truly kind to me. She talks to me like I am a person, not just some science experiment as the scientists do. She calls me Jonathan, not Patient Zero.
Yet, an opportunity presents itself. She is distracting the creature. It seeks after her now. She is leading it further away from me and my escape route here at the front of the infirmary. While it goes for Holly, I can get to my feet and dash for the door on my end. Once I lock the door from the outside, I will be safe.
My conscience battles with my natural instinct to survive. Conscience even tries to play both sides a little. If I go now, then the creature will probably become confused between the two of us. Holly will gain enough time to make it to the side door, and I will get out the front. We will both be safe.
Conscience and instinct both like this plan a lot.
Still, I know that isn’t how this is going to play out. Holly won’t make it. These things are too fast, and she is screaming too loud. It’s in frenzy. She is about to die, and I am about to do nothing and allow it.
I saw the fire extinguisher earlier when I was sitting on the bed waiting for Dr. Schuler to come speak with me. I have been here about a dozen times, since my first day.
I did not think of the extinguisher as a weapon before. It’s fastened to the wall by a metal clip. It’s the only thing I can think of, and there is no time for real strategy.
I leap to my feet and reach to the wall. It comes away in my hand easily. I can’t see the particulars, but fortunately a fire extinguisher is pretty basic. Pull the pin and squeeze the trigger.
Holly is still screaming, but she hasn’t reached the door. I see her in the light of the exit sign over her head. Unfortunately, the creature is almost upon her. All this happens in a matter of seconds. Holly will die in less time.
“Hey!” I shout with the fire extinguisher in my hands, running over to the light coming through front door.
I am keenly aware of the dead guard at my feet. My bare feet feel the wetness seeping around his body on the floor. I just can’t focus on that now.
My shadow appears on the ground with white light from the hall outside framing my form. I continue to shout. Holly stops, her attention drawn to me. The creature turns to me also. It stands close enough to Holly to be seen in the dim red glow of the exit sign above the door.
I am the one making all of the noise, so it is drawn to me. I imagine how obvious a target I must be now. My silhouette framed by the hall light must look pretty tempting. It charges across the infirmary toward me.
I fumble with the pin set through the extinguisher’s trigger. I get my finger in the ring and yank it free. A moment of fumbling with the tank releases a short burst of powdery spray toward the floor as I try to get the hose without dropping it.
The creature runs straight for me. There is nothing strategic about its tactics at all. Basic raging attack. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, coming like a mad dog.
The nozzle finally decides to comply. I raise it and squeeze the trigger. A wash of powder jets out into the creature’s face. At the last second, I realize it is still charging blindly at me, its hands outstretched.
It runs through the cloud and leaps at me, its face covered in white like a man just hit with a pie. I have no time to react. However, I am not exactly defenseless. As a younger boy, I took a couple of years of instruction in Israeli self defense. Krav Maga. Not tournament stuff, but real world applications. How to drop somebody fast and diffuse the situation.
The fire extinguisher tank remains between me and the creature. It gets a hold on me, and my instincts take over. I know enough to use its momentum against it. I turn my body as it hits me, using the extinguisher tank to push it away. There comes a quick scrabbling of limbs, fingers trying to find purchase on me. Then the beast hurtles beyond me, inertia and my instinctive maneuver forcing it to stumble on by me.
I turn after the creature and spray the extinguisher again. I scream in my fear and fury, but manage to choke it back a moment later. If this thing is blind at the moment, then I better not give it sound to focus upon.
Instead, I charge toward it, mustering my anger for the courage to attack. The extinguisher is lightened somewhat by me spraying its contents all over the place, but it is still made of metal. I bring the tank down on its head like a sledge hammer.
No doubt, I hurt it. I imagine the pain such a blow would cause me, if our roles were reversed. Unfortunately, it cares nothing at all for the pain. Undaunted, the creature rises and starts toward me again.
I pummel it across the face with a backhanded blow. I feel something give way then, hear the muffled sound of cracking bone beneath flesh. It stumbles away and then turns back. It isn’t stopping.
Another swing for a rock solid hit. The creature is disoriented now. Most likely, I do enough damage to its head so it can’t see or hear me now. Its movements are desperate, wanting to kill but unable to find its prey.
I raise the tank over my head and then hurl it low at the creature’s legs. The extinguisher crashes into its shins. At least one of the bones shatters. The fiend goes down on its knees.
The adrenaline rush has me shaking by now, my anger leading my actions more than my fear. I rush the creature, as it raises its head toward me again. Using my arm like a hook, I wrap it around the thing’s neck, getting behind it. I bring my other arm up to lock the hold and squeeze down with as much pressure as I can.
I am only a teenager, but I am pretty strong. The doctors here in the Tombs show a particular interest in how strong I am. Holly mentioned it also, making me blush a little because she is still a young woman and very pretty.
Even these things require air to breathe, and I am cutting off its supply. I squeeze harder and harder. My arm tingles numbly.
Then I hear my name being called softly in the dark.
“Jonathan, let go,” Holly says.
I open my eyes then. I didn’t realize they were closed. Holly stands in the light from the door behind me. The monster in my arms is a limp body. The arms dangle. There is no movement, no breathing, nothing now.
I’ve killed someone. It won’t be the last, but it is my first and I’ll never forget it. Probably because I am completely wrong. What happens next engraves the event in my mind.
I release the monster, panting hard with blood on my arm from where I put the choke hold on. I walk over the body, vaguely aware my Johnny gown has come untied in the back during the struggle. My hind end feels a cool breeze. I just want to get out of this room with Holly as quickly as possible.
My bleary-eyed vision begins to come back into focus. My ears ring after all the straining to choke the creature. I barely hear the movement behind me.
Pain. That’s what I realize before any other sensation. Then I am forced down with weight on top of my back. I took hits before from tacklers, but it wasn’t the kind of mad rage this thing possesses.
I hear Holly scream once and then hear the shot. A powder-flash lights up the room like a camera flash, followed by greater darkness after. I see something unexpected in that single brilliant moment—Holly with a pistol aimed right at me—but the flash forces my irises to constrict. I can’t see anything now.
Strange thing is I am not dead. If I’m shot, I don’t feel it. I saw something like that in the movies and wonder if it might be the case that I am bleeding out already and my brain has not registered the fact.
Then Holly kneels next to me, urging me to get up.
I notice then the weight of the ravenous person on my back is no longer there. I turn back to find the creature lying in the floor behind me. The light from the door reveals a single oozing hole in its forehead.
All I can think in that moment is, what a shot?!
Holly holds the guard’s pistol. It fell out of his hand during the initial attack and skittered across the floor. The creature did not pick it up, and I did not think about it at the time.
I’m not sexist or anything, but I am surprised Holly knows how to pull off a shot like this. Especially, in the dark. I am a fair gamer and have some paintball experience, but I doubt I could have done it. Okay, there is no way I could have done it, and definitely not while I am scared out of my mind.
“We have to get out of here,” Holly says.
“Wait a minute,” I say, hopping over the body to the switches on the wall. I flip them on and illuminate the infirmary again with cool white, fluorescent lighting.
Holly and I survey the scene. The first obvious thing I notice is blood everywhere on this end of the room. Between the assault I made with the fire extinguisher canister and the white powder sprayed haphazardly all over the place, the scene looks like a winter murder land. Holly’s Clint Eastwood style shot to the creature’s forehead is neat and clean by comparison.
I look at the guard. His name is Charles. I heard the other guard calling him Chuck a lot. Between Charles’ open throat and the gruesome thing that killed him, there seems very little difference now.
This thing is a person, just like Chuck, not like some monstrous shadow attacking in the dark. With the lights back on, I see we were attacked by a man. His hair was blonde once, though it is so matted with blood and filth now it is hard to tell.
He still wears an orange jumper. This is one of the victims from St. Mary’s. When Tom Kennedy changed into a monster version of himself, he attacked a number of hospital employees who tried to restrain him.
If this disease really is some kind of virus, or biological weapon, then it makes sense his victims would become infected. I assumed, at the time when I was taken into Biohazard Containment, the doctors feared I might be infected by Tom because of the fight that landed us both in the hospital in the first place.
Now, two weeks later, nothing ever happened to me—not that these doctors in the Tombs didn’t poke and prod me enough to find out. They probed me in places I don’t even like to think about, not to mention all the blood and urine and stool I was forced to give them for their tests.
Still, I feel fine, never better. I never became like Tom. I feel pretty sure, I’m not going to.
“How did he get loose?” I ask Holly.
“Thank you, Jonathan,” she says.
I blink, turning to look at her. She is wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. Holly holds the handgun in her other hand at her side.
“You saved my life,” she says.
Typical what goes through my mind at this point. When I’m trapped inside a secret government facility, where they’ve done who-knows-what kinds of tests on me, and crazed zombies have just tried to kill me. I wonder if this pretty, young woman is about to kiss me.
She doesn’t.
However, she does notice something I have forgotten about through all of this.
“Oh!” she says. “You might want to cover—”
I follow her line of sight to the wide open back of my Johnny gown. “Whoa!” I say, hopping around to close the curtain and stop the show. “Sorry about that.”
She suppresses a little laugh, becoming all business again quickly. “We can’t stay here, Jonathan.”
“Do you think there are any more loose?” I ask.
“Hard to say,” she says. “No one has come in answer to the gunshots. That can’t be good.”
I push aside the incessant alarm chime in my mind because of my near death experience with this infected hospital worker. It still resounds, though less so in the infirmary than out in the hall. As Holly notes, no one came to check on us in here. Either they don’t realize we are here—unlikely—or they are unable to get to us for some reason I don’t want to think about.
“Maybe we should stay in here and wait,” I offer. “At least we know there aren’t any more in here.”
“We can’t,” she says.
I try clumsily to get my gown tied behind my back. I manage to wrap the lower half, but I can’t reach the ones that tie between my shoulder blades. I’m already embarrassed enough about accidentally exposing my backside to this young woman.
“Holly, I’m sorry. Do you think you could tie this for me?”
“No problem,” she says, as I turn my back to her, making sure there is no gap at the bottom this time.
“Why can’t we stay in here,” I ask, ready to make the case for locking the doors at both ends and waiting these things out until somebody comes to rescue us.
I only half register her gasp.
She holds the two sides of the gown open, not tying them together.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, turning around.
She lets go of the gown, taking a step away from me. Holly looks stricken. Instinctively, I glance down to the gun in her hand.
Holly says, “You’ve been bitten.”
From Russia with Love
1 Day Earlier
Vladimir Nesky arrives at SVR headquarters located in the South-Western Administrative Okrug in Moscow. Passing through an ID checkpoint without complication, he parks his new Mercedes-Benz S550 in one of the parking garages available. Stepping out of the car, he closes the door and raises the key fob close to his lips, speaking his private code word in Russian. The onboard computer in the car recognizes not only the word, but the particular characteristics of the voice giving it. The doors lock, and the alarm system activates.
He glides through the garage level to the elevator that will lead him up into the Office of Operational Planning. Vladimir was requested by Mikhail Fradkov personally. He carries with him a priority one security clearance microchip embedded in the fat pad behind his left iliac crest. This chip is encoded to pair with his retinal pattern.
Vladimir ascends in the elevator, wearing a custom fit Brioni Vanquish III in gunmetal gray, valued at $45,000. His dark dress shoes by Testoni are valued at better than half this amount. The Russian likes fine things, and he is willing to do what it takes to pay for them.
Risking his life on a regular basis certainly does not seem an inconvenience to him. He is the best at what he does, and his superiors arrange for him to be paid exceptionally well for doing it. Why should he not enjoy the fruits of his labor, even if this usually means someone loses their life in the process?
A double harness holds his twin P220 Sig Sauers comfortably beneath his coat. They serve him well and remain his favorites. He almost feels naked without them tucked beneath his arms. They are perfect when Vladimir wants to get up close and personal with your marks. And a silenced .45 caliber weapon is nothing to sneeze at. He never uses more than one slug to the head, but he usually throws in a body shot gratis, just to be sure.
Vladimir has done this sort of work for as long as he can remember. As a prepubescent boy, he was inducted into one of Russia’s eugenics programs. He left one of his country’s many orphanages and forcibly entered into service.
Over the next few years, he was conditioned to forget his given name. A number was assigned to him and it was by this number he responded during all of his training. Tests were conducted and drugs were administered. He became stronger and faster than was possible by natural processes.
All he knows of the treatments he received is what he learned from a scientist years later. The man was one of his marks. Strange that his superiors would send him to kill a man who was present during the course of Vladimir’s training. Nevertheless, whether by oversight or miscalculation, it was the case.
Vladimir recognized the scientist. He never knew his name during his time in the program. However, Doctor Emil Kurst, since retired, was attempting to
defect to the United States.
Knowing this as a rare opportunity for information he could obtain nowhere else, Vladimir took the man into custody first. Secreted away to an undisclosed location, he politely asked for everything the doctor knew about the program he was a part of years earlier.
At first, Kurst remained unwilling to talk. However, Vladimir knew a hundred ways to make a person spill his most intimate secrets. After several tortuous hours of persuasion, Kurst told him everything he knew.
Satisfied with Dr. Kurst’s confession, Vladimir let the doctor go. He still remembers Kurst’s face as he waved him out the door. The old man simply couldn’t believe it was over. He was going free. He even offered a half-hearted apology to Vladimir for his part in the experiments the boy had undergone.
Magnanimous, the Russian assassin accepted his apology, even shaking the man’s hand. Three days later, Kurst’s financial institution released the entirety of his savings to his new offshore account. He purchased a ticket on a small passenger plane and left his home in Moscow for the last time.
Just as he took his first step onto the stair leading up to the hold of the airplane, Vladimir killed him with a .50 caliber round to the head from his own Barrett M82A2 bullpup, fired from the shoulder at a distance of five hundred and fifty yards, using a Leupold Mark 4 scope. It was a beautiful shot. In Vladimir’s estimation, the old man deserved nothing but the best.
Of course, there was no way in the world the good doctor was going to be allowed to defect. This had nothing at all to do with his involvement in Vladimir’s young life and the terrible rigors he had endured during that time. It was only because Kurst was determined to become a potential threat to his superiors. His execution had been set.
Once Vladimir is set to purpose, he does not stop until the task is completed.
In a way, he feels the old man would be proud. In Vladimir, at least, his training produced as efficient a killing machine as they ever hoped for. What more appropriate way could the doctor leave this world than by the hand of his own creation?