As I look on helplessly I noticed that Bob and some others are organized in their attack. Many of whom had been on his bus. My God this was a coup... he and his entourage had planned this! The whole thing of him slipping away is an act. He is as sentient as Michelle or I. When most everyone is dead, really dead, Bob and about 100 others stand in a line and just look at us both. Bob steps forward and screams out like an animal. He then points behind us. He is the leader of the remaining group and he is allowing us to leave. We are being banished. Steve, Mike, and Alma walk up to me and stand there. I grab Michelle and the five of us back away. I don’t know whether it is distrust or hunger but I grab Alma and tear her head completely off and eat most of her face. She was on his bus, she needed to die. Bob points and screams and we know we have to go before they change their minds. These are cannibals and are just as satisfied eating our own. There are undoubtedly more of them out there and the grim realization of a whole new enemy crept over me.
We head North while Bob and his army go their separate way, continuing to kill and eat anything moving I imagine. We have no weapons but we all trust each other. I think. After a long while we see the Pentagon and the lights of Washington, D.C. in the distance. It is getting dark and lights are on in the buildings. Not as much damage the closer we get. There are vehicles everywhere and a perimeter has been set up around the city. 4 infected people certainly aren’t getting in. No way, no how.
As darkness sets in we notice Washington, D.C., across the river lights up the whole sky. None of us feel safe so we take shelter in an office building that looks abandoned. I go to the elevator and push the button. It actually works. We ride up to the top floor, get out, and go into a large conference room. It is a lot like the ones I was used to when I worked as a DOD Contractor. Memories run through my mind but quickly leave. I look out the windows at the city. It appears that all bridges we can see, save one, have been destroyed. And the one remaining is lighted and heavily guarded. They city looks to be some kind of safe zone. The river protects it on this side, but what about the other side? Maybe another wall? There seems to be a lot going on, but we need rest. Not really sleep, I no longer sleep much. Just rest.
The sun shows strong through the window the next morning. Did I sleep? I never really know. As I look out, cars, trucks, and helicopters are all leaving the Pentagon. They are “bugging out”. Going north I imagine, to join the Northern Alliance I read about in Richmond. They couldn’t have taken everything with them, so we can still expect to find some answers. As the last of the convoy heads into the city, the bridge is destroyed behind it. Presumable to keep V-RAFs out, but who knows? We fight our own, and I bet they still do too. We will wait until tonight to head into the Pentagon, but right now we will look around for food and information here in this building. There have to be people in here somewhere. We leave the large conference room we are in through another door and to our surprise the office space is full of Healthies. FOOD! We head toward them but they are not scared like so many others we eat and kill. They look at us, then at each other, then rush us. Using whatever they have as weapons; we are outnumbered, and out cold.
We wake up in another room, strapped to chairs. An Asian woman and two men, one black and one white, walk in and sit down. There are military police lining the walls. She asks if we can understand her. Steve and Mike cannot. Michelle will not. It’s like she refuses to listen and I don’t know why. I can understand most of what she says, so I say “yes”. It comes out like a gurgling groan of course, but she knows I understood. She is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen and it strikes me as odd that I would be thinking this.
My grunts and groans while understandable by the infected, have got to be unintelligible to Healthies. She asks me to nod if I understand. I nod. She smiles and looks at the two men next to her at the table. These two men come toward me, grab my head and hold my jaw open. They reach in my mouth with what looks like a thick metal spoon and shovel out flesh, blood, hair, bones, fingernails and anything else that is in there. I can’t feel anything inside my mouth now, it is empty. The woman gives me a shot of something and they all sit back down.
She says “We cleaned out your mouth and gave you a shot of adrenaline. You should try and talk now. What is your name?”
I say “Madden. Who are you?” fairly plainly, which surprises me.
She replies “CDC. Center for Disease Control.” She goes on to explain that I and the other infected souls have an as yet incurable virus. Everyone in the building was vaccinated and cannot catch the virus from us. They are a small group that is sorry we are sick and are trying to find a cure, but it is very slow. She knows we will eat her if given the chance and plainly states we will not be given that chance. She then goes on to tell us things we do not know.
“You don’t have to eat much at all. The viral infection has left you the equivalent of inorganic life forms. While the food you ingest is metabolized into energy by your viral ridden bodies, you only actually NEED to eat once or twice a week for nutrition. However it makes you feel good whenever the virus receives energy. It stimulates your nerves with pleasure to ensure you eat to feed it. This virus degenerates some people, while some actually thrive.”
Amazing. I answer all her questions about the group and am beginning to wonder why I am being so cooperative.
She then says “Hetfield, the only way to find a cure is to do biopsies and autopsies of the infected.”
Wait, how does she know my name? When I ask she says “Everyone involved with this knows your name”. Confused, I listen.
“If you remain cooperative, we will let the woman live. The other two will be used to try and find a cure.”
Used?
“Murderer!” I scream as she walks away. “You’re going to kill them!”
She looks back, tilts her head to the side and says “You have never murdered? Besides, look at them”.
They were both drooling and Mike was biting through his own lip.
“They are now completely unaware of what is going on. You are all officially dead, even though your hearts beat within your chests. But you knew that already.”
They take our friends away and inform us we will be studied but not harmed. If we have been sick for as long as I think, she must wonder why I am still so intelligent. Michelle and I are taken to what looks like a secure hospital room. A man in a prison jump suit is thrown into our room. We attack and eat him immediately, feeding each other, Michelle and I. We are all we have and we share this nameless inmate and enjoy hearing his last breath bubble through his chewed throat. We settle next to each other to rest. I feel close to her. I try to make her feel safe.
We wake up to being scraped, prodded, and poked yet again. They take hair samples, what blood we have left, and test reflexes. We are told that the autopsies of Steve and Mike yield surprising results. The virus had infected their brains similarly to others they had examined. The virus takes over individual brain cells and takes over firing nerve impulses. It’s still our conscience, for a while at least, but virally animated. Eventually the brain is lost and the virus takes over only the most basic of instincts.
In Steve and Mike it hadn’t done this. They were still in control. However they were both mildly retarded from birth, or at least that’s what she came up with. The woman apologizes; she actually apologizes for killing my friends.
“I am sorry for what we had to do to your friends. I lost my family to the infected and I, along with everyone else in the building, lost most of my emotions long ago.”
Then she says something I can’t forget as she walks toward Michelle.
“They never should have created this damn virus”.
I feel hot all over.
I scream “WHO?!”
“Who do you think?” She looks back and says incredulously “The DOD of course.”
Then she turns toward Michelle and brushes her bloody hair back caressing her cheek. I look at Michelle. She is looking out at the Pentagon.
Our arms and legs are strapped to the chairs we are in. Michelle leans hard forward hard, her torso loudly snapping free from her arms. She stands up and sinks her teeth into the woman’s neck. Blood pours out as she rips a mouthful of flesh loose. A police guard fires and puts a bullet through Michelle’s head. She turns and stares at me, slumps over in the chair, and dies. For good.
At that moment infected burst through the door. They look familiar. Then in walks Bob. He must have followed us. They make short work of the guards, there are more infected than I can count. Bob looks at Michelle, and then looks at me. He gets me loose and grabs me by the neck and throws me against the wall. From the looks of the people with him, he has released them from pretty much the same situation as me. He beats his chest with one fist, spreads his arms and beats his chest again. I get it. He is the new sheriff in town and he has rescued our people. He has also killed everyone here that knew anything in the process.
I did learn one thing. This was created by the DOD, or at least the CDC woman thought so. But how and why was it spread? And how can it be reversed? Bob turns and walks out of the room, and they all follow him. I am alone, Michelle is dead, and I don’t have a plan. Not even a hint at one. I will have to head north alone, there is no other way. Then I hear a voice.
“It’s deeper than you think Mr. Madden. Deeper than anyone thinks.” I turn to find three men, the one in the middle talking.
“I know you can understand me. We want answers, do you? We have to go to New York. There are answers there.” He continued “My driver is outside.”
I follow them downstairs; it is a ticket to New York after all. One step closer north. We get in a car and drive down towards the Potomac River. The ride is quiet, no one speaks. When we get to a small Marina, the driver gets out and then I suddenly realize none of these people really look that infected. Maybe they turned recently? We get on a boat and I am overpowered and chained to a pole below deck.
“We think you hold the key to a real cure, Mr. Madden, so you will be coming with us. Do so without a fight and you will not only live, but you will get all your answers. Fight us and we will remove your brain, heart, and whatever else we need and toss the rest over the side. Understood Mr. Madden?” I nod. He throws some files at me. “Enjoy”. He leaves. It is going to be a long boat ride, and I have a lot of reading to do.
The more I read the angrier I become. The virus that was created is called Wrath. It was designed to be unleashed on an enemy, the Middle East in this case, in December 2012 to coincide with the whole Mayan/Nostradamus 2012 thing. It would be allowed to take over the population, and then a “cure” would be “discovered” and the good old U.S. of A. would be the hero. What a better way to win the hearts and minds of an enemy in the “War on Terror” than to save them from a disease of biblical proportion; A disease that made the dead walk and feed on the living? The Middle East would lose most of its people, “we” would be heroes, and “we” would have all the oil and adulation we could ever want. Perfect plan. Except testing in Africa, yup Africa, where the flight I read about that infected New York came from, didn’t go as planned.
The cure didn’t work. At all. The virus began to mutate so fast that it got out of control. It spread at an exponential rate and thousands were dead. Now it was clean up time. Erase the evidence. That Darfur genocide? Ever wonder why the U.S. didn’t do much to help? It’s because they had to erase the evidence, or let it erase itself. What better way to do that than to blame lawless warlords for horrendous atrocities?
And what about “us”? Americans? The plan to make sure the people here in the U.S., as well as all our allies, were safe? Give us all vaccines, of course. But it had to be secret, something not out of the ordinary, but still given via inoculation. Ever get a flu shot? Just a few million people get those, right? Unfortunately the vaccine given in the flu shot was a live virus, not dead like it was supposed to be, and it ended up infecting everyone that got the shot. That explains why I and a whole lot of other folks became infected without being bitten. It was also put in children’s vaccines with a similar result. Funny thing was that it was a dead virus before it was put in the millions of vials sent out all over the country, hell all over the free world. It just kind of “came to life” over a period of time. Sound familiar? Interesting thing was that it came to life in everyone at about the same time; right around the Winter Solstice. Unbelievable...
And what about all those people that were infected? Sometimes they got out of hand so low grade nuclear weapons would be burst over them, like back in Springfield when we had to stop driving the buses. I guess with all that was going on, nukes were the only reliable weapon.
They also burn people.
The company that came up with it, GenCap, was a Black Ops genetic research firm that was supposedly experimenting with the reanimation of genetically altered insects. Then one day, a group of animals that ate some of those test insects died and were immediately reanimated. GenCap, being the good citizens they are, immediately thought WEAPON and testing began. First on animals, then--on prisoners. Results were mixed at first. It was difficult to pass the virus through food to humans. Had to be fluid transfer. Hope was lost until an infected inmate bit one of the nurses. She died and was reanimated. The perfect, and most horrifying, method of transfer. This evidently started the whole thing.
The development of Wrath was worked on by different groups within GenCap and before you know it, we have an airliner landing in New York from Africa, infected flu shots, and an apocalypse beginning in December 2012; coincidentally the same timeframe planned for intentional release in the Middle East. Almost funny that it still happened to coincide with the 2012 hooplah... But why are we going to New York? What are they going to do with me there? How do I hold the key to a cure? Was it because I had not deteriorated like the others? Nothing, absolutely nothing, is making sense. I am tired of reading and the pain is overwhelming. I need to eat, and this pole I am chained to feels a little loose.
8
Friend or Foe
History is littered with The Damned; those condemned to live a life they never chose--as a result of the deeds perpetrated upon them by organized Government. Ask the ghost of any slave, in ancient Egypt, Rome or early century America. Ask the Jews that were annihilated during World War 2. Ask any prisoner of war. Cruelty can be accidental, or it can be ongoing. It’s one thing to make a mistake, regret it, and attempt to correct it. But the systematic destruction of the free world by a Government so greedy that it would risk the lives of its own citizens for wealth, victory, and cheap gas is entirely another. How can this happen without being noticed by SOMEONE and THAT SOMEONE saying “Stop, NO, I will not allow this to happen!” Well I have noticed, albeit to late perhaps, and I am shouting at the top of my lungs. It would have been easy to do nothing and go about my day staggering around eating whoever came my way. But I choose to horrify my enemy, the ones who did this. I will attack and leave the largest bloody mess in my wake to strike fear in them and make them all sorry they did this. Make them pray to God that I will stop, that I will just die, that it will go back to the way it was before. But it won’t. I won’t let it. I am Wrath embodied and they will pay, they will all pay with everything they hold dear and they will all travel through me, piece by piece, and be shit out like the garbage they are...
Before I can work the pole loose, the door to the room swings open and my kidnapper enters. He opens up a notebook computer and brings up a screen titled “Project Munchausen: Wrath” and sits it in front of me.
“Here are some more answers. Call it a history lesson”, he says as he unchains me.
I stare at the screen. It takes a while but I start to move the mouse and open files. I find an .mpg file called “CDC Ground Truth: Project Munchausen and the Wrath Virus”. It starts in what looks like a War Room. A high ranking official is speaking.
“Gentlemen, Project Munchausen has gone horr
ibly wrong. The vaccinations we gave in the flu shots contained a dead version of the Wrath virus and so did the vaccinations we gave to the children at schools. Unfortunately, the virus itself reanimated. It started out causing some cases of autism in juveniles, along with asthma and food allergies like most of our germ and viral warfare experiments on the public have caused in the past. Acceptable risk and business as usual as far as we were concerned. Then it went further. As of this moment, it has already infected nearly half of the country.”
People gasp. A map of the U.S. lights up behind him and red was everywhere on both coasts. Pink and white down the middle and white to the north in Canada. He continues “The coasts are hot. The plains are not; for now. As far as the rest of the planet--Africa, Asia and Europe are 80% overrun due to the failure of the Darfur experiments, and we have limited choices now”.
Het Madden, a Zombie Perspective: Book One: WRATH 2012 Page 7