“Yes, sir!”
Several voices in the crowd rose above the murmur. “Thank you! Thank you!”
A woman pushed closer and asked me, “Who are you people?”
I looked to Thomas. If I told them what he’d done, all the goodwill I’d got going might evaporate and they could turn into a killer mob. “I’m a doctor. I’m one of the people who’s trying to fix this,” I said.
Rigg pulled me toward the exit. A smattering of applause started at the back of the crowd. The clapping grew louder as I stepped out of the terminal and onto a helipad. As engine warmed up and the rotors spun faster, the noise of the machine drowned the applause. I almost felt good for a moment. Then I ripped the hem of my dress on something as I climbed into the helicopter.
Chapter 12
DANIEL
The zombies were still coming. I knew that was so because when the victims stopped screaming, I heard the sounds of zombies howling in delight. Their joy at slaking their nearly unquenchable bloodlust rose to our ears. It wasn’t a cheer. That would be too human. No, these were the howls of a wolf pack at the scene of a kill, marking their territory.
I don’t know what was more chilling: listening to the celebration of the victors or the fact that I understood. The meek would not inherit the Earth. The future belonged to the zombies. Even as my mind reeled and rebelled against this knowledge, my heart pounded and my blood ran hot at the thought of joining my brethren in my new tribe.
Picasso made me want to join the feeding frenzy. It was a yearning that penetrated my guts and chest. What little humanity still remained made me cold in my bones.
I thought of all the criminals I’d met who were good fathers and mothers. The stereotypes will tell you criminals are terrible parents and that’s not all wrong. However, most bad parents bound for jail really do love their kids. They just don’t have the skills or brain power to do the job right. Many of them are trying really hard but, as my first partner often said, “If their brains were gunpowder, they wouldn’t have enough to blow their nose.”
The cannibals pounding up the stairs in search of trapped prey were still humans on the inside, just as I was. My father saw something good in my mother that I could not. Maybe it was because he knew her when she was younger, happier and at her best.
It made me think of an incident with my mother when I was seven or eight. One day, like many other days, my mother and I had a particularly nasty argument about something, I can’t remember what it was about. She’d chased me with a wooden spoon, spanking me and not stopping until I ran into my room and threw all my weight against the door. I cried and cried, terrified to come out until my father got home from work. I hated my mother so much I hoped she’d die. Soon after that, she got her first cancer diagnosis.
When I turned 25, I decided I was done with traditional religion and became devoted to Dudeism. It’s more of a lifestyle than a religion, but I figured most of life’s big questions were answered well enough by Jeff Bridge’s character, the Dude, in The Big Lebowski. After a hard day on the job, I got a lot of comfort from drinking White Russians.
When I was a kid, I didn’t get my religion from a goofy movie. I believed and, after my mother died, believing was torture. Had God finally answered a boy’s prayer? Terrified that was true, I was tormented. Had I killed my mother by wishing hard? Eventually, I confessed my crime to my father.
“Cancer killed your mother, Dan. Not you,” he assured me. “Nobody’s that powerful.”
“Do you think Mom being like she was … could she have given it to herself? Or made it worse?”
“You mean — ”
“She was mean, Dad.”
“She wasn’t always mean.”
“She was mean to me.”
“I think she’d say you often gave as good as you got. People don’t get along all the time, that’s all. We can’t read each other’s minds, can’t always find the goodness. You and her? You were just gears that didn’t mesh. It happens. Just because you’re family doesn’t mean relationships work. That’s a myth. I don’t get along with my brother. It broke my mother’s heart that Jim and I fought all the time but we just couldn’t find enough in common to even talk.”
“You never liked Uncle Jim?”
“I can’t remember ever liking him, no. To me, he’s a jerk with a caustic sense of humor. He gets along with plenty of other people, though. So do I. Nobody is one thing, Dan. Personalities come together and seem to make one person but I think that’s not true. We all have dark thoughts sometimes.”
“You don’t.”
“Sure I do. I don’t like the way your mother acted sometimes, but I know that’s not all she was.”
“What was she then?”
“We’re all different people on the inside. I read about it in Reader’s Digest. Everything we think we’re thinking, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We aren’t in control of our ideas. Thoughts are just the little bit that bubbles up to the surface. We do lots of things and we don’t even know why. We like who we like and what we like and we don’t know why that is. You don’t like beets. I love them. Who can say why? Don’t blame yourself for a single thought, Danny. You didn’t give her cancer. Cigarettes probably did that.”
“But I wanted her to die. Really bad. I did.”
“I want to win the lottery. Really bad. But here I am, still driving an old Honda Civic. Don’t worry about it. You aren’t in control of everything. I hardly think anybody’s in control of anything.”
As the sounds of anguish and bloodlust reached through St. Michael’s hospital, I decided Dad had been right about that. We try to change things around the edges, but really? Chaos reigns.
Chapter 13
CHLOE
My parents took me on my first ride in a helicopter when I was seven. We’d flown above Niagara Falls for a quick tour. I hated it. As soon as we’d lifted off, it felt like my stomach got yanked down into my ovaries. Lifting off in the air ambulance from Pearson, nothing had changed. I still preferred airplane wings and a more gradual ascent.
As we rose higher, rotor blades clattering loudly, Toronto’s many lights still burned. I found that reassuring. People were up and watching the news in the pre-dawn hours. It would have been beautiful if not for the insane reasons everyone was up, suffering worry and insomnia. I wondered how many were, at that very moment, hoarding supplies or nailing boards across doorways? Was the crime rate climbing yet? How long before somebody got shot or beaten for breaking a store window so they could load up on candy bars?
The 401 and the 427, blocked and barricaded, were a stagnant river of cars and trucks. Torontonians had been turned back or they had abandoned their vehicles. Some headlights and taillights still burned but I could see no movement along the major arteries of the city.
“Dr. Robinson?” Rigg touched my arm.
I repositioned my headset so the mic was by my mouth. “I was just thinking about all the people trapped down there. Toronto’s a beautiful city from a few thousand feet up. You’d never guess what’s happening downtown.”
He didn’t seem to register what I’d said. “Help me understand your research.”
“AFTER, Artificial Facilitation for Enhanced Response. When I came onboard Prometheus Rembrandt, they had a small Artificial Intelligence Division. I do my best work alone but the division has quadrupled in size since I joined the company.”
“And you’ve never visited the Echidna Lab?”
“Mine is a specialized department within the AI division, Dr. Rigg.”
“You’re saying you didn’t know your company had a weapons division? Doesn’t every big company of your sort have one?”
“I’m isolated from the crowd, working on the West Coast. Part of my deal was I wouldn’t get drawn into management and administrivia. I love my lab. Thomas’ people manage the day to day.”
“Unusual, isn’t it?”
“Is it? I don’t want to major in my minor is all. I’m good in the lab. That’s where
I’m most effective.”
“So are you an introvert or a hermit?”
“Hermits are generally considered crazy so I guess I’m an introvert.”
“Where do you work on the West Coast?”
“Victoria. I wish I was on Vancouver Island now. Being on an island far away sounds very good.”
“And AFTER is a bioengineered stem cell? Have you run any experiments that mimicked Picasso? No negative outcomes?”
“Nothing like that. What do you know about Picasso, or … no. What do you not know about Picasso that I can help you with?”
“We don’t know enough about Picasso’s durability outside a host. The SARS virus can last up to a day on a plastic surface and up to four days in human waste. During Toronto’s SARS crisis, I was the one who came up with the idea to constantly wipe down the elevator buttons. Probably saved a lot of lives.”
I was sure now that my impression of Rigg was correct. He was a smart guy but he was precious about making sure everyone knew he was the smartest boy in class.
“Tell me more about AFTER,” Rigg said.
“Sure. Here’s the goal: take a patient with a spinal cord injury. Inject AFTER’s nanites into the injured area to bypass the communication breakdown and you’ve got spinal nerve conduction again.”
“So it’s similar to stem cell research.”
“My nanotech optimizes biological potentials. It could speed up cognition, for instance. One day we’ll be able to dispense with IQ testing by using a simple skin conduction resistance test. The less time it takes for an electrical charge to travel from one electrode to another on the human body — if we can index and perfect it properly — could determine each individual’s intelligence quotient without the cultural biases inherent in traditional IQ testing.”
“That’s interesting, but help me with the relevance to the weapons division.”
I shifted my eyes to Thomas, thinking my boss might want to jump in. Instead, he stared at the floor. He seemed determined to pretend he’d barely had anything to do with hijacking my research for nefarious purposes.
“Since AFTER facilitates neural conduction, it should be helping people, not making them violent. Think of my work as microscopic robots manufacturing more tiny robots to do what cells can do, only better. My tech works on templates present in the tissue you inject it into. The aggressive behavior we’re seeing must be happening because the nanotech is perverted, modeling on the brain parasites used in the weapons program.”
“I see. How do we shut it off?”
“There’s no one locus of control, no queen bee to tell the rest of the colony what to do. The nanites work together as an egalitarian community. That’s why the programs I use are specific, targeting health problems and stopping production as soon as the medical issue is resolved. The weapons program let the nanites run amok.”
I paused to look at Thomas and he met my eyes for the first time since we boarded the air ambulance. “As for how my research fits with super brain parasites, you’ll have to ask the man who stole my work for that purpose.”
“Not stolen. Adapted. We’re all part of the same company and we used Dr. Robinson’s research to enhance — ”
“To weaponize,” I corrected him.
“To weaponize brain parasites. Dr. Hamish Allen was our senior researcher in the Echidna lab. Without the parasites, we had a hard time getting nanites across the blood-brain barrier. What started out as a transport solution for the Picasso One strain became an evolutionary, no, a revolutionary step to aerosolizing the Picasso Two strain. The parasites did more than escort the nanotech across the blood-brain barrier. They improved the weapon’s range and efficacy.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing, Thomas,” I said.
“He’s got a point,” Rigg said. “If Picasso hadn’t gotten out of the lab and started killing people across downtown Toronto, you’d probably be up for a Nobel eventually.”
“A neurologist named Moniz received the Nobel for what he called the leucotomy,” I scoffed. “His perfected technique was used 5,000 times after he won the prize. Only later did medical ethicists figure out that his brilliant innovation, the lobotomy, was a very questionable thing to do. Take the damn hint, Thomas.”
My boss reddened and yelled over his headset’s microphone so loudly Rigg and I cringed. “It’s so easy for you, isn’t it, Chloe? No shareholders to answer to. Just go to your lab and let me worry about budgets, getting things done, nuance — ”
“Nuance is what got us to this place,” I said.
The pilot came on the intercom, silencing us all. “Would you guys knock it off, please? I’m trying to fly, here! ETA to St. Mike’s, two minutes. Go to your neutral corners and shut the hell up. Please. And thank you.”
Just before we landed, the pilot clicked the intercom again, “Lady and gentlemen, I’ve radioed the Toronto Police Services contact that we’re on approach. The officer reports that the riots have spread to St. Michael’s. Inside the hospital.”
Makes sense, I thought. Inside hospitals is one of the first places diseases go to spread.
Chapter 14
DANIEL
All my life, I tried to take responsibility for my actions. It’s a core value that made me what I am. In high school, if I caught the edges of a conversation where someone was talking shit about someone else, I assumed I was at fault somehow. I thought everyone was talking about me, judging me or waiting for me to mess up. I should have been blameless, but I’d failed to secure the Box. I had one job. I hadn’t liked how my staff sergeant had interpreted the order, hated how he’d shot civilians in the lab. But by not being smart enough or harsh enough, I’d messed up and Picasso had spread.
It was a curious feeling to be in the middle of the action but strapped to a gurney. I’d tasted human flesh but, in the battle for St. Mike’s, I wasn’t running any humans down, tackling them, taking victims to the floor and feeding. That’s what I saw in those hospital corridors as Shelly Priyat wheeled me to the elevator that would take us to the helipad on the roof.
I saw zombies chasing patients. I glimpsed Don, the big cop, hammer an elderly woman to the ground. The poor lady had gone zombie. Still, it was a terrible sight to see. With the savage blow he delivered to her face with his steel baton, the old woman’s teeth flew out. I think most of those teeth were false, but they weren’t all dentures.
She went to her knees, clutching her bleeding mouth. Then she rose again and tried to bite the big cop. She managed to clamp down on his bare forearm but she had no teeth to break the skin. It should have been a comedic scene. It wasn’t. It was equal parts pathetic and terrifying.
In the TV movie series, The Stand, there is a brief scene at NORAD. The plague is spreading and the base's military personnel start to realize they’re infected and doomed. I saw it a long time ago. There was one detail in Stephen King’s masterpiece that always stuck with me: a junior officer in the control room. The actress in that scene was a background player. She had no lines. All she had to do was cough. The other detail that stayed with me was she was absolutely gorgeous. Curly dark hair, buxom, stunning and sick. Looking back on it, I’m sure the director chose that actress as a message to the audience: No one is too pretty to die. No one is safe. Ever.
I thought of that actress again when I saw a beautiful young nurse taken to the floor by three zombies. That nurse would not be going home tonight. She would either be devoured screaming or become terribly wounded before becoming a cannibal herself. As I was wheeled away, I heard her screams die in her throat. I don’t think she was one of those chosen to join the horde.
At first, because of my guilt, I thought it was my duty to take in whatever I could, to witness whatever horrors transpired. Maybe to look for clues to end the apocalypse, probably just to punish myself.
There is only so much horror one person can withstand. As Shelly Priyat wheeled me to the elevators, I abdicated my responsibility. I squeezed my eyes shut to the horrors that happened w
hile we escaped the slaughterhouse that St. Mike’s Hospital had become. I could close my eyes but I couldn’t block out the sounds of anguish as death and torment echoed down the once pristine corridors.
Chapter 15
CHLOE
We’d just touched down on the roof of St. Michael’s Hospital when a far door opened and two cops emerged wheeling a gurney ahead of them. The cops were a large man and a female officer wearing a gas mask. He bled copiously from several wounds on his arms and face.
“Stay in the chopper!” Rigg ordered. “Let them come to us. Pilot, don’t shut down your engine. We are not staying!”
“Roger that, sir. I’m not an idiot,” the pilot replied.
Frantic, the officers wheeled the gurney toward us. Between the rising wind and the rotor wash, the gurney was buffeted like a sail as they rushed along a catwalk. One of the medevac’s crew climbed out of a jump seat behind us and opened the door.
At that moment, a dozen people burst from the far door and ran toward the helipad. No, I was mistaken. These were not people. They were a crazed mob whose jaws dripped with fresh red blood.
The male officer, bleeding and staggering, turned to face the onslaught, blocking the catwalk with his body. He drew his sidearm and fired into the group of attackers. Three went down with the first three shots. He missed with the next shot as a wiry young man in scrubs dodged and leapt.
The cop wearing the gas mask sprinted as best she could as she pulled the gurney behind her. When she arrived at the helicopter I could barely make out what she was saying. Between the rattling din of the helicopter blades cutting the air above us and how the gas mask muffled her shouts, she had to repeat herself twice before the medevac’s crew member nodded and relayed her message.
The NEXT Apocalypse (Book 2): AFTER Life: Purgatory Page 6