by Matt Handle
The northeast side yielded nothing but a few puddles where water had leaked through minute cracks in the plain gray walls and a case of the heebie-jeebies when a rat had scurried past her on the bottom floor and darted under a door that led to one of the building’s maintenance closets.
The northwest stairs, however, yielded something much more interesting. As Erika worked her way down the eight flights of steps, ducking inside each door to confirm she’d explored the connecting hallways, she discovered something she’d never noticed before. Unlike the other stairway cameras, the one pointed at the very bottom of this stairwell had a green power light, indicating it was on and potentially being monitored. Luckily, she noticed it just before descending the final turn of the stairs, thereby avoiding coming into the camera’s field of vision.
At the bottom of these stairs and directly in the camera’s line of sight was what looked like a heavy steel door and just beside that door was a computerized card swipe that bore a small light that shined as red as the camera’s shone green.
Locked, Erika thought to herself as she stood breathless in the dimly lit stairwell. Now what could be hiding behind that door that it warrants being locked away?
She looked at the door a minute longer and then made her way back to the floor above, exiting the stairs and heading for the elevator that would take her to the bio-engineering lab. Whatever was behind that door, she planned to find out.
When she entered the lab a few minutes later, Benjamin nodded in silent greeting and then led her back to his office so he could close the door behind them.
Erika blurted, “I think I found something at the bottom of the northwestern stairwell,” before Benjamin could even settle into his chair.
“What kind of something?” the old doctor asked cautiously as he sat down and met her gaze.
Erika proceeded to tell Ben how she’d spent the last two hours and about the mysterious locked door that seemed to be monitored by a security camera. When she finished, Ben heaved a sigh and folded his gnarled fingers atop his desk.
“Erika,” he began. “You’re going to get yourself killed. I warned you about going off and trying to take this on alone…”
“Then help me, Benjamin!” Erika exclaimed. “Why do you think I’m here?”
Ben grimaced and slowly shook his head. “What would you have me do?” he asked her. “I’m no burglar so there’s no sneaking inside somehow and I’m certainly not going to confront Mechler about whatever he might be hiding back there.”
Ben sat up straighter. “And neither are you,” he finished.
Erika squeezed her hands into fists and tried to remain calm despite her rising fury at the old man’s defeatism.
“Fine,” she started. “But do you agree that the door is suspicious? Have you ever been past it or even heard of it?”
Benjamin heaved another sigh but his face softened a little, seemingly satisfied that Erika wouldn’t go off and do something rash.
“No, I don’t know anything about it,” he replied. “It could be any number of things, but I do agree it’s a little suspicious. I’ll keep my ears open in case anyone mentions it, alright?”
Erika tried to put on a fake smile and then nodded her head in acceptance.
“Thank you, Ben,” she stated. “I know Albert would be happy you’re on my side.”
With that, Erika got up and left, knowing if anything was going to be done to stop Mechler, it was now up to her.
She spent the next couple hours going through the motions in her office, trying to keep up appearances in case anyone might be watching her. Erika thought she was still safe, but the more she considered the plan she was formulating, the more paranoid she felt. If everything Ben Klein had told her was true, she knew Mechler wouldn’t hesitate to kill her if he suspected she was plotting against him.
That night she ate a quick dinner by herself in the cafeteria, mostly just pushing stuff around on her tray. Then she came back to her room where she set up the laptop at her desk, turned on the reading light to cut through the gloom, and got busy.
Erika worked in robotics, but her specialty was programming. It was her job to create the software that allowed the robotic limbs they built at Biomech to receive, process, and respond to the wireless transmissions sent by the microchips that doctors implanted in the limb recipients’ brains. It was intricate, state-of-the-art work and Erika was good at it. Better than good at it, actually. She probably knew more about computer languages than anyone else in the company, even before the plague killed so many of them. Now she faced a new programming challenge, unlike any other she’d attempted, but she thought it was probably a lot easier than her day job. All she needed to do was avoid getting caught.
Her first task was to hack into the security system and add her own company identification card to the grant list for the door she’d found. That part was relatively simple, but the next was trickier. Erika assumed that unlike most of the security in the building, someone was paying attention to this door’s access logs so the last thing she wanted was for her name to show up on the list. She had to create a subroutine that would update her log entries to appear under a name that wouldn’t raise suspicions. That meant she also had to access those logs in order to find an appropriate name. By the time she’d completed these tasks, she noted that the door was used almost exclusively by a Dr. Erwin Steele; someone she vaguely recognized based on the security photo, but didn’t think she’d ever met. It was almost midnight.
She got up from her chair, stretched and rubbed her temples for a minute. Normally, Erika would have been in bed by 10, but something told her this couldn’t wait. The longer she hesitated to break into the secret wing of the building, if that was what was truly behind the door, the more she risked getting caught. After splashing some water on her face at the sink, she sat back down and got back to work.
Now that she’d created a means of access, Erika knew she had to sabotage the cameras as well. It wouldn’t do her any good to hide her name if they could see her face. The video surveillance software proved even easier to hack than the access clearance. Handled by an enterprise system that was several years out of date at this point, like virtually everything else since the plague, Erika had little trouble creating a backdoor that would allow her to shut down the system whenever she needed to.
Finally, after shutting off the camera feed, Erika hid her tracks, erasing any incriminating network logs that someone might trace back to her activities tonight. She shut down her laptop and slipped out the door. Ten minutes later, she was standing at the bottom of the northwestern stairwell and smiling balefully at the camera, its power light as dead as her poor, departed husband.
The door provided ingress without complaint. Erika took one deep breath before stepping inside and letting the door sweep silently shut behind her. What she saw in front of her was a long hallway bereft of any decoration or signage. There was nothing but stark metal walls lit dully by a few of the same type of overhead fluorescents found throughout most of the building.
She padded down the hall, listening for any sign of others, until she reached the end of the hallway and what lay past a short turn to the right. What she saw made her utter a small yelp of surprise despite her best efforts to keep quiet. She was looking at the same laboratory Mechler had seen on his display monitor earlier in the day.
The room was large, with banks of monitors and machines along each wall. Between the walls were Steele’s two dozen zyborgs strapped to their metal beds, tubes and wires still attached. It was the sight of the zyborgs that had shocked Erika. Hearing Ben describe them was one thing, but seeing them firsthand was quite another. They were indeed monsters, she thought. Slack-faced former humans, now mindless from the plague and combined with armor and weaponry that made them look more like robots than people. Most had guns in place of arms, but some had even more bizarre modifications. One had what looked like a flame-thrower for an arm and two of them had visored helmets that covered their heads and eyes
, giving them what appeared to be built-in night vision. Yet another had 18-inch buzz-saws in place of its hands.
As Erika stood just inside the lab looking at these horrible creatures, she heard footsteps approach from the hallway just around the corner. With nowhere else to run, she moved to the far end of the room and flattened herself against the wall behind a storage cabinet. She didn’t dare peek around the cabinet to look right away, but she heard someone enter the lab seconds later followed by a series of small beeps.
Erwin Steele realized that history, assuming some segment of mankind was still around years from now to write it, probably wouldn’t look back on him kindly. Using your medical skills to turn living beings into cybernetic freaks tended to turn public opinion against you. Nevertheless, Erwin didn’t consider himself an evil man. He was merely a skilled practitioner of a science some might deem morally questionable and in the employ of a man that considered those questions too pedantic to waste time on. Calvin Mechler… there was an evil man. In Erwin’s estimation, Mechler ranked right up there with the most monstrous men of power to have ever lived. That said, when your world was nothing but ruins populated by blood-thirsty monsters, you took shelter and sustenance where you could get it. Where else was he going to find the kind of accommodations Biomech was somehow able to provide? He didn’t particularly like the experiments he was currently wrapping up, but he’d already seen what happens to those that disappoint Doctor Calvin Mechler and he had no intentions of joining their ranks. Like it or not, he had a job to do.
Steele had come down to the lab late this night less out of a sense of duty and more out of paranoia. The zyborgs were as close to ready for field testing as they’d ever be, but Erwin had built in a fail-safe just in case he found himself on the wrong side of Mechler’s plans one of these days. Worrying about that fail-safe is what had gotten him out of bed for one last test before handing the mindless killing-machines over to Mechler for deployment.
Once inside the lab, Steele walked between the rows of tables, looking down at each zyborg and checking its vitals on the wall monitors. He typed notes into his handheld and if he hadn’t been so caught up in his worrying, he might have noticed Erika as she risked a glance from her hiding spot to see what he was doing. As it was, she ducked back before she got caught and she kept listening as Steele finished his rounds. Once he had looked at each of the monsters, Steele pressed another button on the device he carried in his hand and smiled in satisfaction as a low humming noise began to fill the room.
Unable to help herself, Erika chanced another peek. She saw one of the visored zyborgs had sat up on its table, its face as passive as ever, but its body buzzing with energy as it seemed to await Steele’s next command. The doctor brushed one finger in a vertical motion across the device and the hybrid monster followed his instruction, raising its left arm up in front of its body and holding it still. Steele then made the gesture in the opposite direction and the monster lowered its arm with the same emotionless efficiency. Steele repeated the test with the zyborg’s right arm.
Just before Erika pulled back behind the cabinet, she saw the doctor put the handheld device down on the table beside the sitting zyborg. At first, she thought he did it in order to check his wristwatch, but as he seemed to touch the side of the watch, the zyborg went almost completely silent, the humming replaced only by the thing’s raspy breathing. It was as if Steele had pulled the plug on the monster’s power supply. It was completely frozen, still sitting up, but as still as a statue. Worried that the doctor might see her out of the corner of his eye, Erika slipped back into the shadows, but seconds later, the humming noise returned. After that, she heard what she assumed was Steele plucking the device back off the table and a couple button clicks and beeps later, the zyborg laid back down and went quiet again. Following five more minutes of silence that seemed to stretch on for an hour to Erika as she waited breathlessly for the doctor to either discover her hiding spot or to go away, she heard his receding footsteps as he left the laboratory and exited back out to the stairwell.
She waited awhile longer in case he returned and once she was sure he was gone, Erika stepped out into the open and took a deep, shuddering breath before stifling a sob of relief. After glancing at the recently awake zyborg and confirming to herself that it was indeed back to sleep, she rushed out of the room and down the hall, stopping again to listen at the door before opening it and escaping back to her apartment.
Once safely returned to her room, Erika immediately got back on her laptop. She turned the stair’s camera back on remotely, and hoped that Steele hadn’t noticed the light being off when he’d come in behind her.
She found her heart was still pounding in her chest, adrenaline rushing through her system over the fear of being caught. She’d discovered Mechler’s secret, but now she had to decide what to do about it. She peeled off her clothes and left them in a heap on the floor as she crawled into bed. It was after 2 AM and she was utterly exhausted, but sleep didn’t come easy. She wasn’t sure if it ever would again.
Chapter 15
Sawyer, Angel, Jenny, and Tyler sat at the bottom of the subway station’s stairs, each covered in cement dust. The top of the staircase was now hidden by a pile of rubble that blocked out virtually all sunlight, leaving them in near darkness. All four of them coughed as they tried to clear their lungs. Sawyer was the first to stand up and as he did, he brushed some of the dust off his arms and shirt.
“Everyone okay?” he asked, only able to vaguely make out their shapes in the gloom.
“That thing must have taken out the entire block,” Tyler said in a shaky voice as he got up to join Sawyer.
“That plane was controlled by a pilot under orders and it was aiming at us,” Sawyer replied. “From now on, we stick to these tunnels. They should get us pretty close to where we’re going.”
“How did it even know we were here?” Jenny asked as she tried to rub the dust off of Luna, cuddling the stuffed animal in both arms.
“It might have been watching us for miles,” Sawyer answered. “Who knows?”
Angel coughed again and then spit into the darkness.
“Ugh,” she groaned. “My mouth tastes like I just ate a fistful of gravel.”
“You might have,” Sawyer said with a slight grin that he was glad she couldn’t see.
Angel ignored the gibe and said instead, “Tell me one of you grabbed the flashlights.”
Tyler pulled the penlight out of his pocket and flipped it on, illuminating the group in soft yellow light. “They got left in the Humvee, but I thought this might come in handy,” he said.
Angel smiled and joked “You’d better hold onto this one, Jenny. He’s a keeper.”
Jenny blushed, but before she could get too embarrassed, Sawyer looked at her and Angel and asked “Either of you pocket anything I ought to know about?”
“Nothing,” Jenny answered, happy to change the subject.
Angel gave Sawyer a sly look and put her hands on her hips. “Exactly where do you think I’d put it?” she asked him saucily.
Sawyer grinned as he looked her up and down, noting again that her outfit didn’t leave much to the imagination.
“Okay, just one light source,” he stated. “I guess we’ll have to make do.”
Sawyer strode away from them and toward an informational sign that stood in the middle of the platform, between two sets of tracks.
“Come here Tyler,” he said. “Let’s check out this map.”
The girls followed and all four of them crowded around the tall sign. It displayed four routes, each color coded; the narrow lines visible in the penlight’s soft glow.
Sawyer pointed at the northbound gold line and said, “This is the one we want. It’ll take us within two blocks of the CDC.”
Tyler looked at him in confusion.
“I thought you said we were going to Biomech?” he asked.
Sawyer replied “The CDC became a public/private partnership a few years ago to solve b
udget problems. Biomech and the CDC are one in the same.”
Sawyer started to walk in the direction of the rails when Tyler called toward his back “So the people that were supposed to be in charge of public health are the same ones that destroyed it?”
Sawyer smiled grimly and said, “Gotta love it.”
He walked to the edge of the platform and then crouched down to lower himself onto the rails. “Come on,” he told the others. “We’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”
The foursome began to trudge north along the underground railway, the narrow beam of Tyler’s penlight, the only illumination in an otherwise pitch-black tunnel. Debris littered the tracks, old soda cans, food wrappers, and broken glass. They moved slowly, scuffling along in the dark, trying to avoid tripping and injuring themselves. There was no way to be quiet, the sound of their progress echoing up and down the tunnel. All four of them were on edge, worried that Afflicted might lurk down here, ready to attack at any moment.
The penlight’s beam skimmed across a scraggly rat sitting atop a small pile of cardboard along the wall, its beady eyes reflected back at them as it stared hungrily. Jenny groaned in revulsion at the sight of the vermin and moved as close to the far wall as possible as they hiked past it.
In an attempt to break the tension, Angel spoke up, her voice amplified by the close proximity of the tunnel walls. “I still don’t get it,” she said. “Even if the people that sent that plane are the same ones that started all this, why try to kill the four of us now?”
Sawyer growled “I’d like to know that myself. And I plan to ask. Right before I put a bullet between their teeth.”
Sawyer’s threat hung in the air as they continued their trek through the darkness. Walking side by side and just a couple steps behind Sawyer and Angel, Jenny nervously slipped her hand into Tyler’s and after a minute or two she leaned in close to whisper, “I’m glad you brought along the light. This place gives me the creeps.”