by Matt Handle
Ben looked down at his feet and didn’t respond.
“You murdered friends of mine,” Angel spat.
“I’m afraid you’re been misinformed,” Mechler retorted. “I’ve never raised a hand to anyone.”
“No,” Erika said with as much venom as she could muster. “You had others do it for you. Just like you had others kill my husband. You’re the coward, Mechler!”
Calvin chuckled softly, remaining in his seat with his hands planted firmly atop the table where Sawyer could see them.
“Believe what you will,” he said. “Yes, people have been lost in the course of my efforts, but it was for a greater good, even if some of you are incapable of seeing it.”
“Enlighten us,” Erika said as she gritted her teeth. “Explain to me why you twisted our work into those things out there! Explain to all of us why so many had to die.”
Mechler looked at each of them one by one, examining their faces, memorizing every line. He knew these were likely to be his final moments and he refused to hurry it along. Fear was a thing for lesser men, but he had no wish to die. As he measured each of his accusers, he saw that he had nothing to fear from Ben. However the other three had murder in their eyes. He had to provide them with a sliver of doubt. Every second he could keep them listening was another chance to change his fate.
“Doctor Klein has already heard much of any speech I might give you,” he began. “He knows that the plague was unintentional. Your government’s intent was to further subjugate you. It wanted you to be compliant. Meek. It certainly didn’t want to turn its citizens into marauding cannibals. That fault lies at your feet as much as my own. We were contracted to create a benign virus. A virus that would be introduced into our water supply and injected into our clouds. A virus that in time, would infect every living person on the planet.”
Angel and Erika both gasped while Sawyer narrowed his eyes. Ben continued to hang his head as Mechler went on.
“Yes,” Mechler said. “By now, our plague has spread to every corner of the globe. With air travel and weather patterns, it was inevitable. But if scientists like Doctor Klein and Erika’s late husband, Albert, had done their jobs properly, all of this could have been avoided. It was their error, not mine. Instead of your friends and loved ones dying or trying to eat one another, they’d all be sitting around like happy cows, dull-eyed and pliable. Just like their leaders wanted them.”
“Once the damage was done, I merely set out to develop contingency plans,” Mechler went on. “Yes, I admit that the zyborgs are a bit macabre, but you’ve been out there. You know what it took to survive. Those monsters standing outside this door were a necessary evil, a way to protect this building and what was left of the people I was responsible for.”
Mechler looked directly at Sawyer. “Not all of us are soldiers,” he said. “So I had to create my own from what I had on hand.”
Erika had heard enough. Her rage boiled over as she raised her gun and pointed it at Mechler’s head and screamed, “None of that justifies killing my husband in cold blood, you son of a bitch!”
Before she could pull the trigger, an explosion rocked the building, the force of the blast shaking the floor so hard that all five people in the room were knocked off their feet. Erika instinctively reached out to try to brace her fall and as she did, she lost her grip on her pistol. It went clattering across the floor.
Another explosion, this one even closer, immediately followed. Cracks appeared in the walls and a new alarm joined the one that had been going off since Sawyer and Angel had arrived. This one indicated the building was now on fire.
Before any of them could react, Mechler got to his knees and grabbed the dropped gun. He then slid behind Ben, wrapping an arm around the doctor’s neck so that he could use the older man as a shield.
“I was worried my friends at Dobbins weren’t going to make it on time with that drone!” Mechler stated gleefully. “I barely had time to place the call before that door gave in.”
Sawyer growled as he got up, aimed his machine gun and started to pull the trigger. Erika yelled “No!” and threw herself at Sawyer, knocking him off balance before we could take the shot.
“He’ll kill Ben!” she shouted as she raised her arms in a pleading gesture to Sawyer.
Mechler smiled and dragged Doctor Klein up to his feet, keeping the gun against the doctor’s temple the entire way. “Listen to her,” he told Sawyer. “She knows of what she speaks!”
Sawyer stared hard at Mechler, his gun pointed right between the man’s eyes. “Why do I give a damn?” he asked. “Sometimes war means collateral damage.”
Mechler began backing away toward the exit, keeping Ben between him and Sawyer as he retreated. “That’s not very grateful,” he said mockingly. “You already got two friends of yours killed tonight. How many more are you going to make me add to the list?”
With that, Mechler made it out the doorway and into the hall. Sawyer stood frozen, rage boiling inside him as he watched the two men depart. He listened along with Angel and Erika as Mechler dragged Ben down the corridor until the sounds faded away.
After a minute of silence, Sawyer moved quickly to the edge of the broken doorframe, Angel and Erika right at his heels. He peeked around the corner and saw nothing but the incapacitated zyborgs and the remains of the desk he and Angel had hidden behind minutes earlier. Mechler and Klein were gone.
“They probably took one of the elevators,” Erika said. “We need to get to the laptop in my apartment. Hurry.”
By the time they made it downstairs and into Erika’s room, Sawyer was convinced Mechler had gotten away. It hadn’t taken them more than five minutes, but with his adrenaline pumping, to Sawyer, those five minutes had felt more like an hour.
Erika pulled up the security camera feed and scanned through the rooms and halls looking for any sign of their quarry. Sawyer and Angel watched over her shoulder as she skipped through the screens. They saw several more of the complex’s employees holed up in their rooms, but no sign of Mechler. After the first three dozen perspectives, Angel gasped and Erika gave out a small cry at what they saw. It was a view inside one of the elevators and Ben’s body lay in a fetal position on the floor, a pool of blood near his chest.
“Oh, god!” Erika exclaimed.
Angel put a comforting hand on the other woman’s shoulder.
“I should have killed Mechler when I had the chance,” Sawyer snarled.
“We’ll go to him in a minute,” Angel assured Erika as they both gazed at the computer’s image of Ben’s unmoving form. “First we need to figure out where Mechler is hiding.”
Erika began to scan through the remaining camera angles, dozens showing portions of the building that had been damaged by the explosions, many of them now full of water due to the emergency sprinkler system. Others still smoldered. Several of the screens were nothing but static. Erika assumed they’d been destroyed by the blasts, but it was possible Mechler had physically disabled some of them in his attempt at evasion. They saw several more workers cringing in various hiding places as well as most of the deactivated zyborgs. By the time Erika neared the end of the loop, Sawyer had counted 13 of the monsters including the four they’d left outside Mechler’s office. He figured the rest stood idle in rooms where the cameras no longer worked.
When Erika reached the last camera, they saw a skewed view of the lobby. The room it depicted hung sideways and one corner of it was blacked out, as if the camera’s casing had been dented or warped when it was knocked from its mount. Sawyer and Angel recognized it as where they’d first entered the building, but the room was now mostly blackened, obviously burnt by the fires from one of the missile strikes. Miraculously, they saw that Jenny and Tyler’s bodies still lay where Sawyer had left them, apparently untouched by the flames.
Sawyer felt a twinge of pain in his chest as he looked at the remains of his young friends, but then movement in the far corner of the frame caught his eye. He leaned in closer to get a bett
er look over Erika’s shoulder and he pointed at the spot as he did.
“Right there,” he said. “Something’s moving in the hallway at the far edge of the camera’s angle.
All three of them watched and after a few seconds, they saw the fuzzy, but unmistakable image of the side of Calvin Mechler’s face as he peeked around the corner of the hallway on one end of the lobby. He was looking at the exit and seemed to be gauging the danger in making a run for it.
“It’s him!” Angel said excitedly. “He’s trying to escape!”
Erika quickly changed windows on the laptop, bringing up the security software she’d hacked earlier in the night to access Steele’s laboratory. In less than a minute, she locked the building’s front door, denying all badge access. She smiled at the screen as they watched Mechler start his dash for the doors only to find them locked tight.
“He’s not going anywhere,” she said.
Erika and Angel were still watching Mechler tug on the handle to the lobby door as Sawyer slipped out of the room behind them without a word. Angel turned to look just as the door clicked shut behind him.
“Hey, wait!” she called out and then she ran to catch him, leaving Erika to keep an eye on the monitor.
As Angel entered the hallway, she saw that Sawyer had almost reached the stairwell that would take him up to the lobby and Mechler.
“I’m coming with you,” she yelled at his receding back.
Sawyer stopped and turned to face her for a second, shaking his head. “No,” he told her. “I’m not risking losing you too. This time it’s just me and him.”
Without another word, Sawyer turned away and kept moving, disappearing into the stairwell as Angel stood with a hand on one hip, stomping her boot in frustration. She knew she could chase after him, but the look on his face told her not to. All she could do was return inside and watch with Erika as Sawyer went to finish what they’d started so many hundreds of miles ago.
Chapter 20
Sawyer made no effort to hide his approach. He took the stairs at nearly a jog, the pain in his ribs and knee forgotten in the rush of adrenaline and anger that flowed through his body like liquid fire. As he neared the top of the stairs, he had to maneuver his way past some broken cinder blocks that had come loose from the walls during the missile strikes, but as he strode into the ground floor hallway that led to the lobby, he was barely even out of breath. His eyes were locked on the room up ahead, his rifle at the ready and nothing but murder on his mind.
The hall smelled of smoke and each of his footsteps landed in shallow pools of water. The remnants of the fire sprinklers’ efforts splashed to either side as he made his way to where he’d last seen the man behind humanity’s near extinction just minutes earlier on Erika’s monitor.
“Mechler!” he bellowed as he turned the corner and looked toward the exit where he’d left his two dead friends. He didn’t see his target immediately, but a split second later, a gunshot rang out as a bullet whizzed by. It was a few feet off the mark, but close enough to make Sawyer duck his head to the side as he kept moving forward.
“You’re going to have to do better than that!” Sawyer taunted as he picked up his pace, loping toward the entrance on his bad leg.
Another shot rang out, the bullet lodging itself into the wall just in front of Sawyer’s face, a puff of damp drywall marking the spot.
“I did the world a favor!” Mechler screeched from where he was crouched in the far corner of the room. “Can’t you see that?”
A series of images flashed through Sawyer’s mind. He saw his neighbors succumbing to the plague one by one. He saw the country slide into ruin as the Afflicted ran rampant, slaughtering everyone in their path. He saw Father Lynch as the bullet from his own gun took the devout old man’s life. He saw poor, sweet Jenny and brave Tyler’s lifeless bodies lying amongst the charred destruction left in the wake of the Predator drone’s missile strike outside the very doors that stood before him. Finally, he saw the ruthless, arrogant face of Calvin Mechler, justifying all of that horror in the name of science and his own inexorable pursuit of power.
Sawyer planted his feet, leveled his M16, aimed at Mechler’s head and pulled the trigger. A neat round hole appeared in the center of Mechler’s forehead and the man dropped dead, his mouth still open as if he had more to say.
“No,” Sawyer stated to the now empty room. “I don’t see that at all.”
***
They buried the bodies in the yard behind the CDC the next afternoon. Jenny, Tyler, and Ben in neatly dug plots one after the other. Angel made sure Luna remained in Jenny’s arms; the ragged little bunny nestled tightly against the girl’s chest now and forever more. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds for several minutes as Sawyer finished shoveling the dirt over top the remains of their friends, warming Sawyer, Angel, and Erika’s faces as they joined in a short prayer once the burial was complete. Nineteen other Biomech employees stood silently behind them. Finally free of Mechler’s tyrannical rule, they’d come out of the building for the first time in years, but they were all well aware of the contempt and simmering rage the big bald-headed soldier held toward them. Calvin Mechler may have given the orders, but every one of them had played some small part in the creation of the Babylonian Plague and Sawyer Bell along with his more appealing, but equally fierce partner, Angel Herrera, had come for a reckoning. They were lucky to be alive.
Sawyer was tempted to burn Mechler, his soldiers, and the half dozen remaining corpses found throughout the building near the spot where they’d been attacked by the drone, but he didn’t want to do anything beyond what they already had to attract more of the Afflicted. Given the explosions and fires last night, he was surprised to find the surrounding land clear of the mindless fiends, but he was far from convinced that more of them weren’t hiding and hunting somewhere in the city. He knew it was only a matter of time before he would have to deal with the monsters again. They may have been dying out, but like any animal, they’d struggle to survive as long as they could.
They looked, but never found the body of Erika’s husband. Whatever Mechler had done with it after the man’s execution, it was no longer in the building. This fact brought a new wave of tears and mourning from Erika, and she refused to watch Sawyer’s disposal of the remaining bodies. He buried them in a group grave, on another side of the building and far from the private plots of his friends. He did it alone. While he toiled, Angel, Erika, and the other survivors busied themselves with cleaning up the interior of the complex instead.
After his work outside was done, Sawyer joined their efforts, but did so in silence. He held a grudging respect for Erika, but wanted nothing to do with the remainder of her colleagues. The missile strikes had damaged a large section of the floors closest to the surface, both the above-ground rooms of the CDC and the first couple of Biomech’s subterranean levels. They didn’t have the materials or skill to repair all of the broken cement, bent steel, and burnt surfaces, but they did their best to make the building safe and cleaned up as much of the mess as they could.
They spent that night in the apartment level of the former Biomech facility. Just 22 people in a building meant to house over 1500. The plague, the zyborgs, and the missile strikes had killed everyone else.
Sawyer considered asking Angel to share his bed that night, but thought better of it. They both needed time to heal. He pictured her in his mind as he drifted off to sleep. For years now, he had been convinced that he was meant to live on his own, too damaged by war and too full of regret to connect with the world again. Now he knew otherwise. He might never escape the violence that surrounded him and lived within him, but he knew he no longer had to do it alone. In the midst of so much pain and bloodshed, he’d found someone to share his life with. He’d found a new reason for hope.
Sawyer and Angel stayed three more days inside the giant damaged complex, helping Erika and the others continue with the clean-up and giving their physical wounds time to heal. The messiest work ha
d been destroying the remaining zyborgs. They’d found all 20 and Sawyer had killed them one by one as they stood helpless, their dull eyes staring into oblivion, their cybernetic-enhanced bodies and plague-ravaged minds at Erika’s command. Once dead, Sawyer had removed their weaponry and took what he wanted, packing the rest into a storage room for Erika’s safekeeping.
He dragged the corpses into the same field where he’d buried Mechler and his cohorts days ago and dug a second mass grave, depositing the dead maniac’s monsters into the ground with the same lack of ceremony or marking. As Sawyer sweated and toiled over the dirty job, he reflected on the fact that Mechler had been bent on ruling the world with his enslaved army and now they’d all be utterly forgotten, ignobly dumped into the same raw earth the millions he’d killed had been rotting in since the plague first began to spread.
The next morning, Sawyer and Angel gathered as much food, water, and gear as they could carry and went outside with the rising of the morning sun. They’d asked Erika if she wanted to join them, but she refused, as they knew she would. Angel was a soldier now, bound to Sawyer in both friendship and blood. Where he went, she went. But Erika remained a scientist, rooted in the Biomech building where her husband had died and determined to work with her remaining peers in a search for some way to begin righting the wrong their research had helped bring about.
“You’ll be alright?” Erika asked as she stood just outside the front doors of the building, looking at Sawyer and Angel as they adjusted their packs and checked their weapons one last time before setting out.
“We’ll be fine,” Angel smiled before looking at Sawyer for reassurance.
“We haven’t seen any more of the Afflicted for days now,” Sawyer stated. “If we run into any on the way, we’ve got plenty of firepower to hold them off.”
“And after Dobbins?” Erika asked for what felt like the dozenth time in the past few days. She already knew the answer, but she still hoped she might get a different response if she kept asking. She still hoped they might promise to return.