by Jack Hamlyn
The next thing I knew I had lifted her up onto the counter and entered her. I rode her hard until she came again, her nails cutting into my back painfully. I kept pushing into her harder and faster as if I had to release something inside both of us. It took me a long time to climax—at least, it seemed so—and when I did, she did again, rocking and bucking and laying my back raw as she pressed herself tightly against me and bit down on my ear, making a high-pitched sort of squeal in her throat.
I dropped to my knees on the floor and she slid down from the counter, leggy and loose, like something poured from hot liquid.
Then, later, minutes or an hour, we were laying naked in the dining room on the carpet, sipping from the bottle of Jim Beam. I kept exploring her olive skin with my fingers, feeling her taut muscles and the bones beneath. She put her head down between my legs and took me in her mouth, sliding her wet lips up and down until I was hard again and then she climbed up on top of me. She pressed me down with her hands and rode me with violent gyrations of her hips, our flesh slapping wetly together. I drew her breasts into my mouth, marveling over the rose tattooed on one and the numbers 182 on the other. It took me longer to get off the second time and she shook with orgasm after orgasm, a hungry and hot thing that moaned and cried out and finally fixed me with eyes that looked black with hate.
Then we were laying there, side by side.
Sabelia was breathing hard like she’d just ran a marathon and her flesh was cool with sweat.
I can’t say how long we laid there.
Finally, still not talking about anything the other understood, we climbed back into our wet things and went back into the kitchen. By then, and I think the sun was beginning to sink low in the sky, we had started to come to our senses.
“What the hell’s going on?” I finally asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know.”
We pulled off the bottle a few more times and the alcohol seemed to help, as if it was canceling out the other drug inside us. We stood there for a time and then I heard boots out on the porch. Jimmy was standing in the doorway.
“You find a bottle,” he said, “the right thing is to share it.”
We both laughed and then stopped because it seemed to strike us suddenly that none of this was funny at all. In fact, it was scary. There was real terror going on only we’d been too stoned to notice it.
Jimmy pulled off the bottle. “We were dosed,” he said.
That much was true. I wasn’t sure about any of the rest of it, but that much was true. The question was why? That’s what I couldn’t figure and what scared me. If somebody was close enough to toss some sort of chemical grenades in our direction, why didn’t they just kill us? It would have been easy.
Because they don’t want you dead, dummy, that voice in my head said. They want you confused and trippy and disorganized. They want you to doubt what you see and hear. They want you incapacitated.
I was starting to make connections, but I had the worst feeling that what was inside us was not done with us quite yet. It was still in there, smoldering away like fissionable materials that were buried but still very active and deadly.
Sabelia started to cry.
I saw it happen. She was perfectly calm one moment, then the next she was backing away from us as if we were horrible slime-dripping monsters. She would have kept going but her ass bumped into the stove. Then she started to cry. Tears rolled from her eyes and there was a dry, wracking whimpering coming from her throat. Through the sobbing, I think she was trying to convey to us exactly what was going on, but we couldn’t understand her. When I went to her, she struck out at me like an injured animal. She sank to the floor, hugging herself, tears still rolling down her face, her entire body shaking with the fear that gripped her.
“Just leave her,” Jimmy said, leaning up against the counter. “Let her work through this. It’s all you can do.”
He looked like hell. He was pale and blotchy, eyes red-rimmed and fixed, unblinking. Clear mucus ran from his left nostril. He was shaking as if he had the chills. But was I really seeing that or was I imagining it?
Sabelia coughed, then made a gagging sound. Then she was on all fours, vomiting out a watery discharge that led to more coughing and dry heaves. Gasping for breath, she said, “I saw…I saw…I saw the hole under the ground…the dark spaces…and everyone was dead…everyone…”
Though it was nonsensical at the time, the meaning of it became all-too apparent later on. Jimmy was mumbling, barely staying on his feet. I couldn't seem to breathe so I stumbled out on the porch and I was overcome by the feeling of being watched and studied closely. It wound me up in a shroud of darkness until I stepped off the porch.
Problem was, I forgot to use the steps and I came down in a mud puddle.
Then everything went black.
DEAD IN THE HEAD
I was losing it and I knew I was losing it and that was the really scary part. They say if you think you’re going insane you probably aren’t. But what if that wasn’t true? Because it didn’t feel true, none of it felt true. Hell, the truth was a butterfly with radiant, auroral wings flitting about in the back of my head which felt like a glass jar and as subjective and fucked up as that sounds, it made sense to me. My mind had cracked open like a walnut and I knew it.
I couldn’t think straight and it seemed almost worse than before. I wasn't even sure if any of that had happened. Memories kept colliding in my head. I saw my house in Yonkers. I saw my son playing in the backyard. I saw Ricki taking the Thanksgiving turkey out of the oven. And then zombies in the streets, armies of them, ravenous hordes. Tuck’s tower and Claymore mines and Strykers rolling through the streets of the Bronx. I saw Sabelia watching me with dark eyes and Diane holding my son and Hillbilly Henry offering me meat and Sonny Boy peeling a man with a knife and Spider’s swollen, grease-shining face as he sucked the blood out of Robin’s throat. These things had happened in one way or another, but most of them were mixed up and reinvented in my head.
Finally, I got up on my knees and cried, “ENOUGH!”
That’s when some of it cleared and I saw the world again, at least enough of it to realize I was kneeling in a mud puddle, still in the yard of the house and there was the fort before me rising up on stilts.
Then, the world began to fade around me and I saw something like shining shards of glass coming at me. I blinked and they were gone. I was still in the yard, still, apparently, tripping my fucking brains out. I couldn’t trust my thoughts and I couldn’t trust my instincts. In fact, I simply couldn’t trust myself. Images of Sabelia and Jimmy passed through my head and I knew I had to get to them…but how? Wherever they were and where I was seemed miles apart.
I reached down to touch the grass to root myself to the real world, only the grass did not feel like grass but like…a floor. A smooth and polished floor that felt oddly like tiles. I could see grass, but I could feel tiles. It made no sense. There was a disconnect between my brain and my fingertips. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. It just wouldn’t come out.
Then…then I saw a room. I was in a dream or a nightmare and I saw a man standing there with white hair and the coldest gray eyes I have ever seen. There was a grin on his face that looked like stretched latex.
There were tables lined up, stainless steel tables like the sort they do autopsies on. And on each one, a zombie. They were strapped down and straining to be free, their eyes glassy and white and they all wore the shadow camouflage of ARM.
The man was studying them intently. Then, slowly, like the head of a puppet turning, he looked over in my direction and I saw that he had a carefully-trimmed steel-gray mustache. There was something inherently evil about him that made me shiver, made my bones feel cold under my skin.
Well, awake are we? Taking a little breather from it all? Good, good. He stepped in my direction and I trembled with absolute terror. He had a needle in his hand, a hypodermic syringe. I could see that it was empty. Now, my friend, all I
need is a little bit of what you have and then we can begin. That’s not asking so much is it?
He moved closer to me and I had never known so much terror before. I tried to move, but I couldn’t. My body was loose and rubbery. He came in closer with the needle and I tried to scream again, but it stuck in my throat like a chicken bone and try as I might, I could not hack it out.
No need of that, my boy, no need for theatrics. I won’t hurt you. And you can’t stop me from doing what I’m about to do, so just…relax.
“I’m crazy,” I heard my voice say. “I’ve cracked up.”
No, no, no, he said, his voice weird and wavering. You’re not mad. You’re not mad at all. At least, not yet.
Then, like a switch was flicked, the room was gone and I was laying on a bed. A cot, really. It was narrow and not terribly comfortable, but the mattress pad was soft, so soft. I had been feeling its softness for some time, not at all sure of its reality. The wild dreams or weird impressions I had been having seemed to disappear and there was a nasty, metallic taste in my mouth. And a voice in my head said, that’s what doom tastes like. Now you know. I looked around the room, but I didn’t see the man.
Then I blacked out again and the dreams came back. Actually, only one dream came back—if it was a dream. I was kneeling in the mud puddle outside the house and when I tried to move, I fell into the puddle and I crawled, crawled on my hands and knees through the wet grass, knowing I needed to get away. That nothing had ever been so important.
Then I saw boots.
White rubber boots.
I looked up and three men were standing there. They looked like spacemen, but they weren’t from outer space. Just guys in white self-contained biohazard suits, staring down at me through the plastic bubbles in their hoods. I could hear the hiss of their respirators. They were dressed like the special ops people in Et Ukhbar and probably for the same reason.
The last thing I was aware of was them dragging me off by the ankles and the sound of Sabelia crying in the distance.
Then I woke up screaming.
Maybe it was hours later or days…God, there was no real way to know. I was screaming my head off in the darkness and then a light came on and Sabelia was there, she was holding onto me and I was on the cot again in a long narrow room with a door at the end. It was a steel security door with a small pane of unbreakable glass up at eye level.
“It’s all right, Steve,” she said. “I’m here with you…ssshhh…it’s okay now.”
The first thing I said was, “Is this real or am I still tripping?”
“It’s real.”
She looked like Sabelia and felt like her as I touched her, but I was still on the edge of panic and I was suspicious of everything. There was a sheet covering me and it was damp and sour-smelling as if I’d been sweating out poisons in my sleep.
I looked Sabelia in the eye. “Where are we?”
She shook her head. “They won’t tell me. They all wear suits…like radiation suits or something. They took us from the town. Do you remember?”
I sighed. “I remember a lot of things. I’m just not sure which are real.”
“They gassed us, Steve. Dosed us with some sort of hallucinogen. Everything is kind of gray after that…but I remember the men in suits taking us away.”
“Jimmy?”
“He’s here. He’s pretty sick, Steve. He’s across the hall. We can go see him if you want. They let us do that.”
I took it all in. There was a logic at work here that my tripping mind had been unable to grasp with its hallucinations, temporal disruptions, and subjective nightmares. Things began to occur to me. I got up off the cot and I was naked.
Sabelia smiled. I smiled back.
She showed me where the shower stall was and I took a hot shower. Everything was provided for. I soaped up and washed my hair. In fact, I did it twice. I had a pretty good growth of beard but there were no razors. I stepped out and toweled off and slipped into a bright orange jumpsuit like the one Sabelia was wearing. We looked like convicts.
Then, I did some thinking.
The town, whatever it was called, had cameras everywhere. The house we found had tax document from a CDC scientist. And now guys in biosuits had taken us away to some sort of biomedical complex by the looks of it. It all fitted together.
“And they’ve told you nothing?” I said.
Sabelia shook her head. “When I came out of it, they were bringing you in. You had a bandage on your arm. They took it off and dumped you in bed.”
The man. The man with the needle. She showed me where the bandage had been. Yes, there was a tiny red needle prick on my forearm. Had the man taken blood? The syringe was empty. But could I trust my memory?
I sat down on Sabelia’s cot with her. “In the house…we…” I broke off. How did I put it? “You have a four-leaf clover on your left thigh and a snake on the right. Is that true?”
“Yes, Steve.”
Her eyes grew very sultry as she answered and I was sure that I had not dreamed we made love. Still, I wasn’t completely satisfied.
“I’m going to do something and I don’t want you to get angry, okay? It’s going to seem weird.”
“Okay.”
Her arms were folded across her chest and I moved them. Then I grasped the zipper of her jumpsuit and started pulling it down. She did not try to stop me. In fact, I think she was excited by the idea. I unzipped it to her waist and then I opened it so I could see her breasts. Yes, there was the rose on her left breast and the numbers 182 on the right. I touched them with my fingers and I could feel her begin to breathe faster.
“There’s also a dragonfly on my back,” she said, “beneath my left shoulder blade if tattoos are your thing.”
I zipped her back up. I felt embarrassed and guilty and I didn’t know all what. “Why 182?”
She chuckled. “East Tremont in the Bronx. East 182nd Street and Crotona Ave was the stomping ground of my posse when I was sixteen. We all had the rose on one tit and 182 on the other. Satisfied?”
I was. Well, I guess I hadn’t hallucinated our relations. I told her what I remembered, tactfully skipping over certain details. Then I told her that I thought this place was some kind of secret CDC research lab and that the town with its cameras and what not was probably part of it, too.
“But it can’t still be in operation,” she said. “The CDC doesn’t exist anymore.”
“No, but maybe places like this are still running, still working on Necrophage or things like it. I rather doubt they’re run by ARM, but maybe something like them or a piece of our government that’s still active. Who knows?”
“So what do they want with us?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
LOCKUP
The next morning we got our answer. It came in the form of a little angry-looking man with white hair, a thick neck, and a big cigar. He came through the door about an hour after we had our breakfast which consisted of bacon and eggs, the former freeze-dried and the latter powdered. But it all tasted good. Maybe it wasn’t exactly fresh, but I ate every bit of it and so did Sabelia.
The little guy introduced himself as Colonel Pratt and apologized for keeping us locked down in what he called “sterile confinement” but they had to be sure we weren’t infected. They had seen us enter the city and would have made contact if it wasn’t for the fighting with ARM.
“They’ve been fucking us pretty hard,” he told me, then looked at Sabelia. “My apologies, ma’am. I’ve got a dirty mouth and a dirty mind, but a clean heart and a good soul. You ask anyone around here and they’ll tell you Billy Pratt is a good sort and then some. And if they don’t, I’ll personally kick their asses.”
Sabelia was not won over by his wit. “Who are you and what is this place?”
“This place was an underground CDC research laboratory. I was head of the security contingent that safeguarded it. Basically, it’s a bunker.”
“Beneath the town?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We’re about half a mile outside town right now. The bunker is—or was—connected to the town by an underground passage. It’s flooded now.”
The town was called Baneberry, he said. All the houses and land were bought up by the government back in the late 1940s under the guise that the nearby Delaware River was going to be dammed to create a reservoir here in the valley. But it never happened, of course. Instead, back in the 1960s the NCDC—National Communicable Disease Center, forerunner of the CDC—covertly built an underground containment facility beyond the city limits and the houses were given to the employees, scientists, technicians, support staff, and the security team that kept an eye on anyone that passed through town. No outsiders were allowed to move in.
The way he described it, it was like a company town and everyone who lived there were involved with the bunker somehow.
“Down here, there’s about thirty of us left. We’re surviving the best we can. A lot of that’s due to the facility we’re in now which is nearly impregnable and a lot has to do with the doctor.”
“The doctor?”
“Dr. Cripps. He was the chief research scientist here and, as such, the head of the whole ball of wax. He oversaw everything and still does. Thank God for him.”
Sabelia and I looked at each other. The awe in Pratt’s voice was more than a little alarming like this Cripps was the fucking messiah or something. I had a feeling I’d already met him. He had to be the guy with the white hair and the cold gray eyes. The one with the needle. That part of my trip must have been real.
“In Baneberry, as you saw last night, it’s chaos. Utter chaos. There’s a group of survivalists hiding out there that ARM has been trying to throw out. Why? Because they’re guerrillas and they harass ARM units constantly. They’re led by an old school ex-paratrooper named McTeague. He’s tough and so are his people. We have a sort of uneasy alliance with him because he trusts no one.” Pratt shrugged. “Anyway, now and again when ARM rolls into town, we hit them as hard as we can. You saw that last night. We hit ARM pretty hard and they hit right back. They suffered heavy losses, but so did we. We don’t have the numbers to strike like that again.”