“I don’t know, man. The only thing I can come up with is that they’re working on super soldiers or something. Why else would they have these cages in here? That could explain those guys in the pens outside, too. They’re doing some human testing stuff on prisoners. The poor guys outside probably got the wrong mixture of testosterone and pain-killers, and we’re the next crop of guinea pigs.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” John said, shaking his head. “Why would they keep so many failed attempts alive out in the courtyard. Why would they keep the evidence around and have to feed them all? You’d think they’d want to bury as much evidence as possible. If the Allies were to catch wind of this, you can bet they would start dropping bombs.”
“Maybe those aren’t failed attempts,” Moto suggested.
The two fell silent at the sound of the room’s lone door opening as a man entered. It was a tall, slender man whose ethnicity wasn’t obvious, though he didn’t appear to be Chinese. He was wearing a white lab coat and chatting away on his phone as he re-locked the door as quickly as he could with one hand, but not before the brothers saw that the door led back into the outside courtyard. He rushed over to the nearest table top and began writing furiously.
“Okay; yessir; okay.”
He stopped writing long enough to set the phone down, and switched it to speaker phone.
“…effects are not showing up where we’d expected, but it still seems to be getting out of hand. Something you’ve assumed isn’t accurate.”
The scientist sighed and answered. “The only explanation that makes any sense for what you’re describing is that DEWW must…”
The scientist gave a suspicious glance toward the caged brothers and switched off the speaker phone. The rest of his sentence was unintelligible.
After a pause, he responded, “Right, sir, the boxing thing is my best guess. If we’re right, the other camp...”
A pause.
“Unfortunately, we can’t know for sure until the hosts…”
Another pause.
“Yes sir. I will find out. If the two they sent me are indeed regulars, we should be able to find that out for sure.” His voice intensified. “There’s no reason to even consider such measures until--or unless--we know it’s already gotten that bad! I need you to make sure he will hold off until I can get the results! For God’s sake, fine, I’ll talk to him.” The man slammed the phone down on the table.
The door opened again, and an armed soldier entered the room. They acknowledged each other as the scientist continued to write. The guard was tall and built, with an assault rifle strapped around his back. He looked annoyed that the scientist didn’t offer any assistance and struggled to juggle two trays of food on one arm as he locked the door behind him. He shot an annoyed glare at the scientist as he dug for his keys. It was obvious he hadn’t been asked to waiter often. Water was dripping to the floor, and he struggled not to slosh what remained in the prisoners’ glasses.
“Sir,” the scientist spoke into the phone again, “I was hoping you had a second to talk now that everything is under control here. Yes, sir, some of the theories regarding antibodies in the plasma are still holding true. There’s still a lot we don’t know, but we’re well past the point of this just being a guess.” After a brief silence, the scientist continued. “They seem to ultimately suffer from fevers that should be fatal. The swelling in the brain causes what effectively becomes a frontal lobotomy, though some areas of the brain tend to become hyperactive instead of dormant, and the cerebrum is largely unaffected. I’m gathering my notes right now if you’d like to see specifics, but there’s another reason I called.” The scientist gathered his papers and continued his conversation as he moved outside--again, taking care to relock the door.
John remained in his original position lying on the floor, pretending to lay unconscious as the guard came near. Moto backed away as far as he could to the opposite corner of his cell from the door. John inconspicuously noted every move the guard made as he left Moto’s tray of food, and struggled to re-lock the cell’s door. When the guard came over to his own cell, John did his best to visualize the guard’s position and movements by sound alone. Upon hearing the door swing open, and the keys fall to the concrete, John knew this was going to be his best opportunity.
He instinctively pushed off from a sprinter’s starting block position full force into the unsuspecting guard. In the split second it took for the guard to shift his focus from the now unimportant food tray, John was on him. John positioned his forearms under the guard’s buttocks and lifted until the larger man’s feet left the ground, form-tackling him into a table. The guard slammed the food tray down on John’s back as he landed hard, but to no avail. The weight of the two men collapsed the lab table, scattering beakers and flasks filled with unknown liquids across the floor. John fought to hold the guard down as he frantically reached for any tool or weapon within his arm’s reach that could be used to maintain his advantage. He had discarded the Bunsen burner and crucible and was considering one of the larger shards of glass before realizing that the guard beneath him now lay motionless. As John attempted to salvage the man’s gun, he saw that one of the large shards had already lodged itself in the guard’s spine. John cautiously wrestled the rifle strap free from the man, though he acknowledged the pointlessness in his care. Even so, John gingerly rested the guard’s head back on the floor.
“Let’s get out of here,” Moto said. “I don’t intend to stick around and find out what that lab rat has planned for us.”
“Technically, I think we’re the lab rats,” John said as he stood and strapped the rifle around his shoulder.
He turned to see the key ring still lying on the floor in his cell and used it to release Moto. Without missing a beat, Moto made for the door.
“Hang on, I have an idea,” John said.
Moto nodded in agreement as John turned back, stepped over the lifeless guard, and unplugged the tubing to a nearby Bunsen burner, turning the gas up to full blast. Moto decided to ransack what he could of the lab, carelessly knocking over the flasks and jars filled with various chemicals and glancing through the incomprehensible documents as he strewed them about--many of which had large portions of text blacked out.
As John turned to ask Moto if he had anything to light the papers on fire, he noticed that Moto had abruptly halted his pillaging and was again staring past him with a now familiar, wide-eyed look of terror. John turned and looked over his shoulder to see the guard slipping in his own blood while fighting to get back to his feet. He realized his own jaw was now hanging open as well, and he noted that again his brother’s incredulous stare was more than justified. The guard groaned as he gazed around the room with a puzzled look on his emotionless face. His sullen frown was quickly replaced with a look of rage when he saw the brothers scrambling for the door, and he let out a gurgling groan that intensified into a guttural warning. The light colored pupils added an extra sense of terror in the brothers. Moto poetically rattled off a long string of cuss words as he jiggled the doorknob, trying to get the door to open. John handed him the keys, and turned to face the rapidly approaching undead guard. His steps were uncoordinated at best, as he stumbled slowly toward the two brothers.
“None of these keys are working!” Moto said in a panic.
John raised and aimed the rifle that he had retrieved from the guard before thinking better of it. He recalled the whistling Bunsen burner they’d prepared. The guard halted and began vomiting up thick, dark-colored bile. Before the ichor had finished its escape, the guard resumed his rigid stagger across the room. John let the rifle hang from its strap and reached for a nearby fire extinguisher that hung against the wall. He stepped forward and swung, making swift, hard contact with the guard’s chin. The impact knocked the guard off balance and sent him clumsily to the concrete. The man’s groans turned to muffled gurgles, and his movements became even less fluid and deliberate, though he continued in a futile attempt to return to a standing positio
n. John wailed on the guard’s back repeatedly with the heavy extinguisher and every ounce of his strength, but the guard kept fighting.
“Got it!” Moto yelled. “C’mon, c’mon, let’s go!”
John made solid contact to the guard’s head once more, sending an echoing low-pitched ring through the room. Before exiting, John jabbed the large tank at another of the gas valves, breaking it loose and sending a whistling rush of the flammable gas loose into the room. The guard was upright, and John threw the fire extinguisher at him once more for good measure as he made his way to the door.
Once outside, Moto paused to catch his bearings. The blinding, setting sun was still above the tree line, and the two took a moment to allow their eyes to adjust. A guard from a previously unnoticed guard tower yelled at the men in Chinese. Moto instinctively ducked under the cover of an adjacent building’s overhanging roof, with John right behind him, as fountains of loose sand were kicked up all around them from the hail of gunfire. Several more footsteps could be heard upstairs as numerous guards rushed into position.
“Get ready to run!” John yelled as he pointed to the nearest cages that lined the perimeter wall. He leaned out to shoot into the lab’s open door but saw that the gore-covered guard was slowly approaching and blocking his shot. John fired off a quick three-round burst into the guard’s chest. The sound of three hollow thuds told him he had hit his target, but the guard continued his slow approach.
“He’s barely even bleeding!” Moto exclaimed.
John squinted as he lined up his next shot.
“If this works, I’m gonna bolt,” John whispered over his shoulder. “You’d better be in my hip pocket if I take off.”
With a slow exhale and an almost undetectable squeeze of his trigger finger, John unleashed a perfect shot. The bullet whizzed through the guard’s left knee and into the lab behind him where it sparked off of the fire extinguisher that lay forgotten on the floor.
For a brief moment, John feared that his shot had proven fruitless, but the barely audible hissing of escaping gas intensified into a roar. John blindly reached behind him and grabbed Moto’s shirt collar as he kicked off into a sprint straight past the hobbled guard and toward the outer row of cages. A fireball blew out a shimmering wall of glass shrapnel as the brothers ducked their heads and ran as quickly as they could in the deep, loose sand. The ground seemed to tremor with the onslaught of blindly fired rounds from the guards above. The leap atop the nearest cage, that would’ve been an impressive feat any other day, felt effortless as adrenaline coursed through the brothers’ veins. The barrage of bullets miraculously missed their intended targets and struck the snarling prisoner in the cage below them as the brothers scaled the high wall.
The air cooled quickly as the setting sun lit up the horizon in a bright, blood red. The brothers ran as quickly as the loose soil would allow with an occasional bullet whistling past them from behind. As their legs weakened, more trees helped to shorten the range of the pursuing guards’ bullets until the threat of even an impossibly lucky shot seemed to have diminished entirely. The walk to and from the bar each night that normally seemed somewhat brief stretched on now for what felt like an eternity. Finally, they found themselves back at the gutted building amidst the darkness where their hammocks still hung lazily. Tucked behind the cover of their sanctuary’s logs, John struggled to catch his breath.
“Did you see the way that guard shook those bullets off like it was nothing?” John managed to say between gasps for air. “He just kept walking toward me like nothing happened!”
“You think they’re still coming for us?” Moto asked while he sat and situated his back into the opposite corner of the roofless room.
“There’s no way,” John whispered, “it’s almost dark and we’re in the middle of a cease fire. They wouldn’t chance it just for us.”
A mortar whistled as it streaked through the night sky, preceding an explosion that shook the Americans’ camp a short distance away. Several more mortars followed, lighting up the terrain as if it was mid-day. The Allies sent up a flare and opened up a hail of returning fire. Hell broke loose around the Chow brothers amidst the confusion of darkness.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
The next morning, John awoke to find Moto fast asleep in the opposite corner, drool hanging down from the corner of his mouth in an impressive strand. John thought to himself how stupid Moto had been to plug in his earbuds, and drown out the sounds of battle with his phone’s music. The cry of the falling mortar rounds had ceased long before, but a few faint cries from the Allies’ camp were still ringing out in the dawn’s early light. The continuous gunfire had also deteriorated into sporadic small arms report--all of which seemed to be coming from the Allies’ side.
John had kept his right knee bent all night to keep himself wedged into a readied, upright position against the wall. His awkward stance against the corner had caused an unbearable stasis of circulation to everything below his hip, leaving his butt completely numb. John tugged at his pant leg to help dislodge his foot from its hold, and the thousands of resulting pin pricks climbing up and down his leg forced a grimace and sharp inhalation. The sudden sound caused Moto to jerk awake and bang his head against the shelter wall.
“Is it safe to go back?” Moto asked while pulling out his ear buds and rubbing the back of his head.
“I don’t know, man. It sounds like it’s about as good of a chance as we’re gonna get.”
As the two neared their camp, the gunshots grew less and less frequent. Several pillars of black smoke became visible as they climbed the last hill, and found that the entire camp lay in ruins. Corpses littered the area. Most, it seemed, had been killed by blasts of shrapnel as well as close-proximity gunshot wounds. If there had been any survivors, it appeared that they’d left. Inside the abandoned tents, the Chow brothers found corpses of some of their friends still lying in their cots, each with a single wound to the head. Many of the wounds were obvious gunshots, but some appeared to have resulted from blows with a blunt weapon.
“It’s like they never even woke up,” Moto said upon entry to yet another tent filled with the dead.
Once he’d reached their own tent, Moto walked in further to more closely inspect a corpse that lay across a perfectly tucked mattress. John wandered aimlessly as he thought to himself, pausing occasionally to search for ammunition.
“Dammit. Garrett’s dead,” Moto said after receiving confirmation from the dead man’s dog tags. “The hell? Please come explain this to me.”
A piece of shrapnel had struck the man and lodged itself deeply into his throat--an obviously fatal wound. In addition, a bullet had been delivered straight through the man’s head. The spray of brain matter and skull fragments made it glaringly obvious that the shot had been delivered as the victim lay on his cot--a cot that the man’s body remained tethered to.
“Now why would they bring him in here after, I assume, he got the shrapnel outside, only to tie him down and shoot him in the head?” Moto asked, covering his nose with the back of his sleeve. “Trying to get information out of him or something?”
“The guard,” John answered while pointing to the small, darkened puddle that had accumulated under the mattress. “Garrett got back up just like the guard did. His blood is the exact same color. Come on, we need to find you a rifle.”
The brothers walked solemnly past a handful of men who had become their family over the past several months. Their lives were now nothing more than memories and bodies laid out on the bunks or along the floor.
Moto bent down next to his bottom bunk to see if his rifle or side arm were still stashed under the bed. He caught a glimpse of his now deceased friend Andrew in the bed just a couple of feet over from his own. He could easily recognize him because, unlike Garrett, Andrew hadn’t been shot in the head. Moto did his best to not let his eyes linger on his friend’s face. He knew that if he looked too closely, then he might not be able to hold back his swelling emotions any longer. Inste
ad, Moto respectfully pulled a sheet over the man’s body, unable to avoid noticing the gruesome damage that had been dealt to Andrew’s mid-section.
Down on his knees, Moto was glad to find some small ray of hope when he felt the familiar, cold touch of his precious rifle. “We’re in business,” he called out to John, holding up the gun.
Suddenly, he caught a hint of movement in his peripheral vision. The sheet on Andrew’s bed rose almost imperceptibly. At the squeak of the mattress, Moto instinctively leapt up and away from his bunk and into the aisle. Andrew’s lungs released a pocket of air and a terrifying groan from his throat as he became aware of the fact that someone was nearby. The man lowered his feet to the floor, allowing the saturated sheets to fall away, and turned his head to focus on the brothers. Moto continued walking backwards toward John while Andrew grunted as he struggled to stand. A large tangle of intestines escaped from his core and splattered to the ground. He took a step forward, straight into his own guts, and slipped down face first onto Moto’s bed. Moto raised his gun and released the safety but quickly realized that he could not bring himself to fire.
“Go outside,” John said calmly. “I gotcha.”
Outside, Moto heard a single gunshot, and it was finished. Seconds later, a pale-faced John emerged and stood silently by his side. After a few brief moments with no one saying anything, the men heard several voices hooting and hollering in apparent celebration. The brothers rushed towards the commotion, realizing that not everyone had left. In a cautious hurry, the brothers crept up and over the nearest hill and silently observed from the safety of the tree line. There, they witnessed a group of deserting Allied soldiers who had assembled in a circle.
The congregation of men backed away excitedly, revealing the reason for their gathering. A Chinese man with paled skin lay before them. The man fought violently from the flat of his back as the group of soldiers dispersed and hopped excitedly into their separate vehicles. As the prisoner had almost returned to his feet, one of the Jeeps pulled forward making it apparent to John and Moto that three of the Chinese man’s limbs were restrained, each tied to a separate truck. One line grew taut, and pulled the man’s feet out from under him, sending him violently back to the dirt.
And the Blood Ran Black Page 4