by Ts Alan
But now here he sat. He did not know how long it had been since Doctor France’s visit and he did not know how much longer it would be, if at all, before the doctor’s promise would be fulfilled—one hour, three hours? Now with nothing to keep his mind occupied he tried to remember happier times. He thought of his childhood, but all in all those were not fond memories. His father had died when he was very young and his mother, who did the best to raise him after the loss of her husband, had the years taken away from her far faster than normal. She too died way too young, from multiple sclerosis, at age 58.
However his youth was not marred with all bad memories. There had been one great happiness in his teen years that had lasted into his early twenties, his band. At the age of sixteen, by sheer act of being in the right place at the right time he was hired as lead singer for the start-up pop band called Twilite. He had been at a friend’s house most of the afternoon and by evening the light mid-winter’s snow had turned into a full storm. By the time the evening came, the snowfall had grown heavy and the visibility had turned from reduced to beyond poor. The winds were stiff and frigid, blowing snow drifts into the street and making it difficult for vehicles to travel.
This was the night his friend John was holding auditions in his basement for a lead singer. Though the musicians were able to make it before the weather turned foul, it now looked like the singing auditions were going to have to be rescheduled. That is when Paul announced he could do it. His friend was surprised at his sudden and brazen announcement. Paul had never once mentioned being interested in joining a band nor did he ever once tell anyone he could sing. The truth was he never had an interest in being in a band until that moment, and though he had never sang before anyone previously, he knew he could do it. They were all surprised at his vocal talent and how many songs he knew, and he was hired that night.
There was a reason he had suddenly decided he wanted to become a singer. It was partly ego to be able to be up in front of people and performing, and then there were the girls. He hadn’t had much luck with girls; in fact he had no luck with girls, but he knew this would change once he was out front performing.
He had been right. Within a few short weeks of playing, the word got around about this fantastic new Top 40s band and the skinny, attractive, lead singer with the sexy, swooning voice. For the next seven years he would perform and never have a problem with getting a girl. However by the age of 24 he found himself in a delicate situation. After a show in Cleveland, he had taken a very attractive, thin but buxom brunette back to his hotel room. After several hours of unabated, intense sex she suddenly told him, ‘By the way I’m fifteen.’ Whereupon she got up, showered, dressed and then left. He realized then that he was getting older but the girls in his audience were still remaining young, a little too young. He realized then he didn’t want to be fifty and touring the lounge lizard circuit and sleeping with underage women. Then there was the security issue. Would people even want to come out and see him when he was fifty?
A lot of his high school friends had gone to college, gotten well-paying jobs, and were now raising families. One such friend had become a teacher and told Paul about the job security it brought him. It was what he was looking for and needed, a job that would pay well with benefits and a retirement package. He had kept the band together while attending the State University College at Buffalo and even kept performing with it the first two years he had begun to part time teach. But it all came to an end when his mother died when he was 29.
The house in Williamsville was now his along with receiving a large life insurance benefit. But now that his mother had passed there was no reason for him to stay in the Buffalo region. He had stayed only because in the last five years his mother had grown increasingly ill and he was the sole care provider for her. Now there was nothing to keep him and he wished to try and live where he had always wanted, New York City.
He now had the resources to make his desire a reality, to live in New York City. He had fallen in love with the city the first time he had performed at a small club in the West Village, the now defunct Village Gate. He would keep the house and rent it out, just in case, to fall back on if needed, but would relocate to Manhattan and try finding a job there as a teacher. It hadn’t taken him long to find an apartment; he had used a finding service and though he felt the fee was a bit high, they had found him a comfortable one bedroom in Greenwich Village. The following month he moved in and it wasn’t very long before he was substitute teaching for the City of New York. Within three years he had gone to full time. By year five he sold his house in Williamsville, took the money, and invested it in a roomy, two-bedroom townhouse in Greenwich Village. The following year he met his future wife, Karen, who had come to his school to substitute for a colleague of his. He asked her out on their first meeting; two years later they were married.
He had been expecting his first child when the plague came. Karen had been three months pregnant. He couldn’t understand why he survived being ill and she didn’t. She died in his arms, then abruptly rose from the dead and attacked him. He had been forced to bludgeon her to death with a hammer in order to survive. For two days he sat next to her corpse and cried until the foul stench of her decaying body brought him out of his daze.
He had survived by sheer will. He owned the top floor of his building. He was able to make it to the basement to find a few minor building supplies and an axe. He boarded up his windows as best he could, and then proceeded to his neighbor’s apartment to scavenge for food and other supplies. He hoped there were other survivors in his building, but knew it was unlikely. One floor at a time he used the axe to gain entry and two out of three times he used the axe on his neighbors. But the supplies he had gathered were not enough. His long-term survival depended on more food items, so he was forced to go to the roof and climb over to the next building. He did this with the buildings to each side of his, and though his encounters were few with the living dead, he had decided it was best he didn’t tempt fate; what he had gathered would have to be enough until he ran out. He did his best at barricading the roof access door and the building entry doors. He then proceeded to barricade himself inside his townhouse and wait until the noise of the outside world dissipated. It would be a long wait.
He ate and drank as little as possible to conserve supplies. He only used his candles and flashlights when necessary and tried at all costs to stay away from the windows. It had been over three months now and he had not heard any attempts to break into the building by the front doors, the roof access, or his own doorway. Although he had heard little, with exception of some high pitched screeching that resembled that of owls, he was unsure what would lie in wait for him. But as food was now running short he would be forced to leave the safety of his home and go out and seek supplies.
Gunshots, there were gunshots. Had the military finally come to kill the walking dead, or was it survivors? he wondered. But if they were survivors were they killing other survivors or the dead? Crashes from below! Someone was coming. They were breaking into the building, ripping apart his protection, making their way up one floor at a time, not stopping because they could see he had broken into the floors below. They were coming straight up for him pounding at his door, not asking if anyone was alive, just smashing his door down.
There were five of them, five armed men pointing their guns at him. He dropped his axe and surrendered; there was nothing he could do. They put a hood over his head and took him, smashing him in the skull and knocking him out.
There were others in the room when he awoke, all of them men. He had found out that women and children had been taken too, but no one had seen them since. There was a small man, a dwarf. He had been stripped of most of his clothes. His upper body was adorned with many tattoos. He had been beaten and was near death. He was unable to speak. The others told him that the man had demanded to know where they had taken his daughter. When he had done so one of the captors told him ‘the little bitch
was entertaining his boss.’ They then took the dwarf away and after an hour he was returned beaten beyond recognition and with his tongue cut out. The man who had taken the dwarf was named Renquist, or at least that was the name on his prison guard uniform he had been wearing, but no one knew for certain.
One by one each man was taken. Some returned battered and beaten, some did not. Paul was taken too, for what he found out was what his captors called indoctrination and reconditioning. It was nothing more than mental and physical abuse to beat the fight out of you and attain absolute obedience through intimidation and cruelty. He had learned quickly to succumb to their wishes. He discovered that those who had not returned to the basement were those who now followed this madman. Those who returned to the basement usually were the ones that would perish there. Every other day they would come and remove the dead and dying, only to bring more ‘fresh meat’ as replacements for indoctrination. They had taken the dwarf, the one the others called Tattoo, the following day to the ‘meat pit.’
He had decided it was better to do what his captors told him and made him do than to be beaten and tortured to death. One beating had been enough for him; he acquiesced to their authority. In doing so he hoped to find an opportunity to escape. At first he only thought about escaping and getting as far away from the city as possible, but the more he kept hearing about the captive children and young women the more angry he grew. He had overheard comments, disturbing comments—whispered words about the upper echelon and their sick and perverse acts of sexual cruelty, violence, and pedophilia—so disturbing that it made him vomit. What if his child had lived? he asked himself. What unimaginable atrocities could have befallen his child? He knew he had an obligation to escape and if possible find help for the children. His resolve was hardened when he was assigned to ‘dead meat duty.’ Someone had to dispose of those deemed unfit to serve in Stone’s New World Order, and it was Paul’s turn as part of his conditioning. However, it wasn’t the few dead from the basement that bothered him, disgusting as it was to move a bloated, fetid corpse, it was the disposal of the abused and murdered children. Though Paul never saw the bodies first hand, he knew that the bed sheet wrapped bundles by their size and weight were not those of adults. He was going to escape and find a way to free the remaining children, whether it was with help or by himself. He would see Stone and his men dead for what they were doing.
J.D. had inadvertently given Paul the opportunity he had been looking and hoping for, a way to escape Stone’s clutches. The one that called himself Colonel Plissken—he knew that was not his real name—had interceded at Astor Place and prevented his overseers from ruthlessly and brutally murdering Ryan Duncan. He knew what his chiefs were going to do was immoral but was afraid that if he attempted to intervene, he too would be killed. It was wrong but he needed to stay alive if he hoped to save the children. J.D. had spared Paul’s group, giving them warning to stay out of his territory. When J.D. told them to run, Paul was the first to flee and headed west toward Broadway. Paul needed to loose his companions if he wished his freedom. He saw an opportunity to make his escape and ran down the steps of one of the north uptown entrances to the N and R trains and into the darkness. Paul had hoped to make it to the tracks and hide in the tunnel, but had not realized that he had run to a place with no escape. It hadn’t occurred to him that the entry gate at the bottom of the stairs might have been shut and secured, but lucky it was ajar. In Paul’s hurried attempt to get inside, he had not seen the obstacles before him. As he pushed through, he tripped over the remains of a MTA worker. He stumbled, tripped over another body, and then fell face forward to the ground in the middle of the station. He scrambled quickly to get to his feet, only to find he had fallen in the midst of a myriad of corpses. He heard Stone’s men following in his footsteps down the entrance stairs. There was no time to make his way through the turnstiles, onto the platform, and down into the tunnels, and even if there had been, it appeared that access was gated off. In an effort to avoid capture, or worse, Paul quickly crawled toward the southeast stairs to make an escape, only to find it was secured. With nowhere to go, the only idea he had was to start screaming, to scream the way he had heard so many others scream during the first day when the living dead began their takeover of the city.
The clamor of fast-paced footsteps down the stairs immediately halted. Paul heard whispered voices near the bottom of the stairs, and then retreating footfalls. Paul sat hunched by the southeast exit a few feet away from the secured gate. The light that came through the large, black iron bars was just enough to give him comfort, but the style of the gate resembled those used in prisons, and he felt like a prisoner waiting in the darkness. He waited to make sure his pursuers had truly left, and that it was safe to make his escape.
With his freedom he could now make a plan at rescuing those Stone and his men held captive. However, who would help him? He knew of only one survivor group the one lead by “Plissken.” It would be a risk to approach them considering the warning he had received about staying out of their territory. Nonetheless, he knew they had a moral compass. If he sought out another survivor group it was possible they could be as equally evil as Stone’s group. If he could get this man to listen to his story, then perhaps there was a chance his survivor group would help. However that decision would have to wait. What he needed to do next was find shelter and food before dark. Before the night creatures emerged.
As he sat on the floor of the locked room biding his time, his thoughts shifted to the state of the armory. When he had been placed in custody after approaching, there had been two armed men with the colonel. There had been an intimidating, well-built older black man and a short, thinner man the colonel had addressed as Sam. He recognized the two as part of the team that had rescued Ryan. Except where were they now and the others that had been with him those two weeks ago at Astor Place? Had they truly abandoned the colonel and their armory stronghold? If they had, how were two men going to defeat Stone’s formidable survivor group?
“Shit,” Paul stated with an uncomfortable tone. He really needed to piss.
8
A Cry in the Wilderness
J.D. was overdue. He should have been back two hours ago. Ryan was worried. There was something wrong and he knew it. The strange cries that echoed throughout the streets were a sound that had a familiar tone, but never so loud or frightening. It was the reverberation of a transmute, but it had been so piercing that it had sounded as if every transmute in the metropolis had simultaneously called out in some eerie death shriek.
He went to the communications room and tried to radio J.D., but he was not familiar with the equipment, and his attempt did not elicit a response. J.D. had been right; he wasn’t prepared to survive on his own. He needed the support of others, as he had when he first banded together with other survivors at St. Clement’s Church.
Doctor France entered the radio room, and told Ryan, “I heard you attempting to contact Mr. Nichols. Are you aware you were using the public address system?”
“Do you know how to operate this equipment? The colonel is overdue, and there was this screech. Did you hear it?” Ryan asked, slightly panicked.
“As did the whole city one would surmise.”
“It was the colonel, I know it. He needs help. I have to go to the rendezvous point.”
“Don’t be so impetuous, Mr. Duncan,” France told him, and then warned. “A solo outing is ill-advised. The bad element is certainly keeping this facility under surveillance. You would make a very easy target.”
“Then we should both go. Strength in numbers, less likely to be attacked.”
“You and I both know that my strength is in my intellect, not in physical prowess. I am far from the best candidate for this quest. Besides, leaving this facility unsecured will be the quickest way to lose our refuge.”
“You’re the only one left,” Ryan reminded the doctor.
“You are forgetting Mr. Wiese. I am
sure he would be more than willing to aid you.”
“The man tried to kill me,” he reminded the doctor. “And J.D. doesn’t trust him.”
“You’re being a tad over dramatic. Besides Mr. Nichols is overly suspicious and irrational at times due to the chemical and physical changes within the frontal lobe of his brain that occurred during his transformation. His trust issue I feel in this case is unwarranted. Mr. Wiese came here not only to seek asylum, but also for our assistance in an important matter. A matter that may also relate to the people that went missing from your former survivor group.”
“And how do you know this?” Ryan asked with suspicion.
“I had a brief chat with the man during my examination of him, before Mr. Nichols struck him in the larynx and dragged him off. I think if you asked Mr. Wiese for his assistance he will be most agreeable.”
***
Paul had come to terms with Doctor France, and the doctor had given his word that he would speak with Ryan as well as J.D. in regard to Paul’s codicil in their agreement. Paul had already been incarcerated many hours before Richard France came knocking, enough so that he needed to urinate badly, but he refused to wet himself or urinate in a corner of the room. J.D. called Paul Piss Pants for a reason that was meant as humiliation. Paul had urinated himself at Astor Place when he thought J.D. was going to kill him. Paul refused to be the butt end of someone’s amusement again; especially from J.D., who had without regard callously punched him in the throat and nearly crushed his windpipe right before being locked up. Now as he felt the pain and urgency to relieve his bladder, he hoped that France would be true to his word, so he could get out and use a bathroom proper, instead of the floor.