by Rockow, B.
Gorud turned to leave the cell. Just as he was about to step out, Savannah spoke up.
“Bring me a Bible,” she said. “I need the Word now more than ever.”
Gorud stopped and turned back to the inmate. “Of course,” he said gently. “We have the Bible that you brought with you on the bus. We will retrieve it now.”
Savannah’s face contorted in an impish grin. “And bring me a TV. I want to watch the news. You know, to see what’s going on out there in the world.”
Gorud smiled. “Yes, of course,” he said. “You will be happy to know that the media is still very concerned with your whereabouts. You have become something of a sensation in your society.”
“What would they say if I returned?” Savannah said.
Gorud shook his head. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Savannah. There are very strict orders, coming down from high places, that you are to be kept in this cell indefinitely.”
Savannah shrugged. She let out a loud belch. The cramps in her belly tightened until they burned. The worms were digesting the human flesh at a rapid pace. Her hunger was already growing again. “Yes, of course,” she said. “I understand.”
“Very good,” Gorud said. He took another step out of the cell.
Before he closed the door, Savannah had one more thing to say. “Wait, before you go, I have a quick question.”
“And that is?”
“This facility is in horrible shape,” she said. “It’s derelict. What did this place used to be, anyways?”
“From what I understand, it was an insane asylum.”
“An insane asylum,” Savannah repeated. Her stomach clenched and heaved. “Very interesting. One more question, if you don’t mind.”
Gorud’s patience was starting to wear thin. He was expected on a conference call with the results of the experiment in less than three minutes. “Yes, what is it Savannah?”
“What city is this abandoned insane asylum located in?”
Gorud turned to the guard, and back to the inmate. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know,” Savannah said. “It’s just important that I know where I am. It will help me sleep better at night. Otherwise I’ll feel like I’m just lost on this big rock we call earth, lost in a horrible dream that I can’t wake up from. You know?”
“We are about two hours northwest of Detroit in rural Michigan,” Gorud said. “Just outside of a town that you call Middleton.”
“Middleton, huh? Never heard of it.”
“We will bring your Bible and TV shortly,” Gorud said. “Until then, good day.”
Savannah studied the features of the giant as he stepped out of the cell. There were two guards posted there with him. Three giants in total. She vowed not to wither away in this cell. She didn’t have any idea how long they’d let her last down here. In her mind, there was no better time to escape than now.
Savannah jumped up from the ground and pounced on Gorud, just before he left the cell. She dug her teeth into his neck. Thick blood oozed from Gorud’s jugular. The Orobu guards readied their assault rifles, waiting for an opportune time to shoot.
Gorud writhed in pain. He easily flung Savannah off from his shoulders. He grabbed his neck as hard as he could, putting pressure on the wound so he didn’t lose too much blood.
The guards let off several rounds from their rifles. The chaos resulted in terrible aim, however. Savannah was hit a couple times in the limbs, her left forearm and right thigh, but nothing fatal. The surge of energy she was experiencing from the new colony of worms in her body gave her a burst of stamina and agility.
She booked it as fast as she could around the corner of the corridor. The guards chased after her, but Savannah’s sprint was much faster than theirs. Before the Orobu guards knew it, she was gone.
The guards returned to Gorud to tend to his wounds.
“You let the Christian escape,” Gorud said. The giant had wrapped a makeshift tourniquet around his neck to stop the bleeding. “This is utter failure. Now I have to report this to Radoula and Boul. Our whole operation could be in jeopardy.”
Chapter Sixteen
A Curious World
This was the dawn of a new age.
The Orobu zombies, all sixty thousand of them, were living out in the open now. Half of them were deployed in the United States. The other half were dispersed in strategic outposts throughout the rest of the world. Major urban centers on every continent had become de facto concentration camps. The people were told that the cities would keep them safe.
The cities of Los Angeles, New York, Moscow, Paris, London, Manila, Jakarta, Rome, Sydney, Beijing, Mexico City, New Delhi, Bueno Aires, Lagos, and dozens of others all became strategic operation centers for the Orobu.
The Orobu had already bullied the heads of state of the major industrial and militarized nations. Every nation cooperated under threat of a rampant, pandemic spread of the M-Worm. It was clear to the leaders of the world that human civilization had turned onto a course that could not be avoided. The zombies were no longer going to live in the shadows. Ten thousand years of human striving, building, exploring, inventing were now in the hands of the Orobu.
There were pockets of resistance. Various factions throughout the world, many which had been enemies before the rise of the zombies, banded together in the name of resistance. They were a ragtag bunch of criminals, bandits, terrorists, outlaws. But respectable men and women joined the ranks, too. They had nothing left to lose. They fought for the fate of the world. They were not going to let these zombies, these monsters who rose from the pits of hell, to squander the future of their children, their grandchildren.
The Orobu pitied these humans. With the advent of the M-Worm, the front lines of the war shifted from the territories of nations to the terrain of the human body itself. Not a single Orobu soldier died while obliterating the ranks of the resistors. All they had to do was unleash the M-Worm by planting an infected human among them. Thousands would die within hours, as the once loyal and committed comrades turned against each other in fits of cannibalism.
Video recordings of the pandemic spread of the worm among the rebel forces were broadcast throughout the world. Each urban center was bombarded by images of humans who had taken a stand, ripping each other up for morsels of flesh and brains. This pacified the throngs of humans who packed into the overcrowded cities. If they stayed, and kept quiet, with their heads down and their eyes forward, the Orobu promised they would be spared from the horrors of the M-Worm.
Little did they know that the camps were built to harvest human bodies in the most efficient way possible.
On August 3rd, 2015, full martial law was declared in the United States. President Angus made the announcement. During the broadcast, representatives from the Orobu elite stood by his side. This made it official: the Orobu were here to stay.
Citizens were subject to quarantine in the jails and prisons across the country that were modified to become internment camps. This would protect them from the rapid spread of the M-Worm.
At first the camps were welcomed. The news convinced the American public that the worm would become an epidemic. If authorities did not act swiftly, society would devolve, crash, and burn within the span of 72 hours. The entire nation, from the skyscrapers of Manhattan, through the corn fields of Iowa, to the rainy forests of Oregon would see utter human destruction, they warned.
It wasn’t hard to convince the American public. All they needed were images, stories, and sound clips, all of it played over and over and over again. Even the critical minded bought into the irrational fear of a worm that turned a normal, breathing human into a full fledged cannibalistic savage. All media outlets broadcasted non-stop footage of people turning stark raving mad, bursting into banks, schools, and homes to cannibalize anybody they found there.
The American citizenry welcomed any relief from the onslaught of the random killings. They frantically boarded trains, airplanes, and convoys of buses headed to the camps tha
t littered the country. The camps promised security and safety from the contagion.
For those that resisted, local authorities conscripted the aid of United Nations soldiers, who operated under the command of seasoned Orobu tacticians of war. A special act of Congress gave the UN authorization to operate in the United States for logistical missions. UN soldiers manned strict checkpoints that sprouted up on every major thoroughfare in the nation. Travel between cities was absolutely forbidden, except for authorized transport to the camps, and the delivery of goods.
There were battles of resistance, led by ragtag groups who operated with different objectives and ideologies. Each group was summarily outgunned and outnumbered by the UN troops. The resistance groups practiced urban guerrilla warfare tactics, which were effective at first, but eventually failed due to infighting and poor tactical and strategic planning. Those that were successful were flagged and targeted by systematic aerosol flybys containing the M-Worm.
They didn’t last long.
By August 17th, two weeks after martial law had been declared, nearly seventy percent of the United States public found themselves in a camp. The inmates of the camps were driven by their guards into forced labor. They tended gardens, cleaned the grounds, and worked on projects that would turn the camps into self-sufficient nodes of survival.
Nobody had a clue as to when the quarantine would end. The Orobu didn’t plan to keep the humans in the camps indefinitely. Their plan was much more nefarious. But their intentions wouldn’t be revealed for some time.
For now, the humans that were in the camps lived a spartan life. There was little abuse from the guards. Most people were treated respectfully. Inmates were fed three times a day. Breakfast consisted of an apple, oatmeal, and two hard boiled eggs. Lunch was a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread with a glass of milk. Dinner was served in a bowl, usually some kind of rice, potato, protein combination.
The inmates were given leisure time, books, gardens, toys for the kids, DVDs. The internet, cellular communication, and landline networks were all forbidden for civilian and inmate use.
Families were not split apart. They were kept together as best as possible. Unless some of the family was spread out across the country, spouses and their children, along with elderly dependents, were able to lodge in the camps together as single units. Those without families were given the choice to bunk with friends and associates. This decision kept morale high.
But even inside the camps, which were clean and modern and devoid of any cruelty, a certain suspicion started to foment. It didn’t take long for unfounded rumors to take hold. The rumors generally came in two forms.
The first originated in the conspiratorial thinking of the lower classes. They saw the camps, which had detained nearly half of the United States, as an operation that had been ordered by a diverse number of suspects, depending on who one asked: the Antichrist, Satan, President Angus, the CIA, the Vatican, aliens, a secret cadre of Nazis, and even a sick ruling elite that were working hand in hand with real life zombies. Luckily, most normal folks rejected these theories. Those that espoused them found themselves shunned by the other inmates, who looked at the experience as simply one of survival.
The second theory originated in the ranks of imprisoned intelligentsia. The milieu of journalists, authors, and lawyers saw the camps as an exercise in authoritarianism well known in the human experience. They saw the camps as a resurgent force of mid-20th century despotism. The difference between then and now was that the enemy was no longer political. The enemy was now biological, unseen, and could infect anybody at any time. Many in the intelligentsia believed that even this theory was a stretch. The majority saw the camps as an exercise in strict, legitimate, and necessary population control to prevent the spread of some unknown, unresearched contagion. To dismiss the utility of the camps was one step away from giving the contagion a green light to spread throughout the population.
These divergent views arose simultaneously in nearly every camp, even though there was absolutely no communication between the camps.
The towns and villages and cities that weren’t protected by the Orobu camps would be facing tough times ahead. Millions had already fallen to the M-Worm, either as victims or as monsters. Most of the people living outside of the protected zones developed their own systems of quarantine. They would not welcome visitors into the home, or travellers from outside the community. There was little travel outside of what was necessary for transportation of goods. Everybody wore surgical masks, thinking that they were sufficient in protecting them from the M-Worm.
The people who were lucky enough to find solace in the camps and cities across the world would be facing their own unique challenges in time. Because they were given shelter and protection from the M-Worm by the Orobu, they were convinced that this giant race would protect them in the future.
But what the humans thought ultimately didn’t matter. They were complete and total subjects of the Orobu.
There were other things, strange, magnificent things, that were happening besides these camps. The Orobu weren’t merely interested in punishing the human race. The camps were there to meet immediate needs, and the initial stages of their strategy were meant to subdue the population, so that they could eat. But they also had long term goals.
These centered around the development of mega-scale infrastructure projects. For millennia, the Orobu had watched human innovation from the shadows. The Orobu saw that although the human mind was uniquely inventive, it possessed an intrinsic flaw. The human race couldn’t help but exist in a perpetual state of conflict.
The Orobu were ready to harness the creative ingenuity of human technology, engineering, and science. As a cohesive ruling body, the Orobu planned to direct the next stages of civilization. They were confident that rapid, unprecedented progress would soon be realized.
With this aim, the Orobu quarantined special teams of engineers, scientists, and architects in zones dedicated to various projects. One of the main projects was nuclear fusion, which humans had made great headway on with the ITER project in France. The ITER was a decades long international attempt at total energy independence through nuclear fusion.
The Orobu started a fresh project emulating and improving upon ITER in the deserts of northwest Arizona. One engineer poetically called the project, “Man’s chance to capture the power of the stars.” The project in Arizona would be the largest, most ambitious tokamak fusion device on the planet. It could produce enough energy to fuel the planet for the next five hundred million years.
Another team of engineers were devoted to the acceleration of nanotech. Some members of Orobu society were already involved with the development of nanotechnology in the United States, Japan, and China. These Orobu scientists were confident that if resources, both human and material, were devoted to serious nanotech projects that tested the limits of the technology, they could reach substantial breakthroughs in less than three years. One of the Orobu stated, “It’s not a matter of if, but when. When we go all in, the results will be dramatic. In one year, we will have nanotech that can construct human flesh from raw carbon. In two years, advanced quantum computing will happen on the nano level. In five years, the behemoth of spacetime could be conquered, giving our race the ability to traverse great spans in the universe with ease.”
When questioned about his last prediction, the Orobu scientist enigmatically stated, “The technology is already out there. Somewhere. Not here. But it’s out there.”
The Orobu were not shy of this sort of enigmatic phrasing.
The Orobu faced great challenges in maintaining the human population. Although the human inmates were compelled to farm their own gardens, this sort of agriculture wasn’t sufficient to feed them all. The Orobu conscripted major agribusinesses to continue operations throughout specific areas of the country. Dairy, meat, vegetable, and fruit production was contracted out to these outfits.
Other essential components of human civilization were
kept running under similar mandates. Raw materials, essential manufacturing, and select research and development institutions were sanctioned to keep functioning even under the strict order that had been imposed on society.
To prevent these human workers from willfully defecting to camps that were safe from the M-Worm, the Orobu developed a vaccine. They administered the vaccine under a strict confidentiality agreement. Nobody who received the vaccine could speak about it. If they did, the penalty was immediate execution.
Radoula and Boul directed this activity. They were able to do so in their sleep, in the quiet moments that they had between meetings and conference calls, in the short lulls they had between the demands of other business. The twins were the central hub of intelligence and action for the Orobu. They shared the duties between them that Zoruth once possessed singularly. The twins were getting used to the great power and responsibility that they were given.
The twins’ hearts swelled with pride as they watched their great vision for the future start to solidify. But there was more to their long term plan than just planetary dominance.
The ultimate goal was to get back in touch with the stars.
Specifically, a star in the constellation Reticulum.
Humans called the star Beta Reticuli. The Chinese called it the Snake’s Head.
The Orobu knew it as their distant home.
And one day, the winds would bring them back.
Chapter Seventeen
Metamorphosis
The guards dragged Jones into another holding chamber. He didn’t have any idea how long he had been down here. He estimated three weeks, but it could’ve been much shorter. Or longer. He wasn’t sure.
Nothing was certain.