All of which had turned Jasmine Maywell’s life into a lonely succession of one-night stands and wasted, narcotic days of not-so-quiet desperation.
Of course, not a single one of these ominous, classified pieces of Fort Denning’s secret history occurs to Jasmine Maywell until she makes her way through the preliminary security checkpoints, showing her ID tag and her tiny two-shot pistol to a succession of nervous MPs. Nobody uses phrases such as “high alert” or “scrambled” until she gets to the final vestibule at the bank of elevators leading down into the innards of the earth.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t go down there today, ma’am,” the guard with the starched uniform buttoned up to his Adam’s apple tells her in a nervous monotone. He stands between Jasmine and the elevators with his M4 up high across his chest, his boyish face as grim and sullen as a golem.
She looks at him. “I got orders.”
“They’re on lockdown, ma’am. Some kinda shit going on down there. It’s under quarantine now. Alarm is sounding. You go down there, I can’t let you back out.”
She sighs, thinking of all the paperwork she’ll have to fill out if she leaves without completing her task. “Maybe I can help.” She digs her orders out of her handbag. “They gave me these at the first checkpoint.” She hands the single typed sheet over to the guard. “I think they might need me down there.”
The truth is, she had only skimmed the classified document. Hadn’t yet studied it closely. It said something about “scanning the memories of a patient zero to ascertain any information on the origins or spread of an outbreak discovered less than forty-eight hours ago in western Pennsylvania.” But Jasmine also knew that in the case of a code black outbreak with unknown origins, the CDC often handed the mystery over to the DIA, who usually threw everything they could think of, including the kitchen sink, at the investigation—SEAL teams, NSA, Interpol, even black ops units such as the Natural Anomalies Group and government-trained psychics. Hence the need for a fast entry specialist such as the illustrious commissioned officer and high-functioning drunk Master Sergeant Jasmine Meredeth Maywell.
She waits for the guard to read the order, dying for a drink.
“Suit yourself,” he says finally, handing the document back to her, and stepping away from the elevator.
“Appreciate it,” she says, pressing the down button. The door clatters open. She enters the enclosure, and the door rattles shut.
The elevator seems to take an eternity to descend into the sublevels.
– 3 –
The Black Oblivion
She doesn’t encounter the first body until she has made her way off the elevator, has moved down an empty corridor with an alarm screaming in her ears, has pulled her pistol, and has passed an unattended guard desk splattered with blood. The atmosphere is charged with static electricity and the coppery odor of gore. She turns a corner and sees the security door to the medical wing hanging wide open and a body lying in a fetal position on the parquet floor just inside it, marinating in a puddle of its own blood. The victim, an older, balding man—whom she’s assuming has expired recently—still wears a white lab coat and security tag. His eyes are closed in the endless sleep of death. Jasmine approaches cautiously and kneels by the body.
Chills rash her arms as the extent of the man’s injuries make themselves known to her in the bright fluorescent light of the hallway and the shrieking buzz-saw din of the alarm. His neck and half his torso are gone, spilling entrails across the tile, chewed away by what looks like a wild animal. She takes a deep breath and against her better judgment decides to do a quick entry.
It’s a process that she discovered early on in her life, sometime around age sixteen, when a boy got a little too cozy with her under the bleachers in the high school gymnasium. What started as a little heavy petting had deteriorated quickly into what can only be called rape. But in the moments before the kid entered her, she grabbed his face, a hand on each temple, fingers pressing in on his skull, and all at once the boy’s innermost secret thoughts flooded her brain—unbidden, inexorable, in Technicolor and high definition. She saw through his point of view not her, but the past, an older boy molesting him, and her cry exploded out of her almost involuntarily. “You can’t excuse this … just because it happened to you!”
She barely remembers what happened after that, the boy skulking away, thunderstruck by her eerie cognition, but the memory will always be with her. Even after years of harnessing the gift for the government, she still thinks of that primal incident.
Now she lowers herself to both knees in front of the dead scientist, the blood soaking into her leggings. She positions his head for better access, and she gently but firmly grasps the man’s skull, cradling it just so, fingertips electrodes on a cardiogram.
She flinches at the violent stream of thoughts and imagery crashing down on her:
(… 7 June, three hundred twenty-two hours, Eastern Standard Time, DOA from Evans City … disposition of remains, pathologist’s notes … the decedent, female, Caucasian, mid-thirties, delivered to Fort Denning restrained in body bag … cause of death unknown … digits on left hand twitching … initial thoughts, postmortem spasms due to residual electrical energy … gases built up within the esophageal walls … anomalous, unexplained … eyelids retracting spontaneously, the corneas exhibiting some kind of patina, vestigial cataracts, milky, iridescent … I see the hands clenching, clenching … rigor mortis? Wait … wait!)
Jasmine winces, sympathetic adrenaline coursing through her, a kind of narcotic, which years ago she dreaded but later started to crave, not at all unlike the acquired taste for a really good whiskey. Nowadays, she could not get enough of that nectar of the gods, that inimitable smoky burn repellant at first, but later in life a salve on her soul. All of which is now overridden in lieu of the heroin-like blast of terrified recall streaming into her:
(… The corpse convulsing, straining against the straps, discoloration around the nose, mouth, and teeth … incisors grinding against rubber guard … swallowed the tongue?)
Jasmine’s hands tighten on the scientist’s mandibles, her knuckles whitening as the dead man’s mind-screen downloads the horrors into her:
(… Straps breaking … decedent slipping off table … now I’m kneeling to administer 100 milligrams ketamine … oh God! Fuck! Pain … searing pain shooting up my rib cage!… The thing has latched on to me!… Dear Lord I’ve been bitten!… Tearing into me!… Mortified teeth like black needles!)
All at once, the screen in Jasmine’s mind contracts into a black void, a single white dot remaining at its center, a TV at the end of the broadcasting day. She loosens her hold and lets out a sigh of exhaustion—memory-scanning can take its toll, a real bitch on the upper vertebrae and joints—when something starts to vibrate in the center of that luminous pinprick emanating from that black oblivion.
Something like a wasp in a jar buzzes in the heart of that white spot.
Jasmine tries to pull her hands away from the scientist’s blood-sticky temples but they won’t cooperate. In her mind she sees the strange alabaster dot swelling, expanding, blazing brighter and brighter, the droning white noise inside it intensifying, a wave breaking on a beach, a tsunami coming straight out of the dead scientist’s mind and heading straight into Jasmine.
She blinks, then looks directly into the face of burgeoning apocalypse.
The eyelids open, revealing orbs of milkglass.
– 4 –
Postmortem
The labyrinth of hallways in the lowest sublevel of Fort Denning glows with a uniform kind of fluorescent light, which gives the place an air of the operating room, walls and tile floors virtually radiating sterile, antiseptic containment. Nothing enters, nothing escapes. Everything is opaque, immutable, airtight, regulated, and scoured clean. All of which is why the blood streaks registering now in Master Sergeant Jasmine Maywell’s peripheral vision on the walls and glass doors as she rises to her feet and begins to slowly back away from the inexplicab
ly animate corpse on the floor strike her as anachronistic, wrong.
The creature that used to be a government scientist named Hanrahan—Jasmine caught a glimpse of the man’s nametag—now sits up with the flaccid, twitchy movements of a rag doll or a puppet. Jasmine keeps backing away as the thing reaches for her stupidly from its spot on the floor, its liver-colored lips peeling back from its teeth with canine ferocity. It makes a sound like rusty hinges creaking inside its mortified throat as it claws its way up the side of the wall to a standing position.
If asked later, Jasmine would not even remember pulling the DoubleTap pistol from its hip sheath. She would not recall raising the gun, aiming it at the creature shuffling toward her now with inebriated purpose—a baby taking its first steps—clawing at the air, drooling black foamy bile. If she were asked to fill out a report the next day, she would have absolutely no memory of firing off a single round at that menacing, lumbering corpse.
The blast hits the former scientist in the chest, between the nipples, sending a plume of blood mist and pink matter out the back of the lab coat.
In her imaginary report—a document that she would, sadly, never get an opportunity to draft—this would be the moment she described as time standing still. All the cryptic information that streamed into her only moments earlier now chimes and flashes in one-hundred-point marquee type font. Words such as “postmortem” and “anomalous” and “unexplained” now spontaneously blaze in her midbrain, exclaiming their portents in fiery revelations as she sees the thing that used to be a scientist unfazed by the catastrophic ballistics of the gun blast.
The creature barely slows down, barely recoils from the bullet’s impact, its pale shoe-button eyes still fixed on Jasmine.
She turns and runs.
– 5 –
The Smell of Gasoline
Her memory of Fort Denning’s lower levels is sketchy and vague at best. She has been down here once before to locate a missing person—a diplomat’s wife—whose single white glove conjured an image of a body-dump, a woman raped, wrapped in Visqueen, sunk into the silt at the bottom of the Potomac. Most of the classified missing-person cases that Jasmine has worked in her career have ended in tragedy. Which seems to be exactly how this day will end for her if she fails to find a way out.
She does remember the place being lousy with dead ends. Everywhere you turn, another airtight, sealed security door with triple-pane, bulletproof, mesh-reinforced safety glass. She turns a corner now, and she runs directly into just such an impediment.
She sees through the impermeable window into another corridor, which leads to another dead end. She can hear the dragging noises behind her, the relentless drunken gait of a dead scientist coming to—what? Sink its mortified teeth into her as some other cadaver had done to him?
Head spinning with dizziness, flesh crawling, blood vibrating in her veins with adrenaline, Jasmine turns and heads down a side corridor.
This hallway leads to the pathology lab. Jasmine remembers the tiled walls lined with metal doors, each one numbered cryptically. The smell of gasoline? Is it disinfectant? One of the burned-out fluorescent tubes overhead flickers back on as though the very current running through the sublevel is nervously reanimating. Something rumbles beneath her. Emergency generators?
She reaches another dead end—a blank tile wall with evidence of black mold in the seams of the grout—her heart hammering. Incredible how quickly all the complicated tasks are reduced to simple survival—fight or flight. She hears the foreboding sounds of dragging behind her, coming around the corner of the side hall, closing in on her, heavy, thick, feral, perhaps additional sets of shuffling footsteps coming.
Glancing over her shoulder, she sees three, maybe four skeletal humanoid shadows appearing at the mouth of the narrow corridor, seeping across the tiles as long and distended as oil spills.
If asked to recount the next few minutes in her nonexistent written testimony of the day’s events, she would now, for the first time this morning, for some unknown reason, have total recall of every minute detail. She would be able to describe her instantaneous decision to kick open the last door on the right—a space she would later learn is the main examination room of the pathology lab—and would have no problem expounding on the single, forceful impact of her right boot-heel on the door. The noise of that bolt snapping is punctuated by the sudden pain shooting up her leg from the impact.
She would be able to give precise descriptions of the odor that greets her in that dark, stainless steel, tomb-like room with the high ceilings, powerless halogen lights hanging down, and banks of body drawers embedded in the walls: The air reeks of gas with a darker accent beneath it, something protein rich and spoiled like old raw meat in a refrigerator that has long ago lost power.
In her report that will never exist, she would make crystalline clear—at this point in the time line—how she madly slams the door, wedges a chair underneath the knob, and searches in vain for the light switch.
Now, at this very moment, as her options run out, she spins and scans the room with eyes still adjusting to the darkness. She grips the DoubleTap pistol in her right hand, a single round left in the chamber. Something moves to her left. She jerks toward a shadow that she may or may not be imagining in her heightened state. With her inherited skills, she is not unlike a psychic medium entering a haunted domicile or a place of historical upheaval, assaulted by the noise of the residual trauma. Now her senses overload with voices and images coursing through her brain all at once, a fractured mosaic of blood, infection, misery, and hate—a great, heaving tidal wave of emotion seizing her.
Something to her left pounces at her in a whirlwind of death-stench.
At first, Jasmine registers only a blur slamming into her as she raises her gun with both hands and involuntarily squeezes off the second round, the barrel pressed against something soft. The creature going for her jugular whiplashes backward—hit dead center in the neck—the point-blank blast sending pink aerosol out the back of its nape. In eyewitness testimony that will never be written, Jasmine would probably describe the moment as instinctual, transpiring so quickly it’s difficult to parse every action and reaction that follows.
One thing is certain: The impact of the bullet passing through its mortified flesh does very little to impede or discourage the thing, as Jasmine learns almost immediately. Instead of falling down, the creature staggers for just an instant, then lurches a second time for Jasmine’s throat. This time, the impact of the creature ramming into Jasmine sends her stumbling.
She trips over her own feet, dropping the gun and collapsing to the floor.
The thing lands on top of her, its jaws already dilating, gaping, its bloodless lips peeling back, exposing wormy gray teeth, some as sharp as X-Acto blades. Jasmine once again reacts reflexively, with involuntary speed, grabbing the thing by its wounded neck one nanosecond before it sinks its incisors into Jasmine’s arm. The jaws snap and clack like castanets. The ratcheting teeth gnash and grind, seeking live flesh, the head attempting to oscillate back and forth, going for the inner parts of Jasmine’s wrists as she strangles the scrawny creature with little or no effect.
The stalemate that ensues practically mesmerizes Jasmine. She stares into the frosted portals of the creature’s eyes, seeing nothing but urgent hunger. There is nothing else there. No life, no blood flowing through its veins, no blush of vitality in the flesh—only pallid dead skin and hunger. Jasmine remembers then what smells like gasoline: embalming fluid.
All at once, the identity of the creature becomes clear to Jasmine—the high cheekbones, the stringy long hair, the emaciated limbs of a former middle-aged rural housewife, maybe a matriarch of a farm. Jasmine realizes on a wave of nausea that this is the decedent. This is the fatality from Evans City, the Caucasian, mid-thirties female delivered to Fort Denning restrained in a body bag … cause of death unknown. This is patient zero.
In the wake of this revelation, a circuit of empathy opens inside Jasmine Maywell—a
current crackling through the contact of her fingertips—which erupts inside her like two catalysts crashing into each other.
– 6 –
Eating Disorder
It’s never just booze. It’s sex, weed, food, porn, blow, poppers, tobacco, pulling your hair out, eight balls, masturbating, caffeine, smack, cutting yourself, crystal meth, forcing yourself to vomit after every meal, sleeping pills, huffing, oxy, and playing endless video games.
Jasmine Maywell grew up consuming all manner of substances in compulsive ways. She was a restless child, nervous, bit her fingernails, suffered from eating disorders, overweight by the time she hit puberty, diagnosed early with ADD. Her special talents had been fully formed from birth, but they had caused her only agitation and night terrors until she was well into her teens. Kissing a boy with whom you’re desperately in love and discovering that he just wants to feel your tits was heartbreaking for a sensitive teenage girl of color in the 1980s.
Now, lying on her back in a dark, malodorous lab, in the thrall of patient zero’s cellular memory, she convulses on the floor. Back arching, jaws locking, mind imploding with the force of an epileptic seizure, Jasmine digs her hands into the ex-woman’s putrid, skinny neck as the poisonous narrative flows into her:
(… Daniel! Daniel, where are you?!… Screams coming from the barn … horses shrieking … me running across the back lawn, plunging into the stench of the stable … Daniel crouched on the floor of the barn, awful smell, blood coating his face … horses dead, torn open, guts spilled … Daniel eating … eating the entrails?)
Jasmine shudders, her hands welded now around the collapsed windpipe of the former farm wife. Jasmine’s fingertips adhere to the moldy, decomposing flesh as though super-glued to it as the jaws work and the teeth grate.
Nights of the Living Dead Page 6