by Gayle Katz
“That’s certainly good news. So you and Ben?”
“Me and Ben? What about it?”
“Just commenting on how close you two were yesterday.”
“Oh. Well. Uhhh. Ben is amazing. He’s been through so much, you know? And now that he’s back, we can finally formulate a real cure, come out of hiding, and live the lives we were always meant to live.” She stops partway down the hall. “Here’s the bathroom. Inside you’ll find everything you need: shampoo, towel, toothbrush, and anything else you might require.”
As I start to push the bathroom door open, I turn back to face her. “Say, that dream of curing the plague and living happily ever after sounds like a good plan to me.”
I see her smile.
“So if that’s the plan, what’s up with you and Malik?”
“Malik? What are you talking about?”
“Are you two close?”
“Not particularly. He’s just our lead scientist. Why would you ask that?”
“I dunno. No reason. Just making small talk.”
“Well, cut it out,” she says changing topics. “When you’re finished, meet us in the lab. Down the hall and make a left.”
As I watch her scurry down the hall, I push on the bathroom door. Time for that shower.
***
The bathroom is basic, but clean. Beige paint on the walls. Black and white tiles on the floor. Private toilet and shower stalls with convenient shelving. At the other end of the bathroom is a closet. I walk over, open it, and see lots of fluffy towels. Grabbing two, I head to the middle shower stall, go inside, and close the door behind me. I take the earpiece out, wrap it in one of the towels, and place it on the shelf. The other towel I hang over the shower door.
Standing there in the shower, I remember what life was like when I was with Jack. For a brief moment, it makes me smile.
Then I snap back into reality and uncertainty clouds my mind. Professor Carter is alive again, er… well… at least his clone is. Will these people keep their word and let me go? I hope so. Am I ever going to get my old life back again? Probably not. That life is long gone. If I do manage to make my way back to Jack, and that’s a big if, I know things will be different. How could they not?
As I finish my shower, I unwrap the towel and pick up the earpiece, scrutinizing it. Seeing it in the light, it looks exactly like a regular earbud. “Hello? How does this thing work? I heard you before, but do I just talk into it?” I whisper into the earpiece, put it back into my ear, and then tap on it.
I hear the Vulture’s voice in my ear again. “It just works. No need to do anything special. Get used to it now. If anyone catches you with it… uhhh.”
“No need to say anything else. It’s pretty obvious I’d be in hot water if I get caught with it.”
“Don’t get caught. Don’t act weird. Just pretend it’s part of you now.”
“Got it.”
“And be careful in here. I know you’re not a typical prisoner anymore, but that doesn’t mean you’re safe. I have eyes on you, but depending on what’s goin’ down, I may or may not be able to help. You’ve gotta watch out for yourself.”
“So same as always then. Got it.”
Chapter 6
________________________________________
There’s a warmth to my skin as I walk down the hall. That might have been the best shower I’ve had in a while, or maybe I’ve just come to appreciate the opportunity to take one nowadays. Being clean. It’s something I used to take for granted.
As I veer around the corner to take the next left as Brie instructed, I walk past another long window that stretches almost the entire length of the corridor. I walk up to the door and I see Ben hit a button. It’s then I hear that familiar hissing sound of these lab door hydraulics opening. I proceed inside.
I look around and see Malik. A chill goes down my back. He’s the one who strung me up not so long ago in this very lab. I stare at him for a moment and then look away, snubbing him, when Ben addresses me.
“How are you feeling?” Ben asks me.
Before I can answer, Malik interjects with his malicious sarcasm. “Yeah, Jane. How are you feeling?” he asks mockingly. His eyes burn into me like hot coals.
I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he creeps me out. I collect myself to make sure my voice isn’t shaky when I answer. “Better,” I say to Ben, ignoring Malik to the best of my ability. “After getting some sleep and taking a hot shower, I almost feel human again.”
Ben lets out a quick chuckle while neither Malik nor Brie utter a sound. Clearly they aren’t amused, or at least that’s what their stoic faces staring at me convey.
“OK. Now that we’ve gotten the niceties out of the way, let’s go observe the latest test subjects,” Brie says, leading the way out of the lab.
As we follow her down the hallway, we pass in front of the cloning room. It looks exactly as I remember it, but now there are more pods, hundreds, maybe thousands of them, as far back as my eye can see. All of them with motionless bodies floating in some sort of translucent liquid. I slow my pace to get a better look inside. The clones have matured quickly. The first few rows are the only ones I can see and they all look the same. The disturbing part is that they all look like me. Before there were only a few clones of me, but now there are many, many more.
“W-Why are there so many more clones of me?”
“There’s nothing to worry about. They’re for our experiments, nothing more,” Brie says.
“OK. I understand that, but why do you need hundreds or thousands of them?”
“Your blood and body chemistry are vital to our experiments. If we lost you for any reason, we needed to make sure we had backups ready to go.”
“Backups?”
“Yes, of course. Our experiments are far too important to be left to chance.”
“Yeah. Makes sense. Am… ummm… am I a clone?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“Why wouldn’t I ask that? All of these clones look exactly like me. Exactly,” I say, pointing at the clone storage room. “How do I know the real Jane isn’t dead and I’m just another one of her clones?”
“Because you’re not a clone. Why would we lie about that?”
The Professor puts his hand on my shoulder and I jump at his touch. “I’m sorry. All of this must be distressing.”
Brie's nonchalant explanation doesn’t ease my mind, but I keep walking with the group until something flickers and catches the corner of my eye. Stopping abruptly, I look back through the window and look past the pods I saw before. Behind them on the other side of the room, I see a bunch of people, researchers probably, wearing white lab coats.
“What are they doing in there?” I ask.
“I’m not sure,” Ben says. “My best guess is maintaining the pods to ensure the clones are preserved adequately.”
“We should really get back to the business of checking on our current experiments,” Brie says. “Let’s stay focused, all right?”
“Sure,” I say, my voice trailing off as I break from our group, leaving Ben, Brie, and Malik behind, and hustle over to the other side of the lab. On this side, I get a better look at what they’re doing. To my horror, I see about twenty or more metal slabs with even more of my clones lying lifeless on them. With one or two researchers per clone, I focus on the closest one on the other side of the window and watch them use shiny tools to implant a small device into the neck of the clone. Creepy. I bang on the window a couple of times to get their attention and yell, “What are you doing?”
The two researchers turn around and stare at me. Suddenly, they start to wave. I’m not waving at them. I turn around and jump out of my skin. Brie is standing right behind me, waving back at them.
“You scared me!”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. Why don’t we leave these good people to their work?”
“What are they implanting?”
“A small microchip.”
“It’s essentially a tracker so we can monitor the clones at all times. It’s similar to those chips veterinarians implant in pets, but modified for the human body.”
“What else do they do?” I ask, wanting to learn as much as I can about the operation they have running here.
“Nothing else that I know of,” she says.
“She’s lying,” the Vulture whispers in my ear.
“Why don’t we rejoin Ben and Malik? If you have additional questions, we can come back or I can set up a time for you to talk with the research director. Does that sound agreeable?”
“Uhhh. Sure,” I reply, trying to discern whether or not I can trust her. The Vulture certainly doesn’t.
***
As we walk back, I stare at the researchers, wondering if that’s the whole story or if the Vulture knows something. Brie continues talking. “As I was saying before, from our last round of experiments, we believe we were able to concoct a serum that has the right ratio of virus and antibodies.”
“Why is that important?” I ask.
“Having the right ratio is critical to producing a viable cure. If you have too many infected virus cells and not enough of the antibodies, the illness persists, and might actual progress faster. On the other hand, if you have too many antibodies, they kill off the virus, but then start attacking healthy cells, which has a nasty tendency to kill the patient. It’s a delicate balance,” Brie says, still walking and talking.
We finally reach our destination, back where the zombies are in cages. The four of us step to the first cage and see a zombie going berserk. Crazed and deranged, she’s on all fours gnawing on one of the steel cell bars, screeching that high-pitched sound. I cover my ears to mute her screams. At first she scares me, but I step forward and try to get a better look. When I’m able to see her face, something strikes me as familiar about her. Nevertheless, she seems too far gone.
“Here you can see we didn’t get the ratio right and the antibodies did absolutely nothing. The zombie virus has completely taken over her body and mind.”
As Brie moves forward, we follow behind her. She stops at another cage with a woman lying on the floor. She isn’t showing any signs of being infected by the zombie plague.
I step forward again to get a look at her face. “That’s me! What did you do? What happened to her? Is she dead?” I ask, running up to the bars of the cage, looking back at Brie.
“Yeah. Unfortunately, we did the opposite here and the antibodies definitely overpowered and destroyed the zombie virus, but it didn’t stop there. They kept going and started killing off her healthy cells.”
I turn back to face the dead woman… er clone, who looks like me, lying on the floor. Seeing myself dead makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It’s like one of those strange dreams where you attend your own funeral. Needless to say, it freaks me out. Not only that, but I start to question who’s who again. Is that just another one of my clones lifeless on the floor or am I the clone and the real me is lying there dead? “That’s me,” I whisper. “That’s me!“ I shout.
“It’s not you. It’s one of your clones. You said you wanted to be a part of this operation. If you can’t handle it, we won’t include you, so chill out, all right?”
“Chill out?”
“Yes. Please.”
“I see my lifeless body lying on the floor and you want me to chill out?”
“Yes. Get over it. Anyway, it’s not you. None of these subjects are you,” she says, walking over to the next cage.
I cover my mouth and look over at the zombie woman shrieking and banging her head against the bars. After a few minutes, she calms down. “That’s me-ah I mean another clone, too?” I ask.
“Yes. Of course.”
Closing my eyes for a moment to calm myself, I regain my composure and head back to the cage containing my dead clone. “You couldn’t help her?”
“First you don’t want the clones, now you’re concerned for them?”
“I’m not a monster. If these clones are real people and you’re torturing them to find a cure, that’s a problem. There’s nothing you could have done to save her?”
“We tried. We really did, but nothing we did helped. We couldn’t stabilize her. There was nothing we could do.”
“What do you mean? There was nothing you could do? Couldn’t you have injected her with more of the virus so the antibodies would have had something else to battle?”
“Human physiology is not that simple. It was too late,” Brie says looking at Malik, who hasn’t said a word since we got here.
“But you cured her, right? At least it looks like you did. She doesn’t look like a zombie. She looks human.”
“Yeah, she does,” she agrees, “but it doesn’t matter much if you still end up dead. Going back to the third experiment in this series of tests, we reviewed our results and tried to extrapolate the right ratio, and that’s what you see here.” Brie lowers her voice to a whisper.
In front of me, behind the bars was the same clone of me who had just been banging her head against the bars, half-zombie, half-human, lying quietly on a cot. “Is she…?”
“Shhh. Don’t talk so loud. The two parts of her are fighting. You just saw her in full zombie mode and now she’s recuperating. That’s what we’re seeing here. She needs her sleep.”
“Is she-“
“Is she turning? Yes, she is, but we believe she’s in the process of turning back into a human. Last time we checked, her vitals were coming along nicely. She’s the reason why we think we’ve finally found the right formulation. Why we think we might have the cure.”
“Bravo, Brie,” Ben says in a low voice as to not disturb the third experiment. “How much longer until we know for sure?”
“We’ll need another day or so. We need to make sure she recuperates fully and that her cells don’t turn on her.”
“We’re almost there. I can feel it. Soon we’ll have the cure and the world will finally be able to heal. All of us. Everything will be better when that happens. See?” he says, turning to me. “I told you she was on the right path. Why don’t we leave these two to their work? I’m sure you don’t want to stay in here any longer than necessary.”
As Ben and I leave the zombie experimentation room behind, he’s talking about something, but it’s difficult to pay attention to him. My thoughts are struggling with so many unanswered questions. First, why would he leave those two together? And second, how did those zombies communicate with me last night? I stop in my tracks.
“Professor… Uhhh… Ben. Wait a second,” I say. “What happened last night?”
“You’re going to have to be more specific than that. So many things happened last night.”
“The zombies that came to me while I was sleeping.”
“Yes?”
“I heard their thoughts.”
“You were curious about curing those who are too far gone, were you not? You also asked how I control the zombie horde, so I gave you a taste of what they’re thinking and what it’s like to communicate with them. There are still people trapped in those zombie bodies. Their minds still able to function with a desire to return to their lives.”
“But they were going to attack me.”
“Like I said, sometimes the connection isn’t strong enough, especially last night when I was facilitating the conversation. I still don’t know how I’m doing it. I just think it and it happens. Sometimes.”
“If you’re thinking of trying anything like that again, please let me know. It scared the shit outta me.”
“Fair enough.”
“Listen. Uhhh. I’m gonna go back and see if Brie and Malik need an extra hand. I might as well be useful while I’m here,” I say.
He shrugs his shoulders. “If that’s what you want to do, be my guest. You’re free to roam around however you please, just try not to get into any trouble or jeopardize their progress, OK?” Ben asks, smiling as he continues on
and as I turn around and head back to the cells.
Chapter 7
________________________________________
Walking back, I hear some static and then the Vulture’s voice is in my ear again. “Before you go back, I want to show you some of what they’re hiding from you.”
“OK. Point the way,” I say, afraid of what I’m going to see.
“Turn right down the next hallway and go into the first door on your right.”
Walking faster, anxious to see what the Vulture wants to show me, I follow his instructions. “OK. I’m here. What do you want me to do?”
“Close the door behind you and sit down at the computer.”
“OK. What’s next?”
“The computer is already on. Flip on the monitor. When the screen comes up, you’ll see a dialogue box pop up asking for a password. Type in all lowercase letters, ‘theendisthebeginning,’ to get access.”
“That’s the password?”
“Yeah.”
“What does it mean?”
“I’m not sure. Let’s get back on track. We don’t have much time. Once you’re in, click on the first file fold-“
“Jane Invasion?” I interrupt. “Why is there a folder named Jane Invasion?”
“Click it and tell me what you see.”
I click the folder. “I see a list of video files, each of them titled with a different city name. It seems to be mostly big city airports around the world. Shanghai International Airport and Heathrow in London are at the top of the list with a whole bunch of other cities listed in between with JFK in New York City at the bottom. What is this? Why do they have a random list of big city airports?”
“Keep going. Click one of them.”
“Which one? The cities are color-coded or something, some in red and others in green.”
“Start at the top.”
I click the one labeled Shanghai. It’s the first one on the list and in the red. Strange. I see myself. What’s going on here? Is a video playing or am I staring at myself? “Oh shit,” I whisper. It’s another one of my clones, and she’s in the bathroom fawning all over herself in a mirror. The video keeps going and it shows me the inside of what looks like a typical airplane. The video feed shows random people from all over the world sitting in their seats reading magazines, watching movies, and staring out the windows. Occasionally, I see a flight attendant or two walk down the aisles. There’s a ding and I see the ‘Fasten Your Seatbelt’ sign light up. The camera bumps around a little and pans around the cabin. The plane is probably in the process of landing. That might account for the camera shaking. Next the pilot welcomes them to Shanghai in multiple languages.