by K. H. Graham
Nick stepped over the dead medic and the glass room came into view. There was blood smeared on the open door. Inside, he could see Griffith standing in the center of the room. He was holding one of Ogden’s men by the left arm. The arm was clearly broken, snapped cleanly along the forearm. The soldier was grunting against it. Nick looked at the man’s face and saw that he was likely not screaming from pain because he was damn close to passing out.
“Sergeant Griffith,” Nick said. “It’s me. I’m here. Can you please tell me what’s going on?”
“You need to hear this,” Griffith said. “I told the nurses that I wanted to speak with you, but Ogden wouldn’t allow it. So this was how I got his attention.”
Nick kept stepping forward, now stepping over the fallen female guard.
“What did you need to tell me?”
As he closed the distance, Nick began to see that something was not quite right about Griffith. His eyes were glassy and the leering expression on his face bordered on lunacy.
Then there was the fact that there was dark red blood around his mouth, covering his chin. He thought of the dead guard’s neck, brutally torn out, and his stomach churned.
“The vaccine,” Griffith said. “I was right. It wasn’t what we thought it was. It wasn’t what we were told.”
Ogden stepped forward, pushing past James and standing directly behind Nick. “That’s classified information, Blackburn,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’d best not spill a word of it.”
“Who the hell am I going to tell?” Nick said, taking another few steps forward.
“So tell me what I can do,” Nick told Griffith. “You have to let that guard go. You need to come out. I’ve spoken with Ogden and he’s given me his word that they’ll help you. You clearly aren’t yourself.”
“Of course I’m not,” Griffith said. “That’s sort of the point. You were trying to help me. You injected me with what you thought was the vaccine because you didn’t want me to die. But it wasn’t the vaccine. There is a vaccine, though. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it work. But they sent us out looking for your friends with something else. If we’d found them and they were infected, they’d be like me right now. Not cured. Something else.”
Nick turned slightly towards Ogden, with his eyes still on Griffith.
“You were setting me up to fail,” Nick said to Ogden. It wasn’t a question, just a plain fact.
Ogden said nothing. He looked like a man that had just had his hand called over a game of poker.
“Son of a bitch,” James muttered.
“I’m becoming one of them,” Griffith said. “One of the ramblers. But I feel…,” he stopped here, grinning. “I feel glorious.”
Nick weighed his options. He sensed Ogden over his shoulder and wanted to strangle the bastard. But that would only get him detained or shot by one of the guards. He looked at Griffith and saw that whatever humanity was still lingering, it wasn’t holding on by much.
“So what can I do?” Nick asked him. “What do you want me to do in order for you to release that guard and stop this?”
“Don’t work for him,” Griffith said. “Leave here right now. He’s going to get rid of you as soon as you’ve done his work.”
“Shut your mouth,” Ogden yelled. “You just said you’re becoming one of them! Of course you’d say anything to betray me.”
Griffith tossed the guard with the broken arm to the ground and leaped towards the door in a motion that was so fast it seemed like a blur. Nick took a single step back, bumping into Ogden.
“Of course I’d betray you,” Griffith said loudly, headed for the door. Looking at him through the blood-streaked glass walls was eerie. “You sent me out with Blackburn with something other than the vaccine and didn’t tell me! But it doesn’t matter now. I can feel them. All of them. Out there, scrambling for meat. I know what they’re thinking. I know what they feel. They know we’re down here. I feel them…calling to me. Wanting me to come to them. But…,” he stopped again, his mouth stretching into a maniacal smile. “But even they don’t know what I am.”
He stepped towards the door and into the hallway. He held his arms out, palms up, as if inviting the guards to shoot. A tremor ran through his body and he winced for a moment, shuddering. His left leg twitched in a violent spasm, nearly causing him to fall over. The whole process looked like a spastic dance of sorts.
Through it all, he smiled at Ogden.
“Shoot me,” Griffith said. “Kill me. I don’t know what this is…this thing inside of me…but I suspect you worked long and hard to see its effects. So you choose, Colonel. Shoot me and kill me. Or try to capture me for study. Tweak it. Perfect it. But trust me…it’s getting faster and you don’t have long before I won’t give you a choice. It’s like a wall…a wall coming down. I can feel it in my head…feels like when something dissolves in your mouth…”
As if to accentuate this point, another spasm passed through him. This one was violent, so harsh that it made him take a few steps back. He chuckled and let out a low mewling sound. He looked up to the people in front of him, his chin covered in blood and his eyes nearly feral.
The med wing was quiet, even despite the blaring of the alarm. Even that noise seemed soft compared to the tension in the hallway.
Then Griffith went to his knees and screamed. When he looked up to them, his eyes were different. The humanity was gone now. What has once been Griffith might have been there, but it was retreating into the depths of madness.
“Fuck it,” Ogden said. “Put him down.”
Nick opened his mouth to object but the hall was filled with gunfire. Nick hit the floor as quickly as he could, pulling Katherine down with him. James had also hit the deck, watching the scene from in front of the boots of one of the guards.
In front of them, Griffith actually started dashing forward. His body spasmed, both from the bullets that tore into him and from the effects of what Nick had injected into him less than two days ago.
After several seconds, the guards seemed to remember the one rule about killing the ramblers: aim for the head.
One shot landed directly between Griffith’s eyes. Another, perhaps for good measure, erased his jaw.
Griffith fell to his knees again, his eyes still alert, wide and filled with wild anger. He finally fell to the floor in a slow pivot. His right arm sprawled out towards Nick.
Nick’s head was ringing from the gunshots and when he opened his mouth to scream at Ogden, he could barely hear himself.
“What the hell was the point of that?”
Ogden looked from Griffith’s body and then to Nick. Nick was still on the floor and it made him feel like a little kid looking up to a teacher for an explanation.
“That’s none of your concern,” Ogden said.
Nick sprung up to his legs and charged Ogden. Two of the guards stepped in front of their superior right away, pointing their rifles into Nick’s face.
“Stand down,” Ogden said, “or I will give the order to shoot.”
“Given what just happened, I believe you,” Nick said. “But don’t you dare tell me that this is none of my concern. I was the one that injected him. What did I give him? What are you up to here? What did you send me out with, hoping to test on my friends?”
Ogden glared at Nick from behind his guards. “He was right. We do have a vaccine. But we have something else, too. A weapon, you could call it.”
“A weapon for what?” Katherine asked, slowly getting to her feet.
“Yeah,” James said. “Because if that was your weapon,” he said, pointing back to Griffith, “you might want to make sure you know what you’re doing with it.”
“I don’t have to answer your questions,” Ogden said. He turned on his heel and motioned for his guards to follow him. One of them was slow to react, his eyes still locked on Griffith’s body and the pool of blood that was rushing from his head.
“If you expect me to go out looking for your government buddies, you better get used t
o answering all the questions you can,” Nick said.
Ogden stopped walking, but only for a moment. He shrugged his shoulders and then headed back down the hallway for the elevators.
Nick, James, and Katherine remained where they were, watching them go. Nick looked back to Griffith and thought about how the man had looked as the ramblers had come down on him in Houston. That, compared to the savage thing he had just seen, was something totally different. What he had just seen was almost non-human. What really worried Nick, though, was the rapid movements Griffith had shown in coming out of his room. It had been uncanny.
And very much unlike the ramblers they were accustomed to.
“What’s going on here?” Katherine asked once Ogden and his men had stepped into the elevators and the doors had closed on them.
“I have a few ideas,” James said.
“I do, too,” Nick said. “But none of them make any sense.”
They all looked at Griffith’s body, frozen by the meaning of what had just happened.
“Time to call it quits before we even begin?” James asked.
“No,” Nick said. “If nothing else, this gives us even more reason to bring this ship down from the inside.”
26
They were back in their rooms within half an hour. Nick toyed with the idea of inviting Katherine into his room but knew it was a bad idea. In the midst of everything that was happening, he didn’t need that added complication.
He lay in bed with the lights on, replaying the entire scene…from the moment he stepped off of the elevator to Ogden’s final comments about not having to answer his questions. Technically, Ogden was right. They no longer lived in a world where morals and laws held sway. Hell, Ogden could have had his guards kill all three of them after Griffith had spilled the beans.
But he hadn’t. Why?
Because he needs us for something else. Maybe even something beyond rescuing his government spooks. But what?
He had no idea. He could only hope that Katherine could find out more as she snooped around their system via her laptop.
He thought of Valerie as sleep slowly and reluctantly crept back towards him. He saw her on that last day, in their Bethesda apartment. He saw the hurt in her eyes, replaced only by the worry of what their daughter was going through.
He wished she was there with him…even for just a moment. She would tell him what to do. If he should turn tail and run, refusing to help Ogden, she wouldn’t sugar coat it.
And maybe that’s what he should do. Maybe they should get the hell out of here. He’d discuss it with James and Katherine in the morning.
He felt the many questions that they needed to discuss rushing towards him, but sleep kept them all away. It was shortly after one o’clock when he fell back to sleep. He dreamed briefly of his daughter, falling into the crowd of ramblers. But in the dream, his daughter opened her mouth as he fell, speaking five words that made Nick whimper helplessly in his sleep.
“It’s okay, Dad. You tried.”
Later, when he was stirred awake by a knock at his door, the first thought to spring into his mind was, Did I? Did I really?
***
The knock on the door was Katherine and James. They both looked mostly revived, although Katherine looked on edge. It was six o’ clock in the morning and the sun seemed to be promising a beautiful day outside.
“Get dressed,” Katherine said. “Meet us on the lawn when you’re done. We already got breakfast from the cafeteria. We’ll eat while I talk. Remember, Ogden expects a meeting with us at seven.”
“You found something else, didn’t you?” Nick asked.
“Just get dressed,” she said, making a point to look away from his mostly naked body.
He closed the door and slid into his clothes. As he pulled his shirt over his head, he again thought that he’d have to ask about getting some new clothes if they decided to stick around.
He brushed his teeth, ran a hand through his hair to comb it and then met his friends outside. He was suddenly ashamed of his thoughts of turning tail the night before. Maybe it was the dream he’d had, the mental insinuation that he had failed his family in the end.
Nick walked to Katherine and James, joining them on one of the few benches that were spread out along the lawn. It was apparently too early for anyone else to be out and about, so they had the stretch of lawn to themselves.
“Yes,” Katherine said, wasting no time as Nick joined them, “I found something else. It explains what happened to Griffith.”
“Yeah?” Nick said, accepting two pieces of toast and a packet of jelly from a small bag that sat between them.
“So there is a vaccine,” Katherine said. “We were told the truth about that and how it affected the three ramblers it was tested out on. It works, but the test subjects experience severe headaches and heart palpitations within the first two days of recovery. Other than that, they seem perfectly normal.
“Once this was considered a success, talks began about how to use it to thin out the rambler population. By the way…the documents I found on quote-unquote solving the rambler dilemma indicated that dropping bombs on heavily populated areas was once being seriously considered.”
“Even with most of the population wiped out,” James said, “these army assholes can’t stop playing with their toys, huh?”
“But instead of that,” Katherine went on, “Ogden and a few others wondered if they could come up with another sort of vaccine. Only this vaccine didn’t cure the ramblers, per se. See, the vaccine actively works against the parasite that causes the infected to become ramblers. But this other vaccine—the one we administered to Griffith—works with it. It mutates it.”
“Into what?”
“I’m not sure exactly. But the purpose of it was to alter the subdued nature of the ramblers. Instead of slow and working together in groups, they wanted to alter the effects of the parasite to make the infected faster and independent.”
“They can do that?” Nick asked.
“Oh yeah,” James said. “The government has been tinkering with stuff like that since the 60s. There were a few success stories in animals, but I don’t think it was ever implemented on humans.”
“Why the hell would you even want to do that to the ramblers?” Nick asked.
“Altering a parasite’s nature to cause the infected to become faster and more savage,” James said. “That right there is the underlying base of what a super soldier would be like.”
“But why would you make our enemy stronger and faster?”
“That’s Question Number One,” Katherine said.
It all sounded like some of James’s old paranoid-laced conspiracies, but after seeing Ogden’s state last night (not to mention Griffith’s horrific state as well), Nick found it chillingly plausible.
“The thing that really bothers me,” Katherine said, “is that Ogden sent you off with this other supposed vaccine on purpose. He figured you’d find me or James and we’d be infected. You’d inject us with this concoction and we would have become whatever Griffith was last night. He wanted us as the guinea pigs. He wanted us infected with it, spreading it. I don’t think he ever intended to put Griffith in harm’s way.”
“That didn’t stop him from gunning him down, did it?” Nick said.
They fell quiet for a moment before James asked: “What about Griffith last night? He said he could feel the ramblers. He claimed to know what they were thinking. You think that means that the ramblers communicate via some sort of hive mind?”
“Who knows?” Katherine said. “I could find nothing in the system about it. But if that’s true, that’s…I don’t know…”
“Scary as hell sums it up,” Nick said.
“Okay,” James said. “So we’re talking about the man we essentially work for having access to a vaccine that legitimately works and then some other sort of vaccine that turns the slow and dumb ramblers into vicious killing machines. And I would assume he wouldn’t have bothered working on su
ch a thing unless he planned on using it.”
“Scary as hell,” Katherine said, echoing Nick’s term.
“It is,” Nick said. “But I think we still need to stick around. You guys are welcome to go, but I’m staying.”
“Why so resolute?” Katherine asked.
“Because Ogden could have easily killed me last night when I went for him. But he didn’t. And he’s for sure the kind of man that would have. For whatever reason, he wants us alive, even after we heard everything Griffith had to say. Also, as I understand it, the first person on his rescue list is President Ames.”
“So?” James said.
“So I know something about Ames that Ogden doesn’t.”
“Care to share?” James asked.
Nick did share. He told them about the last day he had seen Ames, along with Valerie and his daughter. And he told them about the plan that was slowly stitching itself together in his head.
He was finishing up when they caught sight of Shelby Kent walking out from under the cover of the main building. She came out across the lawn and looked up into the bright morning sky.
“Good morning,” she said as she neared their bench.
“Morning,” James said.
“Colonel Ogden would like to remind you of your seven o’clock meeting,” she said. “He’ll be expecting you in his office.”
“He still wants his debrief on picking up James and Katherine after what happened last night?” Nick asked.
“No,” Shelby said. “He’s expediting your first assignment. He wants you on the road tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” James asked.
Shelby nodded.
Nick looked to James and Katherine. Neither of them said anything, but their stern expressions told him everything he needed to know.
The Zombie Squad, Nick thought whimsically. It almost made him chuckle as he looked across the lawn. He saw the small empty playground, a heartbreaking reminder of the world before this one.
The morning was bright and peaceful. It was almost a reminder of what the world had once been like—a world where the next day was something to look forward to and where there was a firm line drawn between dreams and nightmares.