I backed away wearily. I remembered seeing this same thing once before. It was when I was nine. I had gone out with my father to clear one of the smaller buildings in a nearby town when this rabid dog had appeared. My father had instinctively positioned himself in front of me to shield me from the dog. It had white foam oozing from its snout and its eyes were bloodshot, just like Zoey’s were. When the dog’s back had started convulsing and it seized along the ground, whimpering and growling, my father had rushed forward and stabbed his knife through its eye. I remember those eyes distinctly because when my father had removed the blade from its skull, a large chunk of its brain and eye came with it. It hung like bloodied and rotted spaghetti pasta. This was the first day I learned what it meant to be afraid and to vomit all at the same time. The day I learned what death was and that it came for everyone.
My eyes were pinned on Zoey. Her body twisted, and flinched and spasmed just like the rabid dog had. Her hands clawed at the wall and even her body. Her nails tore her pretty face, causing multiple lacerations before inflicting the rest of her exposed body with the same treatment. Her arms bled freely, and the pus leaked from her panting lips as she squirmed against some unseen horror.
‘Zoey! What’s wrong? What’s happening to you?’
But the innocent little girl was unresponsive. The torment lasted only thirty seconds before her back arched and her lungs secreted the last gasp of air she would ever exhale with a grunt. Then her body lay motionless; arms flung to the sides, legs crooked and bent under her body, and her stomach protruding like an old stump towards the ceiling.
I leaned in to see if she was still breathing, and brushed a strand of her yellow hair away from her face. I felt my own lungs gasp when those foggy cataracts stared back at me. Her left eye had a slit slashed through it, and some of the eye’s inners were puffing through, and the other stared off blankly into the distance.
I pressed my ear under her nose to feel and listen for any signs of life. I felt for a pulse on her neck and waited. She was dead. Her skin felt tough, almost like a leather hide or jerky left out in the hot sun for an extra week. I shifted my fingers to her cheeks to wipe away the tears and close her eyelids. Touching her face was like touching ice. I retracted my hands quickly. Her left hand grazed my knee and sent shivers up my leg. Why is she so cold?
Whatever the people in this place had done to her had killed her. And I was next, unless I stopped it. The sorrow in my soul for this small, innocent child vanished the moment her cracked eye blinked. I shouted and backed away. I stared at Zoey’s lifeless body, thinking the drugs they had injected me with were having some side effects. But then her left hand twitched and her fingers curled under her palm. Her chest raised and deflated.
She was breathing! I rushed over to her and placed my hand on her chest.
‘Zoey, can you hear me? It’s Willow. I’m here.’
The pumping of her chest increased and her lips quivered with the interaction of air through her mouth. She was wheezing as if she were having an asthma attack. I leaned forward on my knees and looked at her eyes for any sign of recognition. The viscid suppuration had oozed out of the crack of her left eye and was leaking down her nose. The smell of decayed fruit and burning feculence assailed my nostrils and immediately moved my own organs into action. I projectile vomited all over her chest and neck. The vomit splashed her cheek and meshed with the pus. I covered my nose with my sleeve and distanced myself. Her body continued to twitch and spasm, but she was certainly not alive. Nothing alive could smell like the death before me.
When she raised her head off the floor and swiveled my way, I started screaming.
‘Let me out!’ I screamed, pounding my fists on the door again. ‘Somebody! Help!’
I turned to see Zoey’s body rising off of the floor. Her stomach continued to poke up abnormally as if her spine had been snapped in half and now her upper half leaned down on her lower. I threw up again as she slid towards me like an inside-out slug. How was she alive! How was her body even able to move in such a condition?
I kicked and pounded my feet and hands against the door, yelling for someone to let me out, but my cries went unheard as the devil came for me. I ran to the other side of the room, behind the same table Zoey had hidden beneath when the white suits had come for her. My feet stepped into something fleshy. I held my hand over my mouth to keep from gagging. The entire floor was covered in blood and brown guts. There were body parts everywhere.
I jumped when I felt something on my ankle and ran deeper into the laboratory. Zoey’s hand had made contact. I’m contaminated! I found myself thinking. She touched me! I’m going to die! I prayed that whatever she had was not spread through touch. Zoey’s deranged and mutilated body continued to crawl towards me. There were more bodies as I ran around another set of tables. The petri dishes, burners, and microscopes were covered in intestines and bleeding tissue. What in God’s name happened here? I heard Zoey coming and I had my answer. The devil, and death was his right hand man.
She had said she was sorry for what she had done. Was this what she meant? Was this why she was so afraid? Did she think she’d turn out like them? Did they make her do this? What did they do? Zoey was coming towards more quickly, and her growls and moans escalated as she clawed frantically at the floor and over all the limbs towards me. I tripped and fell. The side of my head smacked the side of a trashcan. My vision blurred while the room swirled in white dots. I tried to roll over and stand, but the wave of vertigo sent me back to my knees.
The cause of my fall lay inches from my face. The remnants of his cheek littered the floor in chunks and his lifeless eyes were empty sockets. I screamed when I felt the same cold hand of death latch on to my ankle. I looked down to see Zoey crawling over my body. Her head tilted sideways, black plasma dripping from her swollen tongue. The dark blood puddled along my own pants and shirt as she heaved her dead body onto me. I tried to wiggle free but her claws dug in.
I screamed for help, but no one could hear me. Or if they could, they didn’t care. They had done this to me. The fear was replaced with the instinct of survival and I reached my hand towards the table. It was too far. I scanned the guts for something to use and saw a blue glass glove shaped into a pyramid. I crawled my way to it and grabbed hold of it just as Zoey’s face was over mine. She lunged towards my throat with teeth parted, ready for gnashing and tearing, and all I could think was: This is it. I’m about to die. If one dog doesn’t get you, the next one will.
I roared as I brought down the globe as hard as I could into her skull. Its sharp edge bit into her scalp, and when I brought my hand away for another strike, it brought along with it a section of her brain. I continued to smash the pyramid into her head until she stopped moving.
The blue pyramid rolled from my fingers covered in hair, bone, and tissue sinews. Zoey’s body lay motionless on top of me, her face against my cheek, the black blood dripping into the cavity of my collarbones.
I roared in anguish at the top of my lungs, glad to still be alive, angry that I had just killed a small child, until my strength gave out and I lay there panting.
≈ Chapter 42 ≈
When the dead rise and thirst for the living, Death is always close behind.
The intercom crackled by the door and a familiar voice came over the speakers.
‘Well done,’ Dr. A said. ‘You have passed your first test.’
I crawled my way out from under Zoey’s dead body and let it slap noisily into the puddle of fresh, black blood oozing from her obliterated skull. Its foulness merged with the other fragments of dead bodies, guts, and blood.
My hands and arms were covered in blood. I shook my right arm violently to rid it of the pieces of sinew clumped there. A large chunk of flesh with a glob of yellow hair attached flopped to the ground. The rage, the disgust of what I had just done, the carnage and unforgivable butchery of a little girl could never be taken away. My hands were strangely calm; the shaking had stopped.
M
y eyes looked towards the window and the reflection of the lost soul staring back at me. My auburn hair burned with black blood. My face was unrecognizable behind the bloody mask and distraught expression etched along its rim. I walked towards the mirror like a ghost hovering over its grave. The pigments in my skin looked transparent beneath the pale sheen. I sure felt dead inside. Even though she had been seemingly possessed, I had just murdered a little girl in cold blood with my bare hands. No, not cold blood. It was definitely warm. The warm blood of an undead child My hands caressed the ray of sadness in my reflection, smearing the mirror with fibrous grit. My fingers felt sticky as I traced them along the glass, blotting out the judgment in those eyes. I wrote my sorrow on the wall with that bloody finger, my final will and testament, my promise. I poured out my emotion, my regret, my fear, my loathing and disgust on that dull glass with every stroke.
The red letters raged back at me; a permanent reminder that would follow me until that same Death took me beyond the barrier of life.
You will pay for this.
I couldn’t cry. I was beyond tears. I just stared at the words smeared on the two-way mirror. The door hissed open and white hands, clothed in protective plastic suits, grabbed and hauled me away. The red words stung the air with their vengeance as I was dragged from the room. Zoey’s body lay there amongst the blood of the previous victims.
Yellow suits with large tanks strapped to their backs walked in after I’d been removed and sprayed the entire room with a green liquid from the barrels of some kind of water rifle. The room filled with a vaporous green gas just as my heels were dragged down another white hallway and the doors sealed shut.
The white fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling burned my retinas as they dragged me to their next torture chamber. I didn’t care. The numbness continued its spread into the remaining limbs of my body. By the time the doors hissed open and I was dragged in, I had shut down completely.
They propped me up in a chair, strapped harnesses around my ankles and wrists to the metal rims, and walked out.
I was in a larger room than the first. This one had arched ceilings and rows and rows of plant life. They had me strapped to a chair bolted to the ground. I teased my wrists and legs against the restraints, but they were fastened tight. No getting out of this one.
The greenhouse was full of all sorts of plants. Plants I had only read about in the world before the bombs. I couldn’t help but forget about the nightmare I had just witnessed moments before and be filled with awe.
I heard a spraying sound as sprinklers positioned all along the high vaulted ceiling popped out and sprinkled the plants like a gentle rain. My boots turned a dull brown as the leather soaked up the water from the nearest sprinkler. The circuitry remained on for several minutes then rotated back into the ceiling, leaving the plants to exhale their mist.
Some movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention as Dr. A squeezed through one of the rows of plants. She had a small bin and she would stop every few feet to sprinkle its contents into the soil. She pretends to not see me, but I knew she was why I was there. She sat the bin down and turned to face me. She ripped off thin plastic gloves and tossed them in a wastebasket nearby. The mysterious substance in the bin must have been some kind of fertilizer.
‘Oh, good!’ she exclaimed, pretending she just now was noticing my being here. ‘I’m glad you made it.’
Like I had a choice.
‘Do you like it?’ she asked.
‘What is this place?’ I was excited to see all the trees—all the green—but I couldn’t let her know that.
‘It’s a BioDome,’ she said, ‘one of several housed in this facility. Quite remarkable really.’
Remarkable was an understatement. I had been working on my baby trees for years, and only just barely got life to sprout. But this, this was astounding. They had an entire forest growing a mile under the ocean. And it wasn’t just growing; it was thriving.
‘How are they even able to grow down here? Without sunlight, they would just die.’
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘And many did die in the beginning. SIND has been trying to germinate the tree population since its instatement. This is only a very small portion of what we have accomplished over the last thirty years.’
‘What are they for?’ I asked.
Nothing SIND ever did was without purpose. Everything was just another means to enslave the surviving people on the ground. My initial theory was they’d have us transplant the trees in designated precincts. For all I knew, they might even go as far as to classify a new economic status for those doing the transplanting. I wonder what they would call the new worker class. Arbors? SIND’s very own arborists hauling around their secret stash of forests and planting them wherever they pleased. I imagine that role would be short lived, and then what, back to your previous role as Sifter or Metallic—or something else?
‘Trees have many purposes,’ Dr. A said, breaking off my conspiratorial gestations. ‘At the very basic level, trees are a source of life. They generate oxygen for us to breathe. They sift through the soil and enrich it. They spread life wherever they go, and prevent flooding.’
She was smiling at me.
‘But that’s not what you meant, I presume,’ she said.
I didn’t respond.
‘There are different stations set up all throughout this facility. Some cultures are specifically for harnessing food, fuel, and feed, while others are for plant development and growth. This one, as you might imagine, is for developing and growing the species for transplanting.’
‘Transplanting them where?’ I asked. ‘Most of the earth is fried. The radiation and heat in the air would just burn them up the moment they were planted. How does SIND expect to keep them alive?’
Dr. A walked over to one of the rows and plucked a small stem from one of the trees. She held the green symbol of life in the air and spun it around in her fingers.
‘Life is fragile these days,’ she said, not answering my question. ‘Every source is valuable.’
‘Is that why you killed Zoey?’ I said. My throat tensed with the resentment welling back up.
Dr. A looked shocked and stared at me briefly, before looking away.
‘Zoey was an unfortunate casualty, but a necessary sacrifice,’ she said.
‘I thought every life was precious?’ I mocked. ‘I guess every life but that of a little girl.’
Anger flashed through her eyes for a brief moment. Her fingers were white before they released the tension and the leaf fell to the floor.
‘You may choose to live in a fantasy world if you’d like, but doing so will only blind you to the truth. None are innocent. We all have blood on our hands.’
She held my gaze. She watched me intently as if looking for a reaction. I must not have given her what she was looking for.
‘What happened to her?’ I asked. There was no point in arguing semantics with a delusional slave of the corrupt government. Nothing I said would ever convince her of her sins and wrongdoing.
Dr. A walked passed me. I heard her rummaging through something behind me and came back with a manila folder in her hand. She flipped through the pages and stopped when she found what she was looking for. She turned the folder around so I could see what was on the page.
I scanned the lab report and read the words ‘Antigens were nonresponsive to the mutagen. Preliminary reports show massive cell degeneration in the amygdala, while cell growth and neuron activity more than quadrupled in the hypothalamus. This indicates the virus’ ability to amplify the host’s primal senses…’
Dr. A flipped the folder closed and stuffed it under her armpit. She crossed her arms and waited for me to respond.
Why would the amygdala shut down and the brain produce an excess amount of neurotransmitters in the part of the brain responsible for hormone production?
‘It’s not a typical virus,’ Dr. A said suddenly. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking.’
I stared blankly
at her.
‘At least, we don’t believe so. It acts very similar to known viruses, but it camouflages itself as an antibody so the nervous system can’t detect its presence. We don’t know why it attacks the central nervous system, but we suspect it has something to do with the chromosomes.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’ I asked. ‘Why kidnap me, put me in a room with an infected young girl, and then show me this?’
‘We had to know if you could be trusted,’ she said.
‘Trusted? To do what?’
‘Whatever it took,’ she said. ‘The world is a dangerous place, Willow. And it’s only getting worse.’
‘No thanks to SIND and people like you,’ I spat.
‘Actually, we’re the good guys,’ she said. ‘I know you may find it hard to believe, but we’re the reason you all are still alive. Why any of us are.’
‘You call living on the ground, fighting for our lives, and living off of scraps just to barely get by living? We’re not living; we’re surviving. And we’ve done it all on our own.’
‘I respect your opinion,’ she said, ‘but that just isn’t the truth. There is so much you don’t know.’
‘Then start filling me in,’ I demanded. ‘What don’t I know?’
Dr. A sighed and placed the folder up against one of the plants and sat down on a stool. She had her hands outstretched on her knees and leaned in towards me.
‘What do you think happened to Zoey?’ she asked.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You heard me,’ she said firmly. ‘What would your prognosis be if you had to decide the cause of death?’
‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ I said. ‘I’m not playing into your demented games.’
‘Humor me,’ she said.
If I could have, I would have crossed my arms in defiance, but the straps preventing me from doing so.
‘You were with her during her last moments of life,’ Dr. A said, ‘what did you notice?’
‘Yeah, and no thanks to you,’ I said vehemently. ‘Why did you put me with her if you knew she was going to die? Why did you make me…’ I couldn’t finish my sentence as the words caught in my throat. Kill her.
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