by Tim Curran
They did not lower their weapons. A couple others cut Janie and Mickey loose. They came over to me, eyes despairing and full of questions.
“Come with us,” the man said.
“What do you want? We haven’t done anything,” I told him. “Where are you taking us?”
“To the place you wanted to go,” he said. “And tonight…tonight you will meet that which you have been running from.”
I felt a chill run up my spine. We had been rescued, yes, but I had a nasty feeling we were about to be given to something far worse. After all the selecting I had done, I had the nastiest feeling that it was I who had just been selected.
“What the hell is this?” Mickey said to me.
But I didn’t have a fucking clue.
12
Of course, I did. In a way I did.
This is exactly what bathrobe guy had been talking about that day in Gary: They came in silver buses. I saw ‘em. They had orange suits on. They took Reverend Bob and threw him in the bus. I remembered how intrigued Price had been when we related the story to him after the silver bus hit us in Des Moines. He knew what it meant. Even then he knew exactly what it had meant.
Janie, Mickey, and I were taken in a sliver, windowless bus out to an Army base beyond Bitter Creek. This was The Creek. It sat behind a high chainlink fence, actually a series of them with dog runs between, a collection of low white fabricated buildings attached to a larger brick complex. Numerous outbuildings were scattered about. The signs were everywhere: U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE. And my favorite: DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED.
We were taken into one of the buildings at gunpoint. Inside, it was clean with electric lights. I even saw operating computers. It was like going back in time a couple years. For in this complex, the old world was still operating, smoothly, efficiently. We saw other forms in orange space suits mulling about. Many of them stopped what they were doing when they saw us. Several backed away like they were afraid of us.
“I demand to know what this is about,” Janie said. “We haven’t done a damn thing. What do you want with us?”
Her question went unanswered. This was a military operation, it seemed. We’d get answers if and when they decided to give them to us. We were ushered through a series of hissing airlocks that had to be opened with plastic ID cards. There were guards with guns behind every one. We went through two more airlocks, the signs announced BIOSAFETY LEVEL ZERO and then BIOSAFETY LEVEL 2. Each time the door slid open, I could feel the difference in air pressure. It was like you were being sucked into the room. It was what Price had been talking about: negative air pressure. At Level 2 we were bathed in blue ultraviolet light. Next, we climbed into an elevator and went down quite a ways. When we climbed out a sign said BIOSAFETY LEVEL 3: STAGING AREA. There were signs around that read: DECON. Which I think referred to the chemical showers you had to go through before going in and particularly when you came out.
We passed through Level 3 and then we reached the big, bad one that price had told me about. There was a stainless steel door before us and just the sight of it made my guts crawl up into my chest:
EXTREME CAUTION
BIOHAZARD
We went through another airlock and into an anteroom with more Decon showers, ultraviolet light sterilizers, and hoses that sprayed chemicals-judging from the signs-on you with the touch of a button.
Janie, Mickey, and I pretty much stuck together. We felt like monkeys going into a test chamber and that’s exactly what we were. We were terrified. More figures in orange suits waited for us. Several had blue suits on with airlines hooked to overhead pumps that moved as they did, sliding on tracks. All we could hear was the hissing sounds of respirators.
They echoed and echoed until it sounded like you were living in an iron lung.
The walls were gray, hoses hanging from the ceiling. Every corner and crack and crevice were caulked thickly with some kind of goo, probably to keep anything from slipping out. There was a series of rooms leading off the first as we were led deeper into the maze. I saw labs and animal containment areas lined with cages. We were brought into a small room with three plastic contour chairs against the wall, each separated by about five feet so you could not hold the hand of or touch the person next to you.
We were told to sit and we did.
We didn’t even dare move.
Two figures with submachine guns watched over us. Then the third one who’d led us in motioned to them and all three left. A clear plexiglass door slid shut and locked into place.
“What the hell is going on here?” Mickey said, rising to her feet.
Right away there was a beeping alarm. A voice over an intercom said: “Please stay seated.”
Mickey sank back down.
Janie and I exchanged looks of absolute dread. We smiled thinly at each other, but there wasn’t much hope. We knew we were screwed.
The door slid open and a man in an orange suit came in. He carried a small black metal box with him. The guards had returned.
“All this,” I said, “is unnecessary. We are not infected with anything. You don’t have to keep us down here. We’re not sick.”
“Aren’t you?” the voice said.
“No we’re not!” Janie said. “Please, get us out of here!”
“That’s our intention,” he said. “Unfortunately, only two can leave. One will join us.”
“Fuck this!” Mickey said, jumping up, the alarm going off again. “I’m not a fucking guinea pig.”
The man turned to her. “Take the female. She’s the one.”
“Stop it,” I said. “This is insane!”
He was unmoved by anything I said. “You are the one that made the selections.”
My face dropped.
“We know about it. We know about your sacrifices to your pagan god. Very well. Make your selection…which of the females goes with you and which stays here?”
I jumped up and a gun was pointed in my face. Janie and I were held at gunpoint.
“Please…don’t do this to us,” I begged him.
“Make your choice,” he said.
“If you’ll only listen-”
“Your choice.”
It was pointless to argue. I suggested taking me, but that wouldn’t do either, I was informed. Only two of us would see the Medusa, the third would stay behind.
“Very well,” the man said. He pointed at Janie. “This one-”
“No! No! Get the fuck away from her!” I shouted. “Not her…not Janie…”
“Then this one?” he said.
I swallowed, nodded.
“Nash!” Mickey cried, “Jesus Christ, what are you doing? Are you out of your fucking mind, you sonofabitch? I belong with you! You know I do-”
Two more guards came in, they took hold of Mickey and held her down. She fought. She screamed. She clawed. But in the end, the man took a syringe with a long needle from the black box and jabbed it into her throat, depressing the plunger. Shocked and shaking, Mickey was put back in her seat. Her face was wet with tears.
“This is fucking crazy!” I shouted. “We’ve done nothing! We’re no threat to you! We’re not fucking infected! Take us somewhere! Anywhere! Put us in quarantine together! Just get us out of this fucking lab!”
The man was unmoved by anything I said. It meant nothing to him. He stood there like some kind of fucked-up automaton from a B-movie, just staring at me through his visor. Now and then, through the darkened bubble, I could catch a glimpse of a face in there. But I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see his eyes and they were what I most wanted to make contact with.
“The effects should begin shortly,” he said.
Mickey was curled up in her chair, shaking, her eyes glazed with horror. She looked like she was in shock.
“But she’s not infected!” Janie said.
The man and his guards stepped to the door. It slid open behind them. “On the contrary,” he said. “Your friend has just been injected with a mutated, lethally hot strain of
the Ebola-X virus. As we speak, her system is being flooded with millions of viral particles.”
The door slid closed.
This was my hell, my pay-off. All that selecting and sacrificing had led here, down a very dark path to this awful moment of betrayal. I felt dead inside, used-up, hopeless. It took some time before I could even look at Mickey, at the broken deceived thing she now was. Her gaze was enough to make me want to put a gun in my mouth.
“You’ll pay for this, Nash,” she promised me. “In the end, you’ll suffer like I did. You’ll die horribly and you’ll die alone.”
13
Within thirty minutes it began.
Janie and I wanted nothing better than to comfort Mickey, ease her mind somehow, make her realize that she was our friend and we stood by her regardless of what had happened…but we couldn’t. She was infected with Ebola-X and we didn’t dare come into contact with her. Not that it would have mattered. Mickey hated both of us. She wanted us, and particularly me, to know agony.
Within minutes, the real Mickey was…gone.
That shocked look in her eyes, she just sat there shaking. She did not respond to anything we said. It was like she had not just been shot up with Ebola, but with some sort of sedative.
We kept calling her name, trying to snap her out of it, but she did not seem to realize we were there.
And then, like I said, within thirty minutes it began.
She went limp in her chair, head lolling to one side, limbs dangling. She was still shaking and as we watched she began to convulse violently, these little broken agonized sounds coming from her throat. Her eyes slid shut. Sweat ran down her face and you could smell the hot stink of it as her fever spiked. Her entire system was under attack. It was devastating.
She sat there, slumped in that chair for a time, not moving or making any sound, then the convulsions began anew. Blood began to run from both nostrils. Her lips peeled back from teeth that were red-stained. A mist of blood came from her mouth. She jerked upright, hands gripping the arms of her chair. Then her eyes snapped open and they were a brilliant, translucent red.
Janie cried out.
It wasn’t so much like Mickey was infected by Ebola-X, but literally possessed by it.
She tore at herself, tearing at her skin with her nails. She ripped her shirt open and her breasts and belly were contused with rising sores. She yanked out locks of hair from her head. She screamed with a deranged shrieking sound.
It took her with amazing speed.
Her face-so pretty, so darkly sensual-began to contort like the muscles beneath it were no longer working in conjunction but fighting against one another. The left side began to sag, the right side twisted up in some grim corpse-like rictus. In classic Ebola this was due to brain damage, soft tissue destruction and the dissolution of connective tissues…but with this mutated form of X, I began to suspect it was something even worse.
Her flesh popped with red sores, it went from that lovely olive hue to one that was discolored, mottled, set with livid contusions that seemed to spread out as we watched. Blisters bulged on her face, her legs, from one breast. They popped open, spewing drainage. And as each one popped, dozens more took their place until her face was unrecognizable, just a twisted mask of jellied flesh. Then she began to bleed. It came out of her eyes and mouth, trickled from her ears and bubbled from her pores. She fell to her knees, vomiting out profuse amounts of tarry black blood and poisoned bile.
She let out one last agonized scream.
She gyrated on the floor, head thrashing wildly from side to side and tossing loops of blood over the floor, up the walls, onto the clear plexiglass door where they ran like rain drops. She squirmed face down on the floor, moving with such wild contortions that she seemed practically boneless. Then she rose up on her knees straight as a post and threw herself at the door, striking it with her face and hands, making splatting sounds, and sliding down the glass leaving a greasy smear of blood and macerated tissue.
She trembled and went still, seemed to deflate as if the air was let out of her.
Long before any of that happened, Janie and I were clutching each other, pressed into the corner.
“Why don’t they take her away, Nash?” Janie wanted to know. “Why don’t they just take her away?”
I didn’t know. The room was a slaughterhouse of blood and leaking fluids. The stench of drainage, blood, and infection was hot and nauseating.
Easily a half an hour later, Mickey began to move.
Her corpse began to tremble.
She had to be dead. She had crashed and bled out, the virus burning through her. Then she sat up, her back to us, staring out the plexiglass door through the mess she had made on it.
“Mickey?” I said.
She stood up painfully and turned to look upon us. Her black hair was greasy with blood, filthy plaits of it hanging over her face which was bulging, distorted, like hot wax that had cooled too quickly, settling into all the wrong places. One eye was sealed shut in a web of tissue, the other was huge, bulging from its raw socket like a bleeding, raw egg yolk. Her lips were sealed shut with strings of flesh on the left side of her mouth, but on the right the lips had sunk away, leaving a grin of gums and teeth.
“Nash,” she said and it sounded like her throat was filled with wet leaves. “Do you wanna fuck me again?”
Janie cried out and I think I did, too. I held her tight against me as terror filled both of us. I looked upon Mickey, the abomination she had become, and I was literally speechless. It felt like the inside of my mouth had been sprayed with oil. I could not seem to get my tongue to work to form words.
Mickey came forward, pus dribbling from holes in her face. She gripped one breast in her bloody hand and squeezed it. It was the most obscene thing I’ve ever seen. Because when she squeezed it, it bulged then ruptured open, black juice and liquefied tissue running down her belly.
“What’s the matter, Nash? Ain’t I good enough to fuck?” she said, getting so close that the heat and stink coming off her made me retch with dry heaves. “Ain’t I hot enough? Ain’t I? Ain’t I? Ain’t I?”
God only knows what might have happened next.
But the door slid open and two men in orange suits led her out of the room. She went willingly with them, sensing that she was now part of them and not part of us. They had an orange suit for her. She stepped into it. Rubberized boots went over her feet. A helmet went over her head. The respirator was turned on. I could hear the hollowing hissing of her breathing.
Faceless as the others, she walked off with them.
That was the last I saw of Mickey.
There was no doubt what was going on by that point. There could be no doubt. I could hear Price’s voice in the back of my head: You see, Nash, when a hot virus infects its host, what it’s trying to do, essentially, is to convert that host into virus. But he had said complete, successful conversion was impossible. But he’d been wrong because that’s what was happening here…beneath those orange and blue spacesuits there were no people, no healthy organisms of ordinary flesh and blood, but walking, functioning, thinking masses of hot virus, viral imitations of human beings and nothing more.
They had nothing to do with Janie or I.
They were in league with The Medusa and they were waiting for it to come, their savior, their prophet, a new god for a seriously warped new world.
Janie and I had not been assimilated yet. That made us dangerous. That’s why those figures in the spacesuits had backed away from us when we entered the complex: it had been revulsion and fear. Fear of infection. Fear of contamination. For they feared healthy, normal bodies with their active compliments of antibodies as much as we feared Ebola.
Janie and I were nothing but disease masses now, infections to be eradicated. We were the abnormal ones.
After a time, two forms in orange suits returned. One of them carried the black box.
“It’s time,” the one with the box said.
“Don’t do that t
o us,” I said. “Please. Just kill us. Destroy us. Don’t shoot us with that virus.”
“We’re not going to do anything to you,” the man said. “When you are converted, it will be she who touches, she who welcomes you into the fold.”
He was talking about The Medusa.
“Please,” Janie, said, tears running down her face. “Don’t hurt us. Don’t hurt us.” She put her hands to her belly. “You can’t. I’m pregnant.”
14
Three hours later, I was still reeling from that one.
But it all made sense when I finally calmed down and was able to look at it with some kind of perspective. Janie had been strange and moody for some time now, even worse than usual, and that had less to do with me being with Mickey than with something much larger than all that. She told me knew since Gary. When we were in that pharmacy after the Hatchet Clan attack and after those birds fed on the Clans, she had slipped off and gotten a pregnancy test. One of those home jobs where you just read the strip. I remember her disappearing that day. Then coming back with that funny look in her eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
“What would the point have been, Rick? What would it have changed?”
“I had the right to know.”
“Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t.”
The men in the space suits took us out of the complex by gun point and led us off into the fields and brought us to a hilltop. You could see for miles from our vantage point. And what I saw was a little valley spread beneath us and it was filled with people. The same sort of people we had run into in Bitter Creek: the diseased, the dying, the suffering. That crazy old man had said they had been congregating in the town for some time and for a particular reason.
It’s coming for all of us! Coming out of the east, yes sir! And there’s those here that want it to come! You see all them sick ones? They been pouring in for weeks! For weeks! Some have died, but others is hanging in just so they can see it! Look it in the face when it comes home to roost!