That only left her with one choice.
She took a deep breath and went towards the door.
Chapter 16
She put her ear up to the door. There was nothing but silence on the other side. At least it didn’t sound like there it was a room filled with moaning zombies ready to tear her limb from limb. That was some relief, but her body was rigid and prepared for battle when she turned the knob and opened the door.
She entered an elegant, sparsely furnished office. To her right, there was a pair of leather chairs and a small table with a crystal lamp. A single empty desk faced her on the far side of the room, and a receptionist with a hard line of black bangs across her forehead, Betty Page style stared back at her.
“Hello…” Cheryl called out.
There was no greeting in return. The woman sat still and mute.
She walked towards the granite desk, calling out again, but stopped half way there as she realized she was talking to a Beast. The receptionist’s black eyes stared back at her, seeing her but not with any sort of consciousness—the unblinking orbs in her sockets were camera lenses.
Cheryl dared coming a few feet closer, curious about the macabre figure’s appearance and purpose. She wore a tailored navy blue dress and silk gloves. A pillbox hat topped her head, probably hiding an EM box underneath. With the thick white pancake makeup covering her face, she looked like a cadaver that had been excavated from the grave, carefully preserved since the 1960’s.
Spooky.
She leaned in closer, staring into the lenses and reminding herself not to let her guard down. As benign as the dead woman looked, Cheryl was fully cognizant of the fact that she was alone in a room with a Beast who might at any second receive a signal to attack.
“Down the hall to the right, Ms. Malone.”
She jumped at the sound of the booming male voice, looking all around her then realizing it had probably come from a hidden speaker. There was a narrow hallway to her right. She hadn’t noticed it before, because she’d been so focused on the ghoulish receptionist.
There was bright light down that way, sunlight streaming in from a succession of windows. Still fearing that she was walking into some sort of trap, she walked in that direction, her hands clenched into fists and her nerves on edge.
She entered the room, a large office with an impressive glass desk that reflected the sunshine with a prism of color. It was empty except for the notebook-sized computer lying flat on its surface. She turned her gaze towards the windows that were lined with a dozen potted palms and walked towards them, lured by the prospect of seeing the city and what it had become from such a bird’s eye perspective.
Looking down on the streets, she could see a few cars moving and people walking. But, it was nothing like the activity that would have existed before the apocalypse. Damage was evident on many of the buildings downtown. Many were blackened from fire and almost all of them had broken windows.
The eeriness of their condition was surpassed by the image of the vacant amusement park. It was mid-spring, a time when crowds normally flocked to the rides and carnival games, but now it was empty and still. She could see the Ferris wheel, the wooden roller coaster, the bright yellow loops of a stomach-churning ride, and the tall, needle like spire of amusement that used to drop its riders towards the earth at a dizzying speed. All of them were now nothing but perches for pigeons.
She heard the clink of glass and whipped around.
There was a man standing next to a portable bar, pouring a drink. “It’s a gorgeous day, isn’t it?”
Luke Marshall.
She remembered seeing his face on the giant screens on that last day in Sedona. In person, his eyes were just as bizarre. There was nothing organic about them. They looked pixelated with square shapes inside. Bionic? Superhuman? They seemed to stare right through her, analyzing every molecule in her body. Scanning her…
He held his glass up to her. “Can I get you a drink, Ms. Malone? Scotch, bourbon?”
She couldn’t speak.
“You’re curious, aren’t you?”
She continued to stare, but shut her mouth when she realized it was agape.
“I forget about them sometimes…my eyes. My contact lenses are an Internet interface. Thanks to implanted electrodes, with a mere thought, I can conjure up statistics on anything. I can also connect to the cameras on our Reanimated Assistants.”
“You mean Beasts?”
He chuckled. “I prefer to call them Reanimated Assistants. They’re so helpful…and compliant.”
“Maybe murder victims would be a better term.” She winced. What the hell was she doing? Trying to hasten her execution?
His upper lip curled and the fine lines that fanned around his disturbing eyes crinkled into deeper crevices. “I know they’re called by many names—Beasts, Eaters, Necrophagous Eating Units. Those monikers and other such misinformed terms come from people who simply haven’t understood the agenda of One New Earth. I’m afraid that misunderstanding has caused a lot of unnecessary deaths.”
She blinked a couple of times, her jaw dropping again as if the motions would were capable of fine tuning her hearing, because she surely hadn’t heard him right. “Unnecessary deaths?”
“Of course. If people hadn’t fought against us, we could have saved some of the more talented people that were lost. The culling could have been more selective, taking out the weak, the old, the lazy dregs of society—”
“The slow runners?” she asked, unable to contain the sarcasm boiling inside her.
He waved a hand in the air. “Bah! Is it so hard for simple minds to understand that periodic cullings are nature’s way of invigorating a biome? That’s why there are forest fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, and diseases.”
And mad men? She bit her tongue as she shook her head in disgust.
“Surely you realize that it’s sometimes necessary to remove a few body parts to save the entire patient. One New Earth gets that. We’ve done the difficult but necessary task, issued the medicine that the world needed to regenerate, heal itself.”
“Heal itself?” she screeched. “You haven’t healed anything! You murdered billions of people and now the soil itself is contaminated with your virus. It’s in the damn food we eat!”
Marshall motioned for her to lower her voice. Then, he took a gulp from his glass and walked to the windows. His back was turned, and for a moment she wished she could push him, send him crashing to his death fifty-six floors down. But she knew killing Luke Marshall wouldn’t put an end to O.N.E. He might be a figurehead or the mastermind, but the machine he’d created was now so omnipresent, it might go on without him. At the very least, she wished Mark was still alive and was here with her so he could vent alongside her. It would have given him some sort of closure to be able to confront the source of so much misery.
She decided to be Mark’s voice. “You opened Pandora’s box with your insane cure all. Now, everyone may die…even you.”
Marshall glanced at a camera on the ceiling, seeming to reassure himself that it was still there. “The virus jumping…well yes…that was unfortunate. Once everyone has the new vaccine it will become a non-issue. XCGen has a brilliant team of scientists working on a blanket product that will—”
“Bullshit! All the tinkering has just made things even worse. You’re a murderer! You—”
He turned around and bored a hole into her with his crazy eyes. “Do you realize that you’re only alive today because I gave the order to bring you in with a pulse? I don’t really expect you to be grateful, but perhaps you could tone down the venom just a little.”
She lowered her voice, but she couldn’t hold her tongue. “Maybe it would have been better to die on my own terms, instead of yours.”
Marshall sighed. “I understand. You’re tired. You’re weary. Your nerves are frazzled. I’ve been trying to explain some things to you, to give you an understanding of the bigger picture, so you might be a little more acquiescent to our program. Let’s
start over, shall we? Last year, there were over seven billion people on this planet. Even if our pollution wasn’t causing catastrophic global warming that could have wiped out a significant portion of the population via terrestrial catastrophes and war, we’d soon have run out of food to feed them all. Everyone eats. Everyone is an Eater of some sort, Ms. Malone. We could not all have continued as things were. “
“So, killing off people and turning them into cannibalistic corpses sounded like a good way to thin the herd?”
“You must admit…the method was effective.” He smiled a big Grand Canyon-wide grin like she’d seen on the screens in Sedona. “This planet will become a paradise like previous generations have only dreamed of. With a smaller, manageable populous and One New Earth as the sole government, there will be no more wars, no more fighting over resources. With the scientific advancements of XCGEN, many diseases will be eliminated. Denver is going to be our model city. By next summer, all of the useable buildings downtown will be retrofitted with new glass and fixtures. We’re going to grow food hydroponically in high rises. We’ll use solar power. Create sustainable living environments. And…to maintain the planet as a habitable environment, we’ll make sure that overpopulation never again becomes a threat to the survival of the human species.
“Some of that sounds good, but the method of—”
“It’s unfortunate that our species is adverse to change, to new ideas, and progress. It’s a symptom of small minds. Witness your own innate resistance to the macro concept of what I’m explaining. That’s why the Cyclops was trialed in Sedona and several other cities. That peaceful mind-altering technology could have helped to smooth the path to transition; it would have reduced the strife that causes resistance to change.
She heard the pretty words. He almost had her sold on the idea that there was some ultimate good that would result from all of the death and destruction that O.N.E. had initiated …almost. Marshall sounded like a very slick car salesman.
He went on, boasting of One New Earth’s vision. “Sedona was supposed to be our crown jewel, our model city of what paradise could be like. It was the perfect setting for renewal until the Resistance destroyed what we had put in place.”
She had to keep herself from laughing out loud, because she remembered what his version of “utopia” had looked like. Before the infection, she knew Sedona had been filled with visionaries, people who dreamed of a new age where there would be peace and harmony, a world less fragmented. After O.N.E. took over, it had turned into some plastic replica of what real life had been like. What had once been a cheerful, new age mecca had transformed into a sedated group who lived for their daily bread and decadent pleasures. Anything of deeper significance that used to be important to them had slipped off their radar.
“Why the pyramid there?” she asked, seeking answers while trying to keep her anger in check.
“It was a symbol of many things. It demonstrated the ability of Reanimated Assistants to do tireless labor, eliminating the need for the rest of us to do menial jobs. And…the strong electromagnetic power in that location would have enhanced the properties of the Cyclops.”
She heard the sound of a chime. Marshall set his drink down, pulled a phone out of his pocket, looked at the screen and tapped it a few times. Then, he returned his gaze to her.
“And the Beasts? It’s bad enough that you’re responsible for their repulsive and miserable condition. Do you really think it’s moral to use them as slaves?”
The corner of his mouth ticked upwards as he smirked. “A corpse has no feelings, Ms. Malone. Except for their insatiable hunger which we can turn off with the EM box, they don’t have any sort of mental or physical discomfort. They’re just pieces of meat and bone like the carcasses of cattle hanging in a slaughterhouse. There’s no thought process left there, no worries about their condition. So, why not use them? They’re free labor and no longer a drain on the earth’s resources. In death, they’re doing more service to the planet than most of them ever did in life.”
Service? She was talking to a loon. Had he never seen anyone ripped apart by an Eater? Seen them tearing a screaming person’s flesh to shreds, tearing them limb from limb? And what about the infected themselves? As frightening as they were, people who had become Eaters were victims as well, doomed to a miserable existence as the walking dead who never fully died. How could there be any logical, humane reason to put them into service as slaves? It was adding insult to injury. Marshall and his One New Earth cohorts must not have souls in their bodies if they actually believed there was any sort of righteousness in what they had done. She wanted badly to let loose and give him a larger piece of her mind, but there was still one thing holding her back. He’d mentioned the Resistance. He’d mentioned Sedona. But, he hadn’t mentioned her involvement with what had happened there. Why not? Wasn’t that why she had been brought here? If it wasn’t, it didn’t seem prudent to lose her cool and accidently volunteer any information that might incriminate her.
“Some of that herd you thinned were my friends and my family. I lost my father and my fiancé, and many other people that I cared about and loved. Haven’t you lost someone too? Don’t you feel some sort of guilt? Some remorse for their deaths?”
Marshall looked out the window, seeming to study the fabric of the city below them. “It’s not possible to have a revolution, to have great change without some casualties. Sacrifices had to be made for the greater good.”
No. That sounded just too simple. O.N.E. was not a group of martyrs. She didn’t believe his story that the whole epidemic had been started to save the human species. There was a cloak here, some other sort of motive behind what had been done. Who benefited from the apocalypse the most? The impetus behind One New Earth was likely some elite group of power hungry people who had every material thing they could ever want and enjoyed the thrill of turning the entire planet into their chessboard. She’d had enough. She didn’t want to talk to him anymore and hear more lies.
The utmost question in her mind could not be held back any more. “Why am I here?” she asked, glaring at him. “Why did you bring me here?”
He drained the last of his drink and set it down on the desk. “Well, my dear rebel. To answer that, I’ll have to ask you a question in return.”
Her body tightened, preparing…
“What would it take for you to join us? To stop trying to buck the inevitable and help us work towards a joyous future together?”
“Nothing you could say could persuade me to become one of your puppets!” she said as her teeth ground together. “Because of you, my father is dead, my fiancé, and many of my friends. I’ve seen people die horrible deaths, and I’ve spent most of the last year running, hiding, just trying to survive. I’d rather die than—”
He held up his hand to stop her. Instead of looking angry, his face was cheerful. “Excellent. That’s what I expected to hear from you. It’s what every other member of the RT told me before I executed them.”
“And that gives you satisfaction?” she asked, shaking her head.
“No. Not that. I wish that you and so many other people weren’t so bullheaded, so backwards thinking. If only you could understand the bigger picture, we wouldn’t have to go to extremes to create harmony. If they had understood, perhaps the friends and family you lost would not have—”
Friends.
Aidan.
She’d been so distracted by her conversation with Luke Marshall, she forgot to demand to know what had happened to him. “Where is Aidan?!” she interrupted.
“The friend that accompanied you to Denver?”
“Yes. I want to see him. Where is he?”
Marshall opened his mouth to speak, hesitating then said, “He’s—”
“Right here.”
Cheryl turned around. Aidan—or someone who looked like the man she used to know by that name—was standing at the entrance to the office.
Chapter 17
The man who looked like her friend w
as wearing fresh clothes, a crisp white button down shirt and starched jeans. He stood up straight with a rigid, almost regal stance, and his face was freshly shaved. There was something…something very different about—
She gasped.
It was Aidan, and he had two eyes again. One was his own and the other looked much like the glass camera eyes she’d seen on some of the Beasts.
Aidan gave Marshall a curt nod. “It’s a pretty nice view, isn’t it?” he asked as he turned away from her and looked out the window. “Gives you a whole new perspective.”
“Are…are you okay?” She couldn’t understand his cavalier demeanor, his seeming familiarity with Marshall.
“Never been better,” he said, grinning.
“Did they look at you? Did they—”
“They scanned my head. I checked out all right, but I’m supposed to take it easy for a few days.”
“Your eye…”
He raised a hand, touching it to the temple near the electronic orb. “Marshall here…” he nodded once more in his direction. “…offered me an experimental implant. “
“You can see through it?”
“Yeah. Pretty amazing, hunh?”
All it took was a new eye and he went over to the dark side? She couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth. She also didn’t believe the electronic eye was a gift without strings. Was it really just an artificial eyeball, or could Marshall see through it as well as Aidan?”
“I’m sure Marshall has been filling you in on some of O.N.E.’s plans. Can you believe how much we’ve misunderstood them? All that time we spent resisting what they were trying to do…such a waste. You get it now, don’t you? The bigger picture…a better world for all of us. We’ve been fools to fight against something just because we didn’t understand…”
Eaters: Resurrection Page 23