Project 137

by Seth Augenstein

  “I was trying…tell you…” he said, gasping. “I made sure…you were hired by Saint Almachius, no matter the cost. I was…one of the doctors triaging the deaths during the Blackout. Dozens, maybe hundreds, in those first days… But I wasn’t supposed to be there anyway…we had gotten word there was to be a mass-casualty incident planned by Project 137. I don’t know why I went…why I was complicit. At that point, I just figured I could help treat the people who were already sick… There had been experiments conducted in the area before, and no one had died. They had all been tests to analyze how things spread, how to protect against a biological attack from a terrorist group, things like that. But…when they started bringing in the bodies from the neighborhood, covered up in sheets and wrapped in plastic, I knew something had changed.”

  He held his face in his hands, scraping his cheeks raw with his fingernails.

  “Chaos. Pure chaos. Four planes went down in the area that night, due to the wholesale electrical failure from the Blackout. Almost every doctor in the place scrambled to save the people with lost limbs, massive bleeding, third-degree burns, souls barely clinging to life. The hospital was entirely dark, except for the emergency lights which cast long shadows down the hallways as medical staff rushed from room to room and bed to bed.

  “I was one of the few left to tend to the bodies. I was already considered well past my prime, and the dead, someone figured, were more my speed than the living. I suited up and checked the remains, making observations and taking down the data by hand as I pored over each corpse by flashlight. I quickly realized this was something totally new. I couldn’t pick out the exact cause, but I knew it was some kind of fast-moving hemorrhagic virus that burned the patients up from the inside. I suspected Ebola immediately, so I was careful to take all the precautions. There were four men and three women in my room. Two of them were married couples, one of them young and one of them old. All from the same restaurant.

  “Except I wasn’t ready for what I saw out in the ward’s waiting room. I walked down the front hallway of the hospital—ready to have a well-deserved pinch of snuff outside, catch my breath, get a grip on the swarming multitudes of the dying and panicked. That’s when I noticed one unmoving center amid the bedlam. A teenaged boy sat there in one of the chairs, hunched over, hair over his face, elbows on knees, hands clasped together as in prayer. I asked one of the triage nurses who the kid was. She told me it was the sixteen-year-old son of the younger married couple I had just been tagging and bagging. The kid was now an orphan, she said, shrugging.

  “I nodded and headed toward the door. The kid was on my right. It was obvious he wasn’t looking, or seeing, anything. He didn’t even know he was breathing. He had forgotten he was even alive—because something inside him had just died. It wasn’t my job to talk to him, to deal with the patients after the experiments were ‘concluded.’ Project 137 expressly forbade that. But I watched from afar. I felt ill. I hadn’t felt that since I buried my very first patients.

  “I had to do something. I started walking toward him. He didn’t notice me. I stared for a second.

  “I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tiny test tube I had collected. I still don’t know why, but I dropped it in his lap. Then I melted into the crowd. As I peered back through the throngs of panicking people, I could see this shaggy-haired kid slowly pick up that thin glass cylinder and turn it over in his hands. He looked around in every direction—other than my own. I kept walking out the revolving door, snuff pouch in my hand. He never saw me.”

  Old Man Wetherspoon pointed at me.

  “I gave you that test tube so you would never forget that night,” the Old Man said. “As the years went by, I kept tabs on you with some help of my friends in academia. I made sure you got into the best classes. I had the hospital roll out the red carpet when you got your degree. I sheltered you a bit when you first came here. I always stayed in the background—I had to be sure you were never forced down the path I wanted for you. But you never disappointed, and soon you were my most trusted colleague. And now here we are, the day when you and I find ourselves partners in this mad escapade.”

  “You mean—that test tube…” I said.

  “It’s the specimen I collected from your mother that night. An attenuated sample of the prototype virus that killed them. The prototype of what killed MacGruder here. The Tojo Virus. It’s got the antigen that can cure any form of the virus, even the latest kind.”

  I rubbed the test-tube still hanging around my neck. Wetherspoon pointed at it.

  “It’s a talisman, Joe,” the Old man said. “Even in this cold, sterile world, there’s still magic in some things.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “I never remembered how… I never really knew what…”

  The Old Man smirked, rubbing at his sore throat.

  “I remembered,” he said. “Somehow, I knew it would see you through.”

  As I stared at him, the Atman rang. I stood and reached into the pocket of my jacket, and I saw a familiar number. It was coming from my house. I pushed the button to answer the call.

  “Mary, is everything okay?”

  “Joe!” said a man.

  “Who is this?” I said, alarm bending my voice upward.

  “Joe, it’s Adam. Adam Abbud.”

  “Abbud,” I said. “What are you doing in my house?”

  Wetherspoon smacked his forehead and walked across the room.

  Abbud cleared his throat, as if he was making a prepared speech.

  “Joe, I have to tell you…your wife is ill,” Abbud said. “We’re bringing her back into the hospital for observation. I wanted to let you know we’re doing everything we can.”

  My stomach plunged.

  “No, no, no,” I said. “I’m heading there now. I can get her to a hospital in twenty minutes.”

  Abbud clucked his tongue.

  “No need,” he said. “Mary called me, and I’m personally taking her to the Saint Almachius quarantine. She’s in good hands.”

  “Quarantine?”

  I checked my Atman—only two hours had passed since I had left Mary.

  “Abbud? Why are you in my house?”

  Perfect digital silence.

  “Why are you in my house? Why didn’t Mary call me?” I said, my voice now roaring. “What quarantine?”

  “Mary didn’t think to,” Abbud said. “She was in some medical distress, the readings on her Atman set off an alarm, and she called me. We made a house call. She’s under careful medical observation. No outside interference. We need to catalog everything, you know.”

  I was speechless in that moment. The Old Man, who had come close to lean in and listen, only nodded. A sad nod of recognition. He squeezed my shoulder, but I shrugged him away.

  “What do you mean—you need to catalog everything?” I yelled. “Abbud, leave my wife there. I’m taking her to Clara Maass, not Saint Almachius.”

  Abbud guffawed. His voice was suddenly cold, sharp over the digital connection.

  “You should pick your affiliations more carefully,” Abbud snapped. “You decided to make trouble. The Project will move ahead, no matter who’s on the operating table or holding the scalpel. You should learn from this experience, Barnes. You’ve been warned.”

  The Atman beeped. Abbud had hung up. I went to the door.

  “Where are you going?” the Old Man said.

  “I’ve got to go get my wife,” I said. “Abbud’s got her—she’s part of the experiments. Goddamnit, Neal. She’s a guinea pig for those bastards.”

  Wetherspoon grabbed my elbow.

  “Joe, they’re already long gone,” he said. “They know you’re against them. Mary is a hostage. They know we’ve got the evidence, and they want it back.”

  “Goddamnit, Neal,” I spat back at him. “What could I possibly have that they want? No one would believe a story like this. The one person who might have had the platform to expose all this—O’Keefe—is dead. We don’t even have that dossier any
more, for Christ’s sake. How could we even prove any of it, at all?”

  The Old Man nodded.

  “We’ve got three things,” he said. “I have a backup copy of the documents. And we’ve got the body of unfortunate George here, of course.”

  “You have an extra copy of the dossier?”

  Wetherspoon nodded, rolling his eyes.

  “Not my first rodeo, son,” he said. “It just might take awhile to find it.”

  “Alright,” I said, holding up two fingers. “The dossier, and George’s infected corpse. But what’s the third thing?”

  “The test tube around your neck. That’s the most important thing of all.”

  PROCEDURE

  U.S.A., 2087

  We made a plan. It wasn’t the best plan, but it was order amid chaos. Covered in polymer ponchos to protect us from the monsoon, we carried the body of MacGruder wrapped in the rolled-up rug to the back of Wetherspoon’s car. Then I drove off in my own car, accelerating hard through the puddles, praying Mary was still home and not in transit to whatever slaughterhouse awaited in the basement of Saint Almachius.

  As I cruised the wet and uncertain miles through herky-jerky traffic, the radio voice of Saxas rang hollow out of the speakers. Her voice sounded even higher, pinched somehow, like the supercomputer feeding her the script was straining to process it all. Or perhaps her programmer had sped her up to fit everything into the time slot. I turned the volume up anyway. Even though my mind was consumed by my mad dash to save my wife, the news was a shocking alarm rattling me to my core.

  “Tensions in Korea touched off by last week’s assassination of the U.S. Vice-President at a meeting of the East Asian Federation continue to escalate,” Saxas said. “China and Japan and the United States have confirmed they are all deploying troops. The U.S.S. Donald Trump is speeding west from Hawaii to support Japan but will be later than required in the century-old alliance, due to the closure of Pacific bases from the Great Purge.

  “However, the U.S. is sending a team from the Bureau of Wellness as part of what it’s calling a “peacekeeping mission” in the wake of last week’s assassination,” she continued. “Chinese forces are already mobilizing divisions along the Yalu River, and are awaiting orders to march south toward Pyongyang and Seoul. Japan itself has nearly the entire fleet of the Self-Defense Forces off the southern coast, waiting to strike at a word from Prime Minister Sogo. Korea is readying all its defenses from Wando to Onsong, with particular strongholds on the Inchon peninsula and a line of surface-to-air missile defenses along the Yalu River, barely a half-mile away from the massing Chinese forces. Korea, still undergoing reunification, has issued terse warnings of “wholesale destruction” to all nations converging on its borders.

  “The military buildup includes the nuclear arsenals of all four nations—which are on highest alert. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock forward to one minute to midnight. The United Nations, which is not in session, remains silent and has only said it condemns the first use of weapons of mass destruction. Strangest of all, record-breaking swarms of some kind of biting insects with pincers have beset every square mile of the Korean Peninsula and seem to be spreading disease and wholesale death in the cities of Seoul, Busan and Pyongyang.”

  A pause.

  “In other news, the Knicks lost to the Miami Heat, 101-97…”

  I stared at the radio, waiting for something more. But Saxas went on with the pre-season basketball scores, and then rattled off a few items about a mass shooting in the Midwest, another outbreak of plague in Oregon, another in Nebraska. The rain beat down on the car’s roof.

  I flipped off the satellite connection. I had to focus. She had to be home—she had to be at home. Mary had to be safe, I kept repeating the words in my mind like a protective mantra. I twiddled the test tube around my neck. There was no time to consider a world war. There were plans to focus on—to concentrate on saving my wife, on stopping the Bureau’s insane program of experimentation.

  The front door of the house was open, creaking a bit in the monsoon gusts of warm wind. The alarm blipped as I stepped inside, but I breezed right past it. I searched every room. But Mary was nowhere. Inside the bedroom I found the half-dozen Atmans with blinking screens strewn on the floor and across the bed.

  “Mary!” I called out, my voice hoarse, beginning to break.

  In the toilet, I found a thick, near-black stew of blood and bile. My heart pounded hard, salty sweat stung my eyes.

  “Mary!” I screamed, and my throat gave out to a rasp like sandpaper rubbing against itself.

  I walked slower down the hallway to the stairs, scrutinizing long scratches and wet footprints on the sheen of the red-maple floorboards. There were many tracks, clustered and smeared. A section of one looked like a heavy boot. But I couldn’t tell who or what had left them—or how many of the intruders there had been. I scraped one with my finger; the mud was still moist. The scratches looked the like the point of something incredibly sharp had been gouged angrily into the wood. Like a scalpel.

  In the kitchen I went to the house terminal and checked the last number dialed. It was mine, twenty minutes earlier. I punched in Mary’s number, but it didn’t even ring. I dialed Wetherspoon’s number, but there was no answer. I went to the sink and splashed cold water on my face, trying to calm my quaking heart.

  It was my fault she had been taken. I had put her life in the gravest of dangers. By leaving her alone at a critical moment, I had doomed her.

  She was still alive, she had to be. There was no time to panic. Even the most medically-unethical experiments would take weeks, if not months, to finalize. Nothing would happen in the few hours it would take to find her. But the blood in the toilet… A horrible thought occurred to me. Rushing back to the bedroom, I dropped to my knees and flipped through the Atmans on the floor. I scrutinized one, glanced at another, tossed aside a third. Nothing made sense.

  But a clue appeared. It was one waiver form allowing any treatments deemed necessary by the Bureau. Then another waiver, and another. Together the pieces fell into place. It all had been directly in front of me—hidden in plain sight. How could I have missed it? A supposed population study on vitamins—but it was really a Project 137 experiment on pregnant women. Everything had been signed by Abbud—and I noticed the Bureau of Wellness seal on everything, with the same serial number prefix, BOW-137. It was all in there. Nameless injections and regimens listed as “placebos.” The triple-blind study disclaimers on every screen. The clause at the absolute bottom guaranteeing the Bureau of Wellness would in no way be held liable for any eventuality. At the bottom, she had signed each and every form with her personal signature code.

  And there, next to it, was my own neat set of electronic initials, pin number confirmed.

  Without reading the fine print, I had signed my wife’s death warrant. She was a guinea pig for Project 137, which I’d allowed with my tacit, stupid consent.

  I clawed at my face, praying to wake from this nightmare. But I knew I was not asleep.

  Standing, I looked around the cluttered room, now shadowy as the dusk settled. I surveyed its contents. Nothing—nothing at all.

  I took a step forward. Stepping on the edge of an Atman, my ankle twisted underneath me. I toppled toward the floor, panicking upon the fall, until my head crashed against the bedpost.

  Blackness swallowed me.

  Again the river rushed over me, I splintered, the cold darkness enveloped my limbs and my brain. I knew I was inside the Yah-qua-whee, the mythical fish that didn’t even exist. I knew it didn’t exist; I knew I was still within a dream. But still I struggled for freedom against the innards of the beast. My arms wouldn’t move, as I sank lower and lower into its depths, and I froze solid, my limbs shattering, icy knives slicing my guts.

  The next moment, something clamped down on my shoulder. I was shaken awake. A pale face loomed in the darkness over me.

  My heart nearly stopped. Neither of us moved
for a second. My eyes finally pierced the shadows of the gloom.

  It was Lanza. I tried to rise, but I found I couldn’t move my hands. At my belt, links of a tiny chain tinkled. My wrists were cuffed tight. I was helpless.

  “Zo?” I said. “Get these off me.”

  “Sorry, buddy,” Lanza said. “But the law’s the law. I came here after the alarm tripped. You’re a wanted man—there’s a full-blown manhunt for you and that Old Man.”

  “What—why?”

  “Bureau of Wellness, my friend. Broke my heart to hear there are murder warrants out for you.”

  “Murder warrants?” I scoffed, propping myself on an elbow. “Who did I kill?”

  “Better question is who—didn’t—you kill. They put twenty-two counts on the warrant, mentioning specifically the school attack, and the death of the reporter outside the funeral home.”

  I laughed.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. You and I were fishing the entire time the school thing went down. And the reporter was in police custody when he died. How could I have killed him?”

  “I’m not the one you have to convince,” Lanza said, shaking his head, pulling me to my feet. “The feds signed the FOJA warrants. It’s all over the news already. Saxas called you the ‘Men-Gulla of modern medicine,’ whatever that means.”

  I snapped my fingers. I had to make him understand.

  “Listen, Zo,” I said, bringing together my cuffed hands like in a prayer. “You have to know this doesn’t make sense. How the hell did I do it? Was anyone killed with a fishing pole?”

  Lanza stared at the ground, waiting for me to finish, weighing my words. His eyes slowly titled up toward me. I could tell immediately that decades of friendship meant nothing in this new context of crime and punishment. An ice clutched at my veins I had not felt since the death of my parents.