Project 137

by Seth Augenstein

  But the safety was already off. I nodded and stepped toward the pile of bodies.

  As I neared within twenty feet, the shock of recognition struck me. The two moving figures were Stash and Stanislaw. A pungent aroma I remembered from childhood struck me. After a few steps I placed it.

  Old-time gasoline. The flammable fuel. The mound was about to become a pyre.

  Why on Earth would they burn down the hospital? But then I realized: they would also be getting rid of the evidence. I moved closer, the gun trained on them. At ten feet I lowered it. The two guards actually were dancing—Stash was doing a little stutter-step shuffle, and Stanislaw was bouncing in time with his great heaving douses of accelerant on the pile of the dead. They worked around the edges, splashing it up high toward a bloody naked fat man at the peak, bloated and stained red like a cherry, with a tiny stemlike prick dangling between his legs. I watched as gasoline splashed up on the fat man’s face. I recoiled, seeing a ghastly greenish glow from within the mountain of the dead. The two guards were about to destroy evidence for the Bureau. But they looked unarmed—I had the drop on them.

  “Hey guys,” I said, both hands on the gun.

  No response. Stanislaw sang the off-key bars of the feel-good hit of ’87:

  “Now, now, baby, baby / Now, now, now…”

  I glanced at the door. It was already locked down. I would have to get the key from the two bozos.

  “Hey guys!” I hollered.

  “Now, now, baby, yeah…” Stash crooned, answering his partner in song.

  I pointed the pistol up and pulled the trigger once. Reverb of the shot echoed through the huge high lobby, and a little plaster tumbled down from the ceiling at Stanislaw’s feet. He looked up, then all around him. When he saw me, his eyes widened with surprise. Flicking his earphones off his head, he stammered.

  “Doc!” he said. “D—didn’t expect to see you here!”

  Stanislaw stepped over and tapped his partner on the shoulder, who looked up and stumbled back in shock. They held up their hands and stared fearfully at the gun.

  “Doc! We thought you were dead,” Stash shouted, his headphones still in his ears.

  “Glad to be among the living, Stash,” I said. “What exactly are you two doing?”

  “We’re security guards,” said Stash, as Stanislaw pulled out his earphones. “We secure and guard the hospital.”

  “Sure—I know why you’re here most of the time,” I said slowly. “But that doesn’t explain why you’re throwing gasoline on a pile of corpses in the hospital lobby.”

  “Sure it does,” said Stash.

  “It’s all part of the emergency lockdown plan,” added Stanislaw.

  “You’re supposed to start a bonfire of corpses in case of emergency,” I said.

  “Sure. Look up there,” Stash said, pointing behind me.

  I glared at them, stony faced. I did not want to turn my back for even a second on anyone within the hospital at that point. But their stares looked so simple, Polish eyes so blue and pale, souls so pure. I whipped my head around and caught a glimpse of a pulsing red light before spinning back. The two guards hadn’t moved. I stepped back, turned fully around, and really looked. It was some kind of alarm, apparently.

  “The Kraken gave us an employee handbook when she hired us,” Stash said. “But she told us only one thing really mattered. And it wasn’t in the book.”

  “The only important thing is, when that red light comes on, we start the Bureau of Wellness decontamination plan,” Stanislaw said.

  “Decontamination plan?”

  “Yes,” said Stanislaw, clearing his throat purposefully. He began to recite, like a child memorizing words learned for a school test: “In the event of a catastrophic breakdown in Bureau safeguards, employees are to burn all the bodies and equipment in the hospital.” He blinked those vapid eyes, smiling at me. “It is our responsibility to lock down all the doors, burn the remains, and start the sprinklers.”

  “Acid sprinklers,” Stash added, nodding. “Mixed in monsoon tanks on the roof. We’re supposed to prevent the disease from spreading. At all costs.”

  “You thought I was dead,” I said, changing the subject, “Why is that?”

  Stash and Stanislaw exchanged a glance. They nodded.

  “Dr. Fujimi told us you were dead,” Stash said.

  “Fujimi?” I said. “You’ve seen him?”

  “He went to the elevator a few minutes ago,” said Stanislaw. “He was sick or something. His face was all messed up. He kept shouting at us to start the fire. He pointed up at the warning light, gestured toward the morgue, and limped away. So we started throwing all the bodies in a pile and got out the gasoline, as the orders say.”

  “The dude left some trail of weird goo,” Stash added, pointing to black streaks on the ground. “It was coming out of his ears, and he kept wiping it off on his sleeve. It was running down his leg, too.”

  Not taking my eyes off them, I crouched and poked at the goo with the gunbarrel. It was gelatinous, a black tinged with green—a jelling pus that wouldn’t come off the pistol.

  “Guess the doctor is pretty sick?” Stanislaw said.

  “He’s a very sick man, but I think I have just the cure,” I said, squeezing the grip of the gun. “Do you know where he is, exactly?”

  “He took the elevator to your—I mean his—office on the third floor,” Stash said. “But the elevator stopped working, with the automatic lockdown. You’ll have to take the stairs.”

  “Thanks. And guys,” I said, “is there any way I can get my wife and my friend outside? They really need to get some medical attention themselves, at some other hospital. As soon as possible.”

  “The hospital’s in lockdown—no one gets in or out now,” said Stanislaw, reciting again, like a boy repeating a nursery rhyme he’d learned by heart.

  “All the decontamination has to be completed, so no germs can escape,” Stash added, in his own robotic voice.

  “So what happens to you, when all this decontamination is going on, with the acid and the fire and all that?”

  Stash and Stanislaw glanced at one another. Their eyes grew wide. They shook their heads.

  “They never told us that,” Stash said, a finger scratching at his temple.

  “We never got that far in the handbook,” Stanislaw said, biting his lip.

  “Does Fujimi just expect you to die?” I said. “Is the Bureau ordering you to kill yourselves?”

  The two security guards exchanged another look. Stanislaw raised his eyebrows. Stash coughed.

  “You know, Doc,” Stanislaw said, “just between us, there’s a door underneath the staircase we leave open to get outside to smoke cigarettes. That one is never locked.”

  “Thanks, guys,” I said. I took a step back toward Mary and Lanza, but remembered something and turned around. “You know—I would watch out for the Atmans on those bodies. If one of them sparks, with all that gasoline—”

  An eruption ripped the room apart. The scalding flash and searing blast knocked me backward off my feet. There was screaming somewhere—from within the pile. The security guards ran in circles and slapped at each other, trying to put out the flames on their heads and their uniforms. They ran back toward the security desk, where they grabbed a fire extinguisher. But it fell to the ground.

  I sprinted around the massive heat of the bonfire, keeping a wide berth from the raging flames. Sliding on the slippery tiles, I stuffed the gun in my waistband, and picked up another fire extinguisher from the wall. I unattached the hose, aimed it, and squeezed the trigger at the form of Stash, who vanished within the cloud of white. Three bursts, and his flames were snuffed. I chased after the flailing form of Stanislaw, spraying and chasing him back toward the burning pile. I extinguished him at the edge of the fire pile. I threw aside the extinguisher and dragged the burned guard back behind the security desk. Stash was stirring, but Stanislaw lay there, blackened and barely breathing.

  “Go…take the st
aircase,” Stash said.

  “I’ll get help for you,” I said.

  Footsteps approached behind me. I pulled out the gun and swung around, pointing it. Mary flinched backward. I tucked the gun back at my waist.

  “What’s the plan?” she said.

  “I found a door out. Let’s get Zo.”

  We walked back to Lanza, who was slumped into the chair. From across the lobby he looked asleep, or dead.

  “You need to get out of here with Zo, and I need to stop Fujimi,” I told her.

  “Just call the cops, call the Bureau of Wellness,” she said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  “You still don’t get it, Mary,” I said. “Fujimi is the Bureau of Wellness. The police are helping him. Our only hope is that I shoot the bastard before he starts some global outbreak.”

  We reached Lanza. My stomach bottomed out as I stooped to check for a pulse on my old friend, expecting the worst. But Lanza recoiled, smacking away my hand. It looked like the blood had clotted around his neck.

  “I’m okay,” he said, eyes opening, squirming up in the seat. “Let’s roll.”

  We helped him up, and together we limped toward the raging fire. But as we neared the burning bodies, Lanza slowed.

  “That can’t be what I think it is…” he said.

  “They’re already dead,” I said.

  We walked past the security guards, Stash slumped forward on Stanislaw’s body, trying to smack him awake with a blackened sooty hand. He looked up and waved weakly at us.

  “Don’t worry about us, Doc,” he said. “We’ll manage. We’ve had worse.”

  “Thanks, Stash.”

  “But do me a favor,” the security guard said, holding up a finger.

  “What’s that, Stash?”

  Stash pulled out a pistol and held the grip out to me.

  “Let’s hit happy hour next week.”

  “Deal,” I said, taking the gun. “How long before those acid sprinklers start?”

  “Twenty minutes, maybe. Maybe more. Maybe less,” the guard said.

  “I’ll get help,” I said.

  Stash nodded, as he rocked his partner like he would have soothed a baby.

  We moved on, past the security desk and into the narrow passage to the stairs. The emergency lighting was on, but the corridor was dark. We came to the door, and I opened it to the stairwell. A crack of light from the door to the outside shone, half a flight below. Four bodies with bloody mouths agape were splayed out on the stairs.

  The three of us trudged down the few steps to the door, me leading the way around the mess. I opened the door into the cool rainy dusk. We grabbed ponchos from the dispenser by the door to cover our heads from the acrid raindrops. We limped out to a nearby bench, where Lanza fell with a relieved groan. I pulled out my Atman and turned it on. After a few seconds, it had a signal—and it didn’t heat up.

  “I guess it’s just the newer implanted models,” I said, handing the device over to Lanza. “Now call someone over at Clara Maass and wait for an ambulance. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  I kissed Mary on her sweaty cheek, pulling the second gun from my waistband. She scoffed at me, shaking her head.

  “This isn’t a damned movie, Joe. You can’t be that stupid.”

  “The guy’s infected with one of his own supergerms, he’s limping, he’s unarmed. I’ve got two guns. I like my chances.”

  She stared at me. I squeezed her arm, gave her my most reassuring doctor’s face.

  “Somebody has to stop this guy,” I said. “If he can zap an entire hospital full of people, who knows what else he can do?”

  She looked at me. Her frown made her chin dimple. She shook her head.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But I’m a better shot. I’m coming with you.”

  I gazed at my wife. Her eyes were cold, hard, steely—like in the pictures I’d seen of her from her tour of duty in the Middle East, before I’d known her. This was a woman who knew how to handle herself. I nodded and handed her one of the guns.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go get him.”

  “This is for Cornelius,” she said, checking the magazine, then smacking it back up into the gun.

  I stared at her.

  “That was the name I picked,” she said. “If it was a boy.”

  I smiled. I held the door open for her. She walked inside, gun aimed ahead. I started after her.

  “Hey Joe,” Lanza said.

  “Yeah?” I said, pausing at the threshold.

  “Follow Mary’s lead. She’s a Leatherneck. We always save the day.”

  “Got it. See you in a few.”

  Lanza gave me a thumb’s up.

  The stairwell looked darker than before. The emergency lighting cast shadows but didn’t actually illuminate anything. There was just enough to see objects in the way, the corpses underfoot. I could make out the jagged outlines of bodies. As my eyes adjusted, I saw Mary. She stood, alert and tense, a few steps above. I came up close behind her.

  “Spread out, but keep each other in view at all times,” she said. “He could be anywhere, waiting in the shadows. Or just bleeding out somewhere.”

  “Should we be so lucky” I said, nodding.

  She climbed. I grabbed a flashlight off the ground and followed.

  MORE THAN THE WORLD DESERVED

  U.S.A., 2087

  Two dozen bodies covered the stairs on our short climb. Grotesque death on every step, slicks of blood and pus. But we were numb to them already. Mary picked her way around the corpses, and I was two steps behind her. A ceiling camera swiveled, tracking our slow progress.

  We came to the third floor, and Mary hesitated. I realized she was the warrior, and I was just the doctor. She sensed something. But there was no time to lose. So I edged around her, and slowly pushed through the door and into the hallway, waving the flashlight to and fro.

  Chaos. Blood smeared on walls, bodies on the floor, gurneys upended. Wires zapped, swinging from fixtures. A low hum, the growl of machinery and electronics on the fritz, buzzed from the erratic shadowplay. I moved out, on the right side of the hallway, as Mary fanned out on the left, sweeping in every direction with her gun drawn. We stepped forward.

  “Do you know where he is?” she whispered.

  “He’s in my office,” I said. “He has to be.”

  We walked slowly, scanning ahead and behind, stepping over and around bodies, the destruction, the blood. The stink of piss and shit was everywhere. The chaos of filth and infection had completely overthrown the order of the hospital, in mere minutes. Halfway down the hallway, a bright light shone from underneath a small door.

  “Stop,” I said. “Wait a second.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Just wait. Cover me.”

  I jammed the gun in my waistband again. I opened the door. And there, in a brightly-lit closet, were a row of white NBC suits. I grabbed two, thrusting one at her.

  “Put this on. We should have some protection before we approach a madman armed with biological weapons,” I said.

  “Alright—keep watch for a second,” she said, setting the gun down on a gurney.

  She unracked the protective suit, and slid it over her shoes, up her lithe legs, around her thin waist, and over the swell of her chest. I scoured the hallways, looking for any threat. But as she slowly wormed her way into the suit, an urge coursed through my limbs. An irrational urge for her. I was lost in the moment. For a few moments, I wasn’t watching the hallways. Distracted right when I needed focus, right at the moment of danger. I knew it was foolish, but I couldn’t help myself. Because we weren’t parents-in-waiting any more. Years of trying, months of planning, and a reproductive miracle ultimately denied. None of that mattered any more. Instead, there was the void—the biological imperative nullified.

  We would have a child someday, I was sure of that. No matter what, I would see to it. We would be parents someday. If we made it home, we’d try again that very night. If
it didn’t work for the hundredth time yet again—at least we would be loving one another. So as she zipped up that hood, disappearing inside that rubberized layer of protection, I felt the most acute need for her I could ever remember. I had to have her. I reached out.

  A quick footstep behind. I started to turn. But a sharp pain stabbed into my outstretched arm, and I dropped the gun, which clattered to the ground. I howled and spun around. Suzanne Kranklein stood there, a demonic elf with gritted teeth, pressing the plunger of a syringe deep in my shoulder with all her might. I pulled back, and I cracked her across the face with my hand. She went stumbling to the wall. The syringe was still in my arm. I yanked it out. I lunged forward, thrusting it into her own arm. She yelped in terror as I dug it down deep into her bicep, pushing as hard as it would go, scraping at the humerus. I pressed the plunger all the way down to the hilt.

  “No, stop—we’ve got to ask her…” Mary’s voice came from far away.

  “I don’t give a good goddamn what she has to say,” I said, tugging at the syringe, then shoving it hard forward, deeper, a different angle into the flesh. The Kraken screamed. Mary pulled me back, but I stayed fast, my forearm jammed hard up under my former boss’ chin, choking her the way Lanza had choked me just hours before.

  “What’s in the syringe, Suzanne?” I growled at her, pressing harder into her windpipe. “Tell me, or I’ll kill you.”

  “I’m a…dead woman…anyway,” she croaked.

  And she did look like she was dead. Her usually-pale skin was even paler, to a blanched white, broken only by the dark sunken circles underneath her eyes. Those eyes had a wild, crazed look. Feeling for the Atman in her arm, I burned the tip of my finger on the simmering metal.

  The Kraken was doomed, my doctor’s intuition told me immediately.

  I released my grip on her and backed away. Her hand went to her throat as she wheezed, sucking air desperately.

  “Was she part of it, Joe?” Mary said, the gun aimed at the Kraken’s head.

  “She was,” I said. “But this test was above her paygrade. The Kraken never got full immunity.”