She fixed the mirror and kept driving. I groaned, but it was lost in the blare from the radio—it was that damned song, the feel-good hit of the summer of ’87.
Now, now, baby, baby / Now, now, now…
Now, now, baby, yeah…
She hummed the tune, off-key. The music and the fatigue overcame me. As I faded into limbo, the radio played on. A series of ads for the new Atman release, a rerun of How Low Can You Go—and then the song again, cycling the electronic choruses, repeating and repeating and repeating. I hummed along as I drifted away, not realizing I knew the song by heart.
When I opened my eyes, it was cool and dark. The car had stopped. At my feet, the door opened. I lifted my head, and Mary stood there.
“We’re here, hon,” she said, grabbing my ankles, gently tugging me out.
I slid out of the car to the ground with her help, my knees cracking and my muscles throbbing. The dusk was fading to black. The car was parked in front of a long two-story building with many doors. A sign overhead said “OLUMBUS OTEL” in pink neon, the first letters short-circuited. The place had to be a hundred years old—maybe two hundred.
“Where are we?” I asked.
She took a deep breath, hands on her hips.
“Nebraska,” she said.
“Nebraska?” I asked.
She nodded and walked away, lugging a big suitcase in each hand. I grabbed a light satchel and followed. I looked up, and all around, but I saw no cameras following my movements. She stopped in front of room 217, put down one suitcase, and unlocked the door with a brass key.
The motel room was clean and spare, beige and brown, with a TV and a fridge with tiny bottles of liquor. It smelled like chemicals, and the plastic sheets on the bed had a certain sheen. Mary set down the luggage and locked herself in the small bathroom. The shower gushed. I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at a fly which crashed into the window again and again. My mind was blank, my body fairly pulverized. I felt at my jugular for a pulse, and pinched my limbs for any symptoms, any vestige at all, of the Tojo virus. I felt like I had a hangover—but nothing worse than that. When the door opened again, Mary’s middle third was wrapped in a towel, as she twisted her hair into two braids. She went into the fridge and poured herself something from an amber-colored nip. She sat next to me on the edge of the bed.
“Mary, why are we in Nebraska? What happened at the hospital?”
She took a long pull of the drink, then handed me the glass. It was whiskey.
She smiled, then reclined on the bed. The back of her hand went onto her forehead. It was very dramatic. She spoke in a weary voice.
“You were unconscious for three days since you died,” she told me.
“Died?” I said, panic rising.
“Yes—died,” she said.
So she told me a story.
The virus had stopped my heart after I had shut down the Atman—and the upload of the Tojo Virus to the rest of the world, she said. She had scrambled, panicking, not knowing what to do around my dying body. But then she thought of the Old Man’s words.
Before the experiments began, Mary and Wetherspoon had been restrained on pallets in an antechamber while the rooms were prepped, the equipment calibrated, and the supplies restocked. The Bureau staff thought their two guinea pigs were unconscious from the drugs, but the doses had not been mixed strong enough. They were groggy, but they still had enough sense to commiserate like drunk friends.
The Old Man told her about his decades observing human experiments. The voiceless souls who died in secret basements of hospitals, or wasted away at home, poisoned for the greater good of the nation. He told her about some colleague who had blown his head off from the guilt of what he had done, Bill Something or Other. The Old Man explained how he had resolved to bring justice to the people who he had not saved, his victims-by-proxy. He spoke in an unwavering voice, but as Mary watched, a procession of tears trickled down his ragged cheek, falling on the shoulder of his blue hospital gown.
Wetherspoon explained his plans for Joe Barnes, her husband the wunderkind who would take over his work. The younger doctor had been groomed for the part: to stop the Bureau of Wellness’ operation before it infected the rest of America, he said.
“He spoke in grandiloquent terms like that,” Mary said. “He was something, that Old Man.”
“What else did he say?” I asked, rubbing at my eyes, trying not to cry.
“He told me about your parents, Joe. And about the test tube,” she said.
I reached for the necklace I’d worn my entire adult life. But it was gone.
“Where is my necklace?” I said, the tears then starting to tumble down my face.
“‘The most important thing,’ Wetherspoon said, ‘was to realize the Tojo Virus was going to get released, one way or another. And we would have to protect ourselves. There is no known cure—officially.
“But a single test tube contained a dead sample of the prototype virus taken from one of the first victims, Neal had said. A vaccination which held the crucial antibodies to destroy the germ. That sample was thought to be lost. But it had been thrown in the lap of a teenaged orphan nearly twenty years ago, Wetherspoon told me.”
“You mean—”
“I injected you with the fluid in the test tube,” said Mary. “It was Wetherspoon’s crazy idea. And you lived, Joe. That dinky little trinket you wore around your neck for as long as I’ve known you actually saved your life.”
Upon hitting my veins, Mary did chest compressions, then zapped me with a defibrillator paddle she’d found in the hallway. My heart again began to beat, and my breathing returned—first fitful, then stable. Then she hauled me out on a gurney and pushed me down the hallway and carefully down the stairs. When we were outside, Lanza still sat there on a bench, clutching his bloody trapezius with one hand, the other pointing a few fellow cops toward the front entrance of the hospital. The officers rushed in that direction, not noticing two more haggard survivors emerging from the back stairwell. Lanza whistled as we approached, winced, and tossed Mary the keys to his patrol car.
“They won’t notice it’s gone for a few hours,” Lanza said. “By that time, I’ll be so high on painkillers I won’t remember who stole the keys”. He winked. “But drive fast,” he added.
Mary dumped me into the passenger seat, and she got behind the wheel. Then she drove to the house. She packed a few things, pictures and soap, water. She ditched the patrol car, loaded up our own car. And then she drove west, without stopping, until dark fell. Parking at a scenic overlook off the ultrahighway in western Pennsylvania, she slept alongside my comatose body on the backseat, listening to my heartbeat.
They’ll be looking for you, Lanza had instructed her before she fled west. Stay off the ultrahighway. Take the local roads. Stay at the dirtiest motels. You’re not the Bureau’s top priority, and as long as you’re off the main circuits of the grid, they won’t find you. They’re going to be too busy covering their own tracks, after the Sick Saint Almachius Atrocity. That’s what they’re calling this on the news—an isolated outbreak of disease which wiped out an entire hospital in New Jersey. The TV reporters might actually have to ask the tough questions this time. The Bureau will be too busy with that to hunt you.”
So after that first high-speed burn down the ultrahighway and the first fitful night of sleep on a darkened hillside, she pulled onto the rambling one-lane roads, the reedy capillaries of America. And she kept heading west, stopping at the red lights in small towns, turning off every few hundred miles to fuel up and pick up a cheeseburger, paying for all of it with the emergency cash she’d taken from the cookie jar in the kitchen. The slack-jawed merchants at the roadside dives looked at her with wide yellowed eyes; they hadn’t seen cash since the Blackout. But they took it.
No swiveling cameras or pilotless planes tracked our movement toward the setting sun on the horizon.
She turned onto the shoulder of the road and injected me with fluids and nutrients every cou
ple hundred miles, tying off the tourniquet and finding a vein like we were vagabond junkies of old. I started murmuring in my sleep, alive, but still catatonic.
Mary talked to me. I had to be somewhere in there, just mustering up the strength again to wake up, she figured. So she discussed things with me—about what the clouds looked like in the blue sky, whether rain was coming, asking what I thought about discovering my parents were murdered all those years ago, and could you believe what a fucking traitor Betty Bathory was. How we had stopped the Tojo Virus from being uploaded and saved billions of lives. Things like that. She didn’t mind the silence.
She drove during the day. She had no compass, no map—but she had an old analog clock. She didn’t go fast—just the speed limit the entire way. She fled the sun in the morning and chased it west in the afternoon. When it disappeared for the night, she turned off and tucked in by the side of desolate country roads where American progress had never touched.
Suddenly, out of the flatness of the Great Plains, a washed-out sign announced, Nebraska…the Good Life. It had to be at least a hundred years old. That was the third night. The following day, just as she thought she could not go on driving, stopping, fueling, talking herself hoarse in the rearview, I awoke to the jarring car. And here we were, in a fleabag motel in the Heartland of America. On the run, in the vast empty miles at the center of a continent.
I scratched at my beard, full and thick now along my jaw. She hadn’t moved. I finished the glass of whiskey, stood, and walked toward the fridge.
“So we’re fugitives,” I said.
“Not exactly,” she said. “It’s just better if we lay low for a while.”
“Where can we go? A million security cameras will see us. We can’t hide forever.”
She turned on her side, drawing up her knees, raising her elbow, propping her head on her hand.
“They won’t see us if we’re careful,” she said. “As long as we stay off the ultrahighways, we’re off the grid, Lanza told me. They never reconnected most of the locals in Middle America after the Blackout, he told me. The Heartland is still in the dark. It’s like we’ve gone back in time, to a simpler place.”
She smiled at me.
“Nebraska is the Good Life,” she said. “The sign said so. My sister says so. It must be true.”
I poured a short glass, tipped it back, and drained it. My head swam. I could almost believe it—the Good Life. I was already drunk. Or maybe I was just released from my worries.
“The money was…” I started to say.
“I know, Joe,” she said. “It doesn’t matter anymore. We’re doing the best we can with what we have now. That’s all we need.”
“So—where are we headed?” I asked, wiping my eyes free of the few tears welling there.
She leaned back, arms spread wide. She closed her eyes.
“Just come here and kiss me,” she said, a blind smile spread across her face.
With a tired stoop, I lay down next to her, the plastic sheets crinkling beneath us.
THE END
Acknowledgments
This book could not have happened without the helping hands of many, both the dead and the living.
Chief among these is Arafat Kazi, a man who saw the value in some depraved history. Susan Breen noticed ways to improve everything. Meg LaTorre was a person whose enthusiasm is catching, and whose eyes are keen. Greg Watry provided more astute insight. Dick Paterson’s red pen gave this book added merits I may not have added on my own. Leonard Cole’s authoritative works on biological weapons were not only inspirational, they were crucial to understanding some concepts that would have otherwise eluded me.
A bit about people I never met: the historian Sheldon Harris was a man who I would have loved to interview, and this book benefited wholly from his crucial work on Unit 731, Factories of Death. Hal Gold and Daniel Barenblatt followed in his considerable footsteps, and also illuminated some all-consuming darkness in their respective works. The tragic figure of Iris Chang (and her inability to shake the ghosts) was somewhere in the background here, too.
Pandamoon Publishing is a great garden in which to plant these roots. Zara Kramer saw the value from the outset. Heather Stewart and Rachel Schoenbauer have laser-like precision with words and story. Christine Gabriel and Elgon Williams and Laura Kemp have been as encouraging as colleagues can be. Any shortcomings are my own.
And of course, this story would never have happened without my resident ladies, wife (and secret editing weapon) Amy, and my little girl Izzy. My mom Trish is pretty great, too.
About the Author
Seth Augenstein is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. His short stories have appeared in more than a dozen magazines and fiction podcasts. He spent a decade writing for New Jersey newspapers, most recently at The Star-Ledger. He picked up some state journalism awards. Currently he writes about true-life horror and crime solving for Forensic Magazine. In college he studied under Nobel Laureates Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel, graduating with a degree in English and History, and a concentration in British Romanticism. For a stint of several months, he was also a tour guide at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin. Now back in the Garden State, he lives on a wooded ridge overlooking a New Jersey highway with a wife, daughter, cats, a dog named Mishima, and the occasional interloping mouse.
Thank you for purchasing this copy of Project 137. If you enjoyed this book, please let the author know by posting a review.
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