by Amber Wyatt
“I will quickly read through some of the documents you recovered first, to get an overview of what is in them, and then I want to start interviewing members of the second group of prisoners as soon as possible,” he said, reluctantly closing the video.
“Where would you like to conduct the interviews, Doctor?” Shepard asked.
“Well, not here…” Indika looked around his crowded office doubtfully. The IDRC was neither a prison nor a police station, and did not have interrogation rooms. “Bring them one at a time to the large briefing room next to the labs. I will be down there reading anyway. There is a big enough table there for me to spread around some of these papers. Shall we start the first interview in say, one hour?”
Down in the large briefing room, Indika sorted the documents into rough piles on the central table. The first papers that he read through were the letters from Wilkins’s family ancestor, the nineteenth century sailor, Paul Cope. Every one of the civilians had been carrying a copy of the letters and Shepard had deemed them important.
Then he picked up a bound file, marked ‘Chest Documents: Translation from Byzantine Greek and Medieval Frankish.’ The title meant nothing to him, but his scientist’s eye had noted the multiple page markers, stickers and notes protruding from its pages. Someone, probably another scientist, had thought this document was important and it was clearly a well-used source of reference.
But once he started reading, his brow furrowed and he started to flip through the pages quicker and quicker, mystified by the folder’s contents. Indika ripped ruthlessly through texts that must have taken hundreds of man-hours to translate. He was perplexed, not just by what was contained within the document’s pages, but more so by what was not.
Indika had expected to find references to disease, symptoms, notes from physicians, case studies of people rising from the dead, maybe even descriptions of ancient remedies. Instead he found a fairy-tale, albeit one that seemed to be based in historical fact.
The first chapter was a brief summary and description of the Arma Christi, the two dozen instruments of the Passion of Christ, including the one true cross and the Holy Grail from the last supper. Then followed a narrative which described the discovery in 1098 AD of the Veil of Veronica, one of the primary Arma Christi, in the Holy Land by Godfrey, a Frankish knight in Prince Bohemond’s Norman army. From that moment forward, carrying the veil folded within the pages of a vulgate bible in one hand, his sword in the other, Sir Godfrey could not be defeated by any mortal enemy.
During the Battle of Ascalon, Godfrey’s horse was killed and fell, trapping his legs underneath it. Grappling desperately with a Moorish warrior, Ibrahim, Godfrey bit him. To his astonishment the Arab then stood and defended Godfrey against all the other attacking Moslems. Similar to the protection granted by the holy spirit to Godfrey, no blade nor arrow could harm Ibrahim. Godfrey called himself the Primus, and named his new companion his Secundus. But when Ibrahim tried to bite another, the effect was not the same. The Tertius, such as he was, was an almost mindless and savage monster, needing constant supervision, and the two warriors eventually had to kill him themselves. Godfrey and Ibrahim prayed for guidance the entire night until dawn and then swore a holy vow, that in respect to the Holy Trinity, only a single Primus and two Secundi could exist at any one time.
Soon afterwards, Prince Bohemond, fearing Godfrey’s power, had him and Ibrahim seized and executed. All references to Sir Godfrey were removed from the Gesta Francorum, and the bible containing the veil was sealed in a chest and given as a gift by the prince to Pope Honorius II. According to legend, even after death, the decapitated heads of the two holy warriors continued to curse at Prince Bohemond for three days and three nights, until he had his bishop burn them to ash.
Indika’s face was dark with fury as he slammed the file down. This whole story is ridiculous! He ran his fingers across the many notes scribbled on the pages. And yet whomever wrote these notes took it seriously. Suddenly he could not stop thinking about the stranger in the hangar, controlling all the other zombies. Was he the Primus? And in that nineteenth century letter from the English sailor, Indika recalled. The Spanish captain was lucid and looked alive, yet was impervious to wounds that would have killed a normal man. His thoughts returned to the mysterious chest secured in the containment chamber. What is inside that chest? A bible and a piece of magic cloth?
His reverie was broken by the door opening and Shepard walking in.
“Here is the first civilian for interview, a Mr. Hugh Willis, long-term…”
Shepard was interrupted by a shout of alarm and a commotion at the door. Suddenly a tall, muscular man burst into the room looking around wildly. Upon seeing Indika he lunged across the table, scattering a swirl of papers, and punched Indika in the face, slamming the smaller man backwards on to the floor.
“That’s for Anna, you son of a bitch!” Hugh shouted, before black-clad Lazarus soldiers hauled him back off the table and beat him viciously to the ground.
“Are you ok, Doctor?” Shepard helped Indika back up to his feet.
“I’m fine,” Indika said, although his legs were shaking and in danger of giving way. “Fuck, that hurts.” He felt his nose gingerly.
“I apologize. That will not happen again,” said Shepard, glaring at the soldiers who had let Hugh loose. They averted their gaze, sheepishly, and strapped Hugh none too gently into a chair using plasti-cuffs.
Indika looked at the angry, bruised man strapped into the chair opposite him. His nose hurt like hell and he felt a malicious satisfaction as he saw a mirroring line of blood trickling from Hugh’s nose.
“Who the hell is Anna?” he asked.
Chapter Thirty-One
Secrets
“Anna was my fiancée. She was killed in the Galleria Incident,” Hugh paused as Indika flinched slightly at the mention of the Galleria. But the flicker of surprise in the other man’s eyes had already disappeared as swiftly as it had come.
“Please. Continue,” Indika said calmly, an inscrutable mask dropping once more across his face.
“Actually, the two of us were there together. It was my birthday and she was taking me out for dinner after we finished shopping. Anna hadn’t got my present yet. It was supposed to be a surprise. So, she told me to go to the restaurant first, while she stayed in the Galleria to pick up my present. And uh…” Hugh looked down at his hands, clenched together. “I sat in the restaurant, waiting. I didn’t hear the news until later that night. I just sat and waited, and she never came. I tried to call her…” Hugh swallowed, his eyes distant, remembering the clink of cutlery from the other diners, the smell of their food, and the nagging anxiety that turned into cold dread, as call after call to Anna’s phone went unanswered.
Beneath his placid expression, Indika’s face paled slightly. This woman, Anna. She died next to Brad and Jen. He felt an instant connection to the man strapped in the chair opposite him, that went way beyond each of them having a bloody nose. He remembered his own, increasingly panicked, unanswered calls to his wife’s silent phone. Thinking of Jenney brought back an echo of the shame he had felt in his dream. Especially now that he had just read a document that, no matter how fantastical it sounded, still made more sense than the last three years of his scientific research. In fact, the more he thought about the document, the more his gut feeling told him that it was the real thing. And to make matters worse, it indicated that the root cause of these zombies was not a virus at all, thus rendering all of his research pointless. Right from the beginning we knew this was no virus. I have been unable to find a cure, because there was no disease to cure in the first place. It was all in vain. What have I done? I killed all of those people. A feeling of horror crystallized inside him, as he realized how far he had fallen, and that Jen had been right. He had crossed a line, and sold his soul to the devil.
“I am sorry to hear about your fiancée. My wife and son were also killed in the Galleria incident,” Indika replied, dragging his thoughts back to the
matter at hand. “Their deaths… what happened that day. It was what drove me to pursue this research into the Lyssavirus.”
“Oh shit, right,” said Hugh, staring and then flushing with embarrassment as he recognized Indika from the news. Just like everyone inside the zone, he knew the about the hero of the Galleria, and how afterwards he had devoted his life to working tirelessly towards curing the Lyssavirus. “I know who you are, Doctor. Sorry about your nose, man. I guess I kind of blamed you guys for the virus.”
“What?” Indika looked at him, utterly bewildered by the other man’s statement. “Why on earth would you think that?”
“You’re funded by DARPA, right? When we were in the museum, we found emails from DARPA showing that they were the ones that set out to recover the chest and transport it to Fort Lauderdale in the first place.”
Abruptly the temperature in the already chilly room seemed to drop by several degrees. Indika had the impression that the walls were spinning around him. He felt as if he was having some out of body experience. Next to him, Shepard’s mouth had dropped open in shock. On Shepard’s other side, Vockler looked at Hugh as if the mechanic were a particularly repulsive insect that he wanted to squash. From far away, Indika heard a voice that sounded like his own, asking Hugh to repeat himself. The mechanic seemed oblivious to the effect his bombshell statement had just had on his audience.
“When we logged into the computers in the museum office, we found a whole bunch of emails between the museum and DARPA arranging for the recovery of the chest from some island near Venezuela, and for its delivery to the museum in Fort Lauderdale.” Hugh’s arms were cuffed to the chair, so he nodded his head and looked pointedly at the table in front of him. “We printed out as many of them as we could find. I can see them right there on top of that pile.”
Indika lunged over and grabbed a sheaf of printouts from the papers on the desk, eyes scanning the text as fast as he could. He’s right. His eyes widened in horror as page after page confirmed Hugh’s unthinkable accusation. But this cannot be possible! Then Indika’s eye was caught by the email addresses at the top of the emails and his heart stopped.
With shaking hands, he searched back through the other printouts. The point of contact in all of the DARPA emails was the same individual. John White, Major-General. Shepard pulled the emails from Indika’s numb fingers and immediately saw what he was looking at.
“Oh shit,” Shepard gaped, uncomprehending. Then he whirled around to glare at Vockler. “Did you know about this?”
“Of course not,” Vockler said after too long a pause, his jaw jutting out obstinately. The two men locked steely glares, one with suspicion, the other with stubbornness.
There was a bang as the door slammed shut, and they all looked around to see that Indika had vanished in a swirl of papers scattering across the floor.
“Take the detainee back to the cells,” Shepard snapped at Vockler. “I need to talk to Indika.” Then he too disappeared out of the door.
Hugh shivered slightly as Vockler turned to look at him with cold eyes. They were the eyes of an executioner, totally lacking in human warmth. Someone who saw him as nothing more than an item to cross off his to-do list.
“Get him on his feet and bring him back to the cells,” Vockler said to the two Lazarus troopers waiting outside the door. Conscious that only moments earlier, the deceptively strong mechanic had already proven himself capable of wrestling free from their grasp, the two soldiers were brutal and thorough as they unclipped Hugh from the chair, cuffed his hands behind his back and pushed him towards the door.
Vockler was already storming down the hallway, his mind clicking through tasks and options as efficiently as a computer. The General needs to know about this. Maybe the timetable is a little accelerated, but it’s nothing he and I have not already accounted for. It was time for Major Shepard and his precious conscience to be removed from Project Lazarus, and for the true, and until now, secret commander of the Lazarus special operations group to step forward. There were a few men loyal to Shepard that would need to be watched, but the bulk of the detachment had been hand-picked by General White and were under direct orders to answer only to Vockler, in the event of any conflict between himself and Shepard.
As he turned the corner to the hallway leading to the cells where the civilians had been imprisoned, Vockler was both annoyed and surprised to see Indika’s deputy, Taylor, standing in front of the cell door with a few of the technicians and one of the captive infected specimens. It had its arms chained to one of the many steel restraining rings bolted at regular intervals along the corridor wall.
“What the hell is going on here?”
“Oh, Lieutenant Vockler!” Taylor blinked up at Vockler through smeared spectacles, startled at first by the taller man’s swift approach, but an oily smile quickly returned across his face. “I was just showing the prisoners here one of our infected. The director asked me earlier to incinerate six specimens, to clear out room in one of the adjoining cells and give these civilians some more space.”
“Incinerate them?” shrieked Gina indignantly. “They are living human beings. They are sick. They should be in a hospital receiving treatment!”
“I’ve just been arguing with her,” Taylor nodded towards the furious singer. “She thinks they’re still alive, just sick, like diabetics or something.”
Vockler looked down at the petite Asian prisoner clutching the bars of the cell door. And then he looked at the zombie. He recognized it as one of the early training zombies the Lazarus troops had practiced grappling with. Deliberately rendered blind and deaf, its hands amputated, teeth removed and its jaws wired shut, specimen 118 had still put up a hell of a fight. But not much use now I suppose, for Indika’s experiments. No surprise that this is one of the ones selected for disposal.
“You think that the infected are alive?” he asked her.
“That man needs medical attention.” Gina snarled through gritted teeth. “He should be in a hospital.”
Both Gina and Taylor jumped as Vockler slammed a bayonet into the side of the zombie’s neck. Neither of them had seen him draw it from his belt. The undead monster thrashed left and right, trying to identify its unseen attacker, but the thick chains restricting its movement held firm. One of the research technicians squeaked in alarm and they all shuffled back a few steps.
“If this specimen were alive,” Vockler remarked in a mild, conversational tone. “Then how would I be able to do this?” He slowly sawed the knife out through the front of the throat, leaving a huge, gaping wound that dripped dark red blood. “Or this?” Then he stabbed the zombie deep in its belly and ripped the blade upwards until his knife grated against the rib-cage.
Face white and pinched with horror, Gina clutched at the bars of the cell door, watching as the tall soldier grunted and worked his knife and hand into the wound he had created. Meanwhile the zombie he was mutilating thrashed in vain against the merciless steel chains biting into its skin.
“There we go,” Vockler grunted with relish, pulling something out of the wound and holding it up to inspect in one bloody hand. Gina’s blood turned to ice as Vockler walked right up to the cell door and held the dripping lump of flesh up in front of her eyes. “Tell me again. If this thing is still alive, as you claim, then how come it doesn’t need a heart?” Behind him the zombie still lurched left and right, looking for its tormentor.
Gina recoiled from the door backwards into Dwayne’s chest, where she hid her face and sobbed silently. Surprised, the large man wrapped his arms around her tightly and glared at Vockler with murder in his eyes. Ignoring him, the Lazarus officer turned to Taylor instead.
“Clean up this mess immediately,” Vockler casually dropped the heart into the puddle of gore on the floor that had slopped out of the zombie’s open stomach as it flailed around. He frowned at the little huddle of technicians. “And take specimen 118 to the incinerator. Stop wasting time with these civilians.”
There was a sudden thud f
rom the back of the cell and everyone turned to see that the slim, Latino convict had backed into the corner as far away from the door as he could get.
“It’s Nasser the Baker,” stammered Sammy Pereira, his eyes wild with terror as he stared at the blind, chained zombie standing outside the cell door. “They… they said he was being transferred to another secure unit. But... but he’s here.”
Vockler cursed under his breath as he realized the significance of what Sammy was saying. Nasser ‘The Baker’ Hassan had indeed been a prisoner at the federal penitentiary, sentenced to life without parole for his murder of five children, whose bodies he had disposed of in his oven at home. He had been in one of the first groups of murderers transferred to the IDRC for use in Indika’s experiments.
Dwayne whirled, scowling at the zombie with confused eyes, before schooling his face to a practiced, blank expression. But it was already too late. Vockler had seen the flash of recognition on the big Hawaiian’s face. Taylor you idiot! Of all the zombies he could have chosen, the bumbling scientist had brought one of the transferees from the prison, to show off in front of escapees from the exact same prison. Now it was no longer a secret that they were using live prisoners for their experiments at the IDRC. Project Lazarus had been compromised. General White definitely needs to know about this. But first, Vockler looked down at his hands and blood-spattered uniform in disgust. I need to wash my hands.
As Vockler stalked off, two large, black-clad soldiers appeared at the end of the corridor, with Hugh firmly held between them. They frog-marched him past Taylor and his team who were struggling to shepherd away the mutilated zombie, uncuffed him and unceremoniously shoved him back into the cell with the other members of the group.