Primus Unleashed

by Amber Wyatt

  “Okay, be quiet and listen up,” Shepard shushed them into silence. They crowded in a little closer to hear, as he continued in a conspiratorial whisper. “Here’s what’s going to happen next. I am going to release you from this cell and take you up the fire stairway to the rear loading bay, which is two levels above us, and then out into the car park. From there you are going to have to get over the perimeter fence yourselves, and make your own way to the highway which is about a mile south-east of here. You’ll see the lights of the highway clearly once you get over the fence. Then you’re on your own.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Hitch a ride, call a cab, whatever. You’ve got your phones back.”

  “Aren’t we being recorded right now?” Dwayne asked, raising an eyebrow and pointing over his shoulder at the polished dome of the security camera up on the ceiling above them.

  “Two men I trust are manning the security cameras right now, but we only have a short window of time to get you all out.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Behnke. “If you are letting us go, why do we have to sneak out like this? I mean aren’t you in charge? Can’t you just release us officially and give us a ride back into town?”

  “It’s complicated,” Shepard answered tersely. “And we don’t have the time to discuss it. Let’s go.” He drew out his access card and swiped it across the doorpad. There was a low beep and an ominous red LED flashed. “What?” Shepard swiped the card again, perplexed. There was another beep and a red light. “Shit!” he cursed bitterly. I’m too late. That bastard Vockler is up to something.

  “I’m guessing that’s a bad sign,” said Hugh.

  “My access permissions have been revoked.” Shepard held up a placating hand. “Don’t worry, I can still open this door but I need to go back to the operations room to do it.”

  The door at the far end of the hallway slammed open and Shepard whirled around to see Vockler stride through it with four of his men behind him. Hana, Hugh and the others could not see who was approaching, but the expression on Shepard’s face was enough to tell them that it was bad news.

  “Card not working?” Vockler called out as he marched towards his commanding officer.

  Shepard said nothing. He thought about drawing his pistol, but Vockler and the men with him were all armed as well. And am I really going to shoot any of them if they disobey me?

  “All of your security authorizations have been revoked, Major,” Vockler continued. “I have informed General White that Project Lazarus has been compromised, and also that the prisoners are aware that the Lyssavirus outbreak here in Fort Lauderdale originated from a DARPA research project.” The tall, blond officer bared his teeth in a mirthless grin. “The general agrees with my assessment that the prisoners cannot be allowed to be released. Ever. He also agrees that you have become a liability. I have been ordered to assume command and to place you under arrest.”

  “No, Lieutenant Vockler, I am going to release these innocent civilians,” Shepard emphasized. “And you are going to issue the fake PR release. Then we will both start wrapping up this project, and work out how the hell the general is going to get us out of the quarantine zone.”

  “The general said that if you resisted arrest, you were to be eliminated.” Vockler drew his pistol and aimed it at Shepard’s face. “…with extreme prejudice. His exact words.”

  “For God’s sake, Vockler,” Shepard trying to control his frustration. “Holster your weapon. We both know that you’re not go…”

  There was a deafening bang as Vockler pulled the trigger and shot Shepard in the face. Blood sprayed from the back of his head and he slumped bonelessly to the floor. The startled gasps from both the prisoners and Vockler’s own soldiers were lost in the ringing numbness caused by the thunderous roar of the pistol in the confined corridor.

  “Leave his body there,” Vockler said to his white-faced subordinates. “Perhaps looking at him will serve to educate the prisoners that immediate compliance with my orders is the best way forward for them.” His face was expressionless as he watched as the pool of blood from Shepard’s head spread out and started to mingle with the earlier blood from the zombie he had disemboweled. Whoever had constructed the laboratory section of the IDRC had had the forethought to specify that the walls and floors were coated in heavy-duty, waterproof paint. Vockler approved. It was functional, and could be easily sluiced down and mopped clean.

  “Yes, leave him there,” he repeated. His eyes glanced past the horrified faces of the prisoners and focused with laser like intensity on the security camera on the ceiling above their heads. An ugly smile twisted his lips. “We have more pressing matters to attend to. Such as investigating why the duty watchkeepers in the operations room failed to inform me that Major Shepard was planning to help the prisoners escape.”

  In the operations room Shepard’s two loyal soldiers, Foster and Eicker, looked at each other in horror.

  “Jesus Christ, that son of a bitch just killed Major Shepard,” Foster raged.

  “What are we going to do?” Eicker asked.

  There was a momentary pause as both men locked eyes. Then Foster grimaced and started flipping through the menus on the screen in front of him.

  “I’m going to free those prisoners first, and then we are going to get the fuck out of here,” he snarled.

  “Don’t be crazy, can you imagine what Vockler will do to us? He’s on his way up here right now.” Eicker pointed at the security screen showing the corridor where Shepard’s corpse lay like a crumpled heap of old clothes.

  “What do you think he’s going to do to us anyway? He just executed Shepard for fuck’s sake. He’s coming up here to kill us too. Either that or we are going to end up transferred to the research and development department as ‘volunteer’ subjects.” Foster cursed as his commands were bounced back on his screen. “I’ve been locked out. I can’t unlock the cell door.”

  “Wait, there is one thing we can do from here,” Eicker quickly pulled up the emergency services menu on his screen and pointed out the last option to his partner. “We can execute this emergency protocol and unlock all the doors in the IDRC.”

  “Bro, that unlocks all the doors. Including the zombie pens.” Foster replied, consternation written across his face.

  “Like you said. Vockler is coming up here to kill us. How far would we get if he could just lock us down before we managed to get out of the building?” Eicker pointed out logically. “Besides… It’s what the skipper would have wanted.”

  “Copy that.” Foster’s face was grim. “Do it.”

  Eicker tapped the emergency protocol on his screen, then tapped again when the confirmation window popped up. A red warning light started flashing above the door and a female voice, deliberately selected for its warm, calming tones, crackled out over the PA system, and echoed all around the vast building.

  “Attention all IDRC personnel. The emergency evacuation protocol has been initiated. Please head to your assembly areas now.”

  Foster looked at the security screen showing Vockler and his men only one level below the operations room. They had started running. He pushed back his chair and stood up at the same time as his partner.

  “Okay, let’s get the fuck out of here.” The two men scrambled out of the door and took off running down the hallway. Behind them the red light strobed around the empty room and across their abandoned workstations.

  All over the IDRC, scientists and other members of staff members looked around in confusion as doors unlocked and opened around them. Down in the detention block the convicts transferred from the federal penitentiary cowered at the back of their cells, staring at their doors in terror, wondering if their turn had finally come to be pulled out for some horrific experiment. In the infected pens, the zombies stirred at the mechanical sounds of the heavy bolts on their doors cycling open, and looked hungrily at the flashing lights blinking on the floor in the gaps under the doorframes.

  Doctor Indika barely heard the recorded announcement in
the distance. His blind flight from the earth-shattering revelation in the boardroom had taken him deep into the secure section of the IDRC. When he had finally slowed and shuffled to a stop in the main atrium of the biohazard section, he had found himself outside the containment room in the center of the hall, looking through the glass door at the chest within. He wondered if it was his subconscious that had brought him here.

  I thought I was trying to fight these monsters, but… I have become a monster myself. General White is an evil, immoral, ruthless psychopath. And I am no better. I believed that I was working for the greater good, Indika’s face crumpled with a sudden pang of grief that was almost unbearable. But I have been working for the man that killed my family.

  The chest squatted on its clear platform like a malignant black presence, its surface so darkened from immersion in sea-water, it was impossible to tell what kind of wood it had originally been made from. Even with the maelstrom of guilt and confusion swirling chaotically around his head, the scientist within him could not help listing what experiments and investigations he would need to do to prove its provenance.

  Indika could not take his eyes from the chest. And what lies within? A bible and a veil? He wondered how he would prove the veil was the cause of the Lyssavirus. Verifying that the cloth was two-thousand years old would be simplicity itself. But in order to unearth whatever phenomenon causes…

  Startled, he jerked out of his reverie as the hermetically sealed containment door in front of him unlocked by itself and the red glow of its keypad turned to green. Then the hair rose on the back of his neck as a sequence of heavy metallic thuds sounded off in clockwise order around the foyer around him. Adrenalin instantly cleared his mind of its earlier swirl of confusion, and Indika froze with fear as he realized that one by one, all of the cell doors to the zombie pens in this section had just unlocked themselves around him. He held his breath and did not dare to move a muscle. Only a few feet away from where he was standing, over one hundred infected specimens were standing motionless behind now unlocked doors.

  For the moment they did not know he was out here. But as soon as he started to move, even the slightest sound of his footsteps within the empty, echoing hall would set them off like a pack of starving wolves.

  His eyes turned back to the slowly blinking green light on the door to the containment chamber in front of him. It seemed like a sign.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Call 911

  The two full-size dump trucks, with ‘BROWARD COUNTY RECYCLING’ on their sides, pulled up and parked side by side in the loading bay at the back of the IDRC. Despite the promising blue sky earlier in the morning, the rest of the day had turned out to be overcast and unseasonably chilly. Michaels did not care, nor did Arlene, sitting in the cab beside him. Marco and Mauro climbed down out of the other truck and waved happily at him as they stretched out their backs and looked around. The entire zombie collection team was on a euphoric high, and Arlene swayed back and forth in her seat as she sang and hummed to herself.

  Just after midday, police responding to reports of gunfire at the old aviation museum had called up Waste Management to report that there were hundreds of dead zombies in there. Michaels and his crew had dutifully gone in and spent the better part of the afternoon using a small, electric fork-lift to load up their trucks with as many corpses as they could. They would need to go back the next day to finish off the job.

  “Damn, boss! How many did you say there were again? Two hundred?” Arlene asked gleefully.

  “You got it,” Michaels answered. “Approximately two hundred.” That’s right, he thought to himself, ‘approximately’. It would be impossible to get an exact number. In one of the ground floor workshops at the back, at the end of a hallway stinking of gasoline and burned flesh, and piled deep with charred corpses, he had no idea what had happened in there, but someone had chopped up an unknown number of zombies into hundreds of pieces and sprayed the body parts all over what Arlene had christened ‘the shredding room’. Rather than even beginning to try to match the grisly pieces together, they had simply shoveled together enough bloody chunks into each body-bag to constitute a ‘corpse’, and then had made a rough estimate of the total body-count.

  “Two hundred zombie collections, one hundred bucks a piece,” Arlene crowed. “That’s another twenty thousand dollars, honey. Now that’s what I call a bonus!” All of them were in a good mood, because after spending the last two days clearing up the aftermath of the earlier mass outbreak at the federal penitentiary, each member of the team was looking to clear nearly a hundred thousand dollars in bonuses in just one week.

  “That’s weird,” Michaels peered through the windshield at the rear of the building. “Where’s the reception committee?” The loading dock was completely empty. “Didn’t the gate security guys call ahead to tell them that we arrived?”

  “Ask the boys to go find out what’s going on. I’ve gotta hit the ladies first, I’m bursting,” Arlene replied. She opened the door, climbed down and disappeared into the female decontamination block.

  Michaels wound down his window and called over at the two men in the other truck which had pulled up and parked next to his.

  “Hey, go press the buzzer and let them know we’re here.” Then he closed his window to stop the chill breeze from coming in

  “Okay, boss,” said Marco, a wide grin splitting his face. He and Mauro had spent the drive up discussing how they were going to spend their unexpected bonuses and were in a great mood. He turned to his partner and laughed excitedly. “Straight to the showroom first thing in the morning, bro. Just wait until Michaels sees what cars the two of us drive into work next week!”

  Mauro grinned back and was just about to reply when the wide, back doors into the IDRC banged open and handful of staff members came running out, terror written across their faces. Before they had taken more than a few steps, a dozen zombies came sprinting out after them and swarmed over the screaming scientists like a pride of lions pulling down their prey.

  Marco and Mauro did not stand a chance. The two men had just climbed the steps to the loading dock and barely had time to react to the surprise opening of the doors. Lost in a daydream about his new car, Marco was still smiling at his partner when the zombies hit them at full pelt, knocking both men to the ground.

  Michaels sat frozen in shock as clumps of writhing bodies rolled around, and blood sprayed across the clean paint of the loading dock directly in front of him. The entire massacre was over in seconds. Then, to his horror, the still warm corpses splayed across the floor started twitching, before rising jerkily to their feet again, with the same dark, hungry eyes as their killers. Then, as was their nature, without any human prey in sight, the crowd of zombies standing in front of his windscreen all slowly stiffened into unnatural stillness, like a group of statues. The only movement on the loading dock was the slight stirring of their clothes in the cool April breeze.

  They haven’t seen me. Michaels realized. He was safe in the cab of his truck, and could just start the engine up and drive off. Oh shit. Arlene! He carefully pulled the walkie-talkie into his lap and pressed the transmit button, whilst from the waist upwards remaining as still as the zombies in front of him.

  “Arlene,” he muttered quietly, trying not to move his lips. “Stay in that building and lock the door. There are zombies all over the loading dock. Live ones. Michaels decided not to tell her that Marco and Mauro were dead. No need to add to her stress.

  “Copy that,” her terse reply came back after a pause. Arlene took another few seconds to process the information. “I’m guessing you can’t move.”

  “That’s right,” Michaels slurred out of the side of his mouth without moving his lips.

  “Ok, you sit tight. I’m calling for help.” Arlene took out her phone and quickly dialed a number. “Hello 911? I’m calling from the IDRC and we have an emergency situation. There has been an infected outbreak up here.” She paused as the emergency dispatcher replied and a
sked her a question. “Yeah, I’d say just like the prison. Please send all the help you can.” Then she keyed the radio to talk to Michaels. “Hey, boss. 911 say they already had multiple calls coming in about an outbreak in the IDRC. They say sit tight; help is on the way.”

  Up in the operations room Taylor typed frantically away at a keyboard, but it was no use, the entire system was rebooting and he was locked out until it had finished. All hell was breaking loose in the IDRC and all security protocols were offline. He looked up in terror as there was a sudden banging on the door. After scrambling inside just ahead of the mob, he had manually locked it from the inside and then covered his ears as his colleagues were slaughtered just outside, begging and screaming for him to let them in.

  “Open this door!”

  Taylor recognized Vockler’s voice. Maybe I should let him in? He could protect me. Then he screamed and flinched backwards as the lock on the door exploded in a hail of bullets. A booted foot kicked open the door to reveal Vockler framed in the doorway. His face and one of his uniform sleeves were thickly spattered with blood. Behind him the corridor was mysteriously empty of the corpses Taylor had expected to see. He shuddered. Of course there are no corpses. They are infected now. Probably roaming around the building, hunting down everyone else.

  Vockler stormed across the room to Taylor and ripped him away from the security console, sending the tubby scientist sprawling on the floor. Taylor’s eyes were fixated on the barrel of Vockler’s pistol. He had always thought that a ‘smoking gun’ was just a figure of speech, but there was literally smoke coming out of the muzzle pointing straight at him, as huge and menacing as a dark train tunnel.

  “What have you done?” Vockler raged. Taylor cowered away from the cold fury in the other man’s eyes. The Lazarus commander looked at the screen showing the empty cell where the civilians had been safely locked away only a few minutes ago. “You let them go, didn’t you? You promised to let them go in return for sex from the women, you imbecile!”