The Lab
|
Amy shielded her eyes against the setting sun, and scanned the perimeter of the compound. As the sky split into layers of orange and purple, her heart squeezed with fear. Night was coming, bringing with it the carnivorous creatures they had come to name as The Infected. Wire criss-crossed the window where she stood, though they were an unnecessary measure. The windows were thick glass, the walls impenetrable steel cliffs, and the doors would give any bank vault a high degree of protection. Even so, grates and safety wire were affixed to every window, making their home feel like a cage. |
During the day, the doors were unlocked; with proper breathing masks it was safe enough to venture outside. At night, the cage was locked, keeping them in, and night-walkers out.
Amy should have been in the lab, bent over beakers and vials with the doctor, trying to make sense of their predicament. Trying to find a way out. But this was no ordinary night. She had to see with her own eyes.
Dusk was always dangerous, but tonight was worse. Tonight, one of their own had not yet returned. Jerico’s daughter, a firecracker even at seven years old, had wandered out of sight during the day. It was easy to get lost when sandy hills cropped up to cut off line of sight. She could wander forever in those hills and never find her way back. No, she wouldn’t wander forever. If the desert-like heat didn’t fry her into exhaustion, dusk would bring its own dangers. Jerico and two others had left immediately to look for her. That was hours ago.
“Anything?” a voice arrived beside her.
It was Eric, a handsome young man from the Perimeter Guard. He’d arrived only weeks ago. Amy remembered his eyes wild with fear, his panting, and his begging to be let in. After the doctor cleared him, Eric joined The Guard. Now, at his post by the front door, his gaze panned from side to side. The piercing wisdom in his eyes contradicted the playfulness of the long eyelashes that framed them. Amy couldn’t help but steal a glance at him as he stared into the last hints of daylight.
“Not yet,” she said. Returning her eyes to the sandy hills, she added, “Hopefully those… things don’t come tonight.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice.” He smirked at another guard across the corridor, who shook his head in reply.
Amy’s jaw tightened. It would be nice to not have to face them again tonight. One night of peace would be very nice, actually. But, she had to agree there was little point in hoping for that. Night brought The Infected as surely as it brought darkness itself.
The sun was gone now, off hiding somewhere. A slice of moon lifted into the sky, come to toy with them in the darkness. The moon smiled with menace. The game was about to begin. Silvery light poured down and helped the sand hills stretch their shadows toward the compound walls. Round black patches spilled out from the hills like oil, seeping past abandoned trucks and debris, spreading closer and closer, reaching for them.
Outside, the intercom picked up a sound.
“What was that?” Eric’s eyes stared straight ahead when he said it. If he were a dog, his ears would have twitched forward.
In the speaker, they heard a metal clanging sound. It was close. They squinted, willing their eyes to see shapes in the shadows.
“I don’t know!” Amy hissed. How was she supposed to know? He was the guard, she was just an assistant in a lab coat. She clenched her teeth, angry at her eyes for seeing nothing but shadows, and hating the moon that just kept smiling like this was all a big joke.
Something rustled from outside. Was it the rustling of paper? Then she heard an unearthly squishing crack sound, like the mushy crunch of stepping on an enormous bug.
Eric adjusted his grip on the machine gun in his hands. The gun was empty, the last ammunition spent a week ago, but it still made a decent baton. It could still crack the skulls of the undead.
Eric and Amy held their breath. Perking their ears, they tensed, listening. A faint grunting. Someone, or something, was grunting outside. Like a dog panting after a plaything.
Squinting, Amy scanned the darkness. Nothing. Guards all along the corridor watched through their windows, silent. Scanning. Poised.
“There!” Eric said, squeezing a fist on the empty gun.
Amy followed his eyes and squinted harder. A shadow moved in the darkness. A lumbering, panting figure lurched unnaturally toward the compound. It was running. They always ran. And they lurched, too. The limbs always flailed, as though the arms themselves were trying to escape the body’s infection but couldn’t, so they just hung there like streamers, flapping in the wind as the body hurtled forward.
Two other shadows appeared on the hilltop, walking stiffly and unbalanced. They followed the first one down the hill, all three lurching their way to the compound.
The limbs on the first one were not flailing. The silhouette was just legs and torso and head, no arms. It neared faster than the others. Then Amy and Eric heard the most terrifying sound they’d heard since The Infection began: the gasp of the creature at the front.
“Help!”
Electric fear pierced Amy like lightening. She and Eric looked at each other in shock. It was Jerico! Of course! His arms were not flailing because they were probably wrapped around the girl.
“It’s him!” said a guard, “Don’t open the gate!”
Eric ran for the front door, just as Jerico’s fists arrived and began pounding.
“No!” a second guard called from his post twenty feet away, “You’ll infect us all!”
Eric slung his gun over his shoulder and set both hands to work on the heavy door latch. “No he isn’t.” He grunted to himself. Unlike the highly trained military guard, Eric knew the terror of clawing on those walls, desperate for mercy.
Amy watched through the safety grate beside the door. “They’re coming!” she said.
“I know!” Eric was panting now.
Outside, the two stiff shadows must have noticed Jerico was trapped because they picked up their pace. Fists pounded on the thick metal door. Jerico’s face popped into view in the window grate, his green eyes, wild with terror.
“Help me!” He gasped it. Panted it. The glass fogged under his hot breath.
Amy nodded, and shouted to Eric. “Hurry!!”
“I am!”
The lock clanked open.
“Are you crazy?” Eddy, the guard captain called from further down. The sound of his boots on pavement grew louder as he ran toward them.
Eric kept going, placing his hands on the steering wheel handle of the door. He tugged.
The two lurching monsters were now close enough Amy could hear their moaning. In the moonlight now, their sallow skin seemed to shimmer. Their eyes were black holes, somehow seeing, but also not. Both bodies looked like something that had crawled out of a grave, clothed in dirty rags that used to be business clothes, and both had worn, weathered skin that hung like rotted sails. In places, there were tears in flesh, the flaps of skin swinging as they ran. Whatever went on in what was left of their minds, they knew enough to raise their arms and bare their teeth as they approached their target. Their prey.
The door squealed as it swung open. Before Eddy could reach the door and slap it shut, Jerico burst in, falling to the ground. Jerico’s arms remained locked around Sylvie, even as he tumbled in. The groaning grew louder. Eddy and two other guards arrived and now joined Eric in pushing the door closed.
The door was heavy, and closed slowly. Too slowly. Two feet. One foot. Six inches left.
Just before the door made those final inches, a grey hand jutted through the opening. Amy screamed. Guards kept pushing on the door. Eric grabbed the gun from his back and battered the hand. Fingers snapped. The wrist broke. Still, the grey arm kept pushing itself inside. It was like these creatures didn’t even feel anything. Finally, Eric put two hands on the gun, lined it up with the grey rotten face in the door crack, and hit hard. Amy heard the crunch. The hand disappeared from the crack, and the door clanked shut.
Eric turned the lock, securing the door.
“Way to go,” Eddy said, eying Jerico. Looking up at Eric he added, “You just killed us.”
Amy slid to the floor, panting, relieved Jerico had found Sylvie. They had made it back, even if the other two hadn’t. But, had they arrived without becoming infected? Time would tell. Time, and a quarantine room.
-------------------
“What do you think, Doctor?” Amy asked.
Doctor Ferber peeled off his gloves and removed the helmet of his safety suit. He hung the helmet on the wall next to the airlock door. He had just emerged from inspecting Jerico. The grimace and shake of his head said it all.
“And the girl?”
“I’m not sure, yet.”
Amy turned her eyes back to the viewing window, through which she could see both Jerico and Sylvie laid out on gurneys and draped in white sheets. Hoses and wires slinked down from the ceiling and attached themselves to the bodies like hungry snakes sucking from veins and hissing into mouths. She was glad they were sedated.
An airlock joined the lab to the quarantine room where the two bodies lay. Amy stood at the viewing window, trying to keep herself together. The sight of little Sylvie like that was almost too much. She forced her gaze to the smooth metal walls around her. They gave the lab a feel of being inside a commercial freezer but, Amy supposed it was better than having the place feel like the concrete basement it really was.
The doctor walked past Amy to a stainless steel countertop, where scanners, a centrifuge, Bunsen burners, and other equipment lined themselves up along the wall like soldiers, eager to serve. His suit billowed and swished as he walked, the shushing sound calling for a moment of silence. He parked himself on his stool and hunched over a microscope, inspecting blood samples from Sylvie.
“Her blood looks clear,” he said. He switched the sample plate and returned his eye to the scope. “His…” He sighed and pinched between his eyebrows. “There’s definitely a mutation here. A virus.” He shook his head.
“I’m sorry.” Amy said.
“Me too.”
“What now?”
They had never had an Infected among them before. They’d never seen it happen. Not like this. When it started, when the whole city turned into a hoard of monsters, a few of them had fled for the desert outside of town.
He warned university professors it would happen. The new virus discovered in their campus lab was a strain like none they’d ever seen. Spontaneous mutations. Difficult to contain. It was the Pandora’s Box of pathogens. But they didn’t listen. Grant money was clawed back, his lab access was revoked, and he was laughed out of the academic world. That’s when he knew it was about to get bad.
Globally bad.
The doctor took his message underground, to the only people he knew would believe him: his friend Eddy and his wife June, the local crazies with a high tech survivalist bunker outside of town and a stockpile of food that would have them surviving into the next century. With the Doctor’s medical expertise and Eddy and June’s military know-how, they hunkered down to defend against the coming pandemic. Survive. Maybe even find a cure.
Amy was the only any lab personnel the Doctor could convince to join the mission. The four of them tried desperately to warn and convince their friends and family to escape with them to their survivalist outpost. They gathered thirty.
After the pandemic hit, the little bunker community hoped the army would fix the world. Or doctors or vaccines would. Or maybe, failing all that, the whole crazy thing would just blow over. That was six months ago. Superman never showed up, not with the army, not with vaccines. They were on their own, and there was no telling how long the siege would last.
Now, one of The Infected was inside the compound. Thankfully, they were set up for such a contingency and able to contain it. Maybe this was the key to finding a cure.
The doctor pulled back from the microscope, and sighed before answering Amy’s question about what to do now. “We observe,” he said. He rose from his chair and walked over to the viewing window. “For the first time, we can witness the transformation in real time in a controlled environment. We can learn from it.” His hands met behind his back. With a deep sigh, he transformed from James, friend of Jerico, to Doctor Ferber, detached medical researcher.
They watched gauges register the increasing body heat of Jerico.
“Fever appears to be among the first symptoms, then?” Amy confirmed, hiding her hands in the pocket of her white lab coat.
The doctor nodded. “This time, anyway. It’s not always the same. Sometimes onset is immediate, other times it can take days for symptoms to appear.”
On the table, the body twitched.
----------------------
“This was a mistake.” Eddy faced the viewing window when he said it. ”I should never have let you in here.” He turned to face the doctor. “It was just supposed to be a medical triage, not some… Frankenstein lab.”
“Yes, and we’re treating one of our own.” Doctor Ferber said.
Amy hunched over her clipboard, becoming invisible in the corner.
“No.” Eddy said, “This isn’t treatment. This is experimentation. And infiltration. He’s got it, and now we’re all going to get it too.” Eddy stepped away from the window, keeping his fierce eyes locked on the doctor. “These bodies need to get out of here.” He put a finger in the doctor’s face. “Bag ‘em and toss em. Burn them. Whatever. Just get them out of here before it’s too late.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” the doctor replied. “The safest place for them is here, in containment. You know,” the doctor cocked his head as he said it. “You sound just like the government.”
Eddy bristled, but waited for an explanation.
The doctor continued, “They wanted to hide from this too. They wanted to make it go away. Well, look around.” He waved his arm across the lab. “It doesn’t go away. This is the result of hiding.”
Eddy folded his arms across his chest. “Maybe all this is the result of someone cooking up nightmares in a lab.”
The doctor didn’t flinch.
Eddy continued. “Lab rats working hard to make us all into lab rats. Maybe the best thing would be for all the lab rats to die – the ones on the tables, and the ones in coats.”
He unfolded his arms and tucked his thumbs into his belt, inches from the pistol holstered there, calmly saying the next words. “Better you than me, my wife, and my team of military men.”
Amy gulped.
“Listen,” the doctor put his palms up, “there’s virtually no risk of it spreading here. So far, tests indicate the virus is not airborne. But we’re taking precautions. Look around. See these air locks and vents? If it does prove to be airborne, this system will filter it out of the main air supply.”
“You idiot.” Eddy shook his head at the floor. Raising his eyes to meet the doctor, he added, “If it’s airborne, we’re already dead. Good old Jerico wasn’t contained in an airlock when he barged in the front door, was he?”
The doctor, unperturbed, shrugged his shoulders. “Well, then it doesn’t much matter if he stays, does it?”
“We’re all going to die, and it’s your fault.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “You’ve killed us, you know.” His eyes bore holes through the doctor’s head. “Hope you’re happy.”
After Eddy turned to leave, Amy sighed heavily with relief.
The doctor smiled to Amy. “If letting Jerico into the building is what sealed our doom, then perhaps Eddy is the one to blame. He is the guard after all.”
------------------------
Eric’s wise eyes stared through the small viewing window in the door. “Will she be okay?” he asked.
“James thinks so,” Amy said, “She keeps testing clean. He’ll move Sylvie to a different isolation room today.”
She memorized the thick, playful curve of his lashes and marvelled at the way his eyes seemed to stare deeply into everything, as if they saw much more than was there. She stared at him a moment too long. He noticed.
“Any progress on a cure?” he asked, releasing her from the awkward moment.
Grateful, Amy dove into explanation, giving him every bit of information she’d come to know.
Jerico was a test subject now, strapped to a table and being experimented on for days. The fever had developed into tremors that first hour. By the second day, blood flow and breathing slowed. There was swelling in the brain. All of this seemed to affect every system from brain function to skin health, even making the eyes go grey and vacant. Doctor Ferber sliced into his friend, taking biopsis and testing samples. He’d even drilled a hole in the head to relieve the building pressure. He’d tried to make a vaccine from his blood. This was difficult, as it seemed the virus also slowed the production of blood cells. Jerico’s body whitened and shrivelled right there in front of them, and there was nothing anyone could do to save him. He was a living cadaver, now.
“It’s so hard to watch him turn,” Amy said, swallowing the stone that had formed in her throat. “Watching his humanity slip away, it’s just…”
“Inhumane.” His eyes grew a darkness in them, like storm clouds gathering, matching the deep blue of his guard uniform.
Unsure of what evil he was glimpsing just then, and clueless about how to ask, Amy simply nodded. She joined his gaze through the viewing window and let her eyes follow the contours of Jerico’s sheeted body beneath the straps and hoses. She wondered at what point the lurching and violence would take hold. Maybe that was the thought storming in Eric’s eyes. Maybe he hoped, as she did, that sedation would keep the violent aspect of The Virus under control. Maybe he feared it wouldn’t.
“Oh, good. You’re both here.” Doctor Ferber’s voice arrived behind them. “Would you help me wheel Sylvie to a separate isolation room?”
An unreasonable fear twisted Amy’s insides, and she imagined armies of virus bugs marching up her arms and into her ears, infecting her. The doctor noticed.
“All the testing indicates she’s free of the virus,” he said. “It’s not airborne, not to worry.” He smiled and nodded. “And her blood is clear, remember?”
Amy mirrored the nod and smiled in weak agreement. She shivered, unable to shake the image, the feel, of virus bugs on her skin.
------------------------
The moon was playing its game again. Most of the thirty-some community members were asleep in their quarters. Besides Amy and Doctor Ferber, only Eric and the other Perimeter Guards were awake, each of them keeping the night’s watch under the menace of the moon.
Amy sat beside Sylvie’s bed, listening to the girl breathe, watching, waiting for her to come back. Something wasn’t right. It had been days since her release from quarantine, and she hadn’t improved. She hadn’t woken. She was still under casual observation, but the doctor’s focus was on Jerico, and on the cure he determined to discover.
The girl on the bed lay motionless, maybe in a coma, maybe not. They didn’t know. Whatever her state, it did not necessitate straps. Or hoses. Or close monitoring. With the doctor absent, Amy sat, compelled to be here for the girl whose mother died trying to escape from the city, and whose father now lay, trapped between life and death, sacrificed so the girl could live.
The girl’s eyelids twitched. That was new. Amy leaned forward. “Sylvie?”
The eyelids fluttered, remaining closed.
Amy stood. “Sylvie?”
She had resisted touching the girl, fearing the spread of marching virus bugs, afraid of finding herself sallow and undead beneath the gurney straps. The girl’s hand twitched. Despite herself, Amy reached for the little fingers, wrapping her own around them. The girl’s hand twitched inside her own. Fear twisted her insides as she registered a disturbing detail. The girl’s hand was burning hot.
Amy gasped. She placed her other wrist on the girl’s forehead, desperate to be wrong. The girl’s forehead was a hot coal under her skin. Fever! Amy snatched her hands from the girl, stunned. Was she infected after all? Could the doctor have missed it? With the battery of blood tests he’d run, and the live specimen available for study, it didn’t seem possible. She shivered, feeling virus bugs. The doctor needed to know.
Amy turned and left the room. Each step brought to mind another question. She walked faster. What if the girl had been infected? Amy tried to count how many times people had come into contact with the girl. Touched her gurney. Stroked her arm. Breathed the same air. Her lungs tightened. She was speed walking now, her legs a pair of scissors, slicing madly. How could the doctor be wrong? They had to quarantine the girl. Now. Amy broke into a run.
She burst through the lab doors to discover the room empty. On the other side of the viewing window, the white body still lay attached to hoses and lines, but the doctor was not at the counter among his vials like he was supposed to be, like he had been all week.
“Doctor Ferber?” Her words fell flat in the tiled room.
There was something different, though. A chair was missing. The doctor’s chair. It was gone. Amy scanned the room, twice, three times, even looking under a lab table for a toppled chair. Nothing. “Doctor Ferber?”
Something else was different. The safety suit was sticking out of the closet like a hand pinched in a door. As she walked over to the closet, her breath became shallow. Her hand trembled on the handle. “James?” She pulled the door open.
The chair had been crammed into the closet. Slumped sideways in the chair, sat the doctor with his mouth and eyes open wide. His body sat still and without breath. He was dead. Amy gasped and clamped a hand on her own wide mouth. Terrified, she couldn’t stop staring at the grotesque statue in the bag.
She stepped back. Her legs and arms trembled. Okay… Now what?
She forced her hands to her side, letting them gesture there. What now, what now? With the doctor dead, two of The Infected inside the compound, and apparently a murderer afoot, what was she supposed to do? She was only a lab assistant. Of all the pressing questions, of all the things that needed answering, the biggest and most unanswerable was, what now? Even the Perimeter Guards couldn’t help now.
Or could they? She remembered the wisdom in Eric’s eyes. Maybe, together, they could figure this thing out. At least, they could quarantine the girl and hunt for the murderer. Yes. That was where to start.
Nearby, she heard a soft moan. It was not the soft sound of a sleepy child, or the sound of a tender love embrace. It was the kind of moan heard beneath a sneering silver moon.
Amy swiveled around, coming nose to nose with the source of the moan. The face in front of her was recognizable only by the playful curve of the eyelashes. The eyes were grey and empty of the wisdom they once held. Beneath them, a crescent of white teeth grinned.
Amy should have been in the lab, bent over beakers and vials with the doctor, trying to make sense of their predicament. Trying to find a way out. But this was no ordinary night. She had to see with her own eyes.
Dusk was always dangerous, but tonight was worse. Tonight, one of their own had not yet returned. Jerico’s daughter, a firecracker even at seven years old, had wandered out of sight during the day. It was easy to get lost when sandy hills cropped up to cut off line of sight. She could wander forever in those hills and never find her way back. No, she wouldn’t wander forever. If the desert-like heat didn’t fry her into exhaustion, dusk would bring its own dangers. Jerico and two others had left immediately to look for her. That was hours ago.
“Anything?” a voice arrived beside her.
It was Eric, a handsome young man from the Perimeter Guard. He’d arrived only weeks ago. Amy remembered his eyes wild with fear, his panting, and his begging to be let in. After the doctor cleared him, Eric joined The Guard. Now, at his post by the front door, his gaze panned from side to side. The piercing wisdom in his eyes contradicted the playfulness of the long eyelashes that framed them. Amy couldn’t help but steal a glance at him as he stared into the last hints of daylight.
“Not yet,” she said. Returning her eyes to the sandy hills, she added, “Hopefully those… things don’t come tonight.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice.” He smirked at another guard across the corridor, who shook his head in reply.
Amy’s jaw tightened. It would be nice to not have to face them again tonight. One night of peace would be very nice, actually. But, she had to agree there was little point in hoping for that. Night brought The Infected as surely as it brought darkness itself.
The sun was gone now, off hiding somewhere. A slice of moon lifted into the sky, come to toy with them in the darkness. The moon smiled with menace. The game was about to begin. Silvery light poured down and helped the sand hills stretch their shadows toward the compound walls. Round black patches spilled out from the hills like oil, seeping past abandoned trucks and debris, spreading closer and closer, reaching for them.
Outside, the intercom picked up a sound.
“What was that?” Eric’s eyes stared straight ahead when he said it. If he were a dog, his ears would have twitched forward.
In the speaker, they heard a metal clanging sound. It was close. They squinted, willing their eyes to see shapes in the shadows.
“I don’t know!” Amy hissed. How was she supposed to know? He was the guard, she was just an assistant in a lab coat. She clenched her teeth, angry at her eyes for seeing nothing but shadows, and hating the moon that just kept smiling like this was all a big joke.
Something rustled from outside. Was it the rustling of paper? Then she heard an unearthly squishing crack sound, like the mushy crunch of stepping on an enormous bug.
Eric adjusted his grip on the machine gun in his hands. The gun was empty, the last ammunition spent a week ago, but it still made a decent baton. It could still crack the skulls of the undead.
Eric and Amy held their breath. Perking their ears, they tensed, listening. A faint grunting. Someone, or something, was grunting outside. Like a dog panting after a plaything.
Squinting, Amy scanned the darkness. Nothing. Guards all along the corridor watched through their windows, silent. Scanning. Poised.
“There!” Eric said, squeezing a fist on the empty gun.
Amy followed his eyes and squinted harder. A shadow moved in the darkness. A lumbering, panting figure lurched unnaturally toward the compound. It was running. They always ran. And they lurched, too. The limbs always flailed, as though the arms themselves were trying to escape the body’s infection but couldn’t, so they just hung there like streamers, flapping in the wind as the body hurtled forward.
Two other shadows appeared on the hilltop, walking stiffly and unbalanced. They followed the first one down the hill, all three lurching their way to the compound.
The limbs on the first one were not flailing. The silhouette was just legs and torso and head, no arms. It neared faster than the others. Then Amy and Eric heard the most terrifying sound they’d heard since The Infection began: the gasp of the creature at the front.
“Help!”
Electric fear pierced Amy like lightening. She and Eric looked at each other in shock. It was Jerico! Of course! His arms were not flailing because they were probably wrapped around the girl.
“It’s him!” said a guard, “Don’t open the gate!”
Eric ran for the front door, just as Jerico’s fists arrived and began pounding.
“No!” a second guard called from his post twenty feet away, “You’ll infect us all!”
Eric slung his gun over his shoulder and set both hands to work on the heavy door latch. “No he isn’t.” He grunted to himself. Unlike the highly trained military guard, Eric knew the terror of clawing on those walls, desperate for mercy.
Amy watched through the safety grate beside the door. “They’re coming!” she said.
“I know!” Eric was panting now.
Outside, the two stiff shadows must have noticed Jerico was trapped because they picked up their pace. Fists pounded on the thick metal door. Jerico’s face popped into view in the window grate, his green eyes, wild with terror.
“Help me!” He gasped it. Panted it. The glass fogged under his hot breath.
Amy nodded, and shouted to Eric. “Hurry!!”
“I am!”
The lock clanked open.
“Are you crazy?” Eddy, the guard captain called from further down. The sound of his boots on pavement grew louder as he ran toward them.
Eric kept going, placing his hands on the steering wheel handle of the door. He tugged.
The two lurching monsters were now close enough Amy could hear their moaning. In the moonlight now, their sallow skin seemed to shimmer. Their eyes were black holes, somehow seeing, but also not. Both bodies looked like something that had crawled out of a grave, clothed in dirty rags that used to be business clothes, and both had worn, weathered skin that hung like rotted sails. In places, there were tears in flesh, the flaps of skin swinging as they ran. Whatever went on in what was left of their minds, they knew enough to raise their arms and bare their teeth as they approached their target. Their prey.
The door squealed as it swung open. Before Eddy could reach the door and slap it shut, Jerico burst in, falling to the ground. Jerico’s arms remained locked around Sylvie, even as he tumbled in. The groaning grew louder. Eddy and two other guards arrived and now joined Eric in pushing the door closed.
The door was heavy, and closed slowly. Too slowly. Two feet. One foot. Six inches left.
Just before the door made those final inches, a grey hand jutted through the opening. Amy screamed. Guards kept pushing on the door. Eric grabbed the gun from his back and battered the hand. Fingers snapped. The wrist broke. Still, the grey arm kept pushing itself inside. It was like these creatures didn’t even feel anything. Finally, Eric put two hands on the gun, lined it up with the grey rotten face in the door crack, and hit hard. Amy heard the crunch. The hand disappeared from the crack, and the door clanked shut.
Eric turned the lock, securing the door.
“Way to go,” Eddy said, eying Jerico. Looking up at Eric he added, “You just killed us.”
Amy slid to the floor, panting, relieved Jerico had found Sylvie. They had made it back, even if the other two hadn’t. But, had they arrived without becoming infected? Time would tell. Time, and a quarantine room.
-------------------
“What do you think, Doctor?” Amy asked.
Doctor Ferber peeled off his gloves and removed the helmet of his safety suit. He hung the helmet on the wall next to the airlock door. He had just emerged from inspecting Jerico. The grimace and shake of his head said it all.
“And the girl?”
“I’m not sure, yet.”
Amy turned her eyes back to the viewing window, through which she could see both Jerico and Sylvie laid out on gurneys and draped in white sheets. Hoses and wires slinked down from the ceiling and attached themselves to the bodies like hungry snakes sucking from veins and hissing into mouths. She was glad they were sedated.
An airlock joined the lab to the quarantine room where the two bodies lay. Amy stood at the viewing window, trying to keep herself together. The sight of little Sylvie like that was almost too much. She forced her gaze to the smooth metal walls around her. They gave the lab a feel of being inside a commercial freezer but, Amy supposed it was better than having the place feel like the concrete basement it really was.
The doctor walked past Amy to a stainless steel countertop, where scanners, a centrifuge, Bunsen burners, and other equipment lined themselves up along the wall like soldiers, eager to serve. His suit billowed and swished as he walked, the shushing sound calling for a moment of silence. He parked himself on his stool and hunched over a microscope, inspecting blood samples from Sylvie.
“Her blood looks clear,” he said. He switched the sample plate and returned his eye to the scope. “His…” He sighed and pinched between his eyebrows. “There’s definitely a mutation here. A virus.” He shook his head.
“I’m sorry.” Amy said.
“Me too.”
“What now?”
They had never had an Infected among them before. They’d never seen it happen. Not like this. When it started, when the whole city turned into a hoard of monsters, a few of them had fled for the desert outside of town.
He warned university professors it would happen. The new virus discovered in their campus lab was a strain like none they’d ever seen. Spontaneous mutations. Difficult to contain. It was the Pandora’s Box of pathogens. But they didn’t listen. Grant money was clawed back, his lab access was revoked, and he was laughed out of the academic world. That’s when he knew it was about to get bad.
Globally bad.
The doctor took his message underground, to the only people he knew would believe him: his friend Eddy and his wife June, the local crazies with a high tech survivalist bunker outside of town and a stockpile of food that would have them surviving into the next century. With the Doctor’s medical expertise and Eddy and June’s military know-how, they hunkered down to defend against the coming pandemic. Survive. Maybe even find a cure.
Amy was the only any lab personnel the Doctor could convince to join the mission. The four of them tried desperately to warn and convince their friends and family to escape with them to their survivalist outpost. They gathered thirty.
After the pandemic hit, the little bunker community hoped the army would fix the world. Or doctors or vaccines would. Or maybe, failing all that, the whole crazy thing would just blow over. That was six months ago. Superman never showed up, not with the army, not with vaccines. They were on their own, and there was no telling how long the siege would last.
Now, one of The Infected was inside the compound. Thankfully, they were set up for such a contingency and able to contain it. Maybe this was the key to finding a cure.
The doctor pulled back from the microscope, and sighed before answering Amy’s question about what to do now. “We observe,” he said. He rose from his chair and walked over to the viewing window. “For the first time, we can witness the transformation in real time in a controlled environment. We can learn from it.” His hands met behind his back. With a deep sigh, he transformed from James, friend of Jerico, to Doctor Ferber, detached medical researcher.
They watched gauges register the increasing body heat of Jerico.
“Fever appears to be among the first symptoms, then?” Amy confirmed, hiding her hands in the pocket of her white lab coat.
The doctor nodded. “This time, anyway. It’s not always the same. Sometimes onset is immediate, other times it can take days for symptoms to appear.”
On the table, the body twitched.
----------------------
“This was a mistake.” Eddy faced the viewing window when he said it. ”I should never have let you in here.” He turned to face the doctor. “It was just supposed to be a medical triage, not some… Frankenstein lab.”
“Yes, and we’re treating one of our own.” Doctor Ferber said.
Amy hunched over her clipboard, becoming invisible in the corner.
“No.” Eddy said, “This isn’t treatment. This is experimentation. And infiltration. He’s got it, and now we’re all going to get it too.” Eddy stepped away from the window, keeping his fierce eyes locked on the doctor. “These bodies need to get out of here.” He put a finger in the doctor’s face. “Bag ‘em and toss em. Burn them. Whatever. Just get them out of here before it’s too late.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” the doctor replied. “The safest place for them is here, in containment. You know,” the doctor cocked his head as he said it. “You sound just like the government.”
Eddy bristled, but waited for an explanation.
The doctor continued, “They wanted to hide from this too. They wanted to make it go away. Well, look around.” He waved his arm across the lab. “It doesn’t go away. This is the result of hiding.”
Eddy folded his arms across his chest. “Maybe all this is the result of someone cooking up nightmares in a lab.”
The doctor didn’t flinch.
Eddy continued. “Lab rats working hard to make us all into lab rats. Maybe the best thing would be for all the lab rats to die – the ones on the tables, and the ones in coats.”
He unfolded his arms and tucked his thumbs into his belt, inches from the pistol holstered there, calmly saying the next words. “Better you than me, my wife, and my team of military men.”
Amy gulped.
“Listen,” the doctor put his palms up, “there’s virtually no risk of it spreading here. So far, tests indicate the virus is not airborne. But we’re taking precautions. Look around. See these air locks and vents? If it does prove to be airborne, this system will filter it out of the main air supply.”
“You idiot.” Eddy shook his head at the floor. Raising his eyes to meet the doctor, he added, “If it’s airborne, we’re already dead. Good old Jerico wasn’t contained in an airlock when he barged in the front door, was he?”
The doctor, unperturbed, shrugged his shoulders. “Well, then it doesn’t much matter if he stays, does it?”
“We’re all going to die, and it’s your fault.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “You’ve killed us, you know.” His eyes bore holes through the doctor’s head. “Hope you’re happy.”
After Eddy turned to leave, Amy sighed heavily with relief.
The doctor smiled to Amy. “If letting Jerico into the building is what sealed our doom, then perhaps Eddy is the one to blame. He is the guard after all.”
------------------------
Eric’s wise eyes stared through the small viewing window in the door. “Will she be okay?” he asked.
“James thinks so,” Amy said, “She keeps testing clean. He’ll move Sylvie to a different isolation room today.”
She memorized the thick, playful curve of his lashes and marvelled at the way his eyes seemed to stare deeply into everything, as if they saw much more than was there. She stared at him a moment too long. He noticed.
“Any progress on a cure?” he asked, releasing her from the awkward moment.
Grateful, Amy dove into explanation, giving him every bit of information she’d come to know.
Jerico was a test subject now, strapped to a table and being experimented on for days. The fever had developed into tremors that first hour. By the second day, blood flow and breathing slowed. There was swelling in the brain. All of this seemed to affect every system from brain function to skin health, even making the eyes go grey and vacant. Doctor Ferber sliced into his friend, taking biopsis and testing samples. He’d even drilled a hole in the head to relieve the building pressure. He’d tried to make a vaccine from his blood. This was difficult, as it seemed the virus also slowed the production of blood cells. Jerico’s body whitened and shrivelled right there in front of them, and there was nothing anyone could do to save him. He was a living cadaver, now.
“It’s so hard to watch him turn,” Amy said, swallowing the stone that had formed in her throat. “Watching his humanity slip away, it’s just…”
“Inhumane.” His eyes grew a darkness in them, like storm clouds gathering, matching the deep blue of his guard uniform.
Unsure of what evil he was glimpsing just then, and clueless about how to ask, Amy simply nodded. She joined his gaze through the viewing window and let her eyes follow the contours of Jerico’s sheeted body beneath the straps and hoses. She wondered at what point the lurching and violence would take hold. Maybe that was the thought storming in Eric’s eyes. Maybe he hoped, as she did, that sedation would keep the violent aspect of The Virus under control. Maybe he feared it wouldn’t.
“Oh, good. You’re both here.” Doctor Ferber’s voice arrived behind them. “Would you help me wheel Sylvie to a separate isolation room?”
An unreasonable fear twisted Amy’s insides, and she imagined armies of virus bugs marching up her arms and into her ears, infecting her. The doctor noticed.
“All the testing indicates she’s free of the virus,” he said. “It’s not airborne, not to worry.” He smiled and nodded. “And her blood is clear, remember?”
Amy mirrored the nod and smiled in weak agreement. She shivered, unable to shake the image, the feel, of virus bugs on her skin.
------------------------
The moon was playing its game again. Most of the thirty-some community members were asleep in their quarters. Besides Amy and Doctor Ferber, only Eric and the other Perimeter Guards were awake, each of them keeping the night’s watch under the menace of the moon.
Amy sat beside Sylvie’s bed, listening to the girl breathe, watching, waiting for her to come back. Something wasn’t right. It had been days since her release from quarantine, and she hadn’t improved. She hadn’t woken. She was still under casual observation, but the doctor’s focus was on Jerico, and on the cure he determined to discover.
The girl on the bed lay motionless, maybe in a coma, maybe not. They didn’t know. Whatever her state, it did not necessitate straps. Or hoses. Or close monitoring. With the doctor absent, Amy sat, compelled to be here for the girl whose mother died trying to escape from the city, and whose father now lay, trapped between life and death, sacrificed so the girl could live.
The girl’s eyelids twitched. That was new. Amy leaned forward. “Sylvie?”
The eyelids fluttered, remaining closed.
Amy stood. “Sylvie?”
She had resisted touching the girl, fearing the spread of marching virus bugs, afraid of finding herself sallow and undead beneath the gurney straps. The girl’s hand twitched. Despite herself, Amy reached for the little fingers, wrapping her own around them. The girl’s hand twitched inside her own. Fear twisted her insides as she registered a disturbing detail. The girl’s hand was burning hot.
Amy gasped. She placed her other wrist on the girl’s forehead, desperate to be wrong. The girl’s forehead was a hot coal under her skin. Fever! Amy snatched her hands from the girl, stunned. Was she infected after all? Could the doctor have missed it? With the battery of blood tests he’d run, and the live specimen available for study, it didn’t seem possible. She shivered, feeling virus bugs. The doctor needed to know.
Amy turned and left the room. Each step brought to mind another question. She walked faster. What if the girl had been infected? Amy tried to count how many times people had come into contact with the girl. Touched her gurney. Stroked her arm. Breathed the same air. Her lungs tightened. She was speed walking now, her legs a pair of scissors, slicing madly. How could the doctor be wrong? They had to quarantine the girl. Now. Amy broke into a run.
She burst through the lab doors to discover the room empty. On the other side of the viewing window, the white body still lay attached to hoses and lines, but the doctor was not at the counter among his vials like he was supposed to be, like he had been all week.
“Doctor Ferber?” Her words fell flat in the tiled room.
There was something different, though. A chair was missing. The doctor’s chair. It was gone. Amy scanned the room, twice, three times, even looking under a lab table for a toppled chair. Nothing. “Doctor Ferber?”
Something else was different. The safety suit was sticking out of the closet like a hand pinched in a door. As she walked over to the closet, her breath became shallow. Her hand trembled on the handle. “James?” She pulled the door open.
The chair had been crammed into the closet. Slumped sideways in the chair, sat the doctor with his mouth and eyes open wide. His body sat still and without breath. He was dead. Amy gasped and clamped a hand on her own wide mouth. Terrified, she couldn’t stop staring at the grotesque statue in the bag.
She stepped back. Her legs and arms trembled. Okay… Now what?
She forced her hands to her side, letting them gesture there. What now, what now? With the doctor dead, two of The Infected inside the compound, and apparently a murderer afoot, what was she supposed to do? She was only a lab assistant. Of all the pressing questions, of all the things that needed answering, the biggest and most unanswerable was, what now? Even the Perimeter Guards couldn’t help now.
Or could they? She remembered the wisdom in Eric’s eyes. Maybe, together, they could figure this thing out. At least, they could quarantine the girl and hunt for the murderer. Yes. That was where to start.
Nearby, she heard a soft moan. It was not the soft sound of a sleepy child, or the sound of a tender love embrace. It was the kind of moan heard beneath a sneering silver moon.
Amy swiveled around, coming nose to nose with the source of the moan. The face in front of her was recognizable only by the playful curve of the eyelashes. The eyes were grey and empty of the wisdom they once held. Beneath them, a crescent of white teeth grinned.
END
Hey, thanks for reading.
I'd love to hear what you thought.
Well... unless you didn't like it. Who wants to hear that? lol
Juuuust KIDDING.
Mostly, I just hope you enjoyed it.
And, I'm sure it goes without saying, but please don't share this secret link. It's just for you. My subscriber. My loyal reader.
BUT ... if you know someone who might want in on secret stories like this, please tell them! You can send them the link to my sign up page. (They'll get a free story as soon as they sign up ;) )
Talk soon!
-Kim
