by Pike, JJ
For an entire month he got the same reply: silence.
He pushed the scrambled eggs to one side. They were made from powdered eggs. Disgusting. No one needed to eat powdered eggs. Not even if they were a prisoner at the South Pole.
He hadn’t left his room, talked to anyone, or been permitted to make calls for over a month. His phone connected him to the comms office where a pleasant young man from the south told him that he’d be allowed calls when the Commander gave the all-clear.
In that month, he ran his TV and/or e-reader almost nonstop. If appearances were to be trusted, he finished Netflix and Hulu, read a book a day, and consumed more adult movies than was good for him. He also made a point of doing lunges and sit ups, crunches and pull-ups in his tiny room.
He allowed the medics to take his blood. He assumed they were also collecting his urine and feces, seeing as he was the only one to use his bathroom.
In spite of all this, his good mood was unending. He wasn’t bothered by the bland food, the cramped quarters, or the lack of human contact. It was all the same: easy-peasy Japan-esey. It wasn’t like him to be so sanguine about everything. Not unless he was acting a part. And for once, Michael Rayton wasn’t acting.
He’d tried giving up water and coffee and drinking only orange juice, but they could have added the mood-altering suppressant to anything he was ingesting (or, for that matter, breathing).
Try as he might he couldn’t drum up a reaction to the fact that he was being controlled by pharmaceuticals. He knew, at a purely intellectual level, that he should “care” and “fight back” but it wasn’t there. It hadn’t been. Not since they’d left Wolfjaw. How had it taken him so long to put the pieces together?
Well, duh, Michael: Drugs.
But it did not mean the ease and lassitude was something he should take lying down. He laughed at his own weak pun; didn’t care that it was a dud. Didn’t care about anything. He decided, in a languid sort of way, that he’d stop eating.
Shit, if he was considering a hunger strike, Baxter would already had done it. He had visions of her being force fed through a drip or kept in a medically induced coma.
As for Alice, she had to be doing better than Baxter in spite of the shock of 1) being captured after fleeing, 2) being away from her family for so long, and 3) seeing her (wow, would she REALLY have an affair? that did NOT fit her profile) “friend.”
He found a rock station so he could play air guitar to some hair metal band.
Anyone watching (they were watching, why else would there be a camera in the corner of the room?) would take him for a degenerate lay about and a slob. And they’d be half-right. He was in a pharmaceutical haze, separated but not divorced from his thoughts.
And he was thinking even though it was a foggy affair rather than the crisp, analytical process he was used to.
Alice had known. The Army (no, the plan went higher than that, surely?), in any case, she’d known someone had been experimenting on them when they were in the field. She had been tracking their movement and habits. Though her notebook had been confiscated she’d been on to something.
What was it?
Food. Right. There was something about the food that bothered her.
Baxter had ruled out uncooked food and fish.
Alice had supplied them with a steady stream of protein.
Think, Rayton. Think. Get through the fog and THINK.
The thought slipped away as soon as it was formed. He needed to record what was going on. Like Alice. Collate the data. See what it revealed.
He banged on the door. “I need paper.”
No one came.
He sat as still as he could and forced his addled brain into a corner.
Alice was smarter than he gave her credit for. She’d worked it out before he had. And what had they been doing differently? They were on the same team, walking the same MELT-infected land, eating the same…
But they hadn’t been.
She’d eaten what she’d snared or trapped. She’d stayed away from the pre-packaged food.
The Army had airdropped food in weekly, mostly MREs, but also some power bars and powdered drinks. He hadn’t felt like himself since they’d left Wolfjaw and started eating Army rations on a daily basis. He’d been an idiot. Alice had offered them an alternative and he’d turned his nose up at her offerings. It didn’t take a genius to work out that they’d been spiking the rations. Why else had he been so docile? It wasn’t in his nature. He had no access to his more belligerent self, but he knew it was in there somewhere, underneath the calm, smiling, nodding puppet.
Alice had been the smart one and he’d been the dummy. If he’d done what she did, he’d have had access to his thoughts rather than this tapioca pudding that passed for a brain.
He didn’t eat dinner. Or breakfast the next day. He flushed his lunch. They’d find it soon enough if they were tracking his inputs and outputs, but he wasn’t going to eat. He was going to think.
He did his best to keep up his docile façade for the cameras. He watched his porn, rang the operator and asked if he was allowed to talk to anyone, cranked the radio and played air guitar.
But as he did what he’d been doing for twenty-three days in a row his brain began pulling the world into focus.
Finally.
He was having ideas rather than rambles up and down the aisles of Nowhere.
Michael put his air guitar to one side.
What if…
What if this had been going on for a lot longer than they’d suspected?
What if it wasn’t only to do with the food? Or the walk toward Indian Point? What if that was the tail end of the experiment?
What if this was a whole lot bigger? Think back, Michael. Not just to MELT being released in Manhattan. That was the work of a deranged individual. That was the only way you could describe Fran: Deranged.
Think back. No, further than that. Even further. He’d been involved with MELT for decades. He’d thought himself one of the good guys, working for the good guys. But, what if…
What if he’d been played?
What if he’d been sent to K&P not so he could keep an eye on MELT, but so his handlers could keep an eye on him?
It wasn’t like the CIA were squeaky clean.
On the contrary.
Project QKHILLTOP: The CIA studied Chinese brainwashing techniques (imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing and so on), which they then used to develop new methods of interrogation.
Project Artichoke: Again, the CIA. This time the Office of Scientific Intelligence studied hypnosis, forced morphine addiction, drug withdrawal, and the use of chemicals to incite amnesia in unwitting human subjects.
Operation Midnight Climax: The CIA studied the use of LSD on unknowing subjects.
Project MKUltra: CIA-sponsored research operation that experimented in human behavioral engineering. Unwitting human test subjects were plied with LSD and other mind-altering drugs, and subjected to hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and torture.
What if he’d been dosed with MELT and an antidote and set off on a fool’s errand, not so they could contain Indian Point, but so his handlers could test the efficacy of their drugs?
He banged on the door.
No one came.
He stood on his bed and waved at the camera tucked in its cage on the ceiling. The wide angle lens meant they could see most of the room. The cage meant he couldn’t touch the lens directly. He jumped on his bed, pulled faces, faked his own manual strangulation for comedic effect.
No one came.
He had a knife and fork. Not useful for reaching the camera, but worth stashing away for later. The tray. That was big enough. He stacked his plate and bowl by the door and returned to his bed. The tray was flimsy aluminum, but the only thing in the room large enough to reach the ceiling. He thwacked it at the camera housing. The tray bent and buckled. The camera remained untouched.
Michael sat on his bed.
He could MacGyver something that might pass for a light tool, but short of taking his bed apart and using the legs as weapons, he was out of options.
Nope. You’re only out of options once you stop thinking. As long as you think, there’s a chance you’ll have a breakthrough. And if your captors are stupid enough to deliver eggs to you every day for twenty-five days, even though you never touch them, it makes sense to put those eggs to work.
He grabbed a handful, smiled for the camera, then threw the eggs at the lens. They didn’t stick, but they made a nice mess that would at least make the images distorted.
Still, no one came.
He needed to talk. He needed answers. He wasn’t going to be their little experimental piggy anymore.
Michael took his sheets, grabbed the knife and used it to push the sheet into the wire housing around the camera.
He waited. He’d cut himself off from the outside world. If the point was to observe him they’d be around soon enough.
An hour after he’d disabled the camera it occurred to his barely-operational brain that there was a camera in his laptop. Duh. He closed the lid.
Right. Small cameras everywhere. Assume every nook hides a camera. There wasn’t a lot to disassemble but Michael destroyed the shower, the taps by the sink, the toilet (God help them if they’d put a bug in the toilet). When no one arrived to stop him he took his knife to the rivets in the bathroom door. Useless. That wasn’t happening. The knife bent under the pressure. He had no tools strong enough to take his bed apart (it was bolted to the floor) so he shredded his sheets and blankets just to make work for his jailors. He was so fixated on his task he’d lost sight of the goal. All he cared about was the destruction of his habitat.
At 1700 hours his dinner arrived.
The hazmat suit and hood meant he couldn’t see his jailor’s face, but the string of expletives that came out of the man’s mouth were reward enough.
Three men (their height and muscle mass told him they were men) removed him from his pod. Michael slumped in their arms, dug his heels in, and yelled. “Alice Everlee? Christine Baxter? Jo Morgan? Are you here? Can you hear me?” The portholes in the doors had been blacked out, just like the windows on the plane, so he couldn’t see who was housed in his corridor but the ceaseless banging and shouting told him he was being heard. “Don’t eat the eggs,” he said. If Alice was within earshot she’d understand. Or at least he hoped she would. Jo Morgan (an FBI agent, not a dimwit or a hack, but someone he’d have been proud to call his colleague) would have known what he was getting at if she’d been cataloguing food as Alice had.
But that wasn’t all.
“Vaccines,” he screamed. “Work out when and how. Track and trace that. When were we dosed? By whom? To what end?”
What else? What would he have written down if he’d kept his cool and asked for a notebook, like a normal human being? “Baxter! If MELT is a combo of an enzyme and a virus, what have they been treating us with? Why aren’t we sick?”
Michael was dragged down the corridor, through a chilled tunnel, and deposited in a conference room.
Not what he’d expected.
The doors opened. Jan van Karpel, and Alice Everlee entered the room. They looked hale and hearty. Well rested. Fit. Alice’s hair had started to grow back: salt and pepper, now, rather than the raven locks she’d sported before.
Behind them were Jo Morgan and three of Hoyt’s soldiers. Michael was too surprised to remember names.
“Is someone going to explain?” he said.
“You had an adverse reaction,” said Alice. Her tone was clipped, clinical, not like her. He watched her carefully. Was she trying to send him a message? What message? What did she know?
“To what?”
“I told you back in Fort Hawthorne, we’re not carriers.”
Michael turned her sentence inside out and back to front but it seemed to be a direct statement of fact.
“Go on.”
“You’ve probably worked it out.” Professor Baxter was at the door to the conference room. Calm. Centered. No longer raving. “MELT has mutated. More than once. We’ve been working with the CDC and WHO to develop a vaccine. It’s a long road, as you know. Your friend Dr. Zhang has been diligent in keeping us up to speed on his progress. We used his work as the basis for the first vaccine.”
Zhang. His old colleague. He had to have been working on that for years. And not reporting to Michael. He’d been out of the loop. Or rather, he’d been at the epicenter and not known it.
“We were exposed to MELT three years ago,” said Alice. He couldn’t imagine she’d be okay with that revelation, but if she was outraged it wasn’t telegraphed on her face or in her voice. “You were exposed much earlier. As early as 2012.”
Michael tried to remember what he’d been doing or how he’d been exposed without his knowledge.
“We all thought Angelina was Patient Zero but, come to find out, it was you.”
“Me?” For a fraction of a second Michael wished he’d kept eating the poison and remained in his mental cocoon.
Alice rolled up her sleeve to reveal a welt the size of an egg. “We’ve also discovered I’m not immune.”
Jo rolled her pant leg up. She had long streaks of infection that ran from her ankle to her knee.
Michael took a step back.
“It’s MELT-3,” said Jo. “It moves far slower than the original MELT, but it’s still lethal.”
What else had he missed? He’d been in a haze for days while they’d been out here working. How did that add up? Apart from the fact that he was the one. The subject. Being studied. For years. He sat down, hard.
“This is why we were sent east,” said Christine, “toward Manhattan. It was to test whether the immunity would hold up under intense pressure. We have no way of knowing whether you can be re-infected with MELT or how each strain interacts with the others.”
Michael couldn’t marshal his thoughts. They weren’t the mush they’d been before he stopped eating. They were a riot. He looked up at his colleagues. “Who knew?”
Alice shook her head.
He turned to Jo. She gave him the thumbs down.
As did van Karpel.
Baxter folded her arms.
“When?”
No one answered.
“When did you know?”
“At Wolfjaw.” Professor Christine Baxter. Plotter. Traitor. She was so calm he wanted to shake her. She’d been a wreck when they were on the plane. What was different?
Oh…
The penny dropped.
Christine Baxter: Medical experimenter…that wasn’t even a word but he didn’t care. She’d known all this time.
“What did they offer you?”
The screen on the far wall lit up. A military uniform below a stern face greeted them. “Dr. Rayton. Glad you could join us.”
“Who the fuck are you?” No point trying to make this sound like a friendly meeting. They might all be cool and groovy with the idea that their company had been conducting illegal experiments on them but he sure as hell wasn’t okay with it.
“Colonel Gisela Livio. We’ve spoken before. When you were in the field. I was the voice on the radio.”
Michael couldn’t remember a thing she’d said. Alice had made notes in her diary about Livio being on calls, but he couldn’t pull those details up from the archives either. His rage made him almost as blank as the drugs that had wiped his mind of meaningful activity.
“You’ve been in isolation while we studied your colleagues. You’ve shown no symptoms, developed no lesions. They have. This makes you valuable as I’m sure you understand.” She didn’t offer an apology nor did she adopt a conciliatory tone. This was business. She was okay with following these orders.
The rest of Michael Rayton’s life stretched out ahead of him: Hospitals, laboratories, tests, him on the receiving end of all of that negative attention.
“You will be briefed soon.”
“What does ‘soon’
mean?”
“You’ll be briefed when we’re ready for you. There’s work to be done.” The screen blanked off.
Alice joined him at the table. “She didn’t tell you everything.”
“Great.” Michael folded his arms over his chest. “Hit me.”
“You’re a silent carrier. A Typhoid Mary. They say you’ve had MELT for years.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MARCH 2022
The stench of hell was in the air. Up the stairs and through the archway, far from the turncoats and their guns, Theo and his tiny army of tots kept that blowtorch aimed at the seams of the door.
Jacinta couldn’t raise her splinted arm, but Jeff made her put her free arm up over her head. Seriously? Like she was even capable of disarming him on her own.
Jeff had brought Dominic Casey, former council member, now traitor. Dominic’s hands were unbound. So much for “putting him out” as punishment.
Behind him was the muscle-bound Meredith Hoffelder. No surprises there. Jeff had attracted thugs and wannabees around him.
What did surprise her was Christine Gasberg being part of Jeff’s posse. Jacinta hadn’t thought the mild-mannered young woman had it in her. Classic spy move: Have the pretty woman play the innocent.
It was all out in the open now. These were the people who thought she was a failure and wanted to see her deposed.
Triple-H kept his hands over his head. He wouldn’t go quietly. Not with his wife’s attacker standing in front of him, a free man.
“Let me pass,” said Patrice, “I have a patient in critical condition.”
“Stay right where you are.” Jeff kept his gun trained on Jacinta. “I don’t want any sudden moves.”
Patrice strode across the floor until she was nose-to-nose with Jeff. “You don’t scare me, Jeff Steckle. You’re going to let me go back to my patient. Now.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Patrice.” Jeff raised his voice. “I don’t want to hurt anyone in Down. We’re more than friends and colleagues. We’re family. So do yourselves a favor and stay calm. If you all do as you’re told, this will all be over in a little while.”
Patrice pushed past him.
