The Rabid: Rise

by J. V. Roberts

  “Where are we?” I ask, not expecting an answer.

  “All in good time.”

  “We’re here now. Seems to be as a good a time as any, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No. I wouldn’t. Hence, the reason I’m not telling you. Keep moving.”

  We reach the landing. Some type of catwalk. As he pulls me to the right, the metal handrails dig into my ribs. We don’t go far. Fifty yards? Maybe. Through another door. The hinges are quiet this time, but we stop moving long enough that I can hear the handle turn. He shoves me into the room, then Bethany. I’m pulled backwards into a wooden chair. The backing is low and rigid. Not built for comfort. Built for interrogation. I hear him pulling another chair across the floor. He places it next to mine. They shove Bethany down beside me.

  “Wait here. Don’t move. Katia is right outside the door,” Ruiz says, emphasizing her name.

  She’s right outside the door and she’d be happy to separate your head from your body.

  The door slams and the footsteps fade.

  It’s just me and Bethany now...I think. I don’t hear anyone else, just the distant exhaust fan and the occasional bout of laughter. The damp smell of mold has all but vanished. This room, whatever it is, wherever it is, is cold. The air is thin.

  “Bethany?” My voice echoes against high ceilings.

  “Yeah?” Her voice is small but steady. Not scared. Good. It’ll make this a lot easier if I’m not having to juggle her emotions.

  “Just checking to see if you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m good. Would just like to know where the hell we are.”

  “I’ve got a feeling we’re about to find out.”

  I stamp my feet against the floor. It’s solid. I rub them back and forth. I can feel dust and grit sliding beneath my boots. “I think we’re in some kind of warehouse.”

  “Warehouse?”

  “Yeah. The wooden doors. The metal stairs. The high ceilings. The exhaust fan. The catwalk. The dirt on the floors. Definitely a warehouse.”

  “You picked all that up between here and the parking lot?”

  “I can’t see. Gotta use my other senses.”

  “If we’re actually in a warehouse, I’ll be extremely impressed.”

  “I’m gonna hold you to that.”

  The door opens again. Hard this time. Slamming back on its stopper.

  “Alright ladies and gents. Sorry to keep you waiting.” It’s Ruiz. “Let me just get around here and pull your blindfolds off and we can get this party started.” He taps his feet against the floor and hums as he skirts his way behind me and starts working at the knot on my blindfold with his thumbs and forefingers. “Tied this damn thing a little tighter than I meant too.” The edge of his thumbnail cuts into my scalp. I wince but don’t say anything. “Alright then, you ready?” he says, holding my blindfold in place.

  “Whenever you are.”

  He drops the curtain. At first I’m dazed by the wall of sunlight pouring in on me. I was right. It’s a warehouse. The entire right side of the room is floor to ceiling windows stacked in dirty squares. But, it doesn’t take long for my eyes to adjust to the room and for me to see the man standing directly across from me by the door.

  The General.

  I instantly come up out of my chair, an animalistic scream erupting from my throat. My fists clenched, ready to kill.

  Ruiz is there to stop me. He grips both my shoulders from behind and slams me back down into the chair.

  “Jesus, the kid is even more spirited than I remember,” the general laughs, crossing his arms across his chest.

  He looks different than I remember. He’s cleaned up. He’s wearing blue jeans, a gray collared shirt, and a black windbreaker.

  “The General? It’s the General?” Bethany asks frantically, still blindfolded. “Where is our mother, you bastard? Huh? Where is she?”

  “Wow, you have had your hands full, haven’t you?” The General puts his hands on his hips, pushing back the windbreaker and revealing a chrome plated pistol holstered to his belt.

  “I told you,” Ruiz says from above me, hands still clamped against my shoulders.

  “You’ve been working with this sonofabitch?” I jerk against him. He’s bearing down hard, putting his body weight behind it. There’s no breaking loose. “This whole time? This whole fucking time, you knew where he was?” Katia is standing behind the General in the open doorway, her shoulder propped up against the frame, unimpressed by my rage. “And you, you knew too? This whole time? You’re telling me how much you care about me and you fail to mention this? Fuck you!”

  “Hey, now, calm it down. I know you’ve got some questions, but she’s still my sister and I’ll still whoop your ass.”

  “Fuck you, Ruiz. Whoop my ass.” The cuts on the inside and outside of my lips still sting where he punched me before. What the hell, I’ll take a few more. “I’ll tell you this, if you don’t and I get loose, I swear to fucking Christ that I’ll kill all three of you.”

  “Kid, calm the fuck down!” It’s the General. The power of his voice breaks through everything, short-circuiting my brain. I stop struggling and settle into my seat. Ruiz loosens his grip. “Let us explain a few things to you, okay? If you want to go on your little one man rampage when we’re done, then so be it, we’ll just have to kill ya.”

  “Where the fuck is my momma?” I snarl.

  “Just listen...okay?”

  “Take her blindfold off.” I tip my head towards Bethany.

  The General nods to Ruiz.

  She blinks as the light attacks her eyes and then quickly sinks back in her chair at the sight of the General.

  Ruiz walks around in front of us and stands beside the General, a hand on his holster.

  The General and Ruiz, side by side, I didn’t fucking see this one coming and I never would have, not in a million years.

  “Now, I’m aware you’ve been referring to me as the General.” He looks at me with a neighborly expression, as if we’re two suburbanites shaking hands across some white picket fence, exchanging stories about which weed killer we use on our lawns.

  I grit my teeth and look away. Fuck this guy. I’ve seen him work.

  “This whole thing will go a lot faster if you drop the hard ass routine, kid. You want answers, then you’ve got to be willing to talk too.”

  I slowly turn my eyes up and fix him with the coldest glare I can manage. “Yeah, we didn’t really have a chance to exchange names last time. You were too busy torturing people and trying to kill me.”

  The General nods. “So I was. Though, I never tried to kill you. If I wanted to kill you, I had a thousand different chances and a hundred different ways in which I could have accomplished the task. I merely wanted answers from you. Be that as it may, I am a General...well, to be honest, was a General, is the more operative term. Just call me Norton.”

  “General Norton?”

  “No, just Norton will do.”

  “Okay, where the fuck is my ma, Norton?”

  “We’ll get to that. Tell me about the men that attacked you. The ones Ruiz and his people rescued you from.”

  I shake my head. “Why don’t you? They were your people. They wanted the drive.”

  He smirks and holds up a finger, walking towards me, slowly, knowingly. “You are right, they wanted the drive, but they were not my people.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit,” says Katia.

  I don’t turn my eyes away from Norton. “Whose people were they then?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know for certain who their direct superior was. They no doubt reported back to the big boys upstairs; CIA or something of the sort.”

  “So, what the hell are you trying to do?”

  Norton looks at me as if it should be obvious. “The same thing as Ruiz, expose the ones that were behind it, see justice done.”

  “I saw you torture and kill an unarmed man. You threatened to kill my ma...”

  “You s
aw me questioning one of the masterminds behind Project Lockjaw. What did you think he was trying to do when he passed that drive off to you?”

  The images race back. The desperate man passing me the cross. The cryptic message. Styles swift intervention. The scrutiny I’d been faced with. “He...he seemed scared to me. Didn’t seem like a bad guy.”

  “He was a desperate guy,” Ruiz says, “we’d just raided his lab that morning and passed him over to Norton’s men. They put up a hell of a fight. The rest of his team was killed. He was trying to preserve the research.”

  I’m confused now. “Preserve it? I thought you said they wanted it destroyed? If they’re so scared of being exposed, why make a copy?”

  “Do you know how long it took them to get this thing off the ground and running? A long time. A lot of money. They’re aren’t going to just toss it all out the window if they don’t have to. However, if the choice is tossing it out of the window or us getting our hands on it and exposing them, well, they’d just as soon destroy it,” Ruiz says.

  “Who’d you think that little air raid was meant for that night?” Norton asks, pacing the floor.

  “Styles said it was ya’ll doing it, clearing the way for prisoner transport.”

  “Styles didn’t know you or your people from Adam. He wasn’t going to divulge information to you. For all he knew, you were CIA moles...”

  “Oh, come on...”

  “I’ve seen the CIA use twelve year old Taiwanese girls to extract information from the sickest and most twisted fucks on planet earth. There is no tree too high for them to climb. That little light show you saw was them targeting us. Trying to destroy their dirty little secret after they learned we’d taken possession. They had a tracker in it. How do you think those men finally pinpointed your position?”

  “Took them long enough.” I give a small and nervous chuckle.

  “You kept moving,” Ruiz says.

  “But they finally found you, didn’t they?” Katia sneers.

  “Lucky for you, we were following them,” Ruiz smiles.

  “If there’s a tracker, then why haven’t they busted the doors down yet?” I ask, thinking I’ve finally cornered their logic.

  “Bytes disabled it,” Ruiz answers.

  “You know, the guy you shot in the head?” Katia can’t help but rub salt in the wound.

  I’m dizzy with all of the information being thrown my way.

  I try to shake the cobwebs away.

  This is all too much to take in.

  It’s bullshit. There’s no way. It’s too crazy.

  Yet, here I am. They have the drive and I’m still alive. “So, the checkpoints. The soldiers. They’re all...”

  “They were all with the men upstairs, reporting to whomever. The government boys trying to cover their tracks.”

  I look to Norton. He looks back, raises his eyebrows, awaiting my next inquiry. “So you what? Ran away from home, so to speak?”

  “Me and some of my men...splintered off, I guess you could say.”

  “Why did you split off from Ruiz? Why the two separate groups?”

  Norton shrugs. “Divide and conquer, as they say. If they drop a bomb or locate one of us with a sweeper crew, it’s bad for business to have both of us in the same place at the same time. It’s the same concept they employ when keeping the President and Vice President apart. We also divide the duties. Me and my men work as intelligence and brute force, when necessary. Ruiz is PR. Builds our forces. Takes care of the people. God knows, we’re going to need people if we’re going to take on the government and win.”

  “So, what, you just decided to switch jobs one day?”

  Norton shakes his head. “No. Not exactly. Once the truth came out and they wanted us to help contain it, that’s when the tide turned. I wasn’t going to help them sweep it under the rug. My men and I,” Norton claps Ruiz on the shoulder, “we lost family to Lockjaw.”

  “Ruiz was one of your men?”

  Ruiz holds his arms out and grins. “Surprise!”

  “Why the hell didn’t you just tell me?”

  “I told you I was in the military.”

  “No, why didn’t you tell me about this? About you and...Norton and the plan?”

  Katia steps from the doorway. Her eyes are ice. It’s evident she loathes the very sight of me. “We tried, Tim. My brother tried. I tried. You just didn’t want to fucking listen.”

  “You tried? Really? When did you try, Katia?”

  Ruiz responds for her. “When didn’t we? The first thing you told us is how you wanted to kill the General. That hardly seemed the time to try to explain our involvement with him. So instead, we clued you in about Project Lockjaw. We tried to bring you into the fight against the government. All you did was talk about taking the information and how you wanted to destroy it. You had no interest in joining our cause. Hell, look at what you ended up doing. One of our guys wound up dead over your bullshit.”

  “If you’d have just explained everything about you and Norton...”

  “You’d have gone off crazier than you did, probably would have shot up the place and forced us to put you down. There was no talking to you. You had it set in your mind how things were and how you wanted them to go down. We couldn’t risk exposing that sort of information to you considering how you’d been acting. It’d have been too much risk. We didn’t need the hassle. The community already deals with enough shit as it is, we do our best to keep the drama to a minimum. So, this is what it took; a forced sit down.”

  They’re right. If Ruiz had tried to explain to me that he was working with the General...with Norton...God only knows how I’d have responded. I’d probably be dead right now. “So...you already knew about Project Lockjaw before I gave you the drive?”

  Ruiz teeters a hand back and forth. “Knew of it is a better way of putting it. We didn’t know the mechanics of it until we got that drive. We also didn’t have any hard proof to use against them either.”

  I feel like a fool. All along, the answers I’d been seeking were right there under my nose. All I had to do to find them was stop looking so far ahead and evaluate what I had in front of me. The guy had his hand out to me the whole time and I just kept slapping it away. He was simply giving me the opportunity to prove to him that I could be trusted.

  I blew that one.

  “Alright...so what about my ma? Huh? Where is she?”

  Norton looks to Ruiz and Katia. They both look at me and back to him and nod.

  “I think it’s cool,” Ruiz says. “Right, Tim, you’re cool?”

  I’m not quite sure what that means, but I play along. “Yeah, I’m cool.”

  “Bring her in,” Norton shouts through the door.

  Norton, Katia, and Ruiz disappear to opposite sides of the room as footsteps appear outside on the catwalk.

  Faint. Then louder.

  My heart rumbles in my chest.

  She rounds the corner like something out of a movie. Framed by the sunlight. Smiling. Tears already falling steady from her eyes. She looks better than I could have imagined. Clean. Wearing dark jeans and a tan pea coat. She opens her arms as she steps into the room, falling to her knees.

  “Come here, my babies,” she weeps.

  Bethany and I race each other for her embrace. Thank God, it’s big enough for the both of us. We just about knock her over as we fall against her. Her sobbing is interrupted by a small croak of laughter.

  “Oh, my God, I missed you guys so much,” she cries, kissing us both on the cheeks and foreheads, her hands stroking the backs of our heads. “Are you both okay?” She looks us over, rubbing our chests, trying to see us through the wave of emotion.

  “Yeah,” Bethany sniffs.

  “We’re good, Momma, we’re good. Are you okay?”

  She nods and smiles, her chin still crinkled up. “I’m great, baby. Really, I’m great. None of this is what you think...”

  “I know, Momma, they just filled us in.”

  She attemp
ts to rub her face dry with her hands. “Good, I’m glad. These people, Norton especially, they’ve been really good to me. I don’t want you thinking I’ve been mistreated or locked up or anything. They’ve saved my life a couple times over.”

  I feel like I should be shaking the guy’s hand or something.

  Maybe later, when my pride has died down a bit.

  “Good, Momma, we were worried. We were looking for you for a while.”

  “We were so worried.” Bethany collapses against her once more, shaking.

  “Shhh,” Momma kisses the top of her ear, “calm down now. The bad days are over. The good ones are just beginning. We’re back together again. Nothing is going to separate me from you two.”

  Norton clears his throat. “We’ve got a room set up for all three of you. Some food. Places for you to get cleaned up. Especially you, Tim, I’m guessing you’re going to want some new clothes?”

  I’d all but forgotten about my blood stained garments.

  Momma frowns. “Are you hurt?”

  I shake my head. “Nah, it’s nothing to worry about. It’s so good to see you again.” She pulls me in, close, showering me with more kisses.

  It’s good to be home.

  24

  “They didn’t treat me like a prisoner for long. Not after I told them our story.” Momma sits on the edge of her cot, not unlike the ones we’d had back at the apartment complex. The room is spacious, the walls are made of plywood, and it has its own sink and mirror. The only downside is that the bathroom is on the other side of the prefab door and is for community use. “After you guys escaped, Norton came back to that tent and told me we were evacuating the camp. That it’d been overrun. That was probably the scariest time for me. Rabid were everywhere when we were escaping. One was almost on top of me and if it hadn’t been for Norton, well, I wouldn’t be here with you guys.”

  “If it hadn’t been for Norton, you wouldn’t have been there in the first place to get attacked,” I say, spreading a sheet across the top of my cot.

  “I know, sweetie, but, you have to understand the situation. They thought...”