by Welker, Wick
He looked down the alleyway and stopped, a multitude of body parts was lining the alley. There was a pair of pants lying at his feet with a dismembered leg still in one of the pant legs. Some of the bodies that had fallen from above remained intact but most of them had split in half at the torso or they had become decapitated. Some of the bodies, already greatly decayed from the infection, had simply exploded on impact spraying bone and muscle tissue in all directions. The alley was coated in blood, indistinct reddish flesh and shards of bone. He was walking through the world's largest butcher shop. He passed a woman wearing a raincoat and could hear a slight gurgling sound from her throat. Staring at her face, he slipped and fell. Regaining his footing, he then stepped right into someone's chest that had opened up on impact, losing all of its contents leaving only a shell of ribcage and spinal cord. He had never seen the exposed spinal cord of a person and it seemed like the appropriate time to vomit, so he did, right into someone's open abdominal cavity.
Slowly, he started to shuffle his feet in between the human debris to avoid falling again, feeling like he was trying to wade through slippery mud. Down the alley, he could see people moving out on the streets, some slowly and others quickly. He sloshed forward weary of every footstep. As he breached the street, he immediately saw that the entire block, as far as he could see was covered with bodies. There had been a blizzard of decrepit bodies raining down on the city. In the middle of the street in front of the building, the majority had fallen and had created a twenty feet high mound of human beings, covering buses and cars. Street signs had impaled some while others were hung in the air, suspended by traffic lights. Looking up the face of the opposing building, he could see that several had fallen and crashed into the windows of the building, half-sticking out of windows or slumped on window ledges with limbs missing. Bodies had accumulated in between the buildings and the sidewalks, forming a burrow-like shape of debris down the street, which curled up the length of the buildings. The streets were flooded with black, clumpy blood, which pooled mainly around the main mound of bodies, but was starting to drain in all directions, overflowing in the gutters and seeping into shattered window shops. An atomic human bomb had exploded in the city creating a human, junkyard holocaust.
A makeshift traffic pattern had snaked its way through allies and sidewalks consisting solely of military vehicles with National Guard painted on the sides. Several of the National Guard men were breaking into the windows of parked cars and steering them out of the way so other traffic could get through. He realized that they were trying to create a path through the traffic to get out of the city block and not into it. A Humvee across the street was spinning its tires on a pile of legs sticking out from underneath its carriage, sputtering blood and fluid. Men were using shovels to remove the debris while some tried to manage a way through the traffic and others were fending off assaults from crowds of the sick. Dave felt a single drop of fear in his stomach when he saw that several numbers of the sick were dressed in army fatigues too, turning against their fellow soldiers. He then realized that the National Guard was no longer here to make the situation better but trying to escape the infected that were overwhelming them. They were constantly battering at the sick with the butts of their guns or with riot shields. No shots were fired. Out of fear of the unknown consequences or direct orders, Dave couldn't tell. He only knew that the army was being quickly overtaken by the sick and he had to get into one of those Humvees that was inching its way out of the city.
He ran up to one of the men in fatigues but tripped and stumbled into his boot heels. The man turned around and immediately kicked Dave squarely in the forehead.
“No...” Dave sputtered from the ground, “help me.” Exhausted from everything, he lay in the blood and grime of the street. Staring up at the man in a gas mask, he could only see two rings of glass staring down at him from the stern face of the mask. They looked at each other in silence. The masked military man then turned from him and started towards the Humvee that the other men had managed to free from the slippery surface of blood and flesh.
“No...” Dave reached out his hand, as he walked away, “I can't...” A delirium was beginning to set into his exasperated mind and drained muscles. His body was no longer taking commands from his brain. Then the sick began to enclose him. They had arrived to claim him; the undertakers of the scourge were making their rounds. Dave closed his eyes and then felt someone tugging at his arm, pulling him free of the crowd. The masked man slumped Dave onto his shoulders and placed him on the roof of the Humvee with the help of another man in fatigues. They crammed inside the vehicle with other men and started to trudge through the human refuse, crushing skulls under the tires as the Humvee waded down the crimson, Manhattan street.
Chapter ten
“Good morning, folks. Oh, whoops, I guess that would be a good afternoon since the time is about 12:34 Eastern Time. We've now reached an appropriate altitude so it’s safe to pull out your laptops or other electronic devices that you might need during the flight. We're running a little behind schedule and we anticipate an arrival in Holland airport in approximately fourteen hours. So sit back and enjoy the flight, thanks.”
*****
Dr. Stark had been staring at two rooms for the past two hours, looking into the glass windows of two rooms holding two very different people. The room on the right contained a nine-year-old boy named Daniel Krumpke. He told Dr. Stark to call him Danny. He was wearing a Cubs baseball cap, not because he liked the team, but because he liked the red and blue colors of the hat. He had been playing video games on a little TV inside the room all morning and kept asking for peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Dr. Stark would slide the sandwich into a small compartment in the front wall of the room and close a flap where Danny could retrieve the sandwich on the other side of the room by opening up his flap on the inside. “Thank you, doctor,” he would say in a small voice. In the other room was a dead body that was stubbornly acting alive who was not nearly as polite as Daniel Krumpke was.
“Okay, Danny, so what happened after all the policemen came onto your front lawn?” Stark was holding down an intercom button so the boy could hear him in the glass room.
Danny took a small bite of the sandwich and put it down on the plate. “My sister wouldn't stop running around the front yard. She just ran around and cut her leg on a tree.”
“And were you feeling sick then? At the same time your sister and parents were sick?”
“Yes, my stomach hurt.”
“Anything else? Did you feel hot with a fever or were you colder than normal?”
“No, I just had a stomach ache but it went away fast. It was kind of right here,” he held the bottom of his stomach. “But my mom and dad were gone then.”
“Okay, so they left and the policemen took your sister and your neighbor, Mrs…. ah...”
“Parsons.”
“Mrs. Parsons took you to her house, okay. And after this stomach ache from a few days ago, you haven't felt sick at all?”
“No.” He looked down at his sandwich.
“Danny, did anyone bite you or hurt you in any way?”
“Uh, nuh uh.”
This was the boy, Stark thought, one of two survivors of the entire obliteration of a small town. The population of Medora had gone from a few hundred to exactly two people in less than twenty-four hours. The other survivor was in the room next to the boy’s, leaning his face and nose into the glass a few feet from Stark. His skin was yellow with black veins coursing from his scalp, past his cheeks and down his neck. The man, whose identity was completely unknown and to who was given the project name “Kyle,” was an utter enigma to Stark. It wasn't the fact that the man's eyes functioned independently of one another, moving in non-synchronizing movements, neither was it the observation that both of the man's tibias had been broken yet he walked on them with absolutely no reaction to pain.
It was none of these oddities that were keeping Stark working with no sleep. It was the little matter
of the man's heart; it wasn't beating. His heart was not beating and Stark was staring right at him as he moved around in his small glass room. There was no blood going to his organs, his brain, or his muscles. There was no oxygen flowing into his cells giving them energy. There was no energy input whatsoever into the body yet he moved around in the room. The entire man's existence was breaking all laws of thermodynamics and Stark felt like someone was playing a trick on him. He had walked into a science fiction movie where the unbelievable is acted out but the details are never explained.
He thought about how the cell samples from his lungs, spinal tissue, liver and heart showed an amusement park of biology through the microscope lens. All the cells were malformed, moving out of their normal tissue boundaries, showing unknown metabolic waste and no patterns of intercellular communication. It was as if every sample he looked at had developed advanced malignant cancer, a complete disorganization of tissue structure and function. None of this should be happening. This man should not be alive, he thought, but there he is right in front of me licking the glass.
When Stark tried to feed the man to find out how he digested, he wouldn't eat a single piece of food put in front of him. They started trying raw meat but the man would only put it in his mouth and spit it out. Stark was confident the man couldn't even digest food since a CT scan of him revealed a ruptured pit where his stomach had been, opening up to his liver and kidneys. Dr. Beckfield, the doctor who had put on the charade of a conference to ease the media had suggested an idea that Stark was shocked as a doctor and as a human being to hear.
“Look, we have to see, we have to understand what's going on with his digestion. We have to figure out how this thing is even moving around,” Beckfield had argued with Stark a few hours earlier.
Beckfield had the face that told Stark everything about his personality: long narrow nose, boney cheekbones and sunken eyes which all suggested a serious demeanor. “It's not eating anything, I mean nothing. Do you know how long we've had it in there? Since the outbreak at Medora and that was two weeks ago. I have watched this guy everyday for two weeks and nothing has gone into its mouth. We have to attempt... other delicate measures. We know what it wants, I saw it, and we must observe what is going on inside. It's metabolizing something, somehow. I'm confident it will lead us to how the virus effects the body-wide change to begin with.”
“I don’t think I can be a part of clinical cannibalism, Dr. Beckfield.” Stark looked over at Kyle, lying on the ground in the glass room.
“Everything here is confidential if you're worried about any illegal implications in your practice or anything like that. It will be given federal discretion. You do know what that means, don't you? We have complete government sanction here. There is no legal danger for you.” Beckfield crossed his arms across his chest and looked down his glasses at Stark. “Do you know what's going on in New York? Seen the news in the last couple of hours? What's ethical or not is irrelevant at the moment. We need to move on this and it's not like we're throwing a person in there with it. We have rooms full of cadavers that we can use.”
Stark looked up at him from a small stool that he was sitting on. “Dr. Stark, I don't need your consent. This is just a professional courtesy.” Beckfield left the room and that's how the conversation ended.
Beckfield returned thirty minutes later with a cart full of “samples” to feed Kyle. A small crew of medical assistants and technicians accompanied him and started filming on recording equipment that had been set up.
Beckfield unveiled the samples on the cart by removing a sheet draped across them. There were various organs and limbs spaced evenly on the cart. Beckfield picked up a sample with his gloved hand and turned to the recording camera. “Test number one: a human hand that has been severed at the distal radius and ulna. The tissue has been dead for about three months.” He opened a small flap into Kyle's room and let the severed, gray hand fall to the ground inside the room. Kyle, who was standing near the back, noticed the movement and lunged at the glass window, slamming the top of his head on the window. He slowly recovered and stood to his feet not noticing the hand. “No reaction,” Beckfield stated for the camera.
He reached for the cart and produced a section of intestine. “Test number two is a section of transverse large intestine resected from an adult male approximately four weeks ago.” He tapped on the glass, attracting Kyle toward him and then pushed the intestine through the flap, which fell on Kyle's foot. He reached down and picked up the intestine with both hands, biting into it. Stark winced and squinted his eyes as he watched. He noticed as Kyle chewed the meat that he didn’t have a single tooth in his mouth. His jawbone had protruded from beneath his gums creating a jagged surface that Kyle was using as makeshift teeth. There was no tongue to be accounted for. The flesh of the intestines began to dribble down his ragged T-shirt from his mouth.
“The specimen seems to respond more to this second test but still does not actually ingest the meat.” Beckfield shuffled his way to the cart, as if completely expecting the results. He picked up a piece of red meat from the cart. “Test number three, a section of human deltoid muscle, harvested less than twenty four hours old.” He flopped the piece of meat into the room. Kyle bent down, picked it up and bit into the meat. After the first bite, he began chomping down on it like an animal trying to eat before other scavengers arrive at the kill. As he shoved the meat into his mouth, he incidentally bit down on his index finger and sunk his jaw-teeth into his own yellow flesh, completely biting off the tip of the finger, which he swallowed with the rest of the meat.
The entire scene was having a dizzying effect on Stark, not from the morbidity but from the nonchalant manner with which Beckfield condoned cannibalism. Beckfield took another piece from the cart. “Another twenty four hour sample from a human liver.” Kyle picked it up from where Beckfield had dropped it in his room and attempted to put the entire organ down his throat without chewing. He began to shake his head in frustration and started chomping at the oblong shaped liver with his jagged jawbone. Stark squeezed his temples.
“Now that we have observed that the specimen “Kyle” will only ingest fresh human samples as expected, we have radioactively labeled the meat to determine where it is digested and how it is distributed to the body. This is an observation we are eager to make in light of the fact that the specimen has an obliterated stomach from massive ulceration.”
After a lengthy ordeal of restraining Kyle to a bed in his room and wheeling in various types of equipment, the entire medical team waited around a single monitor that showed what looked like a green glowing river traveling down the screen. It was showing the radioactive green glow of the meat coursing its way through Kyle's body.
“Here,” Beckfield said, pointing to the top of the green stream. “Here is the esophagus and here towards the bottom we are beginning to see the meat being randomly distributed into the body cavity due to the complete lack of stomach, where it would normally be contained within the stomach. It’s spilling everywhere into the body cavity. It appears that the meat is not being digested properly and is building up in different cavities. Here around what’s left of his liver and over here on top of the only remaining kidney.” The green river was starting to flood the screen. What happened next made the entire medical crew gasp in silent unison. The green started to disappear completely from the screen.
Stark stared at the screen in disbelief and he immediately hypothesized what was happening and why Kyle wouldn't eat anything other than human meat. Individual organs were directly absorbing the meat without any digestion by a stomach or any distribution from a pumping blood supply. The chaotic organ systems were literally taking the already existing structure of the fresh human muscle and integrating it into itself. It was like the giant blob passing over people, absorbing them, making it bigger and bigger as it rolled through the streets. Different organs of Kyle's body were simply using the already existent cells of eaten human meat to replace themselves. It was a war inside his
body, organ against organ, cell battling with cell to absorb the precious human meat. That was why some organs died and others lived, he thought. His mind lit on fire with theories and research ideas to test everything he was thinking.
Beckfield stared at the screen. “It now appears as if the meat is... it's being absorbed directly into the different organ systems that the meat comes in contact with, an occurrence quite unpredictable and fascinating since these organs should not normally be capable of absorbing raw cellular material like this.” At that point, Rambert had emerged in the room dressed in scrubs and cloth booties covering his shoes. His bald forehead wrinkled as he squinted his eyes to look into Kyle's glass room. He approached Stark from across the table from where he sat.
“Dr. Stark, we need you and Dr. Beckfield to the conference now. As soon as you are done with this...” He gestured to the monitor, “uh…immediate task, come straight to room M535.” He left as soon as he had come.
In the conference room, Beckfield and Stark were faced opposite to a table with Rambert, the President of the CDC and the Secretary of Defense. Stark saw a deep look of urgency and sickness in their faces. It looked like they had the flu but Stark doubted that they were actually sick with anything other than fear and panic. Stark had seen the news clip of a gigantic mass of bodies falling off a building in Manhattan rotating at thirty second intervals, and he knew that it changed everything about what was once a new strain of the flu that just needed some vaccination to a monstrous entity that was crumbling the country’s biggest city. He saw a particularly sharp look of fear in the Secretary of Defense's tilted eyebrows. This wasn't an attack from some invasion on the homeland. It was a strange and radical sickness that the Secretary had no grasp of any strategic plan to fight, and no idea what to do with the unyielding fear gleaming from his eyes.
