Degeneration

by Mark Campbell

  The image flipped to an anchorman sitting at the desk in the newsroom.

  “Thank you again, Lisa. In other news, federal authorities say that solar flare activity is behind the communications interference plaguing the entire central North Carolina viewing area. A NASA spokesman said–”

  Terry turned off the television, horrified.

  “Seriously, you need to calm down,” Richard said, eyes closed, massaging his temples. “You’re agitating me.”

  “We’re in a hospital during a killer flu outbreak and you tell me to relax? Haven’t you paid attention?”

  “Well working yourself up and breaking phones won’t help things,” Richard quickly responded. “Look at it this way; we’ve survived something that kills most people. We’re lucky. I mean, it’s just the flu.”

  “That logic doesn’t assure me much,” Terry scoffed. He turned the television on again and muted it. Commercials played across the screen.

  Richard frowned at the man’s insolence.

  He’s acting weird. I don’t trust him, Richie.

  Richard stared at Terry. He knew that the voice inside his head wasn’t real, but he agreed with what it said. Terry was acting strange and on edge. Even worse, Richard suspected that the man’s sanity was teetering on the edge.

  Although he knew that he should ignore the voice, he had nobody else to turn to.

  For the first time in a long time, he asked for the voice’s advice.

  (What should I do?)

  Talk to him. Ease him into conversation.

  (Why?)

  So that way, when we have to kill him, he won’t see it coming.

  The coldness in the voice was unsettling. It was one of the reasons he didn’t like talking to it.

  (When we have to kill him? What do you mean?)

  If, I meant. If we have to kill him. Talk to him and get him to warm up.

  It made sense to him. He understood what the voice was trying to say.

  (He’ll think we’ve bonded.)

  Exactly, Richie. See? Then he won’t see you coming.

  Richard fidgeted in his gurney. He wasn’t a murderer anymore. Those days were behind him. The doctors cured him. Still… if it came down to it and the man really was insane…

  (I don’t want to do it… but I will do it if it comes down to it.)

  Oh, trust me, it will. He’s insane.

  Richard agreed. The man clearly wasn’t in a sane state of mind.

  Now talk to him before he knows that you’ve figured him out.

  “What do you do, Troy?” Richard asked.

  Terry frowned, looked over at Richard, and coughed.

  “Terry. Not Troy. And what do you mean what I do?”

  “What do you do for work?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “We have to distract ourselves somehow, don’t we?”

  You see? I don’t like his attitude, Richie.

  Richard didn’t either. He almost had forgotten how much sense the voice made sometimes.

  What is he trying to hide?

  It was another good point.

  “I’m a regional marketing manager. You?”

  So he says.

  Richard stared at him, but he couldn’t tell if the man was being honest. The voice may have been right.

  “I do a little of whatever comes my way… Work has been tough ever since I got out,” Richard eventually answered.

  “Which branch of service?”

  “The prison service,” Richard answered.

  Terry stared at him, ready for an explanation.

  Richard was used to the stare and he knew what it meant.

  “I did a little stint in USP Butner with someone,” Richard calmly said, just like he said many times before to many different people. The reaction was always the same: a mixture of disgust, pity, and fear. He wanted the man to know that he had a history, just in case the insane man next to him tried to do anything foolish.

  “So you were in prison,” Terry said, somberly, not very surprised. He pegged Richard as a loser back on the train, so he wasn’t shocked to find out he was an ex-con.

  “Yes,” Richard said calmly. He studied Terry’s expression for a moment and smiled. He saw the discomfort in the man’s face, and that brought him a strange sense of satisfaction.

  Now at least he knows where you stand.

  Richard found himself agreeing with the false voice once more.

  Terry found Richard’s nonchalant smile cold and calculating and immediately felt uncomfortable. He turned his head and stared at the television as commercials continued to play, staying silent.

  Richard decided to rattle the man’s cage even more.

  “My brother is locked up there, too,” Richard said, savoring the drama. He laughed and quickly looked over to watch for a reaction.

  Terry continued to gaze vacantly and silently at the television, his bruised face luminescent from the LCD screen’s glimmer.

  “I don’t really care to hear about it,” Terry said, staring at the television.

  Richard seethed with anger.

  He doesn’t care, Richie.

  (I don’t care much for him.)

  I don’t trust him.

  (I don’t trust him either.)

  We have to kill him.

  (Stop it. Don’t say things like that. You’re not real.)

  Richard habitually reached for his pill bottle but was once again reminded that it was gone.

  His thoughts went to his brother, Andy. Hopefully, the thoughts of Andy would drown out the false voice inside his head.

  Andy was the only man in the world he respected and was the only family he had left. He hated to leave him behind while walking out a free man. It just didn’t seem fair.

  However, Richard summarized that the arrogant prick lying next to him couldn’t care less. Still, just talking about Andy made him feel better, safer.

  “Yep, old Andy… that’s my older brother. He killed a man,” Richard looked at Terry, hoping for an interested glance, a disgusted look, something to show that he gave a fuck. Inside, he got nothing. Terry just stared at the television and coughed.

  “I don’t want to talk about your brother right now, sorry,” Terry said. “I have other things on my mind.”

  Kill him. Kill that disrespectful queer.

  Richard suddenly wanted to strangle the little arrogant bastard. He almost got out of the hospital gurney, but stopped himself.

  (No, I can’t listen to you anymore. You’re not really talking to me, Andy. It’s impossible. You’re in Butner. That isn’t really your voice.)

  Reality is relative. Those prison doctors really got you to swallow their horseshit with their pills, didn’t they?

  (You’re not really here, Andy.)

  I’ve always been here. You just chose to block me out.

  The door suddenly opened, startling them both.

  A man inside a white hazmat suit with the ‘CDC’ logo stenciled across the chest stood in the doorway. Wails and shouts echoed down the hallway behind him. “Code Blue, Emergency Ward, Security Stat. Code Blue, Emergency Ward, Security Stat,” a female voice droned over the ceiling intercom speakers. Additional CDC white-suits with assault rifles ran past the white-suit standing in the doorway down the hall. The CDC white-suits were followed by coughing hospital security guards, most of them soaked in fever-induced sweat.

  The CDC white-suit walked into the room holding a small silver case. He quickly closed the door and instantly reduced the commotion in the hall down to a murmur.

  “Are you a doctor?” Richard quickly asked.

  “No, sorry,” the white-suit said as he walked over towards Terry. “But I understand that you two are doing pretty well on our temperature scans so I’m here to take some blood. If everything checks out, we’ll have you on the first evacuation helicopter headed towards Atlanta.”

  The CDC white-suit walked to the nightstand between the two beds and sat the case down on it. He opened the case and b
rought out some syringes and small glass vials. He walked over towards Richard first and injected a syringe into Richard’s forearm.

  Beads of sweat started to form across Richard’s brow and his hands were fidgety.

  “Look, when will a doctor come see me? I have some very important medication that I need refilled,” Richard said as he watched the man drew a vile of blood.

  “Are you on diabetic or asthmatic medication?” the CDC white-suit asked as he tossed the syringe into a red bin, wrote down ‘Room 120-A’ on the vial’s sticker, and then put the vial into the silver case.

  “No, it’s a psychotropic,” Richard said in a quiet voice. “It feels like I’m coming apart inside my own skin…”

  Terry looked at Richard with wide-eyes, alarmed.

  “Oh, well that all will get taken care of later,” the CDC white-suit dismissively said. He turned towards Terry. “What about you? Diabetic?”

  “No,” Terry said.

  The CDC white-suit went to work drawing Terry’s blood.

  “Ah, that’s good. And as far as non-essential medication or any other medical questions, I’m afraid you will have to wait to see Dr. Mathews. He has this floor,” the CDC white-suit said, finished drawing Terry’s blood. He labeled the vial ‘Room 120-B’ and put the sample in the case with Richard’s.

  Terry broke into a spasm of wet coughs.

  The CDC white-suit startled and looked over at Terry. He reached into the case, retrieved Terry’s blood sample, and threw the vial in the trash with the used syringes.

  Terry didn’t notice.

  “Well how long do we have to stay here? The phone doesn’t work and I need to call my wife!” Terry said as he sat-up.

  The CDC white-suit gently placed a hand on Terry’s shoulder and lowered him back down onto the bed.

  “Once again, I can’t say. It really all depends on the result of your blood test. That will determine how long you have to stay here,” the CDC white-suit said. “But I’m going to see about getting you moved to another room.”

  “One with a working phone?” Terry asked.

  “Yes,” the CDC white-suit lied.

  “So we’re prisoners, is that it?” Richard suddenly asked.

  The man turned in his bulky hazmat suit and faced Richard.

  “Prisoners? No, we’re here to help you,” he said defensively. He walked over to Richard’s IV and injected a serum into the IV’s injection port. “This is for the pain, doctor’s orders. He wanted to tide over his patients until he can get up here.”

  “Oh,” Richard said, and then lay back down. He stared at the ceiling as his world started spinning and his mind started to float.

  The CDC white-suit walked over to Terry and injected the rest of the serum into the IV’s injection port.

  “When can I use the damn phone?” Terry asked.

  Richard’s eyes fluttered closed and he slipped unconscious.

  The CDC white-suit shook his head.

  “Soon” the CDC white-suit promised and then quickly retreated back out into the hall, slamming the door shut behind him. Terry thought that he heard gunshots, but he wasn’t sure. His world was spinning.

  Terry coughed, and then fell asleep.

  Thirty minutes later, the CDC white-suit sat inside his make-shift laboratory, analyzing blood samples. The gunshots coming from a few floors below had intensified, but he was too busy with his work to pay attention. He didn’t even hear the fire alarms going off.

  He slid a glass slide marked with blood from the vile labeled ‘Room 120-A’ underneath the microscope.

  He drew back, blinked, and then looked through the lens again. “Oh my God…” he muttered. He hurriedly reached for the satellite phone to call Atlanta.

  His door flung open, startling him, and a woman wearing a blood-splattered patient smock ran into the room, snarling, knocking his table aside as she lunged towards him.

  13

  By the end of the evening, every skyscraper in downtown Raleigh had been draped in plastic and boarded up. A small battalion of soldiers in white hazmat suits stood guard in front of each tower. The white-suits weren’t expecting any problems. The occupants inside the towers, if any were still alive, would be too sick and feverish to cause any protest. Throughout the day, people inside the towers periodically took to the roof or tried to shatter a window and escape, but the sniper’s expert marksmanship made their efforts fall short. The screams inside the skyscrapers eventually stopped and the frantic pounding against the plywood-covered exits slowly subsided.

  A Humvee rolled along Fayetteville Street past small groups of white-suited soldiers as they stood watch in front of the sealed skyscrapers. Colonel Mathis, wearing a white hazmat suit just like the others, sat in the passenger seat and stared out the window. For the first time since the ‘PT-12’ virus escaped the Fort Detrick facility, Col. Mathis felt some sense of an uneasy calm. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt that continued to gnaw at him.

  The Humvee drove past countless shattered storefronts as it made its way towards the 161st downtown base camp. Col. Mathis stared listlessly out the window at the activity outside, chewing on his bottom lip inside of his white-suit.

  Outside, soldiers were burning large pyres and rummaging through emptied buildings for more corpses to burn. Abandoned vehicles littered the street and peppered the sidewalk. Telephone poles and traffic signals lay mangled and toppled. The quant downtown shops had been gutted-out by looters earlier in the day and by soldiers later in the evening. The state capitol building had burnt down to the ground and the cause of the fire was anyone’s guess; army vehicles parked on its once pristine lawn while groups of white-suits watched the remnants of the building smolder.

  The Humvee approached the Meymandi Concert Hall, where Mozart and Chopin once filled the air. It had been reclaimed as the 161st Bioterrorism Response Regiment’s downtown base camp.

  Inside the concert hall, three bored soldiers wearing white-suits were taking it upon themselves to redecorate the concert hall with graffiti. They abruptly stopped when Col. Mathis entered through the front door, flanked by two sergeants.

  The soldiers were surprised when Col. Mathis said nothing and simply walked towards the main auditorium.

  Just as Col. Mathis reached the auditorium’s heavy wooden doors, he stopped and turned towards the soldiers. The two sergeants stopped and turned as well.

  “Sgt. Trevor, Sgt. Rivers? How about taking these three outside and running them through some drills?” Col. Mathis said. “I can’t imagine that their environmental suits will make it a very pleasant experience. When they’re done, I want them to come back inside and clean up the mess they made inside my base. We’re probably going to be here for a long time, so let’s keep it looking nice. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeants quickly replied. They walked towards the soldiers, barking orders.

  Col. Mathis turned and entered the auditorium, shaking his head. He felt disgusted with himself, disgusted with his men, and, frankly, disgusted with his own country.

  “A long fucking time,” he muttered to himself. He kept trying to forget about the dying souls trapped inside those skyscrapers, but found the task to be impossible.

  Meanwhile, inside a darkened office on the fourth floor of the plastic-draped RBC tower, Howell paced back-and-forth.

  His eyes were clouded, his skin was pale, and his clothes were caked in dried vomit. He gave guttural groans as his muscles fired in wild spasms. He paced jaggedly from one side of the ransacked office to the other. Periodically he would stop, stick his nose up in the air, and sniff like a feral animal, listening and smelling for new prey. He could hear thousands like him outside the office, aimlessly wandering the recesses of the darkened skyscraper.

  Howell gave a frustrated snarl and kept pacing.

  The desk in the middle of the office was overturned and coved in dried vomit. Howell’s unfinished handwritten manifesto against the government lay strewn across the floor, ly
ing in pools of urine, trampled beyond recognition by his relentless pacing. The bookcases were ransacked, and the door was riddled with deep fingernail gashes from when he tried to claw his way out. In his final form, doorknobs were no longer something he could master.

  His duffle sat in the far corner of the room, next to the window, underneath a pile of books. The bomb inside, Howell’s last creative endeavor on earth, started beeping as the timer reached the ten second countdown.

  Howell flew across the office in a feral rage, snarling, and dug into the pile of books with blood-stained hands, digging towards the sound. He reached the duffle and battered it with closed fists, screaming.

  The timer reached zero and the resulting blast vaporized Howell along with most of the fourth floor.

  The massive explosion created a shockwave that shattered the building’s exterior windows and blew the plywood off the lobby doors. The small battalion of white-suits standing in front of the building was hurled backwards as a pillar of flames shot out from the lobby. The plastic tarp over the building started to melt and dribbled into congealed lumps onto the pavement as the RBC tower engulfed into flames.

  The blast caused a crescendo of car alarms echoing out for miles.

  “What the fuck was that?!” Col. Mathis asked from inside the command post, blocks away. The entire auditorium shook from the explosion and chunks of plaster shook loose from the ceiling.

  Humvees quickly arrived at the scene of the RBC tower explosion along with multiple FEMA vans. White-suited soldiers poured out of the Humvees and took position around the breached lobby, sighting-in their weapons. Helicopters circled above the engulfed lobby entrance.

  “Delta Lead to Delta Base! Delta Lead to Delta Base! There has been an explosion at Site 21! There are multiple causalities and the building is breached! I repeat, Site 21 has been compromised! A CDC disposal unit is at the scene. Requesting immediate additional security support, over,” one of the white-suits screamed into the radio.

  CDC white-suits wielding flamethrowers hopped out the back of the FEMA vans and formed a semicircle around the breached lobby.

  “Copy, Delta Lead. Base to all downtown detachments! Attention all downtown detachments! Converge on Site 21 immediately! Code Orange! Weapons hot! Engineer detachment, report to the breach and get it sealed, over!”