by Tristan Vick
“How could he? He was unconscious through most of it,” growled Lindsey. She hugged Josh and he sobbed into her shoulder.
Josh felt full of self-loathing; after all, guys weren’t supposed to be rape victims. But what Josh couldn’t admit, not to Lindsey, not to anyone, was although he hadn’t said yes to it, he sure as hell hadn’t said no either. Although he knew that Hurley had abused him in one of the worst ways possible, and had nearly killed him—his mind kept replaying the moment when he regained consciousness just as he climaxed inside of her. Even though he knew it was wrong, he couldn’t help but fixate on how good it felt. Worse, he wanted to be with her again. In fact, he was so drawn to her that he would have done anything for her just to be with her one more time—and he hated himself for it.
Rachael put her arms around Josh and brought him to her chest to provide comfort, like she used to do for her son, Hector. He sobbed into her warm embrace. Lindsey squeezed his hand as silent tears ran down the sides of her cheeks.
Linda stood up and authoritatively announced, “I’m going to go find Mitch and the general and tell them what has happened. I think they need to know that a mad woman is on the loose down here. But don’t worry; I promise you, we’ll get this all straightened out ASAP.”
Having spoken her two cents, Linda Sheridan got up, marched out the doors of the observation lounge, and headed up the hall to go warn the others.
48
Psychosis
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Jennifer sang melodically. Pausing, as if she heard voices, she listened for a moment as if they were relaying to her vital information, then responded, “No, they’re still hiding. But don’t worry, we’ll find them.”
A crazed Jennifer Hurley roamed the hallways holding the machete she had taken from Noble’s rucksack. A trail of moist blood trailed behind her as it dribbled off the glistening blade and onto the pristine white floor.
“Who are you talking to, dear?”
The voice came from behind Jennifer. Slowly, Jennifer turned around and made eye contact with the short fat woman who clutched her cross necklace nervously in her hands and fiddled with it. Staring at Linda, Jennifer Hurley’s face was expressionless.
Linda hadn’t intended on dealing with Jen herself, but she just happened to run into her before she could find anybody else to warn. She glanced down at Hurley’s bare chest and saw the Greek omega sign painted on it in fresh blood. She had no idea what it could possibly mean, but she knew this woman needed help. “Can I help you with anything, dear?”
“Are you my mother?”
Linda didn’t understand what Hurley was getting at. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’m looking for my mother. Are you my mother?” Hurley asked in a little squeaky voice—the sort of falsetto voice an adult makes when they try to talk like a child.
Realizing Jennifer had gone completely insane, Linda clutched her cross even tighter. “No, dear. But I’m your friend.”
“My friend?” Jennifer asked curiously.
“Yes,” Linda replied, trying her best to sound convincing. “I’m your friend. You trust me, don’t you?”
Jennifer’s eyes caught the gleam of the little gold cross clutched in Linda’s hands, and she smiled as a deranged glee danced in her eye. “Do you wanna hear a poem?” Hurley asked, her eyes still fixated on Linda’s little gold crucifix.
“Sure,” Linda said, trying to sound comforting.
“Now Lord of all, he reigns above, and from his heavenly throne, he sees what children dwell in love, and marks them for his own.”
“Well, that’s certainly an interesting poem,” Linda said, growing worried. Reaching out her hand for Jennifer to take, she said, “How about you come with me and we’ll get you all cleaned up. Would you like that?”
But Jennifer didn’t respond. She just stared vacantly at Linda’s golden cross.
Raising her hands cautiously, Linda took several small steps toward Jennifer, and put her hands on her arm and shoulder. “Please, put the knife down,” Linda pleaded. “You need help, Mrs. Hurley. I can give it to you, if you just come with me. Just give me the knife and—”
Jennifer looked down at the knife she held in her hand and acted as if she were suddenly shocked to see it resting in her own trembling hand.
Growing highly emotional, Jennifer Hurley’s voice trembled as she spoke. “I…I don’t know what’s going on.” Looking up at Linda with confused eyes, holding the knife up as if she was going to hand it over, her lip quivering, Hurley sobbed, “What have I done?”
“It’s okay dear. It’ll all be okay. Just hand me the knife and—”
Jennifer moved so fast that Linda could only flinch. Linda’s eyes widened in terrible realization as a red smile opened up across her throat. Her head rocked back as blood spurted out of the gaping wound on her neck, and her fat body teetered then crashed to the floor in a heap.
Bending down, Jen dipped the tips of her fingers into the pool of blood overflowing from Linda’s gurgling windpipe. Examining the moist substance glistening on the tips of her digits, she put her lips close to Linda’s ear and whispered, “Be careful what you ask for.”
Trembling with fear, Linda raised her cross and opened her mouth as if she wanted to speak, but nothing came out. Soon, Linda’s eyes fluttered, her hand went limp and fell to her chest.
Jennifer gently pried the cross out of Linda’s dead fingers and then opened Linda’s mouth and placed it gently down on her tongue. Linda Sheridan laid on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, eyes wide open, with her crucifix pressed into her mouth.
Looking down at her handiwork, Jennifer Hurley curled her red lips into a diabolic smile.
Standing up, she reached out and pressed her wet fingertips to the wall. Walking down the hall, she drew crooked crimson lines on the white canvas with her bloody appendages. When there was no more ink to be had, she clanked the red glistening knife on the metal railing in the hall, tapping it melodically as she went along.
Clank. Clank. Clank-itty-clank.
Quietly, she repeated those last few lines of that ominous poem, twisting them into her own. “Now Lord of Death, she reigns below, and from her ghostly realm, she sees what children dwell in fear, and claims them for her own.”
49
Ill Omens
Unable to sleep, Alyssa popped her eyes open. In the pit of her stomach she felt something was terribly wrong. She didn’t know how she knew. Just somehow, she knew.
Climbing out of bed, she threw on her clothes, and then hastily made her way toward Rachael’s room. When she got there she discovered a strange symbol painted on the door in red. Was it blood?
“What on earth?” she whispered to herself. Just then she noticed the door was ajar. Cautiously, Alyssa gently pushed the door open. She poked her head into the room and checked to see if everything was alright, but it was too dark to see anything. She pushed on the door a little bit harder, and it swung open to reveal Levi Hurley lying on the bed gutted like a fish.
Levi’s lower intestine had been torn out, wrapped around his neck, and crudely stuffed back down into his own mouth. His eyes were wide with surprise, as if he never even saw it coming. In addition to this ghastly sight, his chest was cracked wide open. The sharp bones of his ribcage fanned out like open fingers to reveal that his heart was missing. Well, not exactly missing. It was nailed to the wall with a simple ballpoint pen.
Painted all around his heart, like a horseshoe, was that damned symbol again. The symbol for the end of all things. Omega.
An odious dread flooded into every inch of her and penetrated her very core. As she backed away from the grisly sight, Alyssa’s voice began seeping out of her mouth without her even realizing it. Standing in the middle of the hallway, her lungs rattled and her diaphragm torqued as she screamed with every ounce of strength her quivering body could muster.
50
Z Day
“No, no, no!” Mitch shouted. Power it down, now!” Mit
chel Reinhart wiped the sweat off of his bald head with a handkerchief he kept in his back pocket, and then continued yelling into the walkie-talkie. “If you don’t power down the main system before you install the backups, you’ll blow all the fuses.”
After a crackle of static, a voice came out from the other end of the speaker. “But Mitch, if we power down the main system now there won’t be any power for several minutes.”
“I know that,” Mitch barked in agitation.
“Just a quick question, but what about our guests in the basement? Shouldn’t we be just a little bit concerned?”
“No, that system’s backup is separate from the mainframe. The doors remain locked at all times. Besides, there’s no way to bypass the security settings unless you have the codes. And the General, Linda, and I are the only ones with the codes.”
Down in the generator’s maintenance room, four men wearing bright blue safety helmets and tan overalls worked on resetting the backup generators. With all the additional bodies using up power and resources, Mitch didn’t want to risk an all-out power failure if they somehow managed to overload the system. It wasn’t designed to sustain so many people. He desperately wanted those backup generators to be fully operational.
There was a loud clunk, like a breaker switching off, and then everything went dark. From his radio came the voice of his head engineer, Robert Pearlman. “They’re powered down now, Mitch. What’s next?”
“I’m going to reboot the system,” Mitch said into the two-way. “We’ll be back in business before you know it.”
“Roger that. Ready on your signal. Over.”
“In three, two, one…now.”
A large clunk of giant fuses switching out rang out, and then the electrical hum of equipment dissipated and the air rushing through the ventilation system died down, and an eerie silence took over the underground base.
General Greer and Jesse Zanato froze in their tracks.
“What the hell is going on, man?”
“It’s just a blackout,” Greer stated tersely, as he fished for his lighter. “Don’t get yourself worked up into a panic over it. The backup generators should kick in any moment.”
“Hey, whenever the lights go out something bad usually happens.”
“Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts now,” the general said.
Zanato turned around to see the general's face illuminated by the dim glow of the flame of his lighter in such a way that it gave him a ghostly appearance.
“Gah!” Zanato yelled, seeing the general’s face lit up like he was in a horror film. “You scared the living daylights out of me. Don’t ever do that again.”
The general just stared at him for an uncomfortably long time, then without saying a word, he let the flame go out.
Within a minute the lights flickered and the power came back on.
“See, I told you,” Greer said. “Nothing to worry about.”
Suddenly there was a loud clank. The heavy pressurized door slammed shut behind them. But it failed to pressurize. Somehow Zanato’s discarded shoelace snagged on the door and prevented of the magnetic pressure seals from closing securely.
As soon as there was a problem, an alarm went off, and the lights changed to a cerise hue. The all-too-familiar voice of Zanato’s computerized girlfriend rang out: “*Warning: Obstruction. Compartment pressurization failure imminent. Failure imminent.*”
Both men turned to see the containment door whistling and hissing through the small opening in the seal. Without warning, the door exploded off of its hinges and flew toward them. Reacting instinctively, the general tackled Zanato, and they hit the ground just as the heavy metal door sailed over their heads and lodged itself in the wall in the precise spot where they had been standing.
Looking back, Zanato saw that the lab door to the main room was torn wide open as well. The bottom half was peeled upward, revealing something even more appalling. The zombie containment system was blinking on and off sporadically.
“*Containment breached,*” the woman’s voice said.
“Goddammit!” growled Greer.
“See, I told you!” Zanato said. “Bad things always happen when the lights go out randomly for no good reason.”
From inside the other room they heard moaning, then the sound of a door handle rattling. They looked at each other with frightened faces.
“Can dead-heads open doors?” Zanato asked.
“Good question, kid. Let’s not stick around to find out.”
The battery power to the lab was drained from the explosion. With the power completely gone, the doors in the lab unlatched. A door creaked open, and Greer and Zanato heard the sound of dragging feet and moaning. Pulling out his Glock, the general clenched his teeth and said, “I guess the dead sons of bitches can open doors after all.”
“Fuck this shit,” Zanato complained. “I don’t want to die down here. Not like this.” With that he took off down the hall, running with no compass as he headed back into the maze of the military complex.
“Wait!” Greer shouted, looking over his shoulder as Zanato rushed past. “You’re going the wrong way, kid!”
But Zanato did not listen. His head was filled with fear and adrenaline he could not hear the general’s pleas above the raging sound of his own pounding heart. All he cared about was getting the fuck out of this hellhole.
Dusting off his hand, Bob Pearlman, a large black man who was nearing forty and had a clean shaven head, wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his uniform before putting his safety hardhat back on. “Good job men,” he said, complimenting his five-man crew for getting things done within Reinhart’s impossible time frame.
Suddenly, from out in the hall, they all heard a loud clangor.
“Whoa, did you guys hear that?”
“It was probably just the generators winding down,” Pearlman replied. He was the floor supervisor, and it was his duty to keep his men focused on the task at hand.
“No, I’m telling you,” said Steve Corbin, a skinny man with short brown hair and eyeglasses, thumbing over his shoulder. “I heard something coming from out there.”
“That’s just your overactive imagination getting the best of you, Corbin. Nothing to get your panties up in a bunch over,” Pearlman said with a chuckle. The rest of the men snickered along with him.
Pearlman picked up the two-way and radioed Mitch Reinhart back at the control room. “Mitch, it’s all good down here. You can power back up the main system. Pearlman, out.”
“Roger that,” Mitch’s voice crackled through the two-way. Then with an electrical pop, the power was restored.
The lights flickered momentarily as they warmed up. In that moment of lambency, where the dancing shadows played tricks on the mind, Steve felt something move past the entrance to the door just behind him. He turned to look out the small square window to see what it was. But nothing was out there.
Maybe Pearlman is right, Steve considered. Maybe it is just my mind playing tricks on me. He opened the door and poked his head out into the hall. Still nothing. He turned back to the rest of the group. “Guys, I’m going to head on over to—” Suddenly a shadow whisked past the door as he spoke.
“Holy shit!” Steve yelped.
“What now?” Pearlman grumbled, rolling his eyes.
Steve slowly turned back around to face the men. His nerves were on end and he felt rattled. “I’m telling you guys, we’re not alone. Someone’s definitely out there.”
Just then a fuse blew and the lights crashed again.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got it,” Steve said, flicking on his flashlight. Steve made his way to the rear access panel to flip the switch and reset the fuse.
Huddling together, the rest of the crew grabbed their flashlights and stepped out into the hall. They paused and looked around, and then Pearlman held the flashlight up to his face and started screaming hysterically. His bogus screams quickly turned into bawdy laughter. The rest of the men joined him at Steve’s expense
.
“Ha, ha. Very funny,” Steve said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. As he flipped the switch the lights came back on, hopefully for the last time.
Whirling around, the general found himself standing face to face with a whitewash-eyed monster. It grinned at him with rotting teeth and cracked lips. Greer reached for his gun, but the zombie lunged forward and bit him in the shoulder. Greer grumbled, “Son of a bitch,” and then head-butted the damn monster.
Staggering back, the creature let out a screeching howl. This gave the general enough space to fire off a shot. The creature dropped to the ground, but suddenly there was another one there to take its place. Before Greer could get off another shot, pasty hands grabbed his arm and flung him into the wall.
Crushed under the weight of half a dozen crazed zombies, Greer felt each vicious bite tear large chunks of his flesh out of him. The pain was excruciating, but perhaps worse was the realization that there was no escape. Greer put his gun to his head and pulled the trigger, but nothing. His cartridge had run empty.
Greer’s eyes widened with the realization of what would happen next. He tried to curse one last time, but he wheezed and coughed up blood, which spilled down his chin. Sitting on the floor with his head propped up against the wall, the general’s blank eyes stared out at nothing as the monsters continued their feeding frenzy.
“All right, all right,” Pearlman said. “Playtime is over. Now let’s get back to work.”
Suddenly another scream rang out.
“Okay guys, enough is enough,” Pearlman barked.
But it was just the first of many. Soon the hall became filled with the voices of men screaming for their lives. Each gut-wrenching, terror-filled yelp signified that this was no game.
Pearlman spun around in the doorway to warn Steve, but before he could get the words out something grabbed him and yanked him out into the hall. One minute he was there and the next he was simply gone. Then Pearlman let out a loud thundering yowl, which was followed by an abrupt and eerie silence.
