The Rock Island Zombie Counteractant Experiment

by Better Hero Army

  Why was it in his forearm, he wondered, looking down at his arm. His vision was hazed over with blackness, leaving only the center of his vision unaffected, and even that seemed to have trouble focusing. He watched his hand clench against the pain. He could feel his fingers and wrist moving, but not his elbow.

  The stairwell door clacked and hissed again, and Mason was relieved by the rising volume of moans in the cell block. Chavez and a woman wearing a white lab coat arrived and both stopped at the entrance to the cell. The woman was a thin redhead in her forties with deep worry lines, and he hoped they were her normal appearance.

  “We’ve got to get him downstairs,” she said.

  “Come on, Jones,” Chavez said, moving into the cell. “I’ll help you.”

  “No, I can’t,” Mason replied, shaking his head. He was still seeing black spots dot his vision at the edges. “I’ll faint. I tried standing.”

  “You’re way too big for me to carry you,” Chavez admitted.

  “Blankets,” Mason said, feeling breathless from his controlled breathing. “Noose poles. Stretcher.”

  “Good idea,” Chavez said with a smile. “Johnson, get two of those nooses off the cart!”

  “Doc,” Mason said. She gingerly stepped over a pool of blood left by the biter’s head wounds and knelt down beside him. “Doc, my arm is going numb.”

  “Do you feel that?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  She began walking her fingers up his arm. “Tell me when you stop feeling it.”

  “There,” Mason said.

  She stopped and made a quick slicing motion across his arm, scratching his skin with her nails, enough to make a welt. Mason didn’t feel it, but instinctively pulled his arm away. The pain of doing so shot through him and he groaned in agony. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “I thought you said you couldn’t feel anything,” she told him.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Did you feel me cut you?”

  “No!”

  “Good. We’ll use that mark to see how fast the pathogen is neutralizing your nervous system.”

  “One field stretcher,” Chavez said proudly as he came into the cell with Johnson behind him. “Let’s get you downstairs.”

  Eighteen

  Mason held his arm tight against his chest as they carried him into the lab. They passed through a large steel door and into a hallway with plate glass on both sides. To the left were offices overlooking the hall. To the right was the laboratory.

  The doctor swiped her card and the door to the lab opened. She held it to let Johnson and Chavez carry Mason through.

  “I ain’t never seen this place, and I don’t never want to again,” Johnson was saying as they lugged Mason through.

  The lab was an enormous open room with two surgical tables. Rolling medical equipment was scattered throughout. A countertop with cabinets above and below ran the length of the far wall. A row of eight cells took up the wall nearest the door. Mason glanced at them as they carried him to the center of the room.

  “Put him down here,” the doctor said. “Get him off the blanket. I need to make a call.” The doctor went to the far wall and picked up a telephone to punch in an extension. They eased Mason onto the surgical bed.

  “Come on, Jones, turn a little,” Chavez said. Mason was hardly paying attention to him. The cells weren’t empty. Every other cell had an occupant, four in all. Two were strapped to beds with ventilators and other devices keeping them sedated and alive. A bearded man and a woman occupied the other two cells. The man paced back and forth in his cell like a caged lion, his eyes glaring at Mason and the others. The woman, on the other hand, sat on the bed in the back of her cell with arms wrapped around her legs, a blanket over her shoulders. The light in the laboratory was bright enough to reflect off their eyes, and in both of them he saw the milky haze he had become accustomed to seeing in all zombies.

  A half-breed.

  Both Hank and Matty used that word to describe the woman that came back from Midamerica. Mason wondered if this was that woman, but if so, who was the bearded one? Another half-breed, for sure. Maybe they experimented on them here. Maybe they made them. Or maybe that was what he’d become.

  Mason tried to sit up.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Chavez said, putting an arm on Mason to keep him down. “Doc!”

  The doctor turned with the phone at her ear. “I’ll call you right back,” she said and hung up. She hurried to the table and stepped in front of Mason, who was now sitting up with Chavez holding his good arm to keep him from falling.

  “Jones, I need you to listen to me,” the doctor said. “We’re going to administer the curative, but it has to be dosed against the level of toxicity in your blood.”

  “Them?” Mason asked, pointing at the cells. He could hardly think of how to form a sentence or say what he was feeling. Crippling pain gripped his hand, and now he felt the sensation of fire in his shoulder. He squeezed his pained hand, trying to smash away the ache.

  “They’re special test subjects,” she said. “We use them to incubate the cure.”

  Mason looked at her.

  “Now lay down on your side so I can work on that arm.”

  Mason reluctantly slid back onto the table with Chavez’s help. They helped him on his side, lifting a padded plate so he could lean against it as she could work on his hurt arm. The doctor instructed Chavez to put restraints across him and around his wounded arm to keep him from moving. They restrained his other arm and legs as well.

  “Just so you’re aware, Lieutenant, I’m going to clean and dress your wound as best I can. We’re not going to give you anything for the pain or put you out. We need you lucid when we administer the curative, but I don’t want that arm getting banged around or hurt any worse than it already is. The only good side effect of being bitten by an infected subject is that your pain receptors in the area are all dulled to the point you won’t feel a thing.

  “I’m also going to put this weird looking helmet on your head and this bite guard in your mouth. The bite guard has holes so you can breathe through it even with your teeth gnashed, so just bite down on it and keep it like that. I know it all sounds strange, but you’ll thank me for it later.”

  She slid the helmet over his head and clicked the chin strap on, then held out the bite guard.

  “Open up,” she said and placed the guard over his upper teeth. He bit down on it and sighed. “Let me get a tray setup,” the doctor said and went toward the long counter, opening drawers and cupboards to collect things.

  “Hang in there. Don’t worry,” Chavez told Mason to assuage his fears.

  Mason wondered if his concern was that obvious in his eyes.

  “The cure works. I’ve seen it before.”

  Chavez patted him on the shoulder, but Mason hardly felt it. Seen it before? How did Chavez know something like that when no one else did, and how had he seen it before if he hadn’t been down here with someone who needed it? Suddenly, Mason didn’t trust Chavez or this doctor. He tugged at his restraints, but they were solid. He was trapped.

  And that wasn’t even the worst of it. The pain he felt in his shoulder was climbing up his neck, causing his hands and feet to tremble. His arms and legs came next, involuntary spasms jolting him against the restraints.

  “Hey, doc,” Chavez called. “He’s hitting stage one!”

  “Already?” she asked, looking his way.

  Mason’s convulsions hit harder suddenly, and although he could hear Chavez and the doctor arguing, he couldn’t make out what they were saying. The light intensified, washing out everything, leaving behind what seemed like the inside of a cloud, obscuring sound and sight and everything else. He felt cold, as though he was naked and outdoors in the winter. His skin burned from the chill.

  The world around him grew foreign, absent of time and substance in his fog of consciousness. The here and now faded to memories swimming near and far, some ringing him in a wide arc, hinti
ng at their existence, but not coming close enough to be recognized, while others rushed him in a frenzy. Memories with bites, razor sharp teeth like ravenous sharks, savagely striking and pulling away, each coming from different angles and without warning. He started to recall Christmas when he was eight, the year his father bought him his first pistol—no, that was his fourteenth Christmas, when he was having sex with his girlfriend before leaving for Egypt, and the fight on the tennis courts with that bully Tim Hadowick in fourth grade. By the time he realized none of them were the same memory, he couldn’t remember what the first had been at all. He just remembered Tim Hadowick standing over him and laughing, calling him a pussy, and him wondering what that word even meant.

  He hated grade school. Clumsy, uncoordinated, un-liked, and poor. He hated his father for putting him through hell, moving them from city to city, never settling down. Construction. Mason hated construction, but didn’t know why. He was just certain he hated it, and it had something to do with his father, the son of a bitch.

  And then there were the eyes. They watched him through the fog of his thoughts, waiting for their moment to strike, and he feared them like no other. Whatever memory they represented, he knew them to be the most painful he had ever endured, and yet they waited, lurking, watching him, and biding their time.

  Mason took a deep breath. His body shook violently, uncontrollably. He was screaming and he didn’t know why. The doctor stood next to Chavez, both several feet back, both staring at him with grave concern. Behind them the two half-breeds watched as well, the woman from beneath her blanket, which she now wore tightly over her head, her hands cupped over her ears. The male glared with unabashed interest as he held the bars with both hands, his head pressed between.

  “Fuck me,” Johnson said from where he stood against the glass near the door. “Can I go? This is freaking me the fuck out.”

  “Yeah, get going,” Chavez said. Johnson didn’t hesitate. He swiped his badge, fumbled for the door handle, pulled it open, and rushed to get through and into the hall. He may as well have been running, and Mason wished he could be with him, free of this place. What other tortures did they have in mind for him?

  “Lieutenant, are you all right?” the doctor asked.

  Mason nodded.

  “Well, before you have another spell, I’m going to get that arm sewn up.”

  She pushed a chair and a tray next to him and picked up a pair of scissors as she slid a mask over her mouth and nose. She was wearing protective goggles already. Mason watched her cut off the bandage on his arm. He felt the tug of it when she pulled it away, but his arm was otherwise numb. It interested him a little to finally understand why the zombies had no fear of injury. Even though he watched her squirt water into the holes left by the bite, something that should have ignited unbridled pain, he felt nothing.

  This was what it meant to be a zombie.

  Nineteen

  His second set of seizures ended just as abruptly as they had started. Memories of the world spun inside his head and left him with vague recollections of things he had done and seen in his life, but confused him as he recovered. Piecing together the remnants of his thoughts made no sense, as though he were stitching the wrong fabrics together. And like waking from a dream, the notions of what had been swimming in his head vanished as the world around him came into horrific focus.

  “Hello, Jones,” Kennedy said. She was sitting in the chair in front of him, a mask over her nose and mouth, broad safety glasses over her eyes, and a sanitary hat over her head.

  “Huh,” was all Mason could say through the bite guard.

  “So what do you think now about our little zombie problem?”

  “Huh,” Mason said, not sure what she meant at first. He knew she was being sarcastic, but not entirely certain how it reflected on him. He struggled to remember how he knew her and when he had seen her last, and it irritated him that he was having trouble with recalling something he should know.

  “Good, I’m glad we cleared that up,” she said, slapping her thighs as she stood up.

  Where was the other doctor? Mason looked around the room and finally saw her almost behind him. She was sitting at the counter with her back to him, working on some kind of blood testing device. It relieved him to know he wasn’t alone with Kennedy. Mason remembered the other doctor’s conversation—a one-sided conversation, at that. “Doctor Kennedy? Sorry we got cut off earlier. No, we have the cameras rolling. Everything is setup. He’s past stage one now. About ten minutes ago. Yes, ma’am. I’m ready now. Oh, you’re still on the mainland. But it’ll take you fifteen minutes to get through…no….yes, ma’am, but waiting for stage two…no, ma’am…yes ma’am. You’re the boss.” She had hung up and slapped her hands on her lap angrily, then turned to smile at Mason. “Don’t worry,” she had said.

  Mason was worried.

  Doctor Kennedy pulled on a pair of latex gloves and moved the chair out of the way. She took out a flashlight and held it to Mason’s eyes. He flinched and she put her thumb on his eyelid to lift it.

  “You’re in stage three of degradation right now, Jones,” she told him. “When the next wave hits, you’re going to suffer some more memory loss and you’ll feel disoriented coming out, but it should be the last stage you’ll undergo before reversal. The curative I’ve developed must be administered on waking subjects because it causes vomiting which could kill you if you’re sedated, so I’m sorry you have to go through all this. The nice thing is now you can tell off any mother on the planet when she says you don’t know the meaning of pain. Child birth has nothing on this.”

  Kennedy swabbed Mason’s shoulder above the bite wound. He couldn’t feel it, though.

  “Are you ready, Wendy?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the other doctor said, carrying a loaded syringe on a tray over to Doctor Kennedy. Kennedy picked it up and jabbed Mason’s arm with it in one motion and without a word. Mason watched her squeeze the plunger evenly until she emptied the amber liquid into his arm.

  “Congratulations, Jones,” Kennedy said as she put the syringe back on the tray. “You’re cured.”

  “Huh,” Mason replied unenthusiastically.

  “We’ll consider that productive conversation,” Kennedy said and Mason could see she was smiling by the way her eyes tightened and her cheeks and ears raised behind her mask. Mason wondered if he should know what she was talking about. It was some kind of inside joke, but he hardly remembered her, much less the joke. More memory loss, she had just said. More! How much memory loss had he already suffered?

  Tingling ran up and down his arm. He stared at it, wondering if the pain would return with it. Would the memories return as well?

  “Wendy, let’s get a local ready for this arm,” Kennedy said as she lifted the dressing and peeled back the tape holding the bandage to his skin. She gave Mason a pat on the forearm and walked away.

  The male half-breed continued to glare at Mason through the bars of his cell. Chavez sat on a stool at the bench, an arm on the counter, looking bored. Mason wondered why he was still there. He had a paper cup of coffee beside him, so at some point he had gone and come back.

  “I’ll want to do a comparison of his blood with the half-breed’s as soon as he’s stable,” Kennedy said to the other doctor. “Rudy, do you mind assisting?”

  “Not at all, ma’am,” Chavez replied through a yawn.

  Mason groaned as the tingling in his arm became that lick of fire again. A jolt like lightning struck him suddenly, seizing him so that his whole body went rigid, and in that moment, it seemed as though his skin was being torn from him, that his bones were breaking, that his muscles were flexing so fiercely that they were tearing themselves from their anchors. He let out a wail and closed his tearing eyes.

  In the darkness, he only saw eyes, hundreds and hundreds of eyes glaring at him. He recognized those eyes, the haunting of a hundred restless nights and wandering-minded days, the soldier in Egypt. The one he had been forced to kill. The eyes
struck him like serpents, biting him with teeth like stilettos that injected the poison of remorse and doubt. It was endless, strike after strike hitting him randomly throughout his body. If the burning that engulfed him was an inferno, then these bites were the lashes of the devil himself. Mason’s torment hardly waned except between lashes when he had time to breathe hard and fast through his nose and frothing mouth.

  He felt a tremendous tug on his chin and heard a woman’s voice shouting spit it out over and over again. The bile in his stomach burned his lips and for a moment of lucidity, he realized what was happening. He opened his mouth and spit the bite guard away, heaving up what felt like his own entrails.

  Again, the lashes came, and he seized against the eruptions of pain, for how long he had no idea. They came in waves, each one only mildly more tolerable, which in his state, he attributed only to a dulling of his senses as a whole.

  When it subsided enough that he realized it was fading, he opened his eyes, hoping that the ones that haunted him in his dreams and memories—those of the very devil himself—were gone.

  Kennedy sat in a chair only a few feet away, staring at him with clinical fascination. All he could see were her eyes, how they lacked compassion, how they resembled the eyes of his nightmare. He closed his eyes in an effort to recognize what had tortured him and could only see her eyes glaring at him from the recesses of his mind. Tears fell freely as his lips and jaw trembled with the need to cry.

  “You handled that well,” she said softly. “I think the worst is behind us.”

  Mason opened his eyes only to see the same dark pupils that haunted him from his past staring at him now. Egypt. She was Egypt. How could that be?

  “Wendy, get a rinse bottle for his mouth and a new bite guard, and clean all this up, please. I’ve got to go see the warden. You two can handle things, I assume?”