by A. Giacomi
I collapse to the ground, feeling as though someone had sucked my soul through my mouth. I feel weak and stumble as I glance back at Cam who is now wide-eyed and much further from me than before.
“What happened I ask him? Are we onto the next question?”
It takes him a moment to form a sentence and he seems a bit uneasy as he spits out the next few words. “Umm yeah…next question…right…can I go to the bathroom at some point?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CAM
To say that Agent Williams had lost his marbles would be an understatement. He was a whole other person these days. His body reeked of death; his skin peeled and rotted more and more with every hour that passed. He was falling apart.
The new voice he was trying on was just as terrifying as the mask that covered his face. I knew what lurked beneath, he no longer had a nose, and when I looked at the surgical mask it seemed to fuse with his skin, which only meant that removing it would peel away a lot more than he intended. I try not to hurl as I pee into a bush near the van. Agent Williams had allowed me a bathroom break, but he wouldn’t allow me to venture out too far. I mean for god sakes the men in the van could most likely see my junk from here. As I continue my steady stream, I try to think my way out of this mess. I needed to escape. I needed to warn Eve. I couldn’t trust Agent Williams or whoever he was. What if they were planning on raising an entire army using my blood? What guarantee did I have? His word? That was good for nothing.
As I jiggle and dry, I feel something move in my sock. The knife. I had stored it there for quite some time now and had forgotten all about it. It was small enough to forget about, but it would still be effective. I zip up and decide some acting was in order, I had never been a good actor, but I always did slapstick well. I pretend to stumble, almost as though there was a small drop in front of me. I fall clumsily into the tall grass that shields me from their view.
“Help!” I yell out in invented agony. “I think I twisted my ankle.”
I pull the knife out of my sock and ready myself for what I must do next. I wasn’t a fan of violence, but desperate times…
One of Agent Williams’ henchmen yells out to me, “Get your ass up and get back here!”
“Didn’t you hear me? I’m hurt! I can’t get up…something’s broken.” I spit out trying to make the agony sound as believable as possible.
I hear one of the men mumble, “Son of a…” and then footsteps whooshing through the tall grass follow. Perhaps this was going to work. I just hoped to hell he had a gun on him; that was part two of my plan. Grab gun and fire like a crazy person as I retreat and go as far in the opposite direction as I can, but I was getting ahead of myself. I had to focus on right now.
Lying very still in the grass I hold the knife against my chest pointing upwards ready to meet flesh. The footsteps are mere seconds away. My heart races, I wasn’t built for this. “Man up,” I tell myself just as the man’s face appears through the tall grass.
My knife is hidden by the grass, I just needed him to get down to my level in order to use it.
“Oww, ow,” I say pitifully, “My ankle, what did I do to it?”
My capture grunts and crouches down to take a look at my ankle.
He doesn’t even have time to realize my intentions until the knife finds his throat.
I press the knife so deep into his throat that I fear it might come out the other end. He gurgles and grabs at his throat in his last few moments. I am grateful for his rather silent departure, his partner, however, is quite disturbed by the sudden silence and lack of motion that he begins to call out to us.
“Hey…hey guys? Is everything alright? Guys?”
When he hears no reply I hear someone charging through the blades of grass again. I would not have time to retrieve my first victim’s gun, so I do something a lot less appealing. The little knife had done its job, but I would need it once more. I dig my fingers into the man’s gooey throat and pull out the rather sharp knife, readying it for job number two.
“What the fuck?” the man says as he discovers his colleague’s body soaked in his own blood. “What the fuck did you do?”
He angrily points his gun at me, his anger makes him shake, and I dared not move for a few seconds. Instead, I analyze him and try to find a moment of weakness. The moment comes as he glances down at his now deceased friend. He is overcome with emotion, but does not cry, clearly, they were close. I am sorry for that, but since they weren’t going to help me, I had to help me. I hold up my knife once more and without hesitation grab the arm holding the gun and aim it high while my other hand plunges the knife through his ribcage hopefully puncturing a lung.
The man collapses and starts to wheeze. I take this opportunity to locate their guns and make sure there were ample bullets.
Just as I am about to retreat, the wheezing man grabs at my ankles. I look into his eyes and see a sort of pleading. I wasn’t proud of this moment, two lives were gone and it had been my doing. Nothing about this new world seemed right. It was kill or be killed.
The man’s hands loosen their grip, he is gone, another corpse amongst the already dead. As I am about to dart off into the sunset, I find myself face to face with Agent Williams.
I nearly scream at the sight of him.
“Where do you think you’re going, Cameron Jackson?” he says tilting his head.
I point one of the guns at him. “I’m leaving; I’m not going to be the pawn in whatever game you’re playing. So back aside, or I will have to blow your brains out.”
Agent Williams begins laughing hysterically, like a mad man.
“What’s so funny?” I snort back at him.
“Funny? No, no, nothing’s funny…it’s just how do you expect to get away? How long do you think you can stay hidden? A day, a week, a year even? Wherever you go, you will be hunted, by me or my men.”
“I’m going to take that chance,” I say as I fire aiming for his chest.
The blast hits him dead center, knocking him back a few feet. I don’t bother checking on him. This is my time to run. I take to sprinting through the trees until I find another road beyond them. The road is empty, barren, just like everywhere else these days, abandoned. I try to imagine cars whizzing by as the sky grows dimmer, creating a sea of comets racing past me. I jut out my thumb for nostalgic purposes and chuckle to myself like an insane person. Hitchhikers were a thing of the past anyway. Ever since horror movies began to portray them as dangerous, and sure some of them were, no one dared pick up a stranger. I guess that’s why they made hitchhiking illegal eventually; putting your thumb out there could land you a fine or jail time. There was no threat of that tonight, I put away my thumb and continue down the vacant roads hoping to stumble upon a vehicle that might still have some gas in it. Perhaps luck would find me, and if not, I suppose I still had legs, and I was grateful to just be able to keep on moving and put distance between myself and Agent Williams.
***
It was only as the sun began to rise that I realized that I had been walking all night. I suppose that was why my feet felt as though they were bleeding. I glance around looking for somewhere to rest; instead I find a sign saying Cameron Lake 20 Km, Fenelon Falls 15 Km. It felt fated, that the sign had been intended for me and me alone, after all, my name sat atop the sign, what better signal could the universe be sending me?
The rest of my walk is spent in childhood memories; the last time I had been to Fenelon Falls was when I was four or five years old. It was one of my earliest memories. I remember being happy, my parents smiling, perhaps this was the place I was meant to go? To find safety perhaps? “Snap out of it, Cam,” I tell myself. There was no such thing as safe anymore. I had to be prepared for anything.
***
When I reach Fenelon Falls it is just as I expect it to look. Beautiful but abandoned. I couldn’t be sure if anyone was lurking
around, but I decide to scope out some of the homes in the community, perhaps they were all empty and I could take my pick of comfortable spots to sleep.
I decide that one of the homes just off of the main road into town would suffice. The oldest looking home on the street calls to me. The front door is open, signifying that the previous residents had left in such hurry that locking the door seemed unnecessary. As I continue my tour of the house I hear a creaking behind me. Whipping my head around rapidly, I scan the empty space behind me, but not a single soul is there. As I’m about to turn around something metal makes contact with my face. I grunt dizzily and collapse as tiny stars dance before my eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
DR. AUGUST
With the facility slowly becoming overrun with zombies, it was time to vacate the underground lair that CSIS had forced me to call home for the past few years. Each new zombie we discovered was just another addition to the lie we had all been fed. Vallincourt had promised that one or perhaps two humans had been experimented on and given the Azrael Virus for testing. They had sworn to us that neither of the specimens were good people, former criminals, as they say, but that became hard to believe as I came face to face with a nine-year-old zombie that still wore their pajamas. I feel nauseated for a whole other reason as I stare at the small zombie girl, she might have been stolen from her bed just so they would be able to test and see how the virus interacted with a specimen so young. It was most unfair, and had I known Vallincourt’s intentions, I would have tried to stop him sooner.
Tears find me as I watch the young girl on the security screen stumble in her zombie-like fashion through a crowd of other zombies that surpassed her in height.
Agent Murray voices those very thoughts. “It’s not right is it?”
“No. none of this is right. These were innocent people…she…” The words escape me, my ignorance became too heavy, and I felt guilty, as though I had infected the girl myself.
Agent Murray aids me in completing my thought.
“She’s just a girl. How could those monsters do this?” she says slamming her fists on one of the desks. “They’re supposed to be CSIS agents god dammit, they’re job is to protect these people. What monster is responsible for all this?”
“I believe it was Vallincourt who began this testing, but he certainly must have had help. I don’t know if Agent Williams helped him at first, but definitely, after being infected he became more of Vallincourt’s lap dog until he killed him of course.”
“Do you have evidence of that?” Agent Murray pleads.
“No, unfortunately, it’s only hearsay, but when a man that powerful goes missing and no one is held accountable for it. It reeks of conspiracy, someone on the inside took him out, and someone on the outside covered it up. How else would one get away without an inquiry?”
“It’s also really hard to have a case when there’s nobody,” Mina says shrugging.
I turn my attention back to the many screens at the front of the security room. The steady flow of zombies through the corridors proved that not two, but nearly two dozen zombies wandered the halls, and that was not including those we had already disposed of.
We needed to wait for a clearing in order to head back to the room I had shown Special Agent Murray earlier. The room held a very special parcel that we would need in order to get through to Eve. This parcel could perhaps explain many things and be the answer we had been looking for.
As the seconds turn to hours, Mina finally points out that the zombies had dispersed enough to grant us safe passage back. “Let’s move,” she says as she ready’s her gun and hands me mine. I didn’t like using a gun very much, but these were different times, and if I wanted to make myself useful I would have to at least be able to protect someone, mainly Agent Murray.
We push our way out of the room. It takes quite a bit of force to shove the pile of bodies out of the way in front of the perfectly sealed doors.
“Come on, Doctor! This way…” Agent Murray cries out.
I take a deep breath and then enter the hallway behind Mina. The once white hallways seem darker now, dimer, especially now that the scientists had left as well as Vallincourt’s men. There was no reason left to stay, but one.
***
When we reach the room where I had discovered the pod, we are content to find it undisturbed. I enter the room first and make my way toward the small pod at the center of it. A single pane of glass separated me from the precious cargo within.
“Surely people must have known she was here?” Agent Murray asks.
“I don’t think so, or else she would have been removed from the facility long ago. I suspect that Agent Williams might not even know about this.”
I leave Agent Murray staring into the pod as I search the room for any information that might have been left behind during the evacuation that Agent Williams had enforced. Surely he wouldn’t have left his child if he had known she was still alive?
In one of the glass cabinets on the wall, I find vials of blood samples and a small notebook. I greedily grab the notebook and began to peruse the pages, absorbing everything I can as quickly as possible. Merely a few pages in I find something shocking, it takes me by surprise and I gasp as I drop the notebook to the floor, alerting Mina to my state of total and other disbelief.
“What is it, Dr. August? What did you find?”
“It seems that this notebook belonged to the crazy doctor that Agent Williams had hired…but what shocks me is that not everything in this experiment was reported to Agent Williams.”
He really had been a crazy doctor in it for himself; the only loyalty he ever showed was to his experiments. Not Agent Williams, and I suppose that was what got him killed.
I pick up the notebook and begin to read parts of the research to Mina:
“Day 5, Agent Williams has requested that I use his DNA along with Eve’s. He’s much too daft to understand my work, and that dead plus dead equals dead. The math is simple. I will need a living specimen to complete fertilization. I was asked to complete a similar task back in Europe and succeeded. I will not be following Agent Williams’ request, nor does he need to know this. As far as Williams is concerned he is 100% the father of this hybrid baby.”
Mina looks as sick to her stomach as I feel. “They had been experimenting on that girl? Had they forced a pregnancy? This breaks all sorts of human rights laws.”
“I’m not sure any of this would hold up in court Mina. Human rights would necessitate her being human, something she no longer is. I feel ill that she will never see any justice for this. They used her.”
I’m barely keeping it together, but I force myself to continue reading, we needed the answers and we needed to move quickly.
I skip further ahead in the journal and find “Day 170: The baby is not responding well. I will have to extract it prematurely. My goal is to deliver it and immediately inject it with a freezing serum. I need the child to appear deceased in order to convince Agent Williams that it didn’t make it. This will allow me to experiment further. I will keep the child alive for further testing. I do plan to attempt it again as soon as Agent William’s gives the go ahead. His desire for fatherhood has overcome his senses and this will work to my advantage. I’m sure I will be able to convince him to hand over Eve for another month or so. As for Eve, I’m not sure she will be so agreeable the second time; she warmed up to it but had to be sedated for most of the process. If this premature child survives, it is sure to be an intriguing species. Half human, half zombie. It’s a shame Cameron and Eve will never meet her, she really is quite astonishing, quite special if I may say so myself.”
I gag at the inventor admiring his own invention. He was a Dr. Frankenstein of sorts, playing god and never worrying about the consequences.
“Dear god!” Agent Murray gasps as she places her hand on the small pod that contains Cameron and Eve’s offs
pring.
I walk over and join her in admiring the small miracle. The infant is clearly in a frozen state and I’m unsure what turning off the machines will do to her, so I continue to read on in the journal, hoping to come upon some helpful hints.
“Day 175: The infant will need some minor surgery. Its heart is failing, favouring the virus. I need to find a way to prevent the virus from entering the heart or else the hybrid will cease to exist and will become a full zombie in no time. I discovered a red glowing rock about a month ago and chiseled off a very small sliver of it; having full clearance in the building certainly is a perk. I read Dr. August’s research notes on the stone, calling it the Eye of Ra, and that it could lure or deter zombies. It is worth seeing if it would deter the virus away from the heart. My goal is to take a small piece of the Eye of Ra and implant it directly into the infant’s heart if I fail, no harm no foul. No one knows she’s still alive anyway.”
“No, no, no!” I say in frustration. I look closer into the small glass case, and there it was, very dimly glowing. A faint red glow appeared in the centre of the child’s chest. She held a part of the stone that could never be removed, and the world could not be saved without the Eye of Ra intact and returned to the Dark Lord. I didn’t even begin to know how to explain this all to Agent Murray. Should I tell her that Satan himself requested that the stone be returned, that a sacrifice, meaning Cameron, should be paid? I didn’t even know what this would mean for the child. Would she then be claimed by the Dark Lord?
