Greg patted his fingertips together and nodded his head as he appraised his team. They were an impressive trio and he was lucky to have their skills at his disposal. “Okay, well, as you can see from the name on my desk, I am Dr Gregory Penn. My specialities are in Infectious Diseases and Neurology. I’d say that between us we have quite a broad spectrum of knowledge. My previous experience is mostly in emergency medicine and diagnostics. This is my first research post, but I intend to succeed in any and all tasks that we undertake. Every puzzle has a solution and every disease can be understood and controlled.”
The three doctors nodded.
Greg stood up and clapped his hands together. “Okay, show me what you’ve been up to.”
***
“This is the main lab,” said Dr Button as he showed Greg around the most high-tech facilities he had ever seen. The main testing areas were in a separate space, behind thick layers of safety glass and accessed via a series of airlocks and containment areas. Inside, Greg could see row upon rows of biosafety cabinets. On Greg’s side of the glass was a staging area with positive pressure suits and safety monitors.
“We keep strains of the Lassa Virus inside,” Dr Button mentioned. “Along with all other known forms of Haemorrhagic Fever. We are also studying several yet-to-be classified pathogens and a new strain of Necrotizing Fasciitis that is unresponsive to all antibiotics in current use.”
Greg raised an eyebrow. “Jesus! Where did it come from?”
Button cleared his throat. “That’s…a complicated issue.”
Greg folded his arms. “Okay, well, don’t be shy. I’d like to know where the disease was found. It could help understand it.”
Button turned to his colleagues, Fenton and Wilson, and then shrugged. They seemed to defer to him. “I was going to give you a few days to settle in before showing you,” said Button. “But if you insist, follow me.”
Greg followed his team to the back of the laboratory and through a door. Inside was another staging area, with a large steel door blocking entrance to the room beyond. Button tapped a code into a number pad on the wall and the door hissed and opened.
“After you,” said Button, somewhat patronisingly.
Greg chewed at his bottom lip and then stepped through the open door. There was another identical door up ahead. Once the first door was closed, the second one opened. Greg’s stomach turned a little as he anticipated what he was about to see.
But he never expected to find what he did.
In front of him was a large glass cage. Sitting right in the middle, watching a television, was a middle-aged man. He waved when he spotted them.
“You must be, Dr Penn,” said the man in the glass cage. “I’ve been expecting you.”
***
Greg turned to his team. “What the hell is this? Who is this man?” Wilson pursed her lips and looked nervous. Greg realised it was probably due to the tone of his voice having been so aggressive.
“This is Patient WC-00,” Dr Button said. “The first and, currently, only carrier of Welshchild Necrotising Fasciitis.”
Greg spun to face the younger doctor and gave him a stern stare. “There is no such disease.”
“Yes, there is. And you are looking at it.”
Greg looked at the man in the cage with great interest. He was about Greg’s age, but seemed in better shape – like he exercised regularly. The television standing on the desk in front of the man flashed with images from a 24-hour news channel.
“I like to stay abreast of current events,” said the man in the cage as he noticed Greg staring at the television. “Despite having never been a part of them.”
Greg approached the glass. He saw an oxygen scrubber set against the ceiling and realised that the room was completely sterile.
It’s a giant biohazard cabinet.
“How long have you been in there?” Greg asked the man.
“Since shortly after my birth.”
Greg looked at his team and was astonished when they nodded to confirm it.
“Since you were a baby? Why? Why would they keep you here?”
The man stood up from his chair and shrugged. He came closer to the glass. “I have no ideas. Perhaps now that you’re in charge you can finally let me out.”
“Step back from the glass,” Button said.
Greg shook his head. “I’m fine. I want to know why this man has been locked up his entire life.”
Suddenly, the man in the cage leapt the three feet between them and smashed his hands against the reinforced glass.
Greg leapt back, startled.
The man in the cage smiled widely. His teeth were missing, his gums black. “They lock me up,” he growled, “Because I am death itself. I am Plague.”
Button put a hand on Greg’s shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere and I’ll fill you in.”
***
Back in the office, Greg was too wound-up to sit in his chair, so he perched on the edge of his desk while his team stood before him. As usual, Button was the one to do their talking.
“WC-00 was discovered on the 23rd January 1974 in the mountains of North Wales. An earthquake in the area, twinned with a nearby Army training exercise, led to the discovery. A small group of soldiers from the 1stBattalion Parachute Regiment were running fitness assessments for entry into the SAS. They found an abandoned child three-hundred feet above the ground on one of the foothills. The child was healthy, but crying.”
Greg sniffed. “They found a baby just lying there?”
Button shrugged his shoulders. “That’s what the files say. The child was totally abandoned. There was no one for miles around. The army could not explain it, but they took the child back to a base in Hereford. Within twelve hours, everyone that came into contact with the unidentified child was displaying flu-like symptoms. Twenty-four hours later and their bodies began to…peel.”
Greg swallowed a lump in his throat, but then found himself laughing. “Peel? What on earth do you mean?”
Wilson cleared her throat. “There’s a videotape in your desk drawer. You can play it on the console over there.”
Greg looked left and saw a television and tape desk that he hadn’t even realised was there. There was also hardware for DVD, Blu Ray, and a memory card reader. Greg slid open one of the slim, horizontal drawers at the back of his desk and did indeed find a tape. He went over and slid the cassette into the playback machine.
The television fizzed to life.
“What is this? What am I looking at?”
“This was recorded on the military base in Hereford,” Dr Fenton explained. “When people started getting sick, one of the medical staff had the foresight to make a recording.”
The image was grainy and spotted with noise. On a couple of occasions even the vert-hold went awry. What was clear, though, was that the images were coming from a handheld camera inside what appeared to be an infirmary.
A voice narrated from behind the scenes – the voice of the camera operator.
“It has now been approximately eighteen hours since exposure to the Welsh child. Flu-like symptoms have now progressed to something more resembling the flesh-eating nightmares of science fiction. It is like nothing I have ever seen before. Specialists are en route from Porton Down but I fear that it is already too late for us.”
The camera panned around the room and then zoomed in on a bedridden soldier.
As you can see, the flesh of this man’s face is almost completely gone. His jawbone is exposed and his trigeminal nerve is apparent beneath the liquefying flesh. This man is melting alive. I pray that his pain is soon to end. I see no other outcome but to assume that it is.
Greg felt his stomach slosh as the cameraman continued showing scenes of biological devastation. He watched as at least a dozen servicemen lay in their beds, rotting from various parts of their body. One man even had his skeletal leg bones on display beneath his knees. The video ended with the camera man turning the focus on himself – displaying
his own rotting face – and reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
“Jesus Christ,” said Greg, moving around and sitting behind his desk. The wooden barrier made him feel more secure. He realised, as he placed his hands out in front of him, that he was shaking.
“The base was immediately quarantined,” said Button. “If it were not for the case the child was found by the military and taken immediately to a secure medical facility, the affects would have been far worse.”
“Catastrophic,” Fenton added. “The infection rate of exposure to the Welsh Child was 100%. survival rate: zero.”
“No disease has a total kill rate. Not a single plague know to man.”
“This one does,” said Fenton. “But only with phase one exposure.”
“What do you mean?”
“In tests, only subjects exposed to WC-00 directly displayed a 100% death rate. Of the test subjects exposed to infected patients, only 50% were symptomatic. They still contracted the virus and carried it, but it was dormant in their bodies – yet still highly infectious. On the other hand, those with symptoms, which eventually led to their deaths, were not at all symptomatic.”
Greg rubbed a finger down the length of his nose and thought about what that meant. “So…those who were dying were not contagious, yet those who appeared healthy were? That would make it nearly impossible to contain if it entered the general population. There would be no way of telling who was passing it on to whom.”
“Exactly,” said Button. “Which is why WC-00 is probably the most dangerous human being on the planet. If he ever escaped…”
Greg nodded. He understood what it would mean. “So…this man, this WC-00, is one of the asymptomatic carriers?”
“No,” said Button. “He is something else entirely.”
“What do you mean?”
“He carries the virus, yes, and is extremely contagious, but he is not like the other carriers. The disease is present in his body on a genetic level. Almost as though he were engineered to carry the virus in his DNA.”
Greg huffed. “You’re talking about genetic engineering…in the 1970s? That’s preposterous.”
“Perhaps, but every test we have done on WC-00’s tissue samples suggest that the virus is as much a part of his make-up as amino acids and mitochondria. He literally is the virus, in human form.”
“I am plague,” said Greg, remembering what the man had said to him.
“He says that a lot,” said Wilson. She scratched at her forehead and let out a long sigh. “Since his isolation began, ongoing efforts have been made to socialise and enrich his existence, but in recent years he has begun to take on characteristics of-”
“Dementia,” Greg guessed. “I’m not surprised. He’s been locked in a glass cube his entire life. Has he ever even felt the touch of another human being?”
“Only when he was retrieved from the Welsh foothills,” said Fenton. “The level 5 Bio Hazard protocols were created purely to house him. He’s never left that room. Anyone that goes in must exercise extreme caution. Full safety measures.”
“What about when he gets sick? How has he been kept healthy this whole time?”
“There has been no need,” Button said. “His immune system is like nothing we have ever seen. He’s never been sick a day in his life. Not even a cold.”
Greg shook his head. “Well, I’m not surprised in an isolation chamber. He’s probably never been exposed to anything. I was thinking more about internal disorders.”
“You don’t understand,” said Button, somewhat condescendingly. “We have intentionally exposed him to all kinds of pathogens, from the common cold to smallpox. His immune system dismantled every single attack.”
Greg’s eyes went wide. The man was a miracle – if they could ever discover the reason for his total immunity…harness that knowledge in some way…
“Wait,” said Greg. “What about his teeth. They were rotted and missing.”
“Auto-immune response. The antibodies in his saliva are so aggressive that they attracted the bacteria growing on the surface of his teeth until there was nothing left but stumps. We serve him his nutrients in liquid-form now.”
Greg sighed. “No human being should have to live like that.”
“Many would agree with you,” said Fenton, finding his voice, “but those in charge are just taking the only option available. The real blame should be with whatever terrorist created WC-00.”
“You think terrorists are responsible?”
Fenton shrugged. “Some may have other opinions, but I see no other answers. Somebody was supposed to find WC-00 and contract the disease, before spreading it. It was only supremely good fortune that led to a safe quarantine.”
“Three hundred and sixty-eight people were dead within thirty-six hours of the child being found. If the disease had gotten outside that base, you and I would not be standing here. We would all be dead, or not even born.”
Greg leant back in his chair and held his breath. He concentrated on the pressure building within his chest and then finally let the air out. If WC-00 ever got out, then humanity would die out to the tune of 50%. More than three billion people. And he was now the man in charge of that never happening. Several hours ago, he had no idea that the destruction of mankind was being housed in a glass cage below the British countryside. Now that he knew, he envied the ignorance he would never again have the luxury of having.
I wonder what other secrets this chamber of horrors contains.
Guess I’ll find out.
***
After only three days, Greg had discovered all sorts of uncategorised biological nasties. The underground ‘Level 5’ lab housed methods of killing the world a hundred times over. It was a good thing that the facility was one of the most secure in the world. It would probably even put the American labs to shame.
Still, despite all that he had seen, Greg’s mind kept wandering back to WC-00 – or Welshchild as his team referred to him sometimes. He couldn’t believe that some unknown man of science had once engineered and condemned a new born child to a life of isolation – with the original intention being the semi-extinction of mankind. Welshchild’s very existence was a tragedy. And it was something the world would never know
about. The man would spend every minute of the rest of his life inside a glass cage.
Greg lay back in the king-sized bed of his underground apartment and stared at the whizzing ceiling fan. It reminded him of the wheels on a speeding car; something he would not see again for the next three years.
After the breakup of his marriage, the chance to get away had seemed ideal, but now Greg felt like he was in a tomb and surrounded by agents of death. The only thing keeping him sane was the work – the thrill of being at the cutting edge of epidemiology. His efforts at the facility could directly influence the future of the world and its ongoing battle against infection. If he ever found a way to replicate WC-00’s superior immune system, he would win a noble prize at the very least.
He’s the priority here. He’s a unique human being. The things he could teach us…
But in forty years no one has been able to do anything but contain him.
That’s exactly why this could my chance to make a difference. Maybe I could even find a cure for the disease. I could allow that poor man to finally step outside and smell the fresh air.
Or am I just dreaming?
Greg hopped up off the bed and walked across the bedroom. He had no idea what time it was, but he wasn’t feeling sleepy. He would go back to work until he was.
Being underground meant that time lost its importance. People worked when they were awake and rested when they needed to. It was a system that worked well. People were more productive when they could work to their natural rhythms. There were no early mornings and late nights, just work and rest entwined.
Greg threw on some clothes from the built in wardrobes and headed out of his apartment. The outside corridor led back to the labs and the air-locked areas. He could also get
to WC-00’s containment cell, which was his destination. He wanted to talk to the man, find out as much as he could.
Discover his secrets.
Inside the main lab, Button was working busily away. Out of the members of Greg’s team, Button seemed the most resistant to downtime. The man ate at his desk and slept via short naps of only twenty or thirty minutes at a time. Greg both admired and pitied his dedication.
“Dr Penn, sir? Can I help you with anything?”
“No, I’m just off to see WC-00.”
Button swivelled slightly on his chair and frowned at Greg. “There’s nothing we can do for him, or with him.”
“But to not try would be inhuman. The man deserves to have someone fighting to give him a normal life.”
“He’ll never have a normal life…and he’s not human. No one raised in such an environment could be considered as such.”
Greg nodded. “But that is our doing, not his.”
Dr Button swivelled back around and faced his computer. With a weary voice, he said, “Just be careful. WC-00 has a way of getting inside your head. He’s best left alone.”
Greg didn’t exactly understand what that meant, but he nodded and said, “I’ll take it under advisement, Dr Button.”
Greg headed through the lab and typed in the key code needed to enter the containment cell. The door hissed open and he stepped through into the airlock, before passing through into the next room.
WC-00 sat in the centre of his glass cage as he always did whenever he did not have company. When he saw Greg appear, he waved a hand dismissively and turned back to whatever he was watching.
Greg stepped up close to the glass and sat down on the chair he had placed there a day earlier. “Hello,” he said as he got comfortable.
WC-00 kept his eyes on the television. “What do you want?”
“I just wanted to see how you were doing?”
“I woke up. Exercised for one hour. Ate breakfast. Switched the television on. Later I will have dinner and then go to sleep. Tomorrow I will do the exact same thing again. That will be my life until the moment I pass my final breath. I pray that it is sooner rather than later.”
The BIG Horror Pack 2 Page 124
