Hell on Earth (Zombie Apocalypse Series Book 7)

by Jeff DeGordick

  Glass released his control on David and all of the zombies in each of the cells lowered their arms and snapped out of their dazes. David snapped out of his too and began to mindlessly meander around the crimson cell.

  "How many can he reach at a time?" Glass asked Ron.

  "After we complete the final testing phase, I'm not sure it would be necessary to discuss a limit."

  Glass grinned so widely that the sides of his mask stretched out a little. "That's good for today," he said. "Get him cleaned up."

  Ron nodded. An aide walked up to him and handed him a glass tube filled with liquid, then Ron walked over and inserted it into a panel on the cell.

  Mist entered the violent interior and dispersed through the air, though it was hard to see through the red-painted walls. All of the zombies inside relaxed severely, their heads dipping down like they had all fallen asleep on the spot.

  Ron opened the cell door and the gore dripped down the inside of it onto the clean tile on the outside of the cell. His aide handed him the pole with the rubber loop on the end that he slipped over David's neck and tightened. He carefully led David through the door and along the aisle of cells, David leaving a trail of bloody footprints and drips. He walked him off to the wash stations at the edge of the lab, leaving Glass to wander in the other direction between the cells.

  He washed David off then gave him a change of clothes, the small boy looking like he was drugged on his feet the entire time and practically unresponsive. Ron pulled a syringe out of his lab coat pocket and injected it into David's arm. He looked over his shoulder then pulled the needle out and disposed of it.

  "Hang in there, David," he whispered so quietly he could barely hear himself say it. "You're going to be a normal boy again real soon."

  At the other end of the lab, Glass made his way over to the rows of test tubes, a fresh breed of zombie filling each one. His eyes glanced from one to another, looking at their suspended bodies in the bubbling liquid. The newest batch were complete and in their final gestation period. Specimens from the batch had already been tested and shown that the new alterations to their muscle fibers were more effective than expected; now their muscle fibers acted like the woven fibers in body armor, and they would stop most bullets and sometimes even a knife from getting through. Even their bone chemistry was changed, creating denser bones—especially the skull—to make it much harder to pierce through to the brain and kill them. With these new technologies and his total mind control over all of them, he would be unstoppable.

  A soldier suddenly marched up behind him. "Sir, we have reports of possible intruders at the entrance to the sewer system," he said.

  "Are they still there?" Glass asked.

  "No, sir. They ran off immediately when one of our men spotted them. But he didn't get a good look at them. He thinks there were two or three."

  Glass smirked. "Sarah and Wayne..." he rasped.

  "Should I order additional security in the tunnels, sir?"

  "No need," Glass said. "I've got something else in mind."

  Glass broke away from the soldier and strode back into the cellblock. He stopped at number forty-eight and peered inside.

  A single zombie stood in the middle of the cell, with long and greasy jet-black hair rolling down in patches from his head to his shoulders. He raised his head and stared at Glass.

  After waiting so long in captivity, the killer that had stalked Sarah and put her through hell was ready for his second chance.

  His eyes went wide and crazy, and a big, demented smile stretched across his face.

  6

  COMING CLEAN

  The beam of the flashlight stretched down the tunnel, the batteries weak and its light waning.

  "Crap," Sarah muttered. She smacked the end of it and the light flickered into a respectable intensity; enough to get them through the tunnel, anyway.

  She and Wayne trudged through the tunnel that Ron had originally led her through. Sarah warned him beforehand and he wore boots this time as the water churned above their ankles. And he'd been mighty grateful for the foreknowledge and dry socks, too.

  They passed through the small room with the dangling chains, heading into the final stretch and coming out on the dry and elevated floor of the room just before the secret passageway.

  "At least this tunnel smells better than the other one," Wayne commented.

  "It's a lot nicer once you get inside," Sarah remarked. "I just hope it's still intact; I assume Ron wanted me to come back here. Or maybe this is all just my crazy wishful thinking."

  "I guess we'll find out."

  Sarah pressed her hand against the brick wall in front of them, searching around for the right brick to open the door.

  "What are you doing?" Wayne asked, hearing the soft slapping sound.

  "There's a switch somewhere around here," she said. "But I could never remember which one it is." She continued searching for it, pressing her fingers on some of the bricks, and sometimes just slapping her whole hand around. The longer it took, the more her heart sank, wondering if the entire place had somehow been sealed off and the secret door didn't work anymore. But just before her hopes were completely dashed, she felt a brick that seemed to have a little give in it. She pressed it harder with all of her fingertips and the brick slid back a half an inch. The first door of the secret passageway slid open with a rumble and the sound of grating stone, and Sarah guided Wayne inside.

  "After you," she said.

  "What am I getting myself into?" he asked, apprehensive.

  "Don't worry, it's just as dark to me as it is to you," Sarah said.

  "That's what I'm afraid of."

  Wayne shuffled forward, jumping a little when the wall slid back into place behind them, just as Sarah had done the first time she came through here. They bumped along until Wayne's cane collided with the wall at the far end.

  He stopped and swung the cane to his left and right and found similar dead ends. "What now?"

  Sarah slipped past him, cringing as she slipped her hand into the crack at the top of the wall. She never had to open this door herself, and she still didn't want to know what creepy crawlies lay in the little crevice waiting for her. At first, all she felt was the delicate and skin-crawling feeling of strings of spider webbing touching her hand, then her fingers came across something that seemed more like a traditional button hidden away in the tiny space. She depressed it and the wall in front of them opened.

  The bright lights of the lab poured into the passageway, and Sarah was surprised to see that the power was still on.

  As she shepherded Wayne into the lab and looked around, she was next surprised that it seemed like everything was intact; in fact, it appeared that Ron and Glass had simply just abandoned this site immediately after the attack and never returned.

  "Where are we?" Wayne asked.

  "We're in the lab. It looks like it's still running." Sarah took a quick walk around and stopped dead in her tracks as her heart leapt into her throat.

  The bodies of the seven scientists were still lying on the floor in dried pools of their own blood, just the way Glass had left them. And the finally-dead corpse of the zombie they had used as a test subject still lay on the floor inside the cell amidst the shattered glass.

  "Are you okay?" Wayne called. "I thought I heard you make a noise."

  "It's nothing," she said, moving back to the other half of the lab and forcing herself not to look back.

  She inspected all the machinery and equipment around her, suddenly overwhelmed by it all. When she had been hanging out with the scientists and curiously watching them work, she hadn't a single clue what any of the devices or instruments did, and even though Ron had sprinkled a few leads for her to follow, she had no idea how to start any of it, let alone how to actually complete the project.

  "Hello Sarah," a voice said from behind them.

  They spun around and Wayne held up his came in defense, even though he couldn't see who'd snuck up on them.

  R
on smiled at Sarah, his head big and bulbous and stretched out across the security screen. The video blocked out the camera feeds that had still been operational when they came in, and Sarah realized now that it must have come on on its own.

  She tried talking back to Ron, at first thinking that it was some kind of live feed, but when he obliviously talked over her, she realized it was just a recording.

  Ron appeared to be sitting in a forest somewhere. There was a strong sound of flowing water somewhere near him, and she guessed that he was close to a creek somewhere. Thin rays of sunshine rained down on his bald head and made the rims of his glasses glint. He held a warm smile on his face, the same kind of smile that she was used to seeing when she had first met him—not the kind after he supposedly betrayed her. As he sat there beaming at the camera, tears started to well up in his eyes, and he lifted his glasses and wiped them away.

  "It's so good to know you're watching this video. And if you're indeed watching this, it means that Mr. Glass has entered the final phase of producing his army, and it also means that... I'm the only scientist left of the original group."

  Fresh tears streamed out of his eyes and he wiped them away again.

  "They were all fine people, and I'll be sad to see them go. But each one of them knew what they were signing up for; it's for the greater good. At the time of this recording, you've just uploaded a virus into Glass's network, and we're still looking for a source of one of the final things we need to complete the project. No, it's not glutamic acid, as I'm sure you've already figured out by now. It's triiodothyronine. And if you're watching this video, it means your final mission with Trevor was a success and you got the chemical. If you could open up a time portal and communicate back to me now and tell me where we ended up finding it, I would greatly appreciate it," he said with a chuckle. "We think we have a lead through one of Glass's own productions, but I can't do much snooping around, even on the inside. Mr. Glass watches absolutely everything we do, and if we make a single move too suspicious at all, it could ruin the years we've invested in the Eden Project. The true Eden Project.

  "As I'm sure you figured out by now, the Eden Project that we revealed to you at the end of it was not the true version. As far as Glass knew, the entire project was done with you as the central test subject to study your genetic code and find out how you have the ability to control zombies locked away deep inside of you, and how you were able to pass it on to your son, David. But in actuality, your son already contained all the necessary information we needed to complete Glass's mind control project; I lied to him and told him that only you held the true progenitor sequence, and that we needed to study you. The real reason I needed you to be a part of this project was because you have another ability in your genetic code that wasn't passed on to your son: complete and total immunity from the zombie virus. So while Glass thought we were stringing you along to use your genetic sequence to complete his project, we were actually keeping you around to complete our true aim.

  "I wasn't lying to you when I said that our small team of scientists had been working on the cure for cancer many years ago. What I didn't tell you was that Mr. Glass was a part of that project. The Department of Defense funded our experiments, and he was our point of contact in dealing with the military brass. He oversaw all of our findings, and he personally took a keen interest in the project. Eventually, as we had developed a cure, he heavily integrated himself into the project. But he had some shady operations on the side, and that led to him having his accident, leaving severe burns to his entire body. But despite the potential firestorm of one of the Marines' own men being caught in illicit activities, he was a great asset to his commanding officers, and they weren't willing to let him go. So they brought him to us. His vital signs were extremely weak, but we worked around the clock, discovering that there was a similar link between the work we were doing with cancer and the idea behind regeneration of tissue. So over the next two years, we adapted our project to go even further; we wanted to create not only total immunity to disease, but also advanced biological healing abilities in subjects. He was our human guinea pig in that time, and not only were we able to save his life... something that I regret to this day... but he started to show progress as our project morphed. We were able to regenerate much of his tissue from its worst state, but as we neared the end of our project and we were truly on the verge of the breakthrough we sought, Glass suddenly wasn't interested in regeneration anymore. He had other aims.

  "All he became interested in was the cancer aspect of the project. Specifically the cancer cells themselves. He saw how we modified some of them in order to test our cure, and that sparked an insidious idea in him. Before we knew it, he changed our whole mission statement and turned our project into the unholy opposite of what was originally intended; he wanted us to highly radicalize and weaponize the augmented cancer cells, finding new ways to overcome the body's defenses without killing it. Of course, none of us wanted to go through with this, but he gave us an ultimatum: either we do it, or he would kill all of us and find a new team of scientists who would carry on the project. I don't fancy myself to be the greatest scientific mind on the planet, much to my dismay, so I knew that if we refused and died in symbolic opposition, the evil work would be carried on without us." Ron began to tear up again. "I don't condone what I did next, and nothing can ever atone for it, but my team and I agreed to go through with it with the thinking that if we were in control of the project, maybe we could eventually subvert it and stop him. What happened to the world and all the people in it is directly our fault. God have mercy on us..."

  His eyes were beet-red now. But he stifled his tears and continued on.

  "That brings us to today, or whatever today it is in which you're watching this video. This project was carefully designed by us toward the end of it when we recruited you to be a dual project with a dual purpose. Each item or task that you and Trevor acquired or completed had a secondary item or task to go along with it. Both projects luckily used much of the same equipment, so suspicion hasn't been aroused thus far. But if we just went off and started acquiring items that weren't relevant to Glass's mind control project, the jig would have been up. So we duplicated the items; when you and Trevor went to the hospital to get the fMRI camera, he also quietly collected other equipment that would have seemed out of place in Glass's project. When I had you go to the outpost and download those files, that wasn't the only thing you did; you were in fact uploading a virus into his grand computer network. It's what's allowing you to watch this video right now without him knowing about it; he was watching and listening to every second of what went on in that lab you're standing in, and he was listening to each one of us no matter where we went."

  Ron turned his head to the side and pulled away his earlobe so the camera could see behind it. That same short white scar that Carly had behind her ear was etched into Ron's skin. That had been where Glass sliced a small opening in Carly and inserted the transmitter when she was unconscious, allowing them to track her location and listen in on her conversations.

  "The whole scientific team had them installed to keep them in line," Ron continued. "Though their fate was still sealed from the start. Glass is a very careful man, sometimes to his own detriment, and he will decide he only needs me. If you've been wondering why everyone has been so glum in the lab, it's because they all know they have a death warrant hanging above their head. But we've made preparations to ensure that the lab won't be destroyed after his mind control project is completed, and since you're watching this, then that too is a testament that everything went as planned.

  "The computer virus you uploaded had to be done at a lightly-guarded outpost; if I had tried to upload it myself through any access point, Glass would have known, so that's why I needed to guide you to the tiniest, most bare-bones outpost that still had a link to his network. That way I made it seem like I was running you around and keeping you busy, grabbing a couple of insignificant files, but Glass wouldn't notice the covert
worm virus that you uploaded. He had a direct feed on the lab, and he could monitor any activity that came from there. But I designed the virus to activate the next time the doors to the lab opened after our exodus. Right now the signal is jammed, keeping him from monitoring what's going on there, and it will stay that way unless he discovers the virus. But I don't think that will be a problem. I'm currently jamming the signal that my transmitter is operating on right now through a different means. It's what's allowing me to make this video right now and give you the instructions you need to complete the true Eden Project. My signal can't be cut out from his network for long before he becomes suspicious, and I've blathered on enough already, so I'll try to keep the rest brief.

  "There was one final piece to the Eden Project that we needed but still didn't get at the time of your viewing."

  "The hormone inhibitor..." Sarah muttered as her gaze was transfixed to the screen.

  "I bet you said the hormone inhibitor," Ron said with a chuckle. "Was that what made you come here in the first place? I hope it was. We needed one last mysterious item that remained uncollected so it would stick in the back of your mind. If I laid my clues properly, it led you back here to see this and now that you're here, that means that it's the only thing left. This time there's no dual-purpose; you'll have to get in, grab it, and get out. But whatever you do, don't let Glass know why you were there, otherwise this whole thing can yet be sunk. But I have ultimate faith in you, Sarah." His rosy cheeks beamed at her. "The final thing you need to finish the project is something called 'galanin'. It's a neuropeptide that inhibits certain hormones in the body that will be necessary to overcome this terrible disease that we've created. It will also take care of the advanced regeneration that I talked about. There's a small base several miles south of where you are. Mr. Glass uses it to train his soldiers and do some small experiments on his men. But while the place may be small, it's heavily guarded. The galanin you're looking for should come in a box that you'll find in a small medical office on the property. Here are the coordinates to the training facility..."