Golgotha: Prequel to S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND series (S. W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND companion title Book 1)

by Saul Tanpepper

  “Ah, I can see the excipient has thawed. Quicker than I had expected. It’s warmer in here than I might have preferred. I suppose that means the turning process will also go quicker, not that it matters much, just that I will have less time to finish explaining what Daniels did.

  “What exactly was it? That is a tricky question, but only because I don’t know all the specifics. The government is evasive. Unsurprisingly so. But I have my sources, and they’ve relayed to me all I need to be assured that my suspicions are not baseless. I have obtained samples of their materials and run my own analyses. In my records is the proof I need to expose the government of its deception. All of it.

  “Here now: I am initiating the injection process. The time is…nine-twenty three p.m.”

  [click]

  “Placing the vial into the admixture chamber, and…there we go. Mixing. After I have become infected, I estimate that I will have somewhere in the vicinity of eight to twelve hours before the virus accumulates in my body to sufficient levels to infiltrate every cell, every tissue. I have carefully calculated the number of infectious particles needed, given the activity of this particular batch we have made. I estimate loss of consciousness at about sixteen hours. After the virus is fully incorporated, my cortical functions will shut down, somewhere around the twenty-hour mark by my calculations. Minutes later, the final stage: death. Twenty hours, give or take three hours. I will explain fully shortly.”

  [click…whir…click]

  “Time of injection will be nine-thirty-two p.m.”

  [There then come several seconds of muffled sounds and a whirring noise accompanied by a mechanical clicking; this is followed by a quick hiss, like that of escaping gas; Doctor Daniels will explain to the staff assembled in that room deep within the Pentagon in late December, that the sounds are the injection device mixing the virus into a stable soluble suspension with the excipient, a polyethylene glycolate compound of high molecular weight. The device—“Crude and rapidly assembled, but effective,” Daniels will opine—will load the syringe with the mixture before positioning the needle to the left side of Professor Halliwell’s neck. “It’s a large bore needle, probably a twelve gauge, since the PEG solution is quite viscous.” He then says that this is when Professor Halliwell secures the final restraint on his remaining free hand, next to his mouth and a bowl of food (Daniels doesn’t elaborate), tightening it with his teeth. The vial for the second injection has been loaded and is in place; it will be administered automatically. There then comes the tinny grinding of a small motor…a sharp cry of pain…sobbing. It is this last that will initially shock several of the men sitting in that darkened room, grown men toughened by politics and secrecy and difficult decisions. Their shock will quickly turn to disgust, finally horror, as the recorder replays the sounds it captures next: several seconds of what appears to be struggling, violent at first, then becoming erratic, then eventually stopping. All that follows then for several minutes is a low inhuman moan. Finally, silence, which is prematurely aborted by the recorder’s automatic sensor. The time stamp on the recording flicks forward several dozen minutes.]

  [Doctor Halliwell begins to speak again, but it is evident some time has passed. His voice is broken, sounding lost and transparent, as if it has lost substance:]

  “I…hadn’t…I hadn’t expected…”

  [scream]

  Ahh, god! Pain.”

  [more struggling; panting]

  “That’s the worst of it. I hope. It itches horribly now, and I can’t reach it. Stupid! I should have waited in case something went wrong. But now I cannot release myself. Ah, well.”

  [laughter; moaning]

  “I hadn’t expected this. I’ll die of the itching before I can finish.”

  […]

  “I am fine now. I can see almost forty minutes have passed since the injection. I know it’s just my imagination, but it’s like I can feel the infection taking hold, the new virus entering my cells, replicating. Ha ha, I know I can’t actually feel such things—we cannot feel at the cellular level—and yet somehow I almost feel each cell swelling with millions of new virus particles, leaking them into the interstitial spaces, bleeding into my bloodstream. My lungs filling with them. My eyeballs filling. It is a curious sensation, knowing what is happening at the subcellular level inside oneself, knowing the agent of one’s destruction is contained within, waging a silent war.”

  [coughing]

  In seven minutes the autosampler will test my blood. It will transfer the sample to the analyzer, which will tell me how quickly the infection is spreading.

  “I must hurry. I need to concentrate. In the interest of time, I will be brief. Anything I miss I suppose will be in my notes. I hope they fall into the right hands. I should have written this down and sent it to someone—not the media; they cannot be trusted. Who would I send it to? No! I am wasting time planning contingencies I cannot execute!

  “Daniels. I need to talk about what he did. Thankfully, my mind seems to have cleared somewhat. The calm before the storm, I suppose. The light before fall of night. Ha ha. Poetic. Yes, that’s it: light and night.”

  [sighs]

  “Qangxi. That’s where I need to start. Qangxi. Qangxi.

  “What Daniels and his team at the Pentagon did was to develop a new infectious species of virus. The codename was Qangxi.”

  [At this point, Richard Daniels, former dean of Harvard’s graduate education and current scientific advisor to the President, will be asked to explain how a crazy professor from a small college in rural Montana—yes, a Nobel laureate, but not the first time the Nobel committee awarded the prize to a nutjob—happened to know so much about Project Zulu. And, for that matter, how he got samples of their materials to analyze. And Daniels will be forced to admit he doesn’t know the answer to that question. There will ensue a brief but heated argument between Daniels and his interrogator, a young senator by the name of Lawrence Abrams and the senate’s defense oversight committee’s newest chairman following the untimely assassination of its previous chairholder. The argument will be cut short by a third man, known popularly as the Colonel even though he is really a three star general. The Colonel is the commander of the new Marine fighting force known as the Omegamen. The Colonel will direct Daniels to continue playing the recording; he will declare that what the senator is asking is all water under the bridge. Daniels, glad to evade the questioning, will comply. He taps the keyboard and the recording stutters through the speakers.]

  “—rigin of that strange word remains unproven, but my linguist friend—I will not name him for fear of retaliation against him—has suggested that the word Qangxi derives from the Chinese term Kuang shi, and I choose to believe him for reasons that shall become clear momentarily. The Qangxi variant that the military created, r-d7.04, or Artie for short, has for its genetic backbone Dengue flavivirus. As most people now know, Dengue was essentially eliminated as a global threat after the development of a simple treatment that affected its ability to propagate via its mosquito host. The treatment was so successful that within two years, the incidence of new Dengue infections diagnosed worldwide dropped to less than one millionth of its previous rate. Dengue was on track to becoming the first mosquito-borne disease to be completely eradicated by any manmade means.

  “How do I know this? Because—”

  [muffled sounds]

  “I can…get some relief from the itching by turning my head. It’s not completely effective, but…”

  […]

  “The dengue work was that of my close friend and colleague Stephen Archdeacon. Stephen was the second of us to go missing. It was early last spring. When I was last in Boston, I stopped by his place, to see how his wife and children are managing. I wished I could have told little Kristin and Trevor not to blame their father, but somehow they know. I can see it in their eyes that they know, the terror. Still, it was not Stephen’s fault.

  “What does his work have to do with Daniels? Just this: what almost nobody knows a
bout the Dengue work is that Stephen soon discovered that the treatment may have stopped Dengue from spreading, it didn’t eliminate the virus from humans as he’d originally thought; the treatment only rendered the infection innocuous. The virus found a way to hide in our mitochondrial DNA. As a result, nearly every person on this planet is now a carrier of that virus in their cells. It has become incorporated into our extrachromosomal genome and is heritable. What is worse, Daniels discovered that it can easily jump into our nuclear genome upon expression of a single protein called XRN177, where the virus then makes not just one copy of itself, but thousands upon thousands of copies. Millions, even. It has the potential to render our genomes highly unstable.

  “The government has kept silent about this. Why? Does it think there will be a panic? No, it’s because it wants to exploit that instability. And that’s where Daniel’s work takes a decidedly malefic turn.”

  [muffled noises]

  “Eleven-fifty. Ten minutes of midnight. Another hour has passed—more than an hour—and I am actually feeling quite fine now, although my back is a bit stiff. I should have thought to provide a thicker cushion on this table, though, of course, that would have made escape easier. I can turn slightly to ease the discomfort. I just hope it doesn’t grow too bad, the cramps.

  “Oh, blood results. Let’s see…

  “WBC count…

  “RBC…

  “Shit! Six-hundred picograms per milliliter. The infection is spreading faster than I had thought. I must hurry. I can only hope these restraints hold long enough for the antiserum to take effect. Now I realize I should have coordinated the timing of the second injection with brain activity rather than setting it for the thirty-six-hour mark, but I wanted to be sure to give the virus time to act. Ah well, thirty-six hours, a hundred hours, as long as I can prove the antiserum works, it shouldn’t matter. The postmortem—when it is performed on me—will show that it will.”

  [several minutes of sobbing]

  “I’m okay now. I’m okay.”

  […]

  “Midnight. Past midnight. It is…What day is it? Sunday. It’s Sunday. The twenty-fourth of…?

  “December.

  “My name is Eugene…Douglas…Halliwell.”

  […]

  “Where was I? Daniels, I believe. Daniels. Dengue. Right.

  “You see, Daniels’s forte is genetic reengineering. For him the Holy Grail was to achieve genome resequencing at the cellular level in whole organisms. With what happened with the Dengue dengue the, uh, the denguedengden. What? What? The Dengue— Shut up and listen to me!”

  [struggling noises; Daniels will explain that Halliwell’s cognitive functions are beginning to break down, much to the surprise of those assembled before him, and he will have to further explain that Halliwell injected himself with over a thousand times the dosage of virus than is prescribed in the Zulu protocol, so his infection spread rate is highly accelerated and possibly unstable. “We’re witnessing symptomology we’ve never seen before.” The noises fade into a series of grunts and pants. When Halliwell speaks next, he seems to have regained some mental control.]

  “The new…sequences. As I was saying. In our genomes. The kimchee…? What? Qangxhi. Not kimchee. The Qangxhi sequences provided a perfect target for the dengue— No, other way around. The Dengue sequences in our chromosomes were targeted by Daniels’s Qangxhi r-d7.04 construct, or Q-Artie. It allowed him to act out his whole organism genomic reengineering fantasy. Q-Artie was constructed just for that purpose.”

  [panting]

  “It would be one thing if Daniels wanted to use…Qangxhi to improve human health and medical treatment. What potential for greatness there was—is!—in such a thing. But instead, he proposed the engineering of a new breed of supersoldier, a new human bioweapon that could not only be controlled using Professor Bloch’s neuroreconstructive methods and my own autoimmune blockers, but also rendered using a resource they had in abundant supply already: living human beings. No, not existing soldiers. There would have been an outcry, but the dregs of our society, the thieves and murderers, the forgotten homeless, runaways. That was their secret. Nearly five million prisoners alone, of which nearly a third were serving life sentences. They became our Omegamen.

  “Our government infected them, living souls, turned them into warriors for their army. No longer were live troops sent in. Casualty rates dropped, and everybody was happy. Well, of course casualty rates dropped. You cannot kill what is already dead.”

  [coughing]

  Kuang shi. It’s a…Chinese term. It refers to a creature in their mythology, a zombie vampire. Of course, mythology is always more colorful than fact, but the analogies are appropriate. Kuang shi are corpses possessed and so reanimated by demons. Q-Artie possesses every cell in our bodies and kills it before reanimating the body. But here the demon is man. Ironic, isn’t it, given we are using our own zombies to fight against our old demons?

  “But we…should be…

  “Ahh!”

  [panting]

  “Cramps.”

  […]

  “We shouldn’t be happy. Should be…scared…out of our minds.”

  […]

  “Four hours post-infection. I am feverish. I can feel it. Too soon. Perhaps I miscalculated on the dosage. Is it possible? I am sure I checked and rechecked—

  “My god, I hope the restraints hold.”

  [sounds of struggling; panting]

  “I must have slept. The clock on the wall says it’s almost a half past two in the morning. Five hours post-infection. The ticking is driving me crazy!

  “Concentrate!”

  […]

  “I have to explain. I have to explain. What did I do?”

  [sobbing]

  “Last summer—I am better now, stiff and very tired, but myself again. Last summer I discovered that the Dengue sequences inside our bodies can mutate—they have already, just not to what I discovered. Not yet. There’s something encoded in Q-Artie. They can make a new kind of virus particle that I’d never seen before. It was a simple experiment, done in a flask, totally artificial. Then, curious, I tested to see if it could be transmitted in mosquitoes. Oh, god, what have I done? I’m sure I killed every one of those little fuckers, but one never knows with absolute certainty with such things!

  “I am not paranoid!”

  […]

  “The specific mutation I found has never been reported. None of the tens of thousands of samples I received and tested show it coming up naturally, but I know it’s only a matter of time before it does. And when it does—dear god—there will be a new epidemic of such destructive force that we will all be wiped out. Only this time, it won’t be Dengue fever; the living shall surely die. But that’s not the worst of it! Once dead, we will all rise. Dear lord, it is too horrific to contemplate. Those still lucky enough to be free of any of the Dengue virus in their cells, and thus free of the mutation, will not be free for long. They will be overrun by the mindless monsters that the military now uses to fight its battles. But these new vampires will be without the controls our government has built into their new soldiers. The newly dead will rise and…then what? They have basic needs. They will act upon them, instinctively, reflexively. They will require nourishment. They will hunt to satisfy that hunger. They will take those who are still healthy and uninfected, and they will…they will feed on them, infecting them, turning them into their own. And this will continue until there are no more living.

  “The human race stands on the brink of extinction, while Richard Daniels sits in his ivory tower and plays god.”

  […]

  “Nourishment. Will I eat? The thought sickens me now, but will it still sicken me after I have died and come back? No, of course not. Hunger; it’s the only thing they know. It’s why the Omegamen are so effective, so easy to control. The electrodes the government implants in their brains to control them also control their hunger. But I will have no such control. So it is a good thing I have provided for that. I
mustn’t try to escape, to seek to satisfy my hunger. I only hope these surrogate brains I have brought and placed beside me will suffice.

  “But it sickens me to think I will eat them.”

  […]

  “Six hours now. I am tired. Tired and hot. The itching has stopped, but now it feels like my bones are stretching, pushing against my skin, shattering. It is a curious sensation, not quite painful, but far from comfortable either. This I knew would happen. Dengue fever was once called breakbone fever. I fear things will get a lot more painful before I lose all sensibility.”

  […]

  “I must finish my explanation while I still can. I still have not explained why I have willingly infected myself, guaranteeing that I will become the very monster I fear we will all become. Am I so eager to join them? No. Ha ha. No. Nor have I explained the second injection.

  “It is an antiserum. Yes, it’s true. I have figured out a way to stop it. Stop them. Stop Daniels. This is why they are coming for me, the government. An antiserum would wipe out their army, all of them. Ha ha!

  “But—oh no!—it would give our enemies a defense against us. Ha ha! Sarcasm. Who’d have thought it possible before?

  “Am I wrong to share this with the world then? What will the Chinese and the Iranians do once they kill our soldiers once again? What of the Libyans? The Albanians? The Ca— The Ca—

  “The Canadians?

  “Nightmares I am having of this giving myself nightmares thinking of this nightmares, ulcers worrying and worrying about nightmares. My torn out hair. Nightmares. Wondering whether or not to destroy it and leave us all to fate.

  “Am I making sense? My words come out sounding strange. Or is it my ears?

  “What? Destroy the antiserum? How could I think of such a thing?

  “Whatever happens to us hereafter—war on our shores, certainly, and the…the ruination of our way of life—it is better than knowing it is the end for us all.

  “I am no longer sure if I am speaking. Bop bop. La la. Ya ya ya. I think I’m still speaking.