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

by Saul Tanpepper

  “I have said it before, if this works, I am a dead man, and that is a good thing. The antiserum will be injected automatically in…twenty-eight hours. By then I will be fully reanimated, though trapped by these restraints. I think they will hold. They are made of Kevlar; the buckles are…titty titty—

  “What the fuck? I can’t think straight!”

  [panting]

  “Tiiiii…itanium.

  “Calm down.

  “Reeeestraints. Restraints fuck.

  “Why do they need to be so strong? We learned that reanimated muscle exhibits far greater apparent strength than in situ muscle. The military documents I obtained show this to be the case. It’s why the Omegamen appear to be so much stronger, so much harder to combat in close quarters. But muscle fiber is still muscle fiber, bone is bone. There is nothing magical that happens to it, no increase in tensile strength; it only seems that way because living creatures very rarely allow themselves to reach full power. There is something in the mind concerned with preventing self-injury that makes one stop, before a muscle tears and a bone breaks. We know of exceptions, of course, seldom observed, individuals who, in moments of extreme duress, perform seemingly superhuman acts of strength. Something in their brains is either overridden or made quiescent. But these acts are not acts of superhuman strength. They are fully within the body’s capabilities. In the reanimated dead, the signal is absent. That is why they seem so much stronger.

  “So I will be stronger. Ha ha! I wonder what I could bench press then.

  “But I have calculated and tested and prepared my restraints accordingly. They will hold. They should hold.

  “Temperature now a hundred and four. Thirsty. So tired…”

  […]

  “I just realized I didn’t factor in sweat. I am not worried about dehydration. That is the least of my worries. No, I am worried because my restraints feel looser now because of the sweat.

  “I will try not to struggle.”

  […]

  “Eight hours.”

  [weak laughter]

  “I said if this works, I am a dead man. After the antiserum takes effect, my body will be rid of the virus; but, of course, my body will already be dead. I will kill the zombie I will become. When they find me come…Halloween? Happy New Year and Auld Lang Syne shall old acquaintance happy to see you again.”

  […]

  “January second. When they come and find me, there will be a post-mortem. They will see that the antiserum cleared the infection and…am I repeating myself? I am repeating myself. Am I? It doesn’t matter, explained once or twice or ten times, as long as it’s once. The world needs to know how to rid itself of the monsters that our government is creating, of the monsters that will soon overwhelm us all. I am trying to teach you how to defend yourself against the kimchee when they begin to rise.

  “If it works. Ah, but if the antebellum fails, then…

  “Then I am one of the Zulu lulu…”

  [struggling]

  “The restraints will hold for a while, but not forever. I can sense this now. I am sweating and might even slip out, but I don’t think so. They are tight, and they are strong. But just in case, I have made plans. Ha ha. If the antiserum fails I must not rise and escape. That is the reason for the g— the g— that thing that is hanging over me. Dam…dam…oclees.”

  [“What is he talking about?” Senator Abrams will ask. And Richard Daniels will explain that Professor Halliwell assembled a device that would sever his head, a guillotine, in case the antiserum didn’t work. “And how would he know? Wouldn’t he have lost all sensibility by then? He’s halfway there already.” Daniels will nod and then patiently explain in short sentences—it will be clear to all present that he and Abrams dislike each other very much—that the guillotine was set to fall automatically after ninety-six hours—four days after initial infection and two-and-a-half days after administration of the antiserum—thus beheading the professor regardless of his present condition. “And did the guillotine fall?” Abrams will ask, and Daniels will answer, “Yes. It did. Right on schedule.”]

  “Such an inelegant device, the guillotine, archaic, medieval. Truly effective. If the antebellum—no, antiserum—works, it will kill the zombie I will become, essentially killing me a second time. If it fails, I will remain living dead. Either way, the guillotine will fall. You understand why I had to take such measures, dear? If I didn’t…

  “I couldn’t risk escaping.

  “I shudder at what will arise should I fail.

  “God help us all if that were to happen.”

  […]

  “T-ten hours. Temperature now one hundred and five. Sweating p-p-profusely. S-s-starting to shiver. Hard to concentrate.”

  […]

  “So thirsty…”

  [panting, quiet coughing, rustling]

  “Ahhh! Oh, god, what have I done! What have I—”

  [rustling]

  [banging]

  [beep…]

  “Sophia? Sophia, ish that you? Come here, honnnnneeee. Thasha girl. I mish you. Come here. Thash a girl. I dint shay I din say…say…

  “Goodbye.”

  [beep…]

  […]

  † † †

  “Stop it there,” the Colonel ordered.

  Richard Daniels paused the playback. The lights flickered on. Nobody moved at first; they all just sat or stood, numb, stunned by having just witnessed what appeared to be a man’s suicide. And what happened next? The question buzzed through their minds, buzzed between them. Only the Colonel appeared nonplussed by the recording’s revelations. Then again, he’d heard the entire thing a dozen times. And unlike Richard Daniels, he celebrated each hearing, even though he, too, was a religious man.

  Finally, the thin man in the oversized blue suit, the senator named Abrams, leaned forward and broke the silence: “Is that it? Where’s the rest?” He turned his eyes to the other people in the room.

  Richard Daniels looked to where the senator was sitting. The young man was so obviously out of his element. Richard knew the feeling. He suddenly felt old, older than he’d felt in a very long time.

  Every eye settled on the Colonel, who was leaning back in his usual chair with his hands laced behind his head, his leg crossed over his knee. With its high back and thick, black leather, his chair was unlike any of the others in the room. His was the one that didn’t match. There was nothing on his face to suggest what he was thinking. His brow was drawn and his lips were almost invisible, pulled into the tight, thin line of his mouth; but these things told people who knew him nothing. He was an impossible man to read. He had that freshly waxed look to him that was so characteristic of career military men when they make their first appearance of the day: shiny face, bristlebrush hair, features chiseled from stone. The faintest hint of aftershave clung to him like heat on the hood of a car that had been run hard but was now sitting idling at the curb. Ready to roar into life. This was how the Colonel always looked, and smelled. Run hard or idling, on duty or off, six in the morning or six at night. He was a man who showed nothing…but processed everything.

  The senator threw his pen to the table, where it skittered across the varnished surface, drawing everyone’s attention like a spell broken. The clatter sounded unnaturally loud in that room. He turned back to Daniels, who hadn’t moved from the podium.

  “So he died?”

  Richard frowned. He tried hard to squelch his growing irritation with the man, but wasn’t being terribly successful at it. He would never have the Colonel’s disposition, though it seemed anyone who knew them both expected it from Daniels. His shoulders tensed ever so slightly—enough, he was sure, to be registered by all in the room.

  “Halliwell…turned,” he confirmed, using the term that had only recently entered the military lexicon. He paused, cleared his throat into his hand and added, for the benefit of the nonmilitary types in the room, “We call it turning, not…dying.”

  “Turned. Died. Whatever. My question is how
do you know? Why is there no video? Why would Halliwell go through all this trouble and not record video? This could all be an elaborate hoax.”

  In the two years that Richard Daniels had been President Lancaster’s advisor, he had become accustomed to being interrogated by arrogant, young pricks like this one, as well as arrogant old ones. But something about this particular guy irked him more than any other before. Maybe it was because Daniels had really liked the former chair of the committee, Senator Gorham. He had much preferred dealing with him.

  The poor guy, he thought.

  Being a scientific advisor did not allow him access to very much strategic information, and certainly none regarding matters of national security, not unless it related directly to his work. With regards to the assassination of Abrams’s predecessor, he was totally out of the loop. As far as he knew, the police still had no clues who’d pulled the trigger—much less the strings attached to that trigger. But that’s not what irked him now. What he found irritating was the way Abrams was acting. The young senator had obviously not taken the past seven days to acquaint himself with how things worked in these meetings. There was protocol. There was always protocol.

  His eyes slid over to the Colonel, but the man was a picture of serenity, a sleeping jaguar. A land mine hiding beneath a thin layer of desert sand.

  He had considered that Abrams’s behavior might be out of some sort of political resentment. Maybe the senator hadn’t wanted this position in the first place. Of late, chairing the committee had become hazardous to one’s health; before Gorham had been Tenset, whose private car had exploded in Moscow and caused both countries to teeter on the edge of war.

  Richard himself knew about coming into responsibility unwillingly. He’d not sought the advisor position, had neither coveted nor campaigned for it. He’d been flattered, though. And once in, he wasn’t so naïve as to think he’d be anything but a relatively minor pawn in a game being played by giants. But if forced to admit his true feelings now, two years later, he’d have to say he enjoyed the role. For the most part.

  Today did not happen to be one of those days. There was a lot of explaining to be done, and he hated not having all the answers. Especially when one of those with the questions happened to be the Colonel. He felt like he was ten years old again whenever the Colonel interrogated him.

  Richard cleared his throat. Attention turned from Abrams back to the front of the room. “We know Halliwell turned beca—”

  “The microphone,” the senator snapped.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Speak into the microphone so we can all hear you clearly.”

  He leaned forward, even though he knew no one needed the mic to hear him, including those standing near the back of the room. Years of lecturing had taught him how to project. “We know that Professor Halliwell turned because the electrocardiogram stopped measuring a heartbeat.”

  “Again, Mister Daniels, I fail to see how that is proof of what you claim happened. An EKG flatlining is not proof that Professor Halliwell actually went through with this. He could’ve ripped off the leads by accident or on purpose. Maybe we’re supposed to believe he turned, but so far I haven’t seen any proof that he did.”

  Richard stared at the senator. Could the guy really be this stupid? Did he really need it spelled out for him? Halliwell was not kidding around. This was no hoax.

  He opened his mouth, but all he could manage was a feeble sound of dismay.

  “Let’s assume for now that Halliwell did inject himself and then died. Or turned. Or whatever the fuck you want to call it. I simply can’t conceive of anyone doing that to himself. It’s…” The senator raised his hands. “It’s too goddamn incredible.”

  “It happened.”

  “And nobody else entered or left Halliwell’s lab in the time covered by the recording?”

  Richard shook his head. “No, sir.”

  “No witnesses?”

  “We’re still gathering—”

  “Still gathering what? Clues? Evidence? A matter of this extreme sensitivity and you’re still gathering? Bullshit!”

  “Senator, I—”

  “This is a matter of national security, Mister Daniels. The Dead Reckoning Program is of vital strategic importance to us, the most important in modern history. Imagine what our enemies could do if even a hint of this were to be leaked. Thank God it hasn’t. Think about how defenseless we would be if they got wind of this.”

  The Colonel shifted and his chair squealed beneath him. The medals on his chest flashed and twinkled, reflecting the ceiling lights. Those in attendance turned to give the man their full attention. They waited in respectful silence, waiting for the Colonel to speak, which he did not immediately do. Instead, he locked eyes with Senator Abrams and did not break the stare. Richard knew that look very well, more than he liked to admit. Some people said the Colonel had dead eyes, that he looked more and more like the troops he commanded every day, but Richard knew nothing could be further from the truth. He knew the look in those eyes said one thing and one thing only: Listen closely, son, because I’m only going to say this once. And you had best heed the advice.

  “There was no leak,” the Colonel said. There was just the slightest pause between each word, and what was in those unspoken pauses held as much meaning as what was said.

  The senator’s eyes narrowed, then suddenly widened in comprehension.

  “Please, Dick,” the Colonel said. His eyes never left Senator Abrams. “Continue.”

  Richard Daniels took a breath, then dialed down the lights from his control panel at the podium. On the screen, the photograph of Halliwell’s guillotine taken that very morning was still displayed. Its blade had clearly fallen and embedded itself a quarter of an inch into the stainless steel platform that had become the professor’s deathbed. He tapped a key on his laptop and the image disappeared, replaced by a schematic with the simple heading “Z: Post Process Events.” It depicted the usual post-infection timeline and symptomology on one half of the slide. On the other side was a series of codes, each one representing steps to be performed by the military’s medical staff. These included implantation of an electrode in the lateral hypothalamus to control hunger and a separate device in the cerebellum for muscle control. Many of those in attendance were familiar with the details, but they were relieved that the image of the guillotine was now gone.

  He hit a second key and the room began immediately to fill with static from the professor’s recorder. There was an occasional click, but nothing clearly identifiable for several seconds. Then:

  “Unghhh.”

  It was a vocal utterance of some kind. Human evidently. There was nothing human-sounding about it.

  “Uhh huh huhhh. Haaaaaah…”

  “What’s happening?” Senator Abrams demanded.

  Someone from the back of the room shushed him.

  “No,” Richard said, “it’s all right. This goes on for another two hours or so, although the actual recording covers only about forty minutes, since it stops in moments of silence. In those forty minutes, there’s nothing much to hear but grunts, the typical Omegaman moaning. I’ll forward to the point when the antiserum is administered, which was at hour thirty-six post-infection.” He looked to the Colonel, who nodded once.

  Richard slid the control to the right until the timer read 39:14:36, roughly twenty seconds before the second injection was administered. Before he clicked PLAY, he looked up. His eyes swept the room, trying to find something in the faces there. But most were in shadow. He debated whether to warn those who were hearing it for the first time. The sounds the recording had captured were disturbing, horrifying. He knew what a Zulu was capable of, especially one that was restrained.

  But he didn’t say anything. He steadied his eyes on Senator Abrams, and clicked PLAY.

  The reaction was immediate and, Richard was ashamed to say, quite satisfying. When the terrifying noise erupted from the speakers, Abrams’s face fell in shock. Even in the gloom of the darken
ed room, Richard could see him pale. Several of the others responded in kind, and Daniels felt a twinge of guilt over it, but the look on Abrams’s face more than made up for it.

  Sitting beside him, the Colonel remained as impassive as ever.

  The racket was gut-wrenching: guttural moans and shrieks, thrashing, the metallic echo of the professor’s reanimated body pounding against its restraints. In hearing the recording the first time, Richard had wondered why nobody in the building had heard the noise, but then he’d realized the likelihood of it would have been very low. The professor had planned the experiment to fall over the Christmas holiday. Most of the noise would have occurred overnight on Christmas Eve, when the probability that someone might be in the building approached zero. What they were listening to now had occurred at roughly nine-thirty Christmas morning.

  “It’s been over twenty-four hours,” Richard shouted above the din, “since Halliwell turned. The second inject—administration of the antiserum—is occurring now. We don’t notice an immediate change, as it takes a while for the antiserum to work.”

  The abhorrent sounds continued.

  “How do we know it was administered?” Senator Abrams asked. He’d apparently gotten over his shock.

  “Because we found the syringe, empty. The needle was broken off. There were traces of tissue on the fragment that remained attached to the machine. The rest must still be in Halliwell’s neck.”

  The senator gave another disgusted noise but didn’t question the conclusion. “And how do you know the antiserum worked?”

  Richard looked at the Colonel, who turned to Abrams. “Actually, it didn’t.”

  The senator gawped for a moment, blinking and frowning, turning his head to the others in the room, but nobody came to his rescue.

  “Just listen to the rest of the recording. Fast forward to time point gamma, Dick.”

  “What’s time point gamma?” Abrams demanded.

  “Approximately ninety hours after initial infection,” the Colonel explained. “Roughly eighty hours post-mortem and fifty-four hours after administration of the anti-serum.”