He turned back to front. “I think you’re going to find this interesting.”
Not interesting, Daniels thought to himself. Disturbing.
He hit Play.
† † †
[low moaning]
“…suh…sooo?”
[…]
“Sophia?”
[…]
“What’s happening? Where…am…I?”
[struggling sounds; upon hearing this, Senator Abrams’s face will turn an even paler shade of white and he’ll demand to know what’s happening. “I thought you said he was dead, that he’d turned? I thought you said the antiserum hadn’t worked? It sounds like he’s been cured—as in fully cured.” Nobody will answer. “Are you telling me he cured himself and somehow reversed things? Are you telling me he lived?” Again, nobody will say a word, and the senator will lapse into an angry silence as he begins to realize what he’s hearing.]
“What day is it? What the hell is hap—”
[…]
“Oh, dear God! Wednesday. It’s Wednesday the twenty-seventh! The virus must’ve been defective. I should be… Why aren’t I dead? Am I dead?”
[…moaning…]
“I’m so thirsty. I’m not dead. I’m not dead.
“I have to get out of these restraints!”
[sounds of struggling]
“Four hours. No, less than that. Three hours, forty…three minutes before my fail safe is activated. But I’m not dead! I need to get out of—
“Help! Help me. Oh, God, please…Help! Somebody help. Please help please help please help…”
[sounds of struggling]
“Less than three hours now. So hungry. I’m so hungry.”
[…]
“I smell something.”
[…]
“What is that smell?”
[sounds of struggling]
“Brain. There’s…only one left? How can that be? I brought—
“I brought—
“I had a half dozen brains but there’s only one left. The rest must have fallen onto the floor. They’re beneath me. That’s it. I didn’t eat them. I didn’t.
“I’m so hungry.”
[…]
“Thirty minutes now.”
[crying]
“I am dead. I see that now. There is nothing on the electrocardiogram. The leads are still attached and the recording is registering my movement, but there is no cardiac activity. And I’m not breathing. I am dead. I should be dead. I should have become undead and then died again with the antiserum. But the antiserum didn’t work. It should’ve killed; instead it— Oh, dear God! What have I done? I am dead. I AM DEAD!”
[…]
“Eleven minutes. I’m sooo hungry.”
[moaning]
[“God damn it!” Senator Abrams will shout, startling everyone in the room, everyone except the Colonel. “What the hell is the lunatic going on about? Will somebody please explain to me what the fuck is going on?!!” Richard Daniels will pause the recording and explain: “Professor Halliwell’s antiserum didn’t kill the virus. Yes, he was infected; yes, he did die and then turned. The antiserum didn’t kill what he’d become. Instead…” He will look over at the Colonel, then the President, and then he will begin to feel the first worms of panic beginning to rise inside of him, really for the first time since assembling the team here in the Pentagon, and he will wonder what he’s done. “Somehow, Halliwell’s antiserum restored cognition.” Abrams will sputter for a moment, then shout, “Are you telling me he’s a smart zombie? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That we’ve got a fucking smart zombie?” And Richard Daniels will nod.]
“Seven minutes before the blade falls…
“Just one…last…bite to…eat.”
[sounds of feeding]
“Three minutes. I’m so very hungry still. So hungry.
“I’m sorry, my Sophia. Sophia, my dear wife. My dear… I wonder how you would taste. And my children.
“Stop it! How can I think such a thing?”
[moaning]
“Two minutes.”
[sounds of struggling]
“One minute.”
[struggling, moaning, crying]
[thump of something soft hitting a surface]
[CRASH!!!]
† † †
“We need to discuss contingency steps,” Richard Daniels stammered. He was shaking, despite himself. He’d heard the entire recording three times already and yet, a full day after hearing it for the first time, it still terrified him.
“I thought you said you didn’t retrieve Professor Halliwell’s body?” Abrams demanded. “The recording clearly shows that his own safeguard worked. The picture the sweep team provided shows the guillotine fell.”
“There was no body, senator,” Daniels whispered.
“How can there be no body? Somebody please explain that to me!”
Nobody spoke.
“Are you telling me a…what the hell do we call him? An intelligent zombie? That he escaped? Some kind of undead psychopath who needs to eat brains? Is this what you’re telling me, Mister Daniels? Is that what’s out there on the street somewhere?”
“We’ve got every agency looking—”
“How the fuck are you going kill it?”
“Same as any other zom,” the Colonel calmly answered. “He’s no different than any of the others, except maybe a little more self-aware. He’s still just a machine like any of the others. Besides, we don’t know how long the effect will last. It’s probably temporary.”
Senator Abrams turned to the President, then back to the Colonel. “I’m pulling the plug on Dead Reckoning. As of this moment—”
“No.”
Abrams sneered at the Colonel. “What? You can’t tell me—”
“Shut up, Senator. I said no. That would be missing a wonderful opportunity. Don’t you see? We take Halliwell’s antiserum, and we weaponize it. Think beyond your fear, Senator Abrams. Imagine, if you will, an army of sentient zombies? Faster and more versatile than the ones we have now, able to plan and react and adapt? We’ll still control them like before. We have ways to—”
“How do you know you can?”
“The neuroleptic impulse control we’ve developed will work just as well as before; we just expand it to control free will. We’ve done it before on living subjects.”
The senator’s eyes widened.
“Oh, don’t look so surprised.” The Colonel chuckled, though his face showed no humor at all. “Now, our enemies will never be able to defeat us.”
“You’re crazy, General! Mister President, I submit—”
“It’s already done,” the Colonel said. “We have all of Halliwell’s notes. We’ve begun manufacturing his so-called antiserum. We’ve already developed a testing regimen. As for the good doctor, don’t you worry about him. He will be captured. I can assure you that. Now, I think this briefing is adjourned.”
He didn’t solicit agreement or permission from any of the other members of that meeting, neither the senator nor the rest of the cabinet. He stared at Abrams for another moment before turning back to the front of the room. He didn’t even ask whether the President himself might have something to add.
“Good work, son,” he said to Richard Daniels. He stood up to leave the room and it was as if a bell had blown, because everyone else began to file out, all except Senator Abrams, who remained fuming in his seat.
Then, for the first time in the forty-three years that Richard Daniels had known his father, the man everyone called the Colonel even though he was now a three star general, he saw the man smile.
And he had never felt so terrified in all his life.
† † †
That evening, in the office of his stately Virginia home, Richard Daniels finished his report from the day’s meeting and sent it off to the President. He shut off his laptop and folded the screen down on it, opened a locked drawer and slipped it inside. The drawer clicked shut and automatically locked.
He knew his recommendations would be ignored; they always were. He slumped into his chair feeling used and out of sorts, and let his head fall into his hands, trying to empty it of rage. New images crowded in, images he realized he had been unconsciously pushing away. Now he let them come. There was the stainless steel equipment cart that had become his old friend’s deathbed—Gene’s Calvary, his Golgotha. Wasn’t it ironic that he should think of it that way? The man had thought of himself as mankind’s savior. And here he had risen again after sacrificing himself
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Richard hissed into the darkness that surrounded him.
His wife and teenaged son, Eric, had already gone off to bed hours before. Earlier in the evening, Lana had seen something in his eyes—he had never been as good as his father at hiding his emotions—and had asked him if he was all right. And he’d smiled and told her yes, absolutely, everything was just fine. Then he’d locked himself in his office and waited for the last gray wisps of the dying day to bleed from the room until all there was left was the cold puddle of yellow light spilling from his desk lamp. He halfheartedly typed a few things into the computer, but mostly he just sat and wondered what the hell he had done. What had he unleashed upon the world? What had he allowed his father to create?
He reached over and unlocked a different drawer, reached into it, past the half-empty bottle of twelve-year-old scotch that he’d grown a taste for after joining the president’s team. His fingers brushed the package that was Velcro-taped to the top underside of the drawer and gently pulled it out. The handgun felt light in his hand, and he turned it, marveling at the way the light played over its surface, its simplicity, its understated capacity for murder. He remembered Professor Halliwell’s sentiment about the guillotine, how the blade was crude but effective. And he realized that the gun had a weakness that the guillotine—or any other large blade—had not: a single well-placed blow by the latter would kill a zombie; a well-aimed shot to the head by a forty-five would barely slow one down.
What had he done?
What could he do now?
There was nothing to be done, nothing that would stop his father from getting his way. Nothing.
He checked to see that the gun was loaded. It was, and it suddenly felt heavier than he could manage. He set it on the desk in front of him and reached into the drawer a second time. This time he brought out the bottle and a small glass tumbler. He poured himself a drink, downed it, poured another.
Nobody heard the gunshot.
When the police entered his office the next morning, they found the body of Richard Daniels slumped over his desk, his skull exploded wide open. They found the gun on the floor beside him, empty, a spray of blood on the back of his chair. A single bullet casing was gently picked up from the floor beneath his feet and placed into an evidence bag. They never found the slug.
Or most of his brain.
‡ ‡
Author’s note
For me, Golgotha, was as much an exercise in literary composition as it was an exorcism of real world frustrations. There is so much that worries me about where our world could so easily end up if we’re not careful: the increasing importance of national security and its attendant constraints (more sophisticated methods for search, surveillance and assassination in the form of unmanned drones; public outcry against casualties, which, in my opinion, only makes going into war that much easier to excuse), the explosion in technological advances (in communication, in information, in social and professional networking), and increasing polarization of entities that result in the exploitation of knowledge for personal and political gain.
We are entering into an era of über-awareness and über-vulnerability. We’re not only becoming more and more dependent on information, but we’re being crushed under it. In five minutes on the internet, we can learn more about people whom we’ve never met than we might discover about our own family members in a lifetime.
We trust that the systems delivering our information to us will ultimately deliver us from darkness; what we don’t know is whether it’ll be to our own destruction or to our salvation.
This story embraces classic zombie lore, but it also apposes it with “newer” concepts: the “old” brainless zombie threat has been neutralized by might and technology, but by the same token, our advancements have made us all the more vulnerable to an even greater threat, represented by the “thinking” zombie.
If we’re not careful, it won’t be just our jobs that we’ll lose, but ourselves.
‡
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Golgotha
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[BACK TO CONTENTS]
S.W. Tanpepper’s GAMELAND
A new 8-part action-thriller series
Series summary:
It’s been fifteen years since Professor Halliwell’s now-infamous Golgotha Experiment and zombies have become a firmly entrenched part of life…and death. Six young tech-savvy hackers led by Jessica Daniels, the teenaged daughter of slain presidential advisor Richard Daniels, break into Long Island's Gameland, a formerly militarized wasteland that was, for years, abandoned to the Infected Undead. Now Gameland has been reclaimed by a government-backed company interested in merging virtual reality and survival gaming into a single seamless entertainment package. But while breaking into The Game is a lot easier than they could ever have imagined, they quickly discover that breaking out is one hell of a killer.
Episodes 1 and 2 currently available
Episodes 3-8 published monthly beginning Jun 1, 2012
Packages also available at reduced prices
Click for details
Sneak peek:
Prologue to the series
It wasn’t Reggie’s idea to break into Gameland, not initially, though of course he took all the credit. He liked being the go-to guy whenever it was something the five of us could all get behind. He was funny that way—a big brute of a kid with all kinds of brains and good looks and a huge gaping insecurity complex that needed constant attention. But whenever something turned out to be not so good after all, he was usually the first to distance himself from it, claiming he always knew it was a bad idea, right from the beginning. That’s just the way he was.
He had a way of picking the bad ideas, which is why we should’ve just said no.
We were in Micah’s basement. He and Kelly were team-playing Zpocalypto, which is supposed to be something like The Game. Except it turned out to be nothing like it at all. First of all, it was nowhere near as real. There’s no VR and the action’s totally lame. Plus, the holographics are just so-so. You don’t get a good feel for what it’s like to be in the actual Gameland, fighting actual zombies, trying not to get eaten. Now I know.
I also know this: Not even those lucky rich pricks have any idea what it’s like, the ones who are connected enough to pay for a state-of-the-art cybernetic setup and a Player, plus weasel the necessary invite into The Game. Arc Entertainment didn’t just let anyone play. They only wanted the best.
Like us.
Reg and I were bookending the couch. Ashley was sprawled out between us, her feet on his lap and her head on mine. She was drinking a Red Bull through a straw, the can wedged between two cushions to keep it upright. Reg had chugged his and had tossed the empty at the old milk crate in the corner. He missed, of course, and blamed it on the lighting, which admittedly was piss-
poor. Micah’s HG setup was old and glitchy, so he had to keep the lights dimmed.
Reg was antsy. He was always antsy, but probably more so then because of the caffeine. He kept asking us if we were finished with our drinks. I’m sure he thought the first miss was just a fluke and wanted to redeem himself. That’s how self-deluded he could be. But I’d barely even touched my RB. I like the taste of it, but the stuff gives me a headache if I drink it too quickly. And Ash was purposefully nursing hers just to be a pissant.
I was messing with her coppery hair, twining it between my fingers, trying to straighten the curls and watching them spring back. For some reason it struck me as comical and I kept giggling, even though I wasn’t even the slightest bit drunk or stoned. Not like Micah. He was the druggie in the group.
The rest of us got our highs playing games or hacking them. That was our escape from the misfortune of being born into families that couldn’t afford to buy a decent entertainment system. My family was once so lucky, but after my dad died and Grandpa was fired from his prestigious command post in the Marines, that all went away. Of course, that all happened fifteen or so years ago, so as far as I could remember we’d always been as poor and out-of-the-loop as anyone else in that room.
I caught Reg glancing over at us—probably envisioning me and Ash acting out one of his perverted girl-on-girl fantasies. I obliged him. Sort of. I reached over and pinched Ash’s nose until she slapped my hand away with an inviting shriek. The movement caused her to dig her heels into Reggie’s crotch, which was precisely what I was going for. I saw him jerk in pain. He tried to hide it, but I saw.
“What’s so funny, Jess?” Ash asked me, gazing up at me with those brilliant green eyes of hers. They were so innocent looking, but I’d always known how manipulative they could be.
Golgotha: Prequel to S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND series (S. W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND companion title Book 1) Page 4
