The NEXT Apocalypse (Book 2): AFTER Life: Purgatory

by Chute, Robert Chazz

  Crenshaw pulled a road flare from a Velcro pocket on his thigh as he told me. “Run for your life.”

  The man sounded surprisingly calm as he yanked on a rope that ran through a pulley. The oil drums, six of them in all, tipped over to spill their contents down the steps. Through my faceplate, there was no way for me to smell the liquid. I guessed it was gas or kerosene. I hoped it was kerosene. Kerosene would burn longer.

  I pulled Thomas after me and ran for the ramp. I heard the flare ignite and sizzle. The accelerant went up with a huge WHOOMF!

  Zombies may never retreat or pause at the death of one of their own. However, when they burn to death, their anguished screams sound human. I suppose one of those horrific death throes came from the guard defending the lab. I think he was still human when the conflagration enveloped him.

  Chapter 41

  CHLOE

  I followed Shelly Priyat down the ramp and Thomas followed me. The constable looked back at me. “Where’s Rigg?” I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I drew my right hand across my throat.

  Dried blood stained the floor at the doorway to a long office. It was packed with empty desks. People standing around in biohazard suits. Most carried weapons.

  Most of the white Hazmats showed no insignia but the blue and green ones showed group affiliations at the shoulder. The greens were Public Health Agency staff. The blues were Toronto Police Services and RCMP.

  It seemed everyone was talking at once but I heard Shelly yelling my name. She waved me closer. She stood in a gaggle before a huge steel door. As soon as I stepped within reach, she grabbed my arm, pulled me close and turned to a man in a white Hazmat. Nothing set him apart except that he only wore a sidearm instead of carrying a rifle. “This is Dr. Robinson!”

  The man turned to look at me. “Tell me who you work for.”

  “Prometheus Rembrandt BioSystems, Cybernetics — ”

  “Full name?”

  “Chloe Torielle Robinson.”

  “What street did you grow up on?”

  “In Winnipeg?”

  “No, when you lived in Toronto.”

  “That was later. Um … Gothic Avenue, Toronto. Number 9 — ”

  “And your employee number?”

  “It’s 56589.”

  “Uh-huh. Okay.” He didn’t consult a clipboard. He’d memorized my information. “I’m Bill Arsenault, Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The decontamination chamber is only so big. You’re a priority as soon as that door opens. One sec.”

  I watched as he pressed buttons on a steel keypad with what looked like a stupidly long code sequence. “Isn’t that protocol beside the point now?” I asked.

  “Yeah, one horse is out of the barn but the chamber runs through a cycle. We can’t just reprogram it and let everybody parade through. Besides, there’s still anthrax and shit down there.”

  “This is insane. We’ve got to get everybody into the lab, behind this door!”

  “If you don’t like it, Doctor, I’m sure, there’s a bureaucratic protocol where you fill out a request in triplicate and file it up your ass. Somebody on vacation in Muskoka will get back to their office in Ottawa sometime by the end of August.”

  My boss pushed through the crowd to announce, “I’ve got to get down to my office. It’s on Level 3.”

  Arsenault asked Thomas several questions similar to those he’d asked me. Satisfied with his answers, Arsenault bobbed his head just as the chamber’s hatch buzzed and clicked open. “Okay, you go through with this batch.”

  The room, which had been so loud, suddenly hushed as a long howl — starting low and climbing high — rose nearby. The zombies had entered the building.

  “Holy shit,” somebody said. “They don’t know when to quit. Why are they so fired up about trying to get in here?”

  Me, I thought. They’re trying to stop me from stopping them. All these people are dying for me.

  The people who were armed turned their weapons on the door just as Crenshaw appeared at the bottom of the ramp. “Easy, everybody. Friendly coming in. I’m the last friendly you’ll see coming down here. They’ll be coming in as soon as the smoke clears and the fire dies. Pile those desks in front of this door.”

  They followed Crenshaw’s orders no matter the color of their biohazard suit. Those who were unarmed pressed from the back to get closer to the decontamination chamber, eager to get to the safety of Level 2.

  The crowd pushed as the hatch opened wide. I resisted and grabbed Shelly’s arm. “Wait! She’s with me!”

  Before Arsenault could say a word, Shelly shrugged me off. “Go do what you do, Chloe. My place is here. I have to defend the Alamo.”

  I glanced at the people crowding into the decontamination chamber behind me. A few of them carried rifles so security staff were still a priority. “Constable Priyat is my bodyguard,” I said.

  Staying on Level 1 was certain death. Shelly knew that but she didn’t even allow me to fight for her. “I have a door to guard, Chloe. Go. Save the world.”

  Thomas pulled me into the decon chamber. As the hatch closed, Crenshaw and Arsenault rushed to squeeze in beside me.

  The last words I heard from Level 1 were Shelly’s. “Let’s roll.”

  The hatch buzzed, closed and clicked with terrible finality. Shelly’s fate was sealed. The decontamination chamber felt as claustrophobic as a tomb.

  The sacrifice of all those brave first responders would have been so noble had it not been for a couple of tragic details. None of our precious supplies of food or equipment made it from the LAV to Echidna’s laboratories. Worse, the lab’s computers were destroyed. I found no notes, no records at all that would be of use to stop the Picasso Strain on Levels 2, 3 or 4.

  All we found were the bodies of the dead.

  Chapter 42

  CHLOE

  Thomas Dill stood in the middle of the Level 4 lab surveying the corpses. Some were ETF agents who’d come into the lab to secure it. Others were laboratory staff. “I knew these people. I hired every one of them, hosted them at the annual Christmas party in my home.”

  “There will be a lot more bodies upstairs by now, Thomas.”

  “I know. Ken Rigg was ahead of me — ”

  “I saw how he died.”

  “It’s just so damned awful. How are you holding up?”

  “Numb. I like it that way. We have to go at this like pediatric surgery. Imagine we are operating on a child. The fact that it is even necessary anywhere, anytime makes me want to cry. Now’s not the time to cry. Now’s the time to do.”

  “I wish I was numb,” he said. “I just want to go to bed and not wake up.”

  “If we’re going to stop this thing, we’ve got to figure out what to do next. There are no lab notes left. The computers are destroyed. I couldn’t find anything more than a Post-it note from one tech to another saying it was the other guy’s turn to clean the monkey cages.”

  Trying to hold back tears, Thomas took a few deep breaths. “They will bomb us but that won’t stop Picasso. Somebody will get away. There are always survivors. It’s already at the edge of the city by now. The check is in the mail. The world’s already over. It just doesn’t know it yet.”

  “Focus. What can we do?”

  “I think that’s the problem. I was working on what we could do instead of asking whether it should be done.”

  He was projecting. There was no ‘we.’ Thomas cursed us with Picasso and he was wasting time feeling sorry for himself. “Thomas! Diseases die out because of vaccines or cures — ”

  “When the host dies off and the parasite can find no more victims, Picasso will die. That’s the only way this ends.”

  “Listen. We’ve got to figure out a vaccine or a cure.”

  “Vaccines and cures don’t come from wishing hard. That takes years of research. Have you got a time machine, Chloe? Can you step out of time while we figure this out?”

  Thomas sat in a chair and ran one gloved hand along the top of a for
mica lab table. “This isn’t the first time microorganisms have wiped out most of life of Earth, you know. There have been several extinctions. The big one was 250 million years ago. We were overdue for another ELE. You know anything about Extinction Level Events?” he asked.

  “My dad taught Earth Science, though I’m more familiar with the album of the same name,” I said.

  “Album?”

  “Busta Rhymes.”

  Thomas chuckled. “You’re funny. I could have really had something good with you.”

  “Yeah, but what would have been in it for me?”

  He let that pass in silence for a moment and then moved on. “I wonder why we don’t teach kids more about past extinctions so they’d understand how incredibly fragile everything is. Do they know about the Great Dying? Maybe they do. It’s been a long time since I was in high school. Anyway, this time it’s aerosolized brain parasites and nanotech. In the Permian Extinction — that’s the Great Dying — the apocalypse came in three waves. Insects, plants, marine life … almost everything went away. So much life was erased that it took 10 million years to recover. Volcanoes were stage one, then maybe one or two meteor impacts. The third wave of death came from methanogens. With the greenhouse effect, the microbes mass produced and shit out methane. Microscopic killers … heh. Just like Picasso.”

  I tried to get Thomas back on track. “There’s got to be something. Bombers might already be on their way. Think! There’s no secret computer with all the answers somewhere? No more backups of the backups? Anything that can help us?”

  “You’re used to clean code and neat equations that balance out. This is biology. Biology is … messy. I’m sorry. I really thought we’d have more for you to work with. Hamish Allen was a nut but he was a nut who really knew how to cover his tracks.”

  “So we’ve got nothing at all?”

  “‘Air pudding and walk away pie,’ as my old pastor used to say. There’s a bright side. I’m not worried about going to jail anymore. I have nothing to fear from the investors or the Board of Directors. What’s left to worry about? That’s the appeal of the end of everything. We can stop trying so damn hard,” — he gestured to the dead — “just like these poor souls. Look at those ETF guys. So many situps and pushups wasted.”

  Thomas pulled at his biohazard suit’s seal and yanked the protective hood from his head. He took a deep breath and smiled.

  “This is Level 4! What are you doing? That’s not safe — ”

  “Safety was a luxurious illusion. Now it’s a memory. Smells bad in here, Chloe. Smells like blood and death and failing antiseptic and canned air.”

  “Put your hood back on, Thomas!”

  “Why? The aerosol was released into the street. With the rainstorm, that vector is surely a dead end by now.” He pulled at the tape around his wrists and yanked off his gloves, too.

  “There are other deadly biological agents down here, Thomas.”

  “At this point, I assure you, the Ebola in our tanks won’t get a chance to kill me. If the zombies don’t get me, I imagine one of these guys with guns will oblige when they find out they won’t see their families tonight. This is my fault.”

  Thomas walked around the lab, stopping at each bloody corpse and giving a little bow. “It’s almost funny, the symmetry ….”

  “The symmetry?”

  “If you think about it, this disaster is unfolding in three waves, just like the Great Dying. First, the waterborne vector married your nanotech matrix. Second, Hamish Allen let the genie out of the bottle into downtown Toronto. Third, the zombie apocalypse. Buncha bastards will eliminate all life and transform survivors to crazed animals.”

  “The rest of the world will be fine.”

  “For a while, but you know it will spread. Someone will bring the disease to foreign shores and the cycle will repeat. Curiosity will kill the cat. Meanwhile, in the Western hemisphere, a few humans will escape to remote areas. They’ll try to eke out a living but the systems that make civilization work will certainly decay. Eventually, the survivors may live in caves. They’ll live off rats and live like rats. A few people in bunkers will survive for a while. There’s that NORAD base in Colorado, but whatever survives of humanity won’t have the opportunity to appreciate a fine wine or a lovely Matisse for ten million years.”

  “You’re giving up too easily, burying the whole human race too quick. I’m not lying down.”

  He wept silent tears but he had anger to spare, too. “Congratulations are in order. We extrapolated from your work, yes, but without you, none of this kill tech would be possible. You are one of the giants whose shoulders others have stood upon. Judging from the sheer number of cannibals a few floors above us, their bites must be incredibly venomous. That’s my contribution. Well, Hamish Allen, really. Weapons developers aren’t eligible for Nobels, even if we did it to serve peace. North America is about to get really peaceful, after about eleven months of chaos, anyway.”

  “Eleven months?”

  “The cities will fall quickly. It’s the rural areas where everyone is armed and people are spread out where Picasso will slow down. Still, it’ll happen, faster than most people clean out the burnt food at the bottom of the freezer. Heh. Come to think of it, we should be eligible for the Peace Prize.”

  “You’re reminding me of something my mother told me, Thomas. She said it when I did something shitty or when someone did something shitty to me. ‘We judge others by their actions. We judge ourselves by our good intentions.’”

  Thomas took a deep breath. “You’re not wrong. I’m the first person to breathe the air in this lab since its construction. God, it stinks down here.” He surveyed the corpses again. “That’s their fault, poor buggers. Hamish was too smart. I hired him for the same reason I hired you, you know. I surrounded myself with geniuses. I knew Hamish could really produce for me. Aside from an impressive resume, he gave me quite a lecture in his first interview. He was hung up on the difference between the words venomous and poisonous. He gave me a condescending lecture on the difference. He was an obnoxious, pedantic hippie, but damn, that man knew his brain parasites.”

  “Blood samples.” I said. “We can take blood samples from the dead. The ones that were bitten. Then we have to get out of here, to another lab.”

  “And do what?”

  “To understand what Hamish knew. I have to see how Picasso interacts with the brain parasites.”

  Thomas tapped his naked wrist. “Hmph. Tick, tock. Oops! Buzz! You’re out of time. Thank you for playing. Sorry, no consolation prize, we’re dead. Soon we go boom.”

  At that moment a loud alarm sounded and I jumped. The alarm stopped abruptly and an intercom in the wall popped on. “Dr. Dill? Dr. Robinson? Do you have what you need down there? We’ve got a red light on our control board. Someone just entered the Level 1 decontamination chamber.”

  “Who?” I called.

  “The zombies are coming to get us,” Thomas said.

  “Shut up. Zombies don’t crack codes to hatches in high security labs.”

  The man on the intercom pressed on. “We don’t know who it is, the control room’s pretty messed up. Could be an extraction team to help us evacuate or help coming with supplies. Whichever, you’ll need to bring them up to speed on what you’ve figured out. Come up for a briefing, please.”

  Thomas laughed. “Tell them we don’t have dick! Drop the bomb! And tell them to drop it right on top of us. I don’t want to starve to death down here! Toronto, Canada, the United States … maybe even Mexico! As far as an infected person can walk, it’s all a write-off. If you’re an optimist, Europe is about to have a new Renaissance. The hope of the world might be China and Australia. Anywhere but a good chunk of the Western Hemisphere is a good place to be.”

  “Shut it, Thomas. And stay here. Stay in quarantine. Take blood, skin and hair samples from the dead. I’ll go up and stall.”

  As I left he called after me. “I knew we couldn’t last forever, but I thought we’d outla
st the polar bears!”

  I shouldn’t have left Thomas alone. I suspected he was suicidal but I didn’t care enough. Neither my actions nor my intentions toward my boss were gentle. I would have been a terrible disappointment to my mother.

  I went through the decontamination chamber and Level 4 staging area to take the elevator back up to Level 3. Level 4 was too much of a disappointment to me.

  Chapter 43

  CHLOE

  As I stepped off the elevator to Level 3, I watched my step. The bodies had been carted downstairs but the floor was still awash in blood. The small space had been a scene of mayhem beyond my imagining. The only thing I could imagine would be worse was whatever happened on Level 1 when the zombies attacked. I pictured Shelly firing into the mob as the cannibals blocked the door trying to get at the last human defenders.

  I looked around at our few remaining security personnel. They glanced at me nervously before returning to stare at the hatch, guns at the ready.

  Bill Arsenault and Dale Crenshaw stood talking at the door to the control room. Behind them, a tech had pulled wires out of the wall and seemed to be working frantically to get a surveillance camera hooked up. Another technician had opened the back of a desktop computer. He twirled a screwdriver to pull something from the machine’s guts. A pile of weapons still lay on the control room floor.

  I went to Arsenault. “I’ve got an idea but we’ll need to evacuate to another location. Any equipment on Level 4 that might have been useful is fried. Someone set a small fire down there, too.”

  “Makes sense. The terrorist was thorough. The control room got ganked,” Arsenault said.

  “You want us to go back up?” Crenshaw said. The ETF officer did not look happy with me. “We fought to get you down here.”