by Tom Calen
“So after we left the house, we didn’t know where else to go. I know you’re… I mean, I know things are different for you… but I thought maybe you could help us,” Michelle said. Mike knew she was stumbling around mentioning the changes in him that had occurred since arriving on the island. He understood her sidestepping. If pushed, he was not sure he could put it into words either.
As they talked, as he listened, Mike could feel the paralyzing ice seeping into his limbs. He had become accustomed to the sensation over the past months. Any talk of the past, the nightmare of survival, and most especially any mention of the Tils, was always immediately followed by a cloud in his thoughts. He could feel his heart beginning to race as his vision blurred slightly, his hands and feet growing colder with each word they spoke. Miraculously his mind had kept itself whole during the six years after the outbreak. But once his wounds had healed and he had tried to begin a new life here, the trauma and stress of those years had broken through the dam of necessity and willpower.
Mike shifted in his chair, crossing his arms, hoping that the others did not see the tremors that shook his limbs; another side-effect that had developed since the rescue. Their voices grew distant, as if he listened through a pillow, and he tried to control his breathing. Focus, Mike, he told himself, breathe. There was an almost imperceptible reduction in the tremors, and the fog that had rushed into his thoughts abated slightly. Almost imperceptible but enough to allow his focus to return to his friends, enough to keep his mind from shutting down completely.
“You say they were hunting you… stalking you?” Mike asked.
It was Erik who replied as Michelle was busily unwrapping her injury. “Yeah, and it wasn’t like back home. It was like, I don’t know, more like a pack of wolves, working together, cornering us.”
“Before we got here, Marena…” Mike paused to control the anger that flared up from knowing the doctor’s current involvement. “Marena said that some of the Tils he studied had changes in their brains. The rational mind was healing itself, or at least not decaying like it had in the early years.”
“So, what does that mean? The Tils are smart now?” Andrew asked.
“I don’t know,” Mike replied. His eyes saw the clock on the wall and with a shock he realized that two hours had passed. In a short time he should be leaving for work. “Until we know more… I don’t know, but we can’t stay here. If I don’t show up for work, it won’t take long to make the connection why.”
He was surprised at the serenity with which he was able to assess their situation. In the past year, the thoughts and options that now raced through his mind would have left him incapacitated. The foggy thinking still bit the edges of his mind, but his vision had steadied, his heart had calmed, and the tremors in his arms were minimal.
Continuing he said, “We need a place to hole up for a while, somewhere not connected to any of us.”
“Tumi,” Michelle offered.
“The grocer?” asked Andrew.
“Yes. Everyone else I know works with the Council, and we can’t trust anyone you two work with,” she said as she looked to Andrew and Erik. “Not since Erik’s questions got back to the Council.”
Mike was unbothered by the assumption that he knew no one that could provide sanctuary. He had cut himself off from human contact, save for his new group of students. “Can we trust him?”
With some hesitation, Michelle answered. “Yes, I mean, I think so.” Her lack of conviction did little to settle the matter as far as Erik and Andrew were concerned. Mike realized that they were looking to him to make the decision. Great, he thought to himself. They want to be led by the guy who can barely walk out of his house.
Mustering as much authority as he could find, he announced, “The grocer, then. It’s our only option, so it’s a risk we have to take.” He could see the objections in the eyes of the two men, but their anxiety was defeated by the lack of choices.
“Then what?” Erik questioned. “Say this guy takes us in, what’s the next step? We can’t hide in his house forever.”
Mike looked at Erik, and smiled inwardly. Though he had cut off his communications with his old friends, word of Erik’s spiral into drunkenness had reached him. Now however, he displayed the same mental acuity and readiness that had kept him and countless others alive during the outbreak. Mike wondered if his own return to stability would be as quick, or as strong.
“If Michelle is right, then Paul and his team are in trouble,” he explained. “But, until we know more, we can’t rush off to find him. You guys take my car and get to... Tumi’s, is it? You guys head there, and I will meet you later.”
“Why? Where are you going?” asked all three in variations.
“I’m going to pay a visit to the good doctor,” Mike said.
As the others prepared themselves for the short drive to the grocer’s, Mike returned to his bedroom and dressed for the day. On a typical day, he would have donned a pair of khakis and button down. Today, he opened the lowest drawer of the dresser and pulled out a dark pair of jeans and a long-sleeve black tee shirt. Once attired, he knelt by the foot of the bed and removed a thin, rectangular chest. His hands shook slightly as he lifted the wooden lid. Breathing deeply for a long count and exhaling in the same manner, a practiced method that usually alleviated some of the minor attacks that had plagued him over the last year, he removed the chest’s contents.
As he held one of the two Glock 17Cs, the firearms that had at one point become part of his body, he marveled over how familiar the weapon felt in his hand. He had owned four at one point during the mountain survival, but two had been lost in the escape. The pair that remained with him were the original two he had received days after the virus had laid waste to the world. Gifts from another student—a student that had been in his thoughts every day since arriving in New Cuba.
Rising from the floor, he slipped his arms into the double chest holster, a replacement for the one that had been cut off before surgery, a gift from Paul. Mike’s mind flashed back to the last time he had worn the leather straps of his last holster. His ribs had been broken then, and his memory brought back the confining pain felt with each breath. The face of the Til that had stretched atop him as he lay wounded drifted to his mind. The room around him blurred and spun, and briefly the walls changed to the trees that surrounded him as he lay dying.
With a shuttering breath, he forced the image away, and reached for the guns, his hands once again shaking, placing them in the holsters. With a start, he saw Michelle on his left, bending down to retrieve the extra clips of ammunition. As she handed them to him, her eyes glanced at his tremor-riddled hands.
Placing her own atop his to stop the shaking, she looked into his eyes and he could see the sincere regret and pain in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she choked back tears, “I’m sorry for bringing you into this. I know things have been bad for—”
“You didn’t bring me into this, Michelle,” he cut her off with a gentle voice little more than a whisper. “This began seven years ago. We just thought it was over, but it isn’t. Maybe it will never be over.”
“I know,” she said, and then her tears began to flow.
--
Mike had no trouble locating the home of Dr. Marena, who lived in a more upscale section of the city. The man’s selection of neighborhood was of no surprise to him. He recalled all too well how the doctor rankled at the sparse comforts of the mountain encampment. Gaining access to the home was achieved with equal ease after Mike discovered a rear door with an old-fashioned lock. What did prove difficult was the waiting.
During the first few hours in the home, he made a thorough search of the numerous rooms. The three bedrooms, office, living room, dining room, and kitchen provided no information regarding the Ira Project or Marena’s involvement at the East Side facility. Enough time had passed that Mike began to wonder if the man would return at all. It was a rather long drive across the island, so he knew he was not commu
ting daily. Based on the home, however, there were signs the doctor made frequent use of the property. The refrigerator had a collection of fresh produce, clearly purchased in the past few days. Dates on the innocuous notes in the office indicated that Marena had indeed been in the house three days earlier. Mike worried, though, that given the previous evening’s events, the military facility might be on a lock-down.
The pacing through the house did nothing to relieve Mike’s stress, so he forced himself to stillness in one of the large cushioned chairs in the living room. Focusing on his breathing, he sat, gazing through the window at the sky as it turned deeper shades of pink and red. I’ll wait until after sundown, he told himself, then I have to get back to the others. In an effort to keep himself calm, he had not allowed his thoughts to turn to Michelle and the two boys. Men, he corrected himself, they are men now. And have been for some time.
When they had departed his home, Michelle had been biting her bottom lip, worrying over the grocer’s reaction to their need for a safe house. They had to make it there first, a voice in his mind spoke. Pushing voice and thought aside, he forced himself to believe the three had made it to Tumi’s home, and that the man had accepted them warmly. If not… no, they made it and are waiting for you! As he shouted down his own thoughts, he was startled at the sound of keys rustling at the front door. The sun had travelled far enough west that the once-bright living room now held long shadows that hid Mike from detection. Before the door opened, he slid one of the handguns out of its holster.
With a characteristic grumble and complaint, Dr. Allen Marena bustled in and closed the door, placing his keys on the small adjacent table. Mike could see the large man’s shadow as his hand fumbled to find the light switch. A metallic click preceded the overhead light’s illumination; which was immediately followed by a startled gasp as the doctor’s eyes fell on Mike and the gun he held.
“Scream and you die, Doc,” Mike said menacingly.
“Wh… what, what are you doing here?” the man asked, but by his tone Mike knew the doctor was connecting last night’s break-in with the appearance of the teacher in his living room.
“We need to talk about your experiments,” he informed Marena, his eyes watching the other man slowly move his hand to the table at the door. “Don’t bother going for the gun, Doc. By the time you put it back together and load it, I’ll be long gone and you’ll be dead. Now, have a seat and tell me what’s new with you.”
With dull resignation, the doctor dragged his feet across the planked floor and sat down with such a dejected slump that he doubted he would have to scare the man much further. Dr. Marena had proved to be a very adept physician and sometime surgeon, in the mountains, but Mike knew him to be a coward to the core.
“What do you know?” Marena said, the thick flesh of his neck and chins quivered noticeably.
“More than you think,” Mike lied, but suspected the doctor was too frightened to hear the falsehood. “Start at the beginning. And the moment I catch you in a lie…” Mike said as he tilted the gun for effect.
Gathering his strength, Marena swallowed hard and began his tale. “They brought me in a few years after I completed my residency. They said my work in contagious diseases was impressive.” Even under stress, the doctor’s vanity could be heard in the words.
“The goal was to design a weaponized virus that would force the enemy to turn on each other. Essentially they would kill each other off so that our troops and resources would not be needed. It took years to isolate the right compounds, make them target specific brain functions, formulate a stable dosage, but eventually the research panned out. We called it the Tilian Virus, since it amplified the control of the reptilian part of the brain. The parts of aggression, survival, anger, etcetera.”
It was an effort for Mike not to react. When he told Marena to start at the beginning he never imagined the doctor had been part of the development of the virus that had ended the world.
“And the virus’ release into the population…” Mike prompted.
“We don’t how it happened. The Fort Polk facility was state of the art. It had to be because of what we were creating. But somehow the virus… just got out… maybe through a failure in the security’s air monitoring system… maybe through human error. We didn’t know. Before we even had time to investigate, the virus went global. Within a few days there was no chain of command to give us orders. Those of us that were uninfected eventually decided to abandon the facility.”
“Why?” Mike asked. “If you were healthy and this facility you had was so state of the art, you probably could have lived there indefinitely.”
At that, he could see the doctor begin to fidget, dry-washing his hands repeatedly. “The infected began to change, to become… Tils. It wasn’t safe there anymore, and…” his voice trailed off.
“And?”
For the first time since he began talking, Marena raised his head and locked his eyes with Mike’s. “And, we knew if the facility was discovered by survivors they would… they would blame us.”
Mike believed he could have won a great deal of money betting that the doctor had been the first to suggest abandoning the facility.
“I saw reports listing hundreds of patients.” Again he lied, but Mike saw no need to mention Michelle if the doctor did not already know of her involvement in the break-in. “Where did they come from?”
“Some were prisoners on death row. They were told they would live if they agreed to be patients in our work.”
“Guinea pigs, then,” Mike said, with a grunt. “Does it make you feel better to call them patients? You basically offered them a pardon, but didn’t tell them what would be done to them. You said some… what about the others?”
“The rest came from here, from Guantanamo Bay, enemy combatants from the wars.”
“And did they get the same deal?”
“I don’t know. They were just brought to us.”
Mike could no longer fight the sneer that warred to curl his lips, recalling a time when the doctor had refused to assist a dying man’s wish because it conflicted with the ethics of a physician.
Continuing the interrogation, Mike queried, “And when you got here, you just picked up were you left off?”
“No!” Marena said adamantly, showing the first energy since taking his place on the couch. “I didn’t even know that work was still being done. When I got here, I was told to resume my work or I’d be killed.”
Seems to be the only options you get, Mike mused. “So, what are they doing now? The Tils are different, I know that. What have you done to them?”
“Nothing. The changes are natural. I told you about it after Jenni died.”
Mike restrained himself from leaping from the couch and beating the man. Jenni died because of something you made, you bastard! his mind raged.
“What we have found is that those that have been infected the longest are evolving, or adapting. They’re able to reason. Not like us, but to problem solve, work in groups. They’ve developed a pack mentality. The Tils we have still can’t feel pain, but they seem to understand what can kill them. They won’t feel a bullet, but they’ll try to avoid being shot.”
Taking a moment to process the information, Mike feared that these evolved Tils were far more dangerous than the ones he and the others had faced before. Something in the doctor’s face, though, seemed different to Mike.
“What aren’t you telling me, Doc?”
“We’ve… developed a way to control them,” the man mumbled. Before Mike could ask the obvious question, the doctor continued. “Using a high-pitched frequency, we are able to control them somewhat. Attract their attention, soothe their rages, excite them, very basic emotions.”
“A frequency? You mean like a dog whistle?” Mike felt foolish for making the analogy.
“Essentially, yes. There are numerous frequency pitches that humans can’t hear, like a dog whistle, but Tils seem to have developed the ability to hear registers that healthy humans
cannot. It’s a relatively new development, at least successfully developed. There had been several failed efforts before we arrived on the island. But last night it…” Marena’s eyes widened as his words stopped short.
“Last night it worked?” Mike asked, requiring no answer. Rising from the chair, he crossed the short distance to where the doctor sat. Staring down at the overweight man, Mike funneled all his anger into his words. “You’re going to find a way to kill them, Doctor. Not control, not manipulate, but kill them. Do you understand me?”
Stammering, and sweating more profusely than Mike had detected from the chair, Marena spoke in a voice filled with panic. “If they catch me doing anything like that, they’ll kill me!”
Gently placing the gun under the man’s chin, Mike growled. “How much do you think I care about what happens to you, Doc? Next time I see you, you better have found some way to end what you started.”
Nodding as much as he could with the weapon still pushing into his chins, the doctor mumbled several words of agreement. Straightening from his menacing angle, Mike moved slowly towards the front door. As he slid back the bolt and turned the knob he heard the doctor call out to him from the couch.
“Mike,” he said. “You have to know I didn’t want any of this. I thought I was doing good back then, and then it got out. And now… Mike, there’s something else you need to know.”
Without speaking, he turned from the door, and let his glare rest on the doctor. A slight arch of his left brow indicating he was waiting for the other man to speak.
“There’s another one from the facility. They call us operatives now,” Dr. Marena said with a pitied laugh. “But Paul’s in trouble. The other operative is with him, on his team, and has instructions to destroy the facility and kill the team.”
“Who?” Mike said, his voice hoarse and graveled. It was the last word he was able to speak for some time before shock left his body.
“It’s Lisa… Lisa Velazquez. Lisa is the other operative.”
