Treasure of the Dead

by David Wood

  Fabi yelled at the top of her lungs. “I don’t know where it is!”

  Avila shrugged. “I guess in an hour I’ll believe you.” He turned away from Fabi and huddled with his lab tech in quiet conference in a corner of the room while the armed guard stood watch. Unable to do anything else, Fabi called out to Cassandra.

  “Cassandra! Can you hear me? It’s okay, hang in there, you’ll be okay.”

  Cassandra uttered a couple of nonsensical words but never focused her eyes on Fabi while she tossed her head back and forth. She seemed to drift in and out of consciousness. Avila and his tech ignored them while the guard looked on passively, apparently concerned only with action, not words. Fabi continued attempting to communicate with her friend over the next few minutes, but her condition only deteriorated, taking her even farther from reality.

  “Dr. Avila! Why are you doing this?”

  The physician held a finger up to his lab tech and slowly turned around to face Fabi. “Why? To make people better, of course.” He beamed as though he had just uttered the most fantastic thing a person could ever say.

  “How does carrying out unregulated experimentation on non-consenting subjects make people better?”

  Avila took a deep breath, as though gathering his patience. “Fabiola, you are still a relatively young person, somewhat naive. How can I put this?” He stared at Cassandra while wrinkling his eyebrows into a mask of contemplation before continuing.

  “Many people are nothing more than simple drudges. Near-mindless automatons, going about their daily life chores with a robotic detachment best suited to...well, suited to machine-like labor, really. That’s where my HAITI project comes in. It stands for Human-Animal Initiative for Total Indoctrination.”

  Fabi bristled with hate as she recalled seeing the name of the project in the clinic files, blissfully unaware at the time of its abhorrent meaning.

  Avila went on. “Why not let the zombie class serve the more capable, yes—dare I say it—better, more advanced people, people who will afford them a life of productivity, free from criminal urges?”

  “A person’s station in life should not be dictated to them by someone else, Dr. Avila, that’s why not. You’re not talking about naturally letting people land where they may, are you? Why else would you need to drug them?” She nodded to Cassandra, who had stopped the constant thrashing but now uttered a continuous, low moan.

  “I am simply accelerating their natural fate and harnessing it where it can do the most good.” He also nodded to Cassandra. “Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed that her skills are not exactly irreplaceable. I suspect that on your first day, you’ve already demonstrated you can outperform her.”

  “What about free will?”

  Avila laughed. “Free will is wasted on the inferior. Look at how the lowest of the low exercise it: murder, rape, theft, and countless other crimes.”

  “That’s a messed up version of law enforcement.”

  “There are more applications, though. Drug addiction would be thing of the past. Population could be strictly controlled. So many possibilities, and what is the real cost? Insignificant sacrifice by inconsequential people.”

  “It’s the worst kind of slavery,” Fabi said. “But something else is going on.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Fabi caught the lab tech glance up sharply from his cart of instruments, waiting for Avila’s reaction, which was a hollow laugh.

  “Let’s just say there are certain applications for this work that others will pay handsomely for.”

  “Like what?” A cold fear, like ice water coursing through her veins, gripped Fabi.

  “You served in the military. Imagine a fighting force that never disobeyed an order and never quailed in the face of the enemy. Fearsome, to be sure.”

  “You’re crazy, Dr. Avila, you know that? You can’t possibly understand the full ramifications of this....this zombification process you’re playing with. What if it gets out of hand and you can’t control the people you change?” She eyed Cassandra with dismay.

  Avila glanced over at his tech, who promptly lowered his gaze and went back to shuffling his instruments around on the cart. Avila looked back to Fabi and said, “We’re working on a ‘switch’ so that we’ll be able to turn the abilities on and off. We’re almost there, isn’t that right, Peter?”

  The tech looked up and gave a nod that lacked true enthusiasm. “We’re working on it.”

  “That’s why you want the treasure, isn’t it?” Fabi spat. “To fund your sick experiments.”

  “That is part of it, you’re right. But the other part is that the 1715 Spanish treasure is in fact rightfully mine. I have an ancestor, a distant relative, who was the ship’s doctor on that ill-fated voyage. Cristobal D'Avila was his name. I still share his same pure, Spanish blood. Our family has never permitted our noble bloodline to be diluted by intermarrying with commoners.”

  Avila could see Fabi’s eyes widening, and he leaned toward her to emphasize his last point. “When my work here is completed, I believe it will pave the way for me to rule in Haiti, as it should be.”

  Fabi eyed him with unadulterated disgust. “Consider this my resignation, Dr. Avila. I can’t believe I spent so much time working for such a monster.”

  Sudden, spastic convulsions racked Cassandra’s body. She let out a guttural, pain-addled scream. When she settled back down, Avila said, “You will share her fate, you know, if you can’t tell me where this treasure is. This is your last chance.” He nodded to his tech and the man wheeled his cart full of instruments over to Fabi, still strapped down in the cot. The tech adjusted an IV stand and swabbed her arm, preparing to insert a needle. Cassandra caterwauled again and Fabi looked over at her.

  “Okay! Hold it! I’ll talk.”

  Chapter 38

  Maddock, Bones and Willis slipped unseen past the guarded front entrance to Avila’s main house. After coercing information from the front gate guard by scaring but not actually hurting him, they had left the man trussed up outside the gate and made their way here.

  “Back door should be on this side.” Maddock crouched low and pointed to the house. Bones and Willis nodded. They were about to move out when something stirred in the waist-high brush that surrounded much of the house. A man rose about twenty-five feet in front of them and walked toward them without speaking. The person had a slackjawed look about him, lifeless eyes and a deathly pallor about the skin.

  “More over here!” Bones pointed to the right.

  “And here!” Willis indicated their left flank.

  Maddock pointed at a forty-five degree angle to their left, toward the back door the guard had told them about. More zombii poured out of the brush and stalked after the three intruders. The treasure seekers ran for the back door, slipping through gaps in the zombie ranks before sprinting the rest of the way to the house.

  A chain link fence surrounded the house close to the door, with a gate that was closed and locked. Worse, a guard patrolled the area between the house and the gate, pacing the narrow space up and back. Maddock tapped Bones on the arm.

  “You take care of the gate. Willis, you’re on zombie duty. I’ll handle the guard.”

  Willis held up a hand. “Hold up, there’s gotta be at least a dozen of those things coming this way. I can’t take ‘em all out, at least not without making some noise.” He patted his holstered pistol.

  Maddock tilted his head toward Bones, who was already moving to the gate. “You know how Bones is with locks. Shouldn’t be very long. But if that guard sees us and raises the alarm...” He turned and looked back to the approaching zombie squad. “My guess is that we could end up as one of those things.”

  Willis nodded. He turned around and headed a little ways back through the brush while Maddock crept off to the left, a rock in one hand. When Maddock saw the guard turn around and begin walking back in their direction, he tossed the rock along the fence. When it landed the guard spun around and moved his weapon to the ready positio
n before moving off to investigate.

  Maddock breathed a sigh of relief and looked back to check on Bones, who had thankfully just sprung the lock. Maddock then looked around for Willis and saw two shadowy figures circling in a fighting dance. He went to Willis and dispatched the combatant zombie by pistol whipping it in the skull. It crumpled to the ground, but three more were heading their way.

  “Come, let’s get inside.” Maddock and Willis turned and ran to Bones at the gate. The zombii closed fast and the men hurried inside the fence without closing the gate, running for the door. As they reached it, the guard walked around the corner of a metal utility housing, where Willis grabbed him, pinning his arms to his sides, while Bones relieved him of his weapon and Maddock took the swipe card he wore on a lanyard around his neck.

  The sound of approaching zombie footsteps neared, and they moved on to the door on this side of the house. When they got to it, Bones tried it and found it locked. He pointed to the card reader. Maddock took a glance back at the zombii before pulling the card through. A light turned green and Bones pulled the door open. He stood there a moment, straining to see what was inside, but Willis shoved him in. “”Go! Go! They’re coming!”

  Bones and Willis entered the building first. Maddock followed them, pulling the door shut just as they heard the screams of the guard as the zombii got to him and began to maul.

  Chapter 39

  A wave of bitter self-loathing coursed through Fabi as she unburdened herself to her captor. She hated herself for what she was doing. She’d been trained to resist interrogation, but now she was broken. Damn! She’d believed herself tougher than this. Apparently, she wasn’t.

  “And so Maddock, Bones and Willis went diving off Alto Velo Island to look for the wreck, and I haven’t heard from them since.” Fabi looked up from the cot at Avila, tears streaming down her face, sobbing and gasping for breath. “That’s everything.”

  It had been an emotional recounting of events. The facts, stories and memories poured out of her. Once she began telling the truth, she held nothing back, as if a floodgates had opened and she could do nothing to close them. Avila looked down on her with a wide smile.

  “Shhh, there now, Fabi. You’ve done well! Calm down, now. Take it easy...” Fabi closed her eyes for a moment, to block out the reality of this weird place, to try to calm down a bit...but when she opened them again Avila was wearing a respirator mask and placing an inhaler like the kind used by those with asthma into her mouth. With her wrists cuffed to the cot rails, she couldn’t fend him off, and he squeezed two puffs of whatever the inhaler contained into her mouth before she could move her head away from it.

  “There you are. That should calm you down.” Avila retreated from the cot and handed his lab technician the inhaler and his mask, both of which the tech handled with gloved hands and the abundance of caution reserved for material that represented a biohazard.

  Perhaps it was the contents of the inhaler, perhaps not, but Fabi did, in fact, feel calmer. Self-loathing burned through the fear, and left only anger. She looked Avila in the eyes and somehow knew that he would not let her go. She had to find a way. Perhaps if she could get him to lower his guard.

  “I don’t understand how you even made this zombie formula, or whatever it is.”

  Avila grinned. “The ancestor I mentioned, Cristobal, had an encounter with zombii. From an early age I was fascinated with the story, and researching the phenomenon became one of mypassions.” He settled into a chair, a faraway look in his eyes.

  He’s letting his guard down, Fabi thought. If I could only get loose. “What did you find?” she asked, trying to keep him distracted.

  “I knew the scientist in you would come out eventually. I discovered that most of the reports were garbage: religious frenzy, mental illness, mind-altering drugs, brain damage, even a few cases of someone being buried alive. But in some rare cases I discovered people whose brain functioning had actually changed. The centers that control inhibitions and original thought were “turned off” for lack of a better term. I knew that this phenomenon existed in nature, with certain ants, for example, so I investigated it from a biological perspective. Those who knew the true secrets were reluctant to divulge them, but I…persuaded them. I discovered certain plants that, when used in combination, elicited this effect.”

  “What’s to stop others from simply duplicating your work?”

  “Fair question. We constantly work to collect all the plant material on the island and then used herbicide to eradicate anything we might miss. It is my intention to control the entire supply of the needed material.”

  Fabi was running out of questions and was no closer to freeing herself. “So, you grow it here?”

  “Grow, synthesize, experiment. In fact, you’re helping with one of our experiments right now.”

  Fabi’s heart raced. The aerosol! “What do you mean? What did you give me?”

  Avila’s grin did little to assuage Fabi’s concern, his words even less so. “We're experimenting with transferring the productivity therapy via aerosol, and it so happens that you're the first test case.”

  Chapter 40

  Maddock, Bones, and Willis jumped when the lights came on in the back entranceway to the house.

  “Chill, it’s just motion-activated.” Willis lay a hand on Bones’ gun arm.

  “I hear footsteps. Down there.” Maddock pointed to the end of the short hallway in which they found themselves. The trio of operators slipped silently to the end of the hall, Bones and Willis to the right and left, respectively, while Maddock crouched in the middle. Footsteps grew louder from the left. Willis tensed, his pistol in the ready position.

  “Clear,” Bones subvocalized, letting Willis and Maddock know there were no immediate threats coming from their right side. When the guard reached the hallway, Willis reached up and pulled him in, wrestling him to the ground. What he didn’t count on was the immediate gunfire from the left side, down the hall. Someone was backing up his fellow guard.

  Maddock returned fire down the hall while Willis and Bones incapacitated the other guard, binding his wrists and ankles with plastic zip-ties and relieving him of his weapon, a snub-nosed semi-automatic. When the guard was under control, Willis assumed a prone sniper position and belly-crawled to the edge of the hallway where he joined Maddock in laying down fire to the left. That guard retreated and Maddock and the others pushed forward into the hallway, to the right. They reached an open door on the left side and entered a holding cell area where zombii in different states were held. Some were more human than others, with the ability to speak, though others were mostly animals at this point with little or no capacity for independent thought. And some were in fact actual animals that Maddock recognized from their monkey encounters.

  “Creepy as all get-out.” Willis eyed a monstrous ape-like form that resembled one of the largest primates they had defeated. Bones and Maddock agreed with Willis, with Maddock vowing to put an end to this experimentation when and if they got out of here with Fabi alive.

  They continued on into another room that functioned as a ward of sorts, with people strapped down in cots, connected to IV drips and electronic monitor machines. They moved through this space as well, lamenting there was no time to help these individuals right now, but knowing that bringing down Avila himself would be the best thing they could do for everyone involved.

  Bones tried the closed door at the opposite end of the room and found it locked, but Maddock swiped his appropriated key card and it opened. They entered yet another lab, each wondering what lengths Dr. Avila had gone to in order to develop his hideous creations. This room featured isles of lab benches stacked high with traditional chemistry equipment—ring stands, beakers, Erlenmeyer flasks, racks of test tubes—and they almost didn’t see the guard hunched over one of the benches.

  He was reading a magazine, oblivious to the room’s new occupants. Willis popped up behind him and clocked him hard, but not too hard, on the neck where it joined the b
ase of the skull. The man slumped off his bench, unconscious, and was caught by Willis before his head could crack on the concrete floor. Willis eased the man into a prostrate position and again, they relieved him of his weapons and swipe card.

  Maddock was less than entirely pleased with the outcome. “Guys, we need to be able to question at least one of these guys so we can find out where Fabi is being held. Can’t knock them all out cold right away every time.”

  Willis gave a sheepish look. “Sorry. Instinct, you know.”

  The lab now clear of resistance with no incoming threats detected, the three of them took some time to walk around and see what they could learn. Bones moved to one area that contained grow lights hanging from the ceiling over a soil bed of various plants. He moved among them, examining them closely. He rubbed the leaves of one between his fingertips and sniffed it. “Hey, I know this one. Sassafras, My grandmother swore by this stuff.”

  “Swore by it for what?” Willis wanted to know.

  “Anti-inflammatory and insect bite treatment. It’s been banned in the U.S. Doesn’t surprise me that…”

  A scream rent the air from somewhere outside the lab. A female scream. Bones turned and headed for the far exit, Maddock and Willis following a split second later.

  “Fabi!”

  Chapter 41

  Maddock burst into the room at the same time as Bones, with Willis a step behind them. Fabi lay strapped to a cot while Avila stood over her with a syringe pressed to her neck.

  “Stop where you are! Do not make another move or she gets it!”

  Maddock froze, holding Bones and Willis back, lest emotions get the better of them, especially Bones. “Gets what?”

  “This syringe contains a high concentration of potassium chloride, more than enough to stop her heart. If one of you so much as flinches, she gets the needle.”

  No one spoke for a few seconds, but Avila could see the three warriors visually appraising the situation. Bones focused on Fabi while Willis inspected the room, his gaze lingering on Cassanda, who was no longer moving as she lay strapped to a cot not far from Fabi. Maddock’s eyes were fixed on the doctor himself. The cool scrutiny apparently made Avila nervous enough to want to reiterate his position.