In the faint red light she could make out her mother’s face. She looked terrified. What was she doing in there? She would be killed if the truck went down over the edge. Kizzy grabbed onto the bumper. Her mother tried to open the door, pulling desperately at the handle but it was stuck fast.
“No, no, no,” shouted Kizzy.
The front wheels began to break through the thin plywood. Suddenly the truck fell away. Her mother toppled backwards from the window. There was a bright flash, then a violent explosion that knocked Kizzy backwards off her feet. Her ears rang. Flames roared up through the hole in the floor.
What had happened? Her mother, was she still in there? And what about Diego? Kizzy ran back to the stairs and jumped down. She rounded the corner as the truck was engulfed in flames. Kizzy fell to her knees. Her mother was dead.
Kizzy went completely numb. A bubble formed in her gut and popped turning all of her insides to black. She had killed her mother, the woman who had formed her and brought her into the world. The one who had taken care of her every time she was sick. All the memories from her childhood flashed before her eyes and dissolved away into flames. She had to get to Enoch now. Failure was no longer an option. Too much had been lost and he had to bring these people back.
A few yards from the fire Diego was laid out on the floor. Kizzy ran to him.
His eyes were closed. His face and clothes were black. Kizzy shook him. She couldn’t lose him too. He was the only thing in the entire world that meant anything to her anymore.
“Wake up,” she pleaded. She wiped the black ash from his face. “Please wake up.”
Slowly he opened his eyes. “What happened?” he moaned.
Kizzy looked over at the burning wreck. Iris’s feet stuck out from underneath the smashed front of the truck.
“She’s gone,” Kizzy said. “She can’t hurt us any more.”
Diego looked up into her eyes. The fire’s blaze made them twinkle. Kizzy never felt so vulnerable. She looked away.
Suddenly the truck budged. It rocked again, making the sound of machinery violently twisting.
“We have to go now,” Kizzy said. She tried pulling Diego to his feet.
“I can’t,” he said. His body was limp in her arms.
The flaming wreckage moved again.
“Diego, let’s go,” Kizzy shouted. “This is our only chance.”
He slowly got to his feet and they scurried to the stairs. Kizzy blindly felt her way along the wall, until she found the door that led back into the grocery store, back into real life, back into the daylight. They escaped through the hole Iris had made in the window and made a beeline for the Enoch building.
Kizzy stayed low as they crept through the smoke and the waist-high weeds.
The thought of her mother burning to death in the truck burst into her mind. When Kizzy pushed the thought away, it squeezed a tear from her eye. Dr. Enoch can bring her back. Dr. Enoch can bring her back. Dr. Enoch will bring her back. She felt as if she was beginning to lose it. Her breathing was speeding up. In that moment she realized that if she was going to make it the rest of the way, she would need to pretend nothing had ever happened to her mother. She forced her mind to the present.
Inch by inch they crossed the wide open square. They needed to move quickly. If there were any police left, they would be combing the area. And Iris was back there somewhere behind them. She was un-killable, like an insect that had been smashed, but refused to die, only coming back stronger and stronger. Evil and unstoppable. The thought made Kizzy shiver.
Suddenly she came upon a crow in the weeds. It cawed and snapped at her. Kizzy jumped back. Another crow was beside her and nipped at her arm.
She stood up to see the entire square was filled with crows, thousands of them. Her heart trembled. They all stared at her with black empty eyes, as if they were waiting for something. Why were they here? Kizzy and Diego slowly approached the Enoch building amidst the silent flock.
Spray painted in big black letters across the front of the building was “#ENOCH!”
Diego pointed to the entrance. The revolving glass doors were locked shut with rusty iron chains. “That’s probably a bad sign.”
“Is it abandoned?” Kizzy asked. It couldn’t be. If there was one place on earth with survivors, it would be here. “Maybe the chains were to keep the infected out?”
“It would be kind of hard to chain the door from inside though.”
Kizzy walked up the cracked concrete stairs and shook the chains. They were rough to the touch and held tight. They needed to find another way in. A dried out old potted plant stood beside the door. Kizzy plucked out the long dead plant and knocked over the large earthenware pot. The brittle clay shattered into small pieces and the dried dirt spilled out on the ground. Kizzy picked a shard of pottery and flung it into the glass. The crash echoed off the skyscrapers and down the empty streets. Some of the crows were spooked and began to caw. They fluttered around for a moment, then went back to their stillness. Kizzy glanced all around to make sure nobody had heard.
“What are you doing?” scolded Diego, his forehead furrowed.
“How else are we supposed to get inside?” Kizzy snapped back.
The window had cracked but the pottery shard had burst into smaller useless pieces. Kizzy grabbed another and hurled it into the glass. It cracked more. This time a small hole appeared. Kizzy took another piece and began chipping at the opening. It started to grow as the glass was bashed into shimmery dust. Kizzy began to kick at the window, knocking the pieces into the building, until the whole was large enough to climb through.
Kizzy contorted her body to enter. Inside was a long white reception desk that ran the entire length of the lobby. At the end of the room was an elevator.
It was deadly quiet, just like everywhere else in the city. This was nothing like what she had imagined. Had they found the right place? She walked to the elevator and pushed the button, but nothing happened.
“They usually need electric to work,” Diego said with a smile as he entered.
Kizzy pushed the button a few more times, hoping something would happen. “I probably should’ve guessed that.”
In the corner of the room was a bright white staircase leading up to the second floor.
“Maybe someone’s upstairs,” she said.
Hundreds of cubicles filled the large second floor office complex. Kizzy walked down the central passageway, passing all the gray square work spaces. Each desk was a little different, with pictures of spouses and white beaches. Many of them were messy, as if they had left in a hurry. At the end of the hallway was a large office with a big white desk. A family picture sat next to the computer; a man holding a woman and two young boys. That grouping of people looked strange to Kizzy. Papers were scattered over the desk. They were mostly covered in numbers, they seemed to be expense reports. The operating cost of factories, a 2029 farm receipt, payroll. There wasn’t anything of importance.
Diego came to the doorway carrying a small plastic figurine. It was a skeleton dressed in a black hood and cloak and holding a scythe. In his bony hands he held a sign that read “Will Work For Food”.
“This is the weirdest thing isn’t it?” Diego said.
“What is it?” Kizzy asked.
“Some sort of kid’s toy?”
“It’s as creepy as hell put it away.”
He tossed the toy. “Do you think the plague got all the people here to?”
“It just doesn’t seem fair,” Kizzy said, looking at the picture of the family on the desk. “That so many people would die when they were so close to getting the Enoch pill.”
“Well that’s how life works doesn’t it? Evil comes, sneaking up right behind the good.”
They walked up the staircase to the third level. The cubicles here seem
ed to be a little larger. Kizzy checked each desk, searching for any relevant information. All the papers talked about testing trials and lab reports, each coming back with a one hundred percent success rate. Others showed the results of studies showing there would be no ill-affects from children taking the pill. There was a newspaper clipping hanging in a frame on the wall. Kizzy took it, exposing the dustless square beneath, and read it aloud.
“‘The miracle pill that took the world by storm in the spring has proven to be all that was promised. Clinical trials have established that it stops the aging process completely.’”
“It’s nothing we don’t know already.” Diego said shaking his head.
“’Also seems to make a human’s lifespan indefinite. Scientists at Unicorp have been developing...’” she stopped and groaned and scanned further down the page. Not a single word about Dr. Enoch.
“Maybe Enoch died in the plague too,” said Diego.
“Don’t say that.”
“Shit like that happens.”
Kizzy threw the frame at the floor and stormed off.
“What? What did I say?” Diego asked.
The office at the end of the room looked out onto an overgrown park outside. Spread out on the desk was a large map of the world.
Diego came and knocked on the door frame. “I’m sorry for whatever I said.”
Kizzy shook her head. “No, it... it’s nothing.”
Diego nodded and wandered over to a closet at the end of the room. He opened the door to find a large storage room filled wall to wall with Enoch pill bottles.
“Oh my god,” he said. “El Dorado.”
He ran into the room taking huge arm-fulls of the pills, hoarding as many as he could in his shirt.
The pills meant nothing to Kizzy, she stared back down at the map. Every few inches there was a red dot representing a distribution center. The land was colored pink where the distribution had reached. The entire earth was covered, with nearly three hundred red dots.
“Look at this,” Diego said, stumbling out from the closet, carrying as many bottles as humanly possible, even dropping some onto the floor as he walked. He stood on the other side of the desk, looking over the map.
“Do you know what this means?” Kizzy asked, staring up at him.
“What?”
“Enoch can be at any of these places. Any of these red dots. If he’s even still alive.”
“We would have to check all of them,” Diego said to himself.
“No, it means there’s no way we’ll find him,” she said. “It would take hundreds of years.”
Diego gazed at the map and slid his hand over the top of it, feeling the thousands of miles glide under his fingertips. “Yeah, it would.”
“Well, we don’t have that option,” said Kizzy.
“What? What do you mean?” asked Diego. He dumped the bottles over the desk. He had a real big grin on his face as he gazed out the window. “We have forever.”
Kizzy felt a hole in her stomach. She tried to smile, but she could feel tears coming to her eyes. That was the one secret she could never tell. She walked away.
“What wrong? What did I say now?”
Kizzy gazed out the window and saw five police officers on the street outside. She ducked down and motioned to Diego to the window. They were approaching the entrance.
“They must’ve heard you,” Diego said.
Kizzy eyed the last staircase leading up to the third and final floor. Diego continued to watch the police. If Enoch was upstairs, Kizzy needed to get to him first. Diego couldn’t hear that she needed a cure. He could never know.
“Wait here,” she whispered to him.
23
Kizzy walked up the last staircase to the top floor of the Enoch Building. If Dr. Enoch was indeed there, this was the place he’d be. Kizzy climbed each step, keenly aware that destiny or disappointment awaited her.
At the top of the stairs was a large open office. The walls were of white polished stone and the floors, smooth black slate. The far side of the room was solid glass that led out to a circular balcony. A chestnut executive desk sat at the head of the office. Behind it was a black leather chair. It faced away from Kizzy, looking out the window over the overgrown concrete jungle.
She approached the chair with baited breath. With a shaky hand she reached out and turned the cold leather, but the seat was empty. She looked outside. A man in a red robe was sitting on the balcony wall.
“Hey child,” he said, hopping down from the ledge and strolling towards her.
Was this Enoch? It had to be. Who else could it be? There was no other way up to this office besides the staircase she had just climbed.
“You must be Kizzy,” he said with a friendly grin. His features were sharp and he looked as if he had been in a few fights in his life that had broken his nose. Tiny eyed sat deep in his skull.
“How do you know?” asked Kizzy.
“Oh, I know a lot about you,” he said, as he took a seat on the edge of the desk. “I know why you’ve come so far and caused so much trouble and I know your problem. I know what you’re looking for.”
Kizzy’s heart skipped a beat. Was this the moment she’d been waiting for? “You’re Dr. Enoch, aren’t you?”
“Dr. Enoch?” asked the man with a laugh. “No, not quite.”
Kizzy furrowed her brow and shook her head. This had to be him. Something was off. “Do you know where he is?”
The man thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “I do. And I can take you there.”
“Where is he then?” Kizzy asked.
“Iris is here,” Diego cried out as he ran up the stairs. “The cops tried to stop her, but she blew right through them...” He froze when he saw the man in red. “Father Morrigan? What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for your little friend,” said the man. He winked at Kizzy. “She’s the only one who can get to Dr. Enoch.”
“Look, we got to get out of here,” Diego said scanning the room for an escape.
“Why am I the only one who can get there?” Kizzy asked, turning back to Father Morrigan.
“Because of your condition,” he said.
It felt as if the ground shook underneath her feet. Was it from the destruction that Iris was causing down below or from what Father Morrigan had just said? “How do you know about that?”
“What condition?” Diego asked.
“You mean you never told your partner in crime?” Morrigan asked, looking at Kizzy with raised eyebrows. “That’s not so nice.”
“Never told me what?” Diego asked.
Kizzy began to feel flushed. Her face and arms were turning red. The room began to spin around her. Diego looked in her eyes, but she glanced away, churning her mind for a lie.
“What don’t I know?” he asked, his voice sounding hurt.
“It’s nothing,” Kizzy said.
“I’m sensing a little something between you two,” the man said. “This is great stuff really.”
From downstairs they heard a loud explosion of metal and glass colliding. Kizzy and Diego looked at each other, then to the stairs.
“It’s something terrible isn’t it?” Morrigan asked. “I can sense your fear. Is it some sort of monster you’ve created?”
“We need to get out of here,” said Kizzy. “Even you’re not safe.”
“Oh, I’ll worry about myself,” said Morrigan. “And I can get you out too, but I need you to promise your cooperation.”
Kizzy looked to Diego. He was stared at the doorway, pale faced and terrified. At that moment she felt so much sympathy for him like a hole burned in her gut. It almost made her sick. She glanced back at Morrigan. How could he be so calm?
There was another explosion. Smok
e began floating up from the staircase.
“Whatever it is, it sounds pissed,” said Morrigan.
“What kind of cooperation?” asked Kizzy.
“Just a simple delivery,” he said. “But you have to make a decision now. Time is of the essence.”
“Ok,” said Kizzy as she looked at Diego. His breathing was heavy as he gazed at the door in horror. “Get us out of here.”
“Follow me,” Morrigan said. He walked out onto the balcony and Kizzy and Diego followed.
At the corner of the terrace Father Morrigan lifted and put on a strange rubber and cow hide suit that sat leaning against the wall. The helmet was made of stitched brown leather and was long and pointed like a crows beak, with large black glass lenses for the eyes. From the neck stretched out long rubber tubes that hung all down Morrigan’s arms. They looked half like wings, half like tentacles. The whole outfit was terrifying.
“What is that?” Kizzy gasped, even though she didn’t want to know the answer.
“It’s my Halloween costume,” he said, taking his cross necklace and inserting it into a receptacle in the beak.
“What are we waiting for?” Diego asked.
“Our ride,” said Morrigan. He flapped the wings, they snapped against the concrete floor like whips.
Metallic steps came clanging up the stairs. Kizzy turned to see Iris appear, marching towards them through the thick black smoke. She hadn’t even been damaged. Black motor oil dripped from her eyes and mouth.
“Get us out of here!” shouted Diego.
Kizzy looked to Father Morrigan. He was still, holding up his arms, looking to the sky. Suddenly from above the building came a huge swarm of crows. Kizzy’s first reflex was to run inside, but she knew that wasn’t an option. The black murder spiraled down towards them. She wanted to run or jump from the building or scream. The crows had brought nothing but death and destruction, and now they were coming for her.
The first of them reached Father Morrigan. They grabbed with their talons onto the long rubber cables and flapped their wings violently. In an instant they lifted him into the air and off the balcony. Kizzy looked to the stairway. Iris was marching towards them, spurting fire as she came.
The Enoch Pill Page 24
