by Jay Smith
“Listen,” she said, squeezing my hand to get my full attention. “Things are a little complicated down here.” It was the same expression I gave poor Kenny Kartheiser before our uncomfortable talk. “We’re part of something called ‘Project: ARGENT' It stands for something, but Paul can explain it better than me. It’s important. Just trust me it is.
“W-why are you…h-hiding?”
“I need you to promise me you’ll behave because if you cause problems, Paul will take it out on both of us. I’m responsible for you. Understand?” Something came over her and her eyes shifted to the darkness over my head. “You should have let me go.”
Of course I should have, my mind wanted to say. But that’s not what I heard you tell me, what I felt with you the night before you left. I was as sure as anything I’ve ever known that YOU wanted me to come after you, to be with you. Why would you say otherwise now?
What came out was: “Yes. Just…glad you’re okay. After…after…JACK…”
Molly cringed at the name. “He was the last. I needed him to get my Bible back. I got in a shitload of trouble for it, but…what’s mine is mine, right? Now I have it and I have you, silly girl.”
She kissed my forehead and folded my hands over my stomach before pulling my blanket back up, whispering about how cold it gets in the Down Under at night. There was more, but I drifted away, back to sleep.
I dreamed of the dark corridor and the many doors leading to the truth about HG World and Project: ARGENT; a truth build on a foundation of bodies stacked like firewood, put there by the P.A.I.N. virus, but also by the cruelty of humankind.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – WHERE DO ZOMBIE BABIES COME FROM?
Part 1
I drifted back to that room off the main corridor. Things Paul mentioned about the Down Under, about the people there – who apparently live and work independent of the refugees up above in HG World – those references helped put back the memories the drugs had taken out of my timeline.
I dread coming to this part of the diary.
The room was empty, lit from a hooded work lamp clamped to the cabinet above a worktable. Once upon a time, it had been a machine shop; a place where the forklifts and trolleys and other machines that ran the HG World store up above would be fixed. Storage cabinets lined the walls at the ceiling and on the floor serving as support for flat steel tabletops. My first thought was of a kitchen in a culinary school. Tools of all kinds hung from racks suspended over a central island worktable and everything had the shine of a pristine kitchen, but every surface showed scars of beatings and scratching. Closer inspection showed scorch marks or dried paint and the tools seemed more like medieval weapons than things you'd use to stir a stew.
There were saws with shark teeth and saws with tiny blades for tougher cuts. A variety of clamps and tongs, mallets with flat rubber heads and hammers with large round steel heads. A crow bar. A machete. I thought of checking the drawers, but the idea of drawing metal across metal seemed to contradict the idea of remaining "stealthy .” I imagine they contained smaller tools or supplies.
It smelled of cleaning chemicals... pine and orange. Working my way across the room, I kept an eye on the office door on the far side. The frosted window panel on the top half of the door showed a light on inside. I tried to keep quiet, but every sound I made bounced around the room. To my mind, the room could have many purposes, but the further along I stepped, the more blemishes emerged: a missed splatter of brownish red on the underside of a cabinet. A small clump of dark hair fixed by some glossy, hardened residue and pinched in between two steel plates. Toward the far end of the room, the chemical smell got worse, like the area had just been hosed down with industrial cleaner. I thought it might be a good idea to pull back to the corridor and try another door.
Given the choice between the rats and the unknown, I somehow chose the unknown. I tried the door and it fell open as I turned the knob. This time I navigated through without a pratfall.
The adjoining room was a morgue. It took me a moment to get my head around why I could walk out of that steel workshop and onto the dimly-lit set of some CSI show, complete with a tic-tac-toe board of sealed refrigerator body filing doors, autopsy table and a white board filled with dry-erase equations and notes. The light I saw in the other room actually came from behind another window covering most of the wall to my left.
The only other exist seemed to go through a fire door into the room with the curtained window. I made my way over to the small gap in the curtain and peeked through.
Part 2
(Editorial Note: I found this account written into my netbook, hidden in the locked folder I use for just this kind of entry. I was so shaken by the experience that I lost my head inside that morgue. I walked out without thinking or looking...right into the arms of two men in coveralls. I never saw their faces and I don't remember anything after until I woke up in my cot four days ago. For clarity, I revised this section with additional information, but it remains largely my response as I recorded it in the moment. I put it here in the narrative because the dreams always bring me here at the end of that dark corridor.)
Diana Rubell was a 44 year-old resident of Altoona, Pennsylvania. From a review of her personal effects I learned she was a member of the Planetary Fitness gym, she was a frequent shopper at Sheetz, Giant, Barnes & Noble and Wegman's. At one time she owned a Lexus and was the general manager of W.T.F. Applebuster's owned by her husband Bill Rubell. She was pretty, with thick coils of black hair, tanned skin (which she maintained by weekly visits to a salon) and the face of a beautiful woman who worked long hours. Diana and Bill were married five years ago and, apparently due to some medical condition, could not have children. Sometime in the last ten months, Diana was inseminated artificially, leading them to expect their first child sometime last month.
Her class ring tells that Diana Rubell graduated cum laude from the University of Rochester in 1989. Her jewelry and other trinkets explain she was a practicing Episcopalian married into a Jewish family. She was a member of the Women's Leadership Council of Altoona. Her cell phone was full of bookmarks and tags identifying clothes for a baby boy. Her gallery covered every inch of the nursery Bill completed for his son. At one point, they had narrowed the list of names for their baby to Casey, Alexander, Ezekiel, and Joshua.
From the string of saved text messages, it was clear that Diana and Bill loved each other very much and the prospect of this new life and a family had reignited their love for one each other, bringing them out of a period when the life they'd built was based on fried cheese sticks, staff scheduling, and paperwork.
I bring this up because Diana Rubell was once a person full of life and hope, filled with love for this new life inside her. Like everyone else, she watched the world end. When I saw her for the first time it was right as the doors to HG World shut for good. She was feverish and laid out on an improvised stretcher. People who saw her enter the medical bay made her part of the daily conversation and some asked the doctor about her baby. Her case was described as serious, but classified - just like everyone else who ended up in the special part of the infirmary.
Some folks emerged from the infirmary to join us but they did not speak of their experience or of other patients. We stopped asking about the people who did not come out because it was pretty clear why. No one asked about funerals or memorials, either, because - frankly - very few people inside HG World had the time to offer their own loved ones that final dignity. The best we offered our dead as a community was a moment of silence lead by The Mayor. Each of us mourned or grieved in our own private way.
So no one asked again about Diana Rubell or her baby.
I bring this up and share it here because the life of Diana Rubell and Baby Rubell is otherwise summarized on a clip board as a collection of statistics and clinical descriptions in a laboratory. She lived two excruciating days after being brought inside and down the ramp to this chamber. She was admitted and classified as "infected" by a triage nurse named Tami Tho
mas who dotted the "I" in her signature with a heart, the bitch. Another part of the chart indicates that Diana was ordered into isolation for observation, but no treatment was indicated beyond pain medication and a delousing which was the result of being in the wild for some time. Every hour, someone initialed a print out of vital signs, noting any significant change in Diana's condition. They monitored the progress of the disease and left her on a table, strapped down by the wrists with her legs high and spread, strapped to the stirrups for two days.
For two days, with her child still moving inside her and unable to be born naturally, Diana Rubell suffered the unique agony of final phase Pervasive Assimilative Immuno-Necrosis. Dementia. Rage. Uncontrollable hunger and thirst. In the last phase of the disease, your body becomes corrupt and your blood starts to blacken as the disease begins converting the body for its purposes. In those final days, the brain itself is transformed - occupied for lack of a better word - by the disease. Who you are and what you were are drowned from inside like a slow stroke. Memories and voluntary functions end as the disease takes over and eventually wins control of your entire body. In that moment, you die. A moment or two later...maybe an hour...the disease figures out how to jump start it.
But that's not how Diana Rubell died.
According to the report, Diana could have lingered another day, maybe more. She had been taken off the IV because her blood wasn't moving fast, hydrating or metabolizing pain medication. But she was in such good physical health that the core of her body refused to shut down and she likely remained in a deranged, but very aware state. Instead of removing Baby Rubell, the monsters here continued to monitor and study how his mother's disease carried over to him. The disease consumed Baby Rubell …and it turned inside the womb.
The clinical notes don't convey the horror Diana must have felt and certainly not the pain as the thing that was once her baby boy began to tear its way out of her body. I can only hope that the disease had robbed her of any capacity to feel that pain - physically or emotionally - as the thing inside her clawed and tore through her uterus and up into the tangle of intestines, clawing and writhing its way through her, splitting her open to reach for the light above the exam table. I could not imagine the kind of person who would stand where I stood in the morgue not twenty feet away, watching it happen and writing down the names of muscles and patches of flesh being shredded.
I made note of the phrases "preternatural strength" and "explosive dispersal of contaminated bodily fluids", "primal, aggressive consumption .” I imagined this....thing.... covered in thick grey fluid and pink froth slithering up over the body of its mother, lost in the bright lights and by its own immeasurable hunger, gripping strips of flesh to hold on as it followed its last flickering instinct to grasp onto its mother's bosom to suckle and imbibe its curdled, blackened milk. Finally, weighed down and unsteady, it slid sideways and off the corpse down onto the bloodied tile floor.
It is not easy for me to imagine it without the evidence still strapped to the table in front of me. Diana Rubell is dead, but the withered, dry, gray eater - the charts calls it a "necroambulate" - just stares up at the light. Without the dignity of a sheet over it, the body is on display and its abdomen is open to display dried, useless organs. Across the room, inside a glass case, Baby Rubell's body twitches like a hunting dog in the middle of a dream. Every so often, it will gurgle or growl slightly and I want to believe I see Diana Rubell's body respond ever so slightly. If it's one eater's reaction to the sound of another or the deeply-buried connection between a mother and child...even in death, I'll never know. They remain on display behind the glass as a study in decomposition.
I can’t write any more. I’m empty. This is the world now. It is hell. Someday it will be me on that table. Or you. I’m out.
(Editorial Note: I’ve dreamed of Diana every night. Sometimes I see her and Baby Rubell together in death. Sometimes it’s me on the table as an angelic mother and son try to comfort me as something dark and hungry twitches in my body. Last night, it was Molly in my womb, turning as I ran for the exit of HG World, splitting me open as I crashed through the door into the sunlight. I was lucky that each time I emerged from those nightmares, my Molly was there for me.)
CHAPTER NINETEEN – DIE WHILE YOU’RE ALIVE
Part 1
I woke to the smell of cinnamon and coffee. I opened my eyes to see Molly looking over a tray of food. It took a few minutes to get my head together, but when I shook the sleep out of my eyes I realized I could think much clearer, move as I did. I was tired and a little weak from lack of food. I didn’t know how long I’d been in bed. She saw me awake and smiled at me. “Do you want me to feed you? I could make train noises and bring the choo-choo to mouthtown.”
It was the absurdity of that remark that brought me around again. I laughed so hard that Molly had to shush me. I sat up on the side of the bed – slowly and carefully until I could measure my own strength - and took in the smell of warm oatmeal, toast, coffee and orange juice. In a little paper cup I noticed a few assorted pills. I was still smiling and trying to come up with an equally silly thing to say back to Molly, but when I saw her face, the sincere look of pleasure on it, I stopped and enjoyed the moment. I smiled at her and, before I could articulate the thought, Molly leaned in and pressed her lips onto mine in a kiss that I’d been waiting to enjoy for weeks. Instead of the passionate grinding and sucking and probing I expected, it was a simple, soft affair where I was able to taste her and smell her neck and hair. She touched my cheek with the back of her fingers and let her hand glide down my arm. She broke the kiss slowly, pecking my bottom lip with smaller kisses that started crossing that line from the innocently sensual “Good morning, sweetheart” and into the realm of “How YOU doin’, sexything?” I kept my breathing under control and focused on my tray of food.
“Vitamins,” Molly said, pointing to the cup of pills. I had my doubts for my own reasons, but said nothing. I dove into the food with Molly beside me on the bed, grinning. She ran down the morning’s plan. A hot shower. New clothes. A proper medical exam. Finally a chat with Paul. At the mention of his name, I stopped chewing and looked up at Molly to hear more.
“Everybody works down here,” she continued. “You got a couple more days to rest up unless the doc thinks you’re ready to get to work.”
“What do you do down here?”
“We keep the up top running, first of all. We help those idiots running HG World avoid riots. This was all supposed to be a temporary arrangement. People were supposed to come and take everybody out of here. But that ain’t happening.”
“I don’t understand. How many of you are there?”
“50 of us. Plus 12 workers who take shifts in the pipes and tunnels. They don’t know anything about what else we do. That’s part of the Down Under you can’t visit. You may see someone who might recognize you. If that happens…” Molly tried to put it the best way she could, but settled on the truth. “You may as well put a bullet through his head, too.”
Letting that sink in, Molly crossed the room to a small side door hidden by a book case. I’d learn that each of these little offices, designed to operate during a time of crisis, came with a full bath. I imagine that bureaucrats and politicians stuck in the middle of a global crisis would still want to look their best.
The hot shower was welcome and damn near orgasmic. Thinking I had maybe a few minutes tops, I scrubbed and lathered and scrubbed some more, knowing full well that Molly was waiting on the other side of the plastic sheeting watching me. I wanted her in there with me, but…shower good. I stayed until she came for me a long while later when my fingers were prunes and the water had lost its sting.
“Paul is busy with an excavation project right now,” Molly said as I toweled off. She stood silently as I put on some fresh sweats, then said. “Want to see something really awesome?”
I can tell you what I hoped she wanted to show me, but as I followed her across the floor of my little office/dormitory/prison ce
ll, Molly revealed a little brown book from behind her back. It was her Bible. At first I was a little confused and disappointed, but remembering this was what she risked her life…surrendered her body to recover, I shared her excitement.
“Tell me,” I insisted, touching the book and the back of the hand holding it.
“It’s not really mine, but..”
Something in Molly’s hip pocket began to vibrate and stopped her in mid-sentence. Rolling her eyes, she pulled a small, old cell phone from her pocket and rolled her eyes one more time. “Paul’s ready for you.”
Part 2
It was a walk intended to impress, maybe intimidate me. Two of Paul’s “assistants” I guess (I wouldn’t want to call them thugs) were already outside the door. They gave us the usual disrespectful, lingering glances and smiled wide at Molly before leading us down a stretch of cheap carpet and drywall followed by another and then one with slightly more expensive paint and trimming to a big oak door. It wasn’t as impressive as it was ridiculous because it was a big oak door hung on a thin interior wall: a decision that screamed “bureaucracy .” The inside of the room looked like a movie set of some important government director’s office. Impressive and shiny from a distance, it was really all pressboard. The walls themselves pretended they were mahogany even though it was just the backside of the corridor wall that shook when the big heavy door opened and closed. Molly remained outside with our guides in a small waiting area.
