Torn Apart

by James Harden

  I had a feeling it was the latter.

  The engine of the boat continued working over time. It was loud.

  “You’re right,” Maria said. “We have to get out of here.”

  “And then what? Swim for it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we take over the boat. Mutiny, so to speak.”

  “To do that, we’ll have to take those men as prisoners. Or kill them.”

  “First things first,” she said. “We need to get out of this room. And then we need to get Ben.”

  I looked around the room for something we could use to break out with. Maria tried the handle. When she realized it was locked, she tried pushing the door, then she barged it with her good shoulder a couple of times. But the door was solid. It didn’t budge.

  I picked up a fire hydrant off the far wall. “What about this? We could use it to smash the lock.”

  “What if they hear?”

  “If they hear us, they’ll come looking and we’ll have to get the jump on them somehow. Maybe we could use this to hit them in the head? But we can’t stay in here. Staying in this room is a dead end.”

  “OK,” she said. “Do it.”

  I used the fire hydrant to smash the lock, using it as a sort of battering ram. I busted the lock and smashed the door open. It made an incredible noise. We slowly stepped out into the corridor. We waited for a few minutes to see if anyone came to investigate. But no one did. The noise of the engine must’ve drowned out any noise we were making.

  There were four rooms below deck. There was one door directly opposite our room. And one to our left at the end of the corridor. To the right, were the steps that led upstairs, to the dining room and the cockpit, or driver’s cabin, or whatever the hell it’s called. There was another door, another room behind the stairs. There was also a trap door that led down, maybe to the engine room.

  No sign of the old man or the man he had been speaking with.

  “We need to find Ben,” I whispered.

  Maria nodded.

  We checked the doors. The room at the end of the corridor was unlocked. It looked like the captain’s room. It contained a bed and a desk. I guess this is where the old man slept.

  All the other doors were locked. And there wasn’t enough room in the corridor to use the fire hydrant to smash the door. No room to swing. The corridor was too narrow. But Ben had to be inside one of them, I thought.

  “We need to find a key,” I whispered to Maria.

  She nodded. Pointed up the stairs. If there were keys, they would be up there. We both knew it. I handed the fire hydrant to Maria so she had something to defend herself with. We slowly made our way up the stairs. We carefully looked around the room. I couldn’t see anyone. As far as I could tell, this part of the boat was deserted.

  The dining room table was empty.

  In the kitchen area there was a large pot on the stove. The old man was cooking something. Steam rose from the pot, filling the room.

  We crouched in the dining area and weighed up our options.

  Another set of stairs led up to another level. The driver’s cabin. The bridge.

  The boat slowly turned.

  I pointed up the stairs. “Someone is up there, steering the boat,” I whispered.

  “Maybe they are both up there,” Maria said.

  This gave us some time to look for the keys. We searched the benches in the dining room, and all of the cupboards.

  We found nothing.

  I moved to the rear of the boat. Maria’s NBC suit was no longer hanging up. It was gone. I saw the large fishing hook, resting on top of the industrial sized ice box.

  A weapon.

  From my position on the rear of the boat I could see up to the bridge. The windows were dark and grimy. Covered in dirt and maybe salt. I could just make out the shadow of a man. Odds are, the keys to the rooms were up there. The old man probably had them on him.

  This was no good.

  I returned my attention to the large fishing hook. At the very least, we might be able to use the hook to break open the locked doors, I thought.

  I tapped Maria on the shoulder and pointed over to the hook.

  She nodded.

  I stayed low and crawled over to the ice box. I grabbed the hook. I was about to take it back to Maria so we could briefly discuss whether we should attack the old man, or if we should use the hook to break into the rooms. But then I noticed that the padlock on the freezer box was unlocked.

  I don’t know what came over me. But I couldn’t resist.

  Something the man had said earlier, “We could use the brunette.”

  Use? What did he mean?

  I needed to know for sure.

  I needed to know.

  I opened the box.

  I held my hand up to my mouth and held my breath.

  I had to look away. And I had only looked for a split second, but what I saw would be forever burned into my memory.

  I saw arms.

  And legs.

  Human.

  Chunks of meat.

  I ran back to Maria, hunched over. I felt dizzy. Nauseas.

  She looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head. “We need to get Ben first. And then we need to kill these guys.”

  “What?”

  “I’m serious. It’s us or them. They’re messed up. They’re eating people. We need to kill them. They were talking about food before. They were talking about eating us. Well, eating me.”

  “Eating us? Like cannibals?”

  “Yeah. This is messed up.”

  Maria was shaking her head. She didn’t believe me.

  I dragged her down the stairs, back below deck.

  I jammed the hook in the door of the room that was directly opposite our room. I used the hook like a crowbar and pried the door open.

  The room was empty.

  A narrow bunk bed.

  A desk.

  A computer.

  We moved over to the desk.

  It was covered in paper.

  Some of the pages were bounded together.

  The cover page read:

  ‘Swarming Behavior of Infected’…

  Another one titled:

  ‘Hunting techniques/behavior of nano-virus’…

  More papers titled:

  ‘Mutations of Oz virus and Accelerated Growth’…

  ‘Project Salvation’…

  All of them had been written by Doctor Michael Hunter.

  “What does this mean?” Maria asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe this guy likes to keep himself informed.”

  We left the papers and moved to the next room. We pried it open with the fishing hook. We finally found Ben.

  He was lying down on a bed. He was hooked up to an intravenous thing. A bag of blood was hanging from a hook. Lying next to Ben was another man. He was unconscious. He had no legs. They had been amputated above the knee, about mid-thigh. He had no arms. They had also been amputated. Above the elbow, close to the shoulder. He was the source of the blood transfusion. He was giving life to Ben.

  I dropped the hook and ran over to Ben. I felt his forehead and checked his pulse. He was alive.

  He slowly opened his eyes. He already knew we were in trouble. “We need to get out of here,” he whispered.

  Yeah. He already knew what was going on. They had given him a blood transfusion, not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was better for his muscles. For his meat.

  They wanted to keep him fresh.

  If I had to guess, I’d say this is why they had kept this poor man alive. They had cut his legs off. And his arms. But they had kept him alive.

  Ben stood, ripped the intravenous tubes out of his arm, blood spurted onto the floor. He pushed me aside.

  “Hey we need to be quiet,” I said. “Take it easy.”

  But then I turned around and saw why Ben was so agitated.

  Standing in the doorway with a gun pointed directly at Maria’s head
, was a man who I’d never thought I’d ever see again.

  A man with one hand.

  A man we left for dead in the morgue of North Sydney hospital.

  Doctor Hunter.

  Doctor Michael Hunter.

  “You cannot leave,” he said. “No one leaves the boat.”

  Chapter 32

  Maria and I were marched up the stairs at gun point. Ben was handcuffed and locked inside the captain’s room. For a second I thought Doctor Hunter was going to shoot him and throw him overboard or something. But then I realized they wouldn’t do that. It would be a waste of food.

  We were led to the back of the boat.

  The engines were fired up. It sounded like they were struggling. And then I noticed why. The Boat was pointed up stream. It was fighting the current.

  Water was rushing past the boat, towards a massive waterfall.

  The old man pointed to the waterfall. “The water is rushing. It is moving fast. If you try and swim, you will drown. If you don’t drown, you will go over the falls. Your bones will be crushed. And then you will die.”

  The old man still had the bottle of rum in one hand. A gun in the other. The bottle of rum was nearly empty. He must’ve been drinking all night.

  “The water system is circular,” he continued. “Water has to be flowing. Stagnate water is no good.”

  Doctor Hunter also had a gun pointed at us. They were taking no chances. He threw us a pair of handcuffs. “Tie yourselves together. To the railing.”

  The handcuffs he gave us were stained with blood.

  “Look familiar?” he asked.

  I had a bad feeling I knew what he was going to say.

  “These are the handcuffs you used to tie me to the morgue fridge at North Sydney Hospital. Do you know what I had to do to escape from that hospital?”

  The blood on the cuffs had dried to a deep brown.

  “The infected had broken into the hospital,” he said. “There were more inside the morgue fridge. They were about to break free. I was trapped. No way out. Do you know what a person is capable of when they are faced with certain death?”

  “We had no choice,” Maria said. “You tried to kill us!”

  “Kill or be killed,” he said. “It is the way of the world now. And I guess, it always was the way of the world,” he paused, looked at his left forearm, where his hand used to be. “I thought I knew. I thought I knew what people were capable of. But now I truly know. One of my tools, a surgical saw was within reach. I used it to cut through my arm. Cut myself free. I only blacked out twice.”

  He opened the ice box and retrieved what appeared to be a surgical saw. “This is the very one. I carry it with me now, wherever I go.”

  He tossed it over to us.

  It landed at my feet, clanging loudly on the wooden floorboards of the boat.

  “You may use it, as I did.”

  He was taunting us.

  “What did you do with Kim?” Maria asked. “We saw you. In that town. You captured Jack. You were with Kim. Where are they?”

  “Capture? We did not capture Jack. We rescued him.”

  “Whatever. Where are they?”

  “They are safe. For the moment.”

  “What are you doing to that man down there?” I asked. “What is in that ice box!?”

  The old man dropped his bottle of rum. He tried to pick it up but he just kicked it further away. When he finally did pick it up, he threw it overboard. “Do not judge me! You must free yourself from the judgment of others and of yourself if you truly wish to survive. You have no right to judge me. No right. We are surviving. That is all.”

  “You’re eating him, aren’t you?” I said. “You’re going to eat Ben. You’re going to eat us!”

  “Not her,” the old man answered, pointing a bony, wrinkled finger at Maria. “The Doctor says we are not allowed to eat the blonde.”

  “You’re crazy!” Maria said.

  “No,” the old man said, defiantly. “We are not. We are not. We know what this is. We know what we have to do. We have massive warehouses of food down here. But the supplies are cut off now. The infection. The airborne strain. We went hungry for the first few weeks. The pain was awful. It made it hard to think. All we did was sleep. We knew we couldn’t survive for much longer. So we made a choice.”

  I shook my head. “What choice? This is not a choice.”

  “We are afraid. Of dying. Of starving. We will survive. We will endure. We will do whatever it takes. The human spirit is capable of such amazing feats of strength and endurance. It can survive almost anything. It adapts, it gains strength from the smallest, most insignificant things. These things give us hope. Hope gives us the strength to live, if only for one more day. You have been hungry, yes? We are doing this out of necessity. We are doing this to live. Survive.”

  Doctor Hunter lowered his head. “You don’t know. You weren’t here. You don’t know what it was like.”

  “We’ve gone hungry too,” I said. “We’ve barely had enough food or water. We were struggling. Same as you. Same as everyone.”

  “I had been living on this boat for over a month,” Doctor Hunter continued, ignoring me. “He would ferry me back to the docks, back to the inner-sanctum, so I could continue my research. But I was living, sleeping, eating on the boat. I no longer trusted the General or his men. There were rumors that civilians and research assistants and non-military personnel were being murdered in their sleep or taken away, thrown into the labyrinth.”

  “Labyrinth?” I asked.

  “I can’t continue my research if I’m hungry,” Doctor Hunter added. “Too weak to think, too weak to concentrate. I can’t fix this if I’m dead.”

  I closed my eyes and looked away. I honestly thought I was going to be sick.

  “Our goal, our mission,” he said, shaking his head. “Mission. It’s amazing to even think in those terms now. To have a mission, you need to be organized. From top to bottom. You need to have goals. Plans. Orders. We have none of that now. Everything is gone. It happened so quickly.”

  “What happened?”

  “Our mission was to find Maria. The General’s men had intercepted intelligence reports that indicated Maria was still alive. There were reports of activity, three hundred miles south of here. In the town of Hope. There were survivors. They sent in surveillance drones. They found her. Maria Marsh. If I could capture her, if we could secure her, we would be allowed to stay, we would be allowed to live. She was the answer to our prayers. Kim had been living in the research facility. She was proving to be quite useful. And she would guarantee Maria’s cooperation. Unfortunately, we did not find Maria. We found Jack. Kim vouched for her brother. She said we could use him to lure Maria to us, force her to cooperate. The area was becoming increasingly dangerous. We had to fall back. Sometime during the night we were hunted down by several rogue nano-swarms. Part of the convoy broke away, to distract the swarms. They were ambushed. They never made it. And when we finally made it back here, there had been a containment failure. The General had ordered a Lockdown.”

  “Yeah,” Maria said. “You brought infected people back here. In those tanks. They got loose. Haven't you learnt from your mistakes?”

  “We needed them,” Doctor Hunter answered, defending his methods. “To continue our research. We must know our enemy. But now I’m starting to think the General no longer cares about our research. I’m starting to think he doesn't care about any of it. Not anymore. But you,” he said pointing to Maria. “You. The General will take notice now. He will.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked. “What if he’s gone totally insane?”

  “If I prove my worth,” he said. “If I prove that I can fix this mess, he will allow me to live.”

  Maria shook her head. “I’d love to help, really, I would. But remember the last time we met? You tried to kill us. You tried to harvest our organs. Believe me, I want to help. But I don't want to be cut up into tiny pieces.”

  “I won't hurt
you,” Doctor Hunter said. “You have my word. We will need blood samples from you. Maybe conduct and MRI of your brain. But you will not be harmed. I promise.”

  “And what about Rebecca?” Maria asked.

  Doctor Hunter was silent for a moment. “I cannot guarantee her safety.”

  Could we trust this guy? Maria and I knew it would eventually come down to this. Maria would eventually be turned into a science experiment. But I had always hoped it would be under slightly better circumstances. Doctor Hunter had turned to cannibalism. He had killed. And continued to kill.

  And there was something else. It’s hard to explain. He wanted to use Maria to create an anti-virus, but it wasn’t so he could stop the Oz virus from spreading. It wasn't so he could save the world. It was so he could save himself. There was something about the distinction between those two motivations that made me feel uneasy.

  And of course, for me, the unfortunate part about all of this, was even if they kept their word and did not harm Maria, I was still as good as dead.

  “You need to promise me,” Maria said after a while. “Promise me that you won’t hurt my friends.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not up to me,” Doctor Hunter said. “General Spears is God down here. It is up to him.”

  “Where is Jack!?” Maria shouted. “Where are you keeping him?”

  “And what did you do with Kim?” I asked.

  “Trust me,” he continued, “They are safe for the moment. Kim was our last great success. Her body. Yes, they are safe for the moment. And we are safe for the moment. For how long? I do not know. This is the safest place to be. On the water. We are isolated from the rest of the dwindling population down here. The outbreak occurred in the research and residential areas. It was a catastrophic containment failure. I am starting to think we have been the victim of sabotage. All along. I know the virus moves fast. I know it is deadly. But every time we are close, every time we make a breakthrough, we have been met with disaster. It is too much. But I believe everything happens for a reason.” Doctor Hunter looked at his forearm. And then back at us. “Yes, I truly believe everything happens for a reason. My body is just a vessel. My knowledge will ensure my survival, my immortality. I can bargain with the General and I can teach survivors like Charles here. Together we will survive. My knowledge. His body. It is a symbiotic relationship. It’s funny. The Oz virus, once it takes over, it creates a sort of symbiotic relationship with the primal part of the brain, the reptilian part. It stimulates certain areas, it stimulates the adrenal glands. And it completely destroys other areas. The frontal lobe. The neo-cortex. It is truly amazing. We created a new form of life. A new predator. A new weapon.”