by Joshua Guess
Which was, you know, fucking insane.
And I mean that. It was hard to hate the doctor’s self-delusion even if it came with a healthy dollop of megalomania, a bit of narcissism, and assorted sprinkles of other illnesses. The colonel was right about one thing; it was damn hard not to feel sorry for people whose minds had cracked under the pressure. John was doing great harm, but it was the only coping mechanism he had.
It didn’t excuse his behavior by any means. If I could get away with killing him and not die as a result, I would. In the world before Zero, I’d have paid for his psychiatric help myself. God knew I had needed enough of it in my day.
But this wasn’t that world. Mental illness shouldn’t be a death sentence, but our options were sharply limited.
“Does anyone think for a second he’s going to obey that order?” I asked. “Not to experiment on us, I mean?”
Anthony shook his head. “Hell, no. With no one standing over his shoulder, dude’s gonna come at us twice as hard. Can’t imagine he’s gonna be careful about it, either, not when he has no clue when they’ll be back and stop him.”
Julia absently touched the bandage on her arm. “Yes, I think you’re right, dear.”
I leaned over the small table and titled the cheap, disposable salt shaker into my hand and rolled it around. It wasn’t even the good stuff, just shitty low-sodium sort of salt. Wracking my brain for a solution, I fell into a familiar habit and distracted myself. It usually worked for me, the same way trying to remember a name or word never worked until you forgot about it and did something else.
“What do we do?” Anthony asked. “Figure we have until morning, and then he comes after us.”
I chewed the inside of my lip. “Tough to say. Do we barricade ourselves in a room and hope for the best? Do we fight? If I thought he’d leave the rest of you alone, I’d volunteer.”
My eyes fell on the list of ingredients and the idea hit me like a derailed train. Both in terms of force and because it was insanely dangerous.
I looked up at them, handing the shaker to Julia. “Keep this safe. Ask for another one when they bring lunch. I have an idea.”
Anthony frowned. “What’s that?”
“Just what I said. I’m going to volunteer.”
The door between the dorm and the clinic wasn’t locked. The interior of the clinic had a double-door setup like the dorm to prevent a crazed patient (like me) from barging into a hallway where some innocent bystander might be having a chat with a coworker about how imprisoning all those people was a real drag.
I stepped into it and pressed the call button. A face appeared through the window a few seconds later, poking out of the small office next to the door.
“I’d like to speak with John,” I explained. “I don’t have to come in if you’re worried, but I think he’ll want this to be a private discussion.”
The person looking at me was the white-coated man with the bright red hair. He put up a single finger, telling me to wait, before jogging off down the hall.
He reappeared shortly with John in tow. The latter carried a pistol in a way that reminded me he was a soldier as well as a physician.
“I trust I won’t need to use this?” he said, wiggling the Colt.
I shook my head. “Not unless you decide to do some target shooting at random, which I don’t recommend indoors. If I wanted to kill you, I’d play contrite to get you to bring me back in here, gain your trust, and catch you by surprise. With my speed and strength, I could almost rip your head off before anyone could stop me.”
I met his eyes and winked at him. “Not that I’ve thought about it.”
The sigh that filtered through the intercom was one of purest expressions of just plain tiredness I’ve ever heard. “Very well, then. Please let her through.”
When we sat down with the desk between us a minute later, alone at last, John kept the gun pointed at me. His finger sat outside the trigger guard, but curled enough to let him fire off a shot if he so much as saw me twitch.
I crossed my legs and rested my hands on my knee. “I’m here to make a deal.”
Surprise registered on his face in a sort of spasm. “What kind of deal?”
“We both know you’re going to drag us in here as soon as no one is looking,” I said. “You don’t start flensing skin off senior citizens and just take the order to stop.” I raised a hand as he began to protest. The barrel of the gun steadied on me instantly. “No, I’m not going to sit here and argue with you. I’m volunteering to work with you today and every day Phillips and his people are gone.”
He eyed me suspiciously. “Why?”
I nodded in the direction of the dorms. “So you’ll leave them alone. I step up so none of the others has to put up with your mad scientist shit. You take whatever samples you want, test me however you like. I’d super appreciate you not sticking anything in my eye or doing permanent damage, but other than that, I’m all yours.”
It was a testament to his ability to put on a good face that it had taken the others to open my eyes to the fractured psyche lurking below the surface. Even now I had to look for it, really look for it, to see the small signs that something was deeply wrong with him. The faint gleam in his eyes, the way they widened with an excitement I’d have labeled sexual in any other context, sent a shiver down my spine.
“Agreed,” he said, a bit too quickly. “Can we work today?”
I waved a hand, palm up. “Right now, if you want.”
He perked up. “Would you be willing to do another endurance trial? I won’t need you to push as hard as your last one. This time I’d like to test your blood as you work, so you’ll be able to take it easier.”
“I told you, whatever you want. But if you so much as look at the others funny, I’m gonna ruin your fucking day.”
This was a risky statement to make considering the gun in his hand, but the palpable focus building up in John seemed to overwhelm any other reaction. “Yes, let’s go ahead and get you set up. Did you know that hormone levels in Triggers drop at nearly four times the rate of a normal person? It’s as if Nero drinks up the adrenaline and other secretions when you don’t need them any longer…”
I let him go on, following him to the main suite where the majority of the big testing equipment was installed. John didn’t bother bringing anyone else in. I figured he was at least somewhat concerned I might go on a rampage and didn’t want to risk his team. Messed up as he was, the guy wasn’t a sociopath. I’m sure part of it was a strong desire not to let on what we were doing. The less questions, the better.
He brought a supply cart over and began opening draws and pulling out tape, tubing, needles and the like. I let him go about his business and strap me up. He attached a weird little pump to the tubing in my arm, which was for testing my blood in a continuous loop, or so I guessed.
We got to it. I didn’t push very hard to start, following his instructions. The gadget on my arm was had wireless capabilities, and judging from John’s face in the soft blue glow of his laptop, it was feeding him interesting stuff.
At his direction, I slowly increased my level of effort. Twenty minutes on the treadmill left me sweating, the black veins in my neck throbbing uncomfortably. I was nowhere near my limit, though.
I moved off the treadmill and to the heavy bag, which looked identical to one you’d find in a gym except for the thick cluster of cables trailing from it. I fell into the pattern of strikes from previous rounds of testing, designed to measure the power and responsiveness of various muscle groups.
To keep the Shivers going, I forced myself to think of everything that made me angry. My situation, my lonely dog back home, my lack of recent sex. I repeated the patterns at John’s direction. I was only a few feet away from him, and as I worked harder I forced myself to become more and more angry. Every new triggered bout of the Shivers pushed my cardio to new heights.
“Ease back a little,” he said. “You’re starting to hit your red line.”
; Fact: John had been surprised when, on that first day, I’d told him I was able to trigger attacks of Shivers without external stimuli. It wasn’t a super power; I’d just sussed out the set of chemical reactions created by the right kind of mental stress needed to get the job done.
So I kept on doing it until I felt the world spin.
“Okay, stop,” John said. I stopped. He reached down to a shelf on his computer stand and pulled a bottle of water free. He handed it to me as I moved over and put my elbows on the supply cart. I opened the top and took a swig.
As soon as my head changed positions, the world spun around me again. I toppled, trying to grab the cart for support, and hit the ground only to have it fall on top of me. The drawers crashed open, spilling their contents everywhere.
In the mad scramble as John tried to right the cart and help me at the same time, he never saw me pocket the little five-pack of syringes.
14
Survival doesn’t take anything like real genius. I definitely don’t come close to meeting that definition. Yeah, I know a lot about a lot of things, but that’s because I have an obsessive need to understand and do a ton of research as a result. The fact that I parlayed my neuroses into a job is almost incidental. I’m smart, but I’ve met and even know people way smarter. Carla for one, and I’m pretty sure Ellis also met the definition.
At its core, survival is a game of leveraging what you know against what you need to accomplish and putting in the work of figuring out just the right angle.
Haha. Geometry puns. See what I did there? Leverage? Angle?
…Anyway.
The human body contains a lot of complicated chemicals and elements you might not expect. Think of it like one of those listicles you used to find on the internet. ‘You Won’t Believe How Many Poisonous Substances You Pee Out Every Day! The Answer Will Surprise You!’ or whatever the click bait ethos might have been, it was true. People contain everything from arsenic to formaldehyde. One thing we definitely need is potassium. Good old vitamin K.
Fact: you can actually give yourself potassium poisoning by eating enough bananas at a time. More than eight or nine puts you in the ballpark. We need the stuff to live, but what is and isn’t poisonous depends on the dose.
Except carbon. But I promise if someone dropped a short ton of it on you, you’d die.
The crappy salt substitute in our shared space was half salt, half potassium chloride. We dissolved every grain of the stuff we could into bottles of water and filled the syringes with the solution. Was it lethal? I had no idea. But it was a weapon.
I had other ideas for weapons if we needed them, but I kept that to myself. Not because I didn’t trust the other prisoners—I didn’t, but that’s because I don’t trust easily rather than any fault of theirs—but because I didn’t want to have to explain the horrible consequences of misusing other relatively harmless items.
“This is a bad idea,” Anthony said as we worked in one of the rooms. “What if they come in and see what we’re doing?”
“Then they see,” Samantha said, sounding almost eager. “I’ll be fucked if I’m gonna let them scare me into doing nothing. Not anymore.”
I’d only been in distress after my collapse, having stopped myself just before going through another epic meltdown in the lab. Oh, my heart and blood vessels were for sure unhappy about the strain, but the faint and fall were mostly for show. I only had a vague plan on how to get into that cart, one I was halfway sure would fail. Originally I’d planned to fake passing out and hope John would leave the room for help. Unlikely.
He took my quick rebound as a sign that my flavor of Nero was letting me recuperate faster and endure more, checked me over without searching my pockets, and sent me back to the dorm.
I made everyone get to work at once. Because survival isn’t about what you wish you had, it was about using what you had and making the world your bitch.
Sheets were cut into strips using the tiny blade from a safety razor Anthony had somehow smuggled in. Those strips were braided into ropes about five feet long. Climb out a window, you say? Why, no. The mesh covering them made that extremely difficult if not impossible. These were thin, light weapons to strangle with if necessary. They could be hidden in clothes.
Julia had turned one of hers into a flail. The length of ragged rope ended in a knotted ball wrapped around a small chunk of concrete broken from a wall, several butter knives sharpened as best she could tightly wound between the strands. Was it a brilliant, super effective piece of engineering? Maybe not by a classical definition. But as prison weapons went, it was pretty fucking dope.
“You’re the scariest grandma ever,” I said appreciatively.
Julia’s hands froze in their work, her body going rigid. A momentary ripple of purest despair crossed her face and I immediately felt like shit.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean…”
She waved the apology away. “It’s fine, dear. It’s fine. Not a day goes by I don’t think about what happened.”
A silence fell between us like a curtain. Then, before I knew I was going to speak, words came out of my mouth.
“Only person I had in my life I really cared about was my dog. My boyfriend and I broke up on Zero day and he died, but it didn’t faze me. I always thought I was lucky not to have people, you know? Less they could hurt me. Then everything happened and I felt like I was right. Until I started meeting other survivors. Now I can’t imagine my life without them.”
Julia nodded along with me, and smiled sadly. “You probably expect me to say that life isn’t worthwhile without family or some nonsense, but I won’t. Everyone is different. For you, not having people close to you was just how you lived. For me, it was having a big family. We all lived in the same home, you know. Old farmhouse passed down and added to for a hundred and fifty years. Me, my daughter and her husband, all four of their kids. It was the youngest of them that turned. Happened in the middle of the night.”
The words didn’t touch Julia’s face. She looked no more haunted than usual, and I knew it was because this was a memory she’d taken out many times, its jagged edges worn smooth from handling. That those sharp bits tore into her in the process went without saying. They had left scars.
Julia continued working. “Went like dominoes. Lauren shared a room with her sister, who turned after Lauren…well. You know. Then they went after their siblings, who went for their parents.”
Everyone in the room was silent, listening with rapt attention. I guess it was the first time they’d heard it, too.
Samantha broke the quiet. “How’d you get away?”
“With a shotgun and a blessedly narrow hallway,” Julia said. “We had seen the news all day. I understood the bloody things chasing me up the stairs weren’t my family any longer. They weren’t alive. Back in the sixties, three men broke into the house just after my husband and I got married. I was eighteen at the time. I don’t believe they expected a slip of a girl to put birdshot into them, but I did. Two barrels was enough to convince them I meant business. What happened to my family was much the same. We hunted when I was young. Had to sometimes if we wanted meat.”
She stopped, realizing she was beginning to ramble. There was no gentle segue to another topic, no distraction. Just the jagged end of a conversation the way lives are so often cut short; brutal and pointlessly quick and with no satisfying crescendo.
Of the countless tragedies and truths the end of the world brought us, one of the worst to cope with every day was the realization that while our stories might be unique, the pain and suffering in them don’t make us special. Everyone has a tale to tell and they rarely work out as neatly as they do in movies.
Survival: for Julia, it meant pushing on even though she lost every reason to bother.
No one came to hit us with tear gas and stun guns. We’d carefully covered the microphone and left it that way. Our preparations for a probable betrayal at the hands of John or his people went smoothly.
&nbs
p; We slept in shifts, so I was already awake in our communal room when the mass of soldiers moved out toward whoever had sent the zombies at us. The small fleet of trucks all fueled up from a set of those high-pressure hoses jutting out from a metal fixture. I assumed there was an enormous tank nestled in the stone somewhere and idly wondered whether they got resupply top-offs for it. Whatever the case, it was enough to fill five large trucks and haul a hundred and fifty soldiers off toward battle.
I stood at the window and watched three quarters of its fighting strength drain from the fort like blood from a wound. Those left behind would be enough to guard the walls and defend this place if needed, but it wasn’t us I was worried about. We were in a fortified position, and the colonel wasn’t stupid. He would have figured out how many people he needed here to keep it safe, then double it.
No, my concern was for the men and women piled on the backs of those trucks. I was hell in a fight and not shy about killing, but I didn’t wish them any ill. Death itself doesn’t make me happy. The idea that some of them were unlikely to return bothered me more than I would have expected.
John was careful about summoning me to the clinic. He waited until after the assault force was long gone, after breakfast was served and there was no reason for a random soldier to show up at the clinic. The red-haired doctor walked between the buildings unafraid of being seen since one side was surrounded by other buildings and the other only offered a narrow visible slice at which no soldiers were looking. Because the only ones outside were on the walls, and those fellows kept a sharp eye out rather than in.
I went in without any of the weapons we had put together, obviously. My thin scrub pants had a nylon string running through the waist that would serve as a handy garrote in a pinch. And of course no one had thought of checking, much less confiscating, my boots. The tools and items secreted in the hollowed portions of the soles and shoved between cut seams between the layers were still safe.
