After Everything Else (Book 3): Creeper Revelation

by Brett D. Houser

  Chase stopped at the door to the stairwell. He had wedged a metal filing cabinet beneath the door mechanism. The handle could not turn, the rods could not be pulled from the sockets at the top and bottom of the frame. They were secure down here. Trapped, but secure. After dragging Green’s body into the nearest room, he explored the extent of the hallway and all of the other rooms. The stairway was the only point of entry or exit. The horrors in the rooms on the corridor had opened his eyes even more. He could see the depth of evil in Dr. Green, the lack of feelings for other people, the basic lack of humanity and morality. He wondered just how much Koeller had known. How could the man have continued to bring Immunes to the doctor knowing what was happening down here? He hadn’t believed in science the way Dr. Green had, but he had believed in order, a certain way of doing things, maybe. And had stuck with that without question. Chase wondered which was the bigger evil.

  He pressed his ear against the metal door. He was sure he could hear distant gunfire. He thought about Marilyn. Stay away, he thought. He hoped she had gone back to the camp, but knew enough time hadn’t passed. A sudden pounding on the door made Chase jump back.

  “For God’s sake, let me in! They’re going crazy up there!” Despite the terror, Chase recognized Dr. Rogers’ voice.

  “Why?” he shouted through the door. “Why you?”

  “I’m not infected. I took the vaccine. I don’t want to die with them. I don’t want them to find me. Please! I can help you!” Desperation made the man’s voice break. Chase considered.

  “Okay,” Chase said. He dragged the cabinet out of the way. Sonya’s head appeared at the door of the room where her father lay.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Letting Dr. Rogers in.” He twisted the handle, but didn’t quite disengage the lock. He looked at Sonya.

  “Why?” she asked. She wasn’t concerned. Her attention was elsewhere, on her father. And she trusted Chase. He knew that. He closed his eyes.

  Should I do this? he thought. He had found no weapons while searching the rooms, but he thought in a fight he wouldn’t have a problem with Rogers. The man was clearly not a fighter, and Chase had him by several inches and probably forty pounds. Chase gambled that the scared doctor was not bringing a weapon of his own. He finished turning the handle, opened the door, and stepped back.

  The red-haired doctor rushed into the corridor, turning and pushing the door closed again. His eyes were wild. Chase watched as the frantic man grabbed the handle and threw the bolts into place. The doctor leaned back against the closed door and slid to the floor as his knees buckled. He was visibly shaking.

  “Hey,” Chase said harshly, “you said you took the vaccine. Which vaccine?”

  Rogers looked up at him, fresh fear on his face. “What do you mean?”

  “Dr. Green said there were two, or he was working on two. One was short term. A week, he said.”

  The terror left Rogers’ face, replaced by despair. “Yeah, the short one. We didn’t finish the longer term. Weren’t even really that close.” He slumped down against the door, sinking to the floor, his face crumpling. “And we didn’t make much of the short term. I could only find one dose, a sample. Green must have destroyed the rest. All I’ve done is delay dying by a week. Then I’ll get sick, too.”

  Chase looked down on the man, feeling disgust. “How much did you know about what Green was doing down here?”

  Rogers’ eyes started to get crafty, but under Chase’s stern glare he seemed to grow resigned to his fate. “How much did I know? I’ll tell you now. I knew all of it. All of it. I didn’t like it. I felt bad about it. But I felt worse about dying. Protesting what he, what Dr. Green, was doing was a death sentence. People that argued with him had a way of disappearing, becoming test subjects. You don’t know.” He chuckled drily, looked down at his feet, shaking his head. “Most of the people who died didn’t have time to think about it. They got sick, and within two days they were dead. Maybe they knew they were dying. Maybe they were afraid of dying, but they weren’t afraid long. We knew, though. We knew what was happening, what was going to happen. And we sat down here for months on end, afraid, watching it happen to them up there, knowing if we didn’t figure something out it would happen to us.”

  Chase felt the blood fill his face, his fists clench. All the helplessness over the last few months, and nowhere to direct the resulting anger. Now he had somewhere. Now there was someone to hate. “You caused this,” he said.

  Rogers looked up at him again, fear on his face. “I didn’t. That was all Green. Sure, I helped modify the spores, the DNA. Weapons grade stuff is what we were being paid to produce. We tried to tell the government that we couldn’t guarantee anything, that it was probably not containable enough to be used as a weapon, but they wouldn’t listen. And Green didn’t try too hard to convince them. He just wanted to do science. And when he had it modified and knew we couldn’t control it and we realized that was it, it was a dead-end as far as being a weapon and as far as the government was concerned, he released it. I wasn’t involved in that. I wouldn’t have done it.” He gave a bark of laughter. “I didn’t know this was how it would turn out, but I knew it was bad stuff. We both knew. But he wanted to see what would develop. He didn’t mind living in a hole like this. He got to continue his research, which was all he wanted to do. But I had a life. I had a girlfriend, I had a dog, I had parents and family.” He looked at the floor again, a smile that was more grimace still on his face. “I guess the dog might still be alive.”

  The anger left Chase. This man was evil, but there was nothing left to do to him that he hadn’t done to himself. Chase didn’t know how much to believe what Rogers said, but he knew he didn’t have anything to fear from him. He looked down at the dying man. “You said you could help us?”

  “I did?” Rogers looked up. “I guess I did. I would have said anything to get away from them.” They listened together. The faint sound of gunshots still came through the door.

  “I really hope you can help,” Chase said. “Otherwise, I have no use for you.”

  “Help with what?”

  “With Sonya’s father. The man in that room down there. In about twenty four hours, we’re going to try to get out of here. I want him as ready as he can be to go with us. You’ve been pumping him full of spores, and we need help getting him to recover from that. If you can’t help, there’s no reason for me not to lock you in that room right there.” Chase pointed at the door opposite the stairwell. “Dr. Green could use some company. Not that he’d know you were there. Koeller shot him in the head before coming upstairs and starting the party.”

  “Dr. Green is dead.” It was a statement, not a question. “And Immune 7 is your girlfriend’s father? Well, that makes sense. He’s the strongest we’ve found so far. The others, if we pumped them too full of the spores, would catch the disease and die. He’s handled twice the amount of any of the others. He was our hope for finding the vaccine. He produces antibodies like nobody’s business. We thought he might even survive a bite.”

  “But is he going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. He’ll be okay, and he’ll probably be ready to go by the time you are. Did you kill the drip?” Chase nodded. “He’ll be fine. Nothing we can really do to speed things up. You don’t need me, but don’t put me in there with Green. I won’t cause any problems. Just let me stay down here until you leave. Then take me up with you. I want to see the sun again. I want to breathe the air, even though that’s what will kill me.”

  Chase considered. This was not a good man. He thought Rogers was a follower, and his moral compass was way out of true, and he tried to work things to his advantage, but by himself he was harmless. “Yeah. Okay. But stay away from us. That’s your end of the hallway,” he said, pointing. “You stay down there. When we’re ready, I’ll let you know. The more I forget that you’re down here, the better off you are.” Rogers nodded and scuttled down to the end of the hall. Chase replaced the file cabinet under
the handle.

  Chase looked down at the sleeping Sonya, sitting in a chair next to the table where her father still lay. He was glad she was getting some rest. They were both short on that commodity, and he could feel it in the sand of his eyes and ground glass in his joints. But he couldn’t sleep. Rogers was down here. Why had he let the man in? Not that there had been any issues. Rogers had stayed down at his end of the hallway. After letting him in, Chase had gone in and explained the situation to Sonya, who looked doubtful, distrustful. “Still,” Sonya had said, “he didn’t seem like a real bad guy. At least he was nice to us.” Chase didn’t say that sometimes it’s the nice ones that have to be watched, but he thought it.

  He turned his attention to Sonya’s father. He was only a little surprised to see the man’s eyes open and regarding him with intelligence. The whiteness had disappeared. Chase had stayed in the hallway most of the time, but visits had shown improvement in the man. Their voices had reached him out there, and when he had come in, the number of empty water bottles and the full catheter bag showed he had been drinking willingly. “You’re Chase,” he said. Chase nodded. “Sonya has talked and talked about you. You’re important to her. And that makes you important to me. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Chase replied. “Are you…are you back to normal, Mister….” Chase realized he didn’t even know Sonya’s last name. It had just never come up.

  “Just call me Grant. And I think so. There’s still some odd thoughts, but I can keep them down for now. I think it’s safe to let me go, but if you want to leave me like this for a while, that would be okay. I’d understand. Might even make me feel a little better.” He frowned, looked at Sonya. “I’ve never felt anything like that before. So out of control. In some ways it was like after her mother died. I walked around in a fog, filled with depression, no energy to do anything. I knew I should do something, I should help Sonya more, I should try to show her how to be happy. But I couldn’t. This was a little the same, but it wasn’t about doing nothing. It wanted me to do something. It wanted me to get up, to hurt people. No, that’s not right. It twisted my thoughts. It made me think that infecting them wasn’t hurting them, but helping them.” He shook his head. Chase made a decision and starting unbuckling the restraints that held Grant to the table.

  “I’m going to let you up. I need your help. In just a few more hours, we’re leaving. I hope it will just be a walk through the facility and then out in the open. What happens then I don’t know. We have someone outside, or we did have. I hope she’s still there.”

  “Marilyn,” Grant said. “Sonya told me about her, too.”

  “Yeah. I’m thinking the soldiers all got sick. They’re either dead or dying, but not risen again. Not yet. So I open the door and we leave. We walk out.” He finished with the last restraint and turned his back as Grant lifted his gown and disconnected all the other devices attached to him. “Are you okay physically?” He turned back around when he heard movement behind him.

  Grant stood looking down at Sonya who was still sleeping. He reached out a hand and stroked her cheek. “I’m fine,” he said. “A little shaky, but that could be hunger. I couldn’t tell you the last time I ate something solid.”

  “How long were you down here?” Chase studied him. He was thin, but he might have been thin before. Sonya had to get her small size from somewhere.

  “Couldn’t say. I lost all track of time.” He touched Sonya’s face again, and this time Sonya stirred. Her eyes opened. She looked at the empty table and alarm filled her features until she looked up to see her father standing over her. She jumped to her feet and wrapped her arms around him, her face against his chest. He folded her in his arms and dropped his cheek to the top of her head. Chase studied them, wondering what that kind of love from a parent felt like. At last they stepped back from each other.

  “How long has it been? How much longer do we have to wait?” Sonya asked. “I want out of here. I want to be heading back to the camp.”

  “Soon,” Chase said. “I haven’t heard anything from upstairs in several hours. There were some noises outside the door, but then nothing. For all I know, they cleared out. I think we need to talk to Rogers.”

  “Beaker? He’s down here? Why?” Grant asked. Chase explained, and Grant nodded. “Okay,” he said. “He’s a resource. Let’s use him.”

  They left the room, walked down to where Rogers sat against the wall. He scrambled to his feet, his eyes on Grant, widening in fear. “You can’t let him loose! You don’t know what he will do!”

  “No thanks to you,” Grant said. “And I don’t know what I’m going to do, either. Especially looking at you.”

  Chase interrupted. “We’re trying to decide if we can leave now. I haven’t heard anything from up there in a while. They may have left, they may all be sick. If we wait too long, we have to fight our way out against creepers. You call them Subjects. Leave too soon and we may face soldiers angry that they’re dying. So you tell us. Leave now, or wait?”

  Rogers reluctantly pulled his eyes from Grant and addressed Chase. “The average time from infection to ambulatory corpse state is thirty hours in non-immunes. That’s the average. Longest time we’ve seen is thirty-six hours, shortest is twenty-three. And the infection varies in incubation time, too. Some fevers spike high and fast, some are low grade. Some of the infected may be able to function fairly normally up until a few hours before death, some may become unconscious within a few hours after infection.”

  “Not much help,” Chase said. “It’s been about eighteen hours.” He spoke to Sonya and Grant. “A few more hours?”

  “I could use a little time to work some of the kinks out of my muscles,” Grant said. “More water could help, too. But since we don’t know how long I was down here on that table without food,” he glared at Rogers, “I don’t want to wait too long. I’m afraid I’ll just get weaker.”

  “We did feed you,” Rogers stammered, “toward the end we used a feeding tube, feeding you a controlled mix of proteins and vitamin paste until it became too dangerous. You wouldn’t let us after the toxins took over your system.”

  “Toxins that you put in there,” Grant said. “You want to say as little as possible when you’re around me, and only when you’re asked a question. And the minute I start worrying about you, or even think you might not be useful any more, I might make a decision that you won’t like.”

  Rogers stepped backward and partially behind Chase. “W-we stored the paste down here. There’s some in this room. I tried it. I’m so hungry. It tastes terrible, but it will give you some of what you need. I’ll get you some, if you want.” He looked at Chase, and Chase nodded.

  “You might have let us know before now,” Chase told Rogers. He realized that he was starving. Rogers disappeared into a room and returned with a white plastic tub. He pried off the lid and offered it to Chase. Chase dipped in a finger and tasted it. Rogers was right. It was awful.

  They took the tub from Rogers and left him alone down at the end of the hall. They took turns dipping into the paste, quickly washing it down with water until it was mostly gone. Chase was still exhausted when they were finished, but he did feel a lot better. He could tell by the way Grant was moving that he felt better, too.

  They spent the time talking, each telling their story about what had happened to them. Grant’s story about the quarantine measures and the actions of the National Guard to contain the disease was interesting, but Chase found himself only half listening. His desire to know why and how this happened had been mostly satisfied. When Sonya told her story, Grant held her hand and told her he would never leave her again. Chase tried to keep his own story short, but Grant kept asking questions about how he had known to do certain things, how he had figured stuff out. Chase tried to explain, but he didn’t really know. It had just made sense to him to do things. He had seen how things would work. Grant looked at him oddly, but with respect as well.

  “You took a Humvee?” Grant asked. “And you
figured it out?”

  Chase prepared to answer when a loud noise came from down the hallway. A gunshot, near to the other side of the door. A single gunshot. Then, after a short time, another. This isn’t in the plan, Chase thought to himself.

  Chapter 35 – Marilyn

  What had once been a laboratory was now a room full of broken glass, overturned tables, and smashed equipment. Marilyn and her group had come down the stairs into the hallway, and Theresa had led them to the examination rooms. She said that was as far as she had ever been, so everything since then was new territory. They had walked into the lab not knowing what to expect. The results of chaos met their eyes.

  Marilyn walked through in her heavier footwear as the others picked through in their flip-flops, warily stepping over the glass fragments on the floor. The smarter ones followed Honey as she made her way through the room. The overwhelming smell in the room was one of bleach, but other smells simmered up from the floor and the puddles there, both chemical smell and organic. They searched the lab, opening doors, but most led to small closets which had been stripped of supplies. One door led into an office, though, and Marilyn knew what they found in that office would be in her dreams for years to come.

  Koeller’s body sprawled in an office chair, leaned back and mouth open as though he were napping, but the gore on the wall behind him and the pistol in his lap told the true story. On the desk in front of him was a note with four words written in careful cursive: I will not rise. She closed the door behind her as she stepped backwards into the main lab. The others must have seen something awful in her face because they didn’t ask questions.

  Finding nothing, they returned to the small hallway with the examination rooms. Todd tried the doors. The first three examination rooms had been untouched. The last door turned out not to be an examination room at all, but a set of stairs going down.

  The stairwell was filled with bodies of soldiers. They didn’t have any visible wounds. Todd stepped down into the darkness and prodded one of the bodies with his toe. The body responded by grasping weakly at his ankle. He screamed and charged back into the corridor, nearly knocking Marilyn down. “They’re about to rise!” he yelled. But the form of the soldier didn’t follow him. After waiting a little longer, Marilyn herself stepped down, Honey at her side. She studied what appeared to be about fifteen of the soldiers covering the stairs, but it was hard to tell in the tangle of arms and legs. She looked at Honey, who appeared to be concerned but not reacting as she would if creepers where near. Marilyn knelt close to the soldier who had moved, just out of his reach. When nothing happened, she reached out to him. Before she even touched him, she felt the heat baking off of the still form.