by JE Gurley
Basky nodded, sending him into a bout of coughing. When it abated, he said, “Save me a place on the plane.”
Marino smiled at him. “Right up front by the heaters.” He wasn’t certain whether Basky heard him. Basky’s eyes had closed and his breathing sounded labored.
Gilford walked back into the room. “You put up a good front, but you know he won’t make it. None of us will.”
“Shut the hell up!” Marino yelled. “I’m sick of your bitching. If you’re so eager to die, why didn’t you die with your friends?”
A serious expression crossed Gilford’s face. “That would have been too easy. I don’t deserve easy.”
Gilford turned and walked over to a bench and lay down. Marino thought he heard quiet sobs coming from Gilford, but didn’t approach him to find out. He decided he would have to watch Gilford closely. The researcher’s physical health was improving, but his mind was having difficulty coping with the scope of his failures. He seemed to be slipping into a state of psychosis, becoming paranoid, but paranoid about himself. Marino supposed having been instrumental in destroying the world might play havoc with one’s mind. Perhaps with more rest and the passage of time Gilford’s mind might recover, but Marino didn’t hold out much hope. Some shocks to the mind just couldn’t be assimilated.
Another blast of freezing air assaulted him as Anson entered the room. He stood and surveyed the dining room before continuing to the kitchen. Through the serving opening, he could see Anson remove his gloves and back up to the stove, hands clasped behind him. Marino went to him.
He spoke quietly so Gilford couldn’t overhear. “I think Gilford is over the edge. We need to watch him.”
Anson closed his eyes, lowered his head, and shook it slowly. “Great. Two psychos to watch over. If I wanted to play nursemaid, I would’ve chosen a different profession. As you might have gathered, I’m not a people person. I came to the Antarctic because I like solitude. Even in a crowded Quonset hut, people ignore you and leave you to your own thoughts. I like you well enough. We get along better than many I’ve been paired with, but adding two loonies to the mix . . . I don’t know.”
Marino stared at his friend’s admission. “I didn’t know. You laughed and joked with the others and they seemed to like you. I never imagined you as a loner.”
“I take my responsibilities seriously. If I could find a way to get you back home while I stayed here, I would. I can fix the generator. I’ve got fuel and plenty of food.” He laughed. “Except for the zombies, I would be perfectly happy to live out the remaining years of my life here. Maybe I would take up landscape painting.”
Marino smiled, “Yeah, you only need one color – white.”
Anson’s mien changed, becoming more serious. “I’ll watch Gilford. I don’t trust him. He’s smart, but he has no scruples. He’s lying about something.”
“Oh, what?”
“I’m not sure. He’s not telling us all that went on here. I checked some of the bodies. They had been shot.”
“Makes sense. Shooting zombies is a good thing, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think they were zombies when they died.”
Marino’s mouth formed an ‘O’.
“Don’t say anything,” Anson cautioned. “I don’t know that it was him, but his story about sealing himself in his office doesn’t ring true.”
Marino had also harbored doubts about Gilford’s story. Gilford would have had to leave the lab and go to the dining room for food supplies. People would have seen him and questioned him, especially if a zombie plague was occurring. Had they questioned or tried to stop Gilford and he shot them? Only Gilford could answer that question, and Marino doubted that he ever would.
“Okay, you keep an eye on Gilford. I’ll take care of Basky, although I don’t think he’ll be a problem. He’s too weak.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Anson warned. “I’ve seen men suffering from frostbite before. Once the fever starts raging, even a man as weak as Basky, can find a surprising amount of strength.”
“Noted,” Marino answered. He turned to leave, surprised to find Gilford standing in the kitchen doorway.
“What’s going on?” Gilford asked, looking his eyes moving from Marino to Anson.
“I guess you heard us talking about Basky,” Marino stated.
“No. I just walked up. What about Basky?”
“He’s in bad shape,” Marino answered truthfully, trying to keep any of his doubts from showing in his voice.
“He’ll be dead by morning. Better to give him something to ease his passing.”
“No,” Marino snapped, more harshly than he had intended. “If he asks . . .”
Gilford shook his head. “You’re not doing him any favors. I’ve seen gangrene before. It’s a nasty way to die.”
“Still . . .”
Gilford relented. “It’s your call.” He looked at Anson. “Find anything in the lab?”
Anson shrugged, “Dead bodies; some had been shot.”
Gilford nodded, “It was chaos. People were frightened and started shooting anyone who came near them.”
He pressed Gilford, “No one got away?”
“No one. General Scott left on the plane and the snowmobiles were under lock and key in the hangar. The sergeant in charge of the motor pool, well last I saw of him he was munching on a technician. I didn’t bother asking for the keys.” When Anson said nothing, Gilford added, “We were a secret base. No one was supposed to know we were here or at least what we were doing. Visitors were aggressively discouraged.”
Marino saw that Anson was on the verge of pressing Gilford further. He jumped into the conversation. “At Casey they burned the base to try and stop anyone from leaving.”
Gilford smiled as he looked at Anson. “Aussies are a hardcore bunch. They’re altruistic. We Americans are more individual. With the Director dead, and Captain Elkins missing, there was no command authority. It was every man for himself. Pure chaos. Much like I imagine Washington was by day four. The P-51 nanite virus spreads fast. The hospitals would have been overwhelmed before they knew what was happening. You from Melbourne?” he asked Anson. Anson nodded. “The old adage, ‘You can’t go home again’ is most apropos. Melbourne is a cemetery by now, but the corpses don’t want to lie down and die.”
Marino saw Anson clenching and unclenching his meaty fists. Thinking he might attack the much smaller Gilford, he stepped between them. “No sense in speculating. We’ll find out soon enough.” Gilford’s sly smirk almost drove him to punch the smug researcher himself, but he mentally counted to ten and smiled. “I think we all need some sleep.”
“To sleep, perchance to dream,” Gilford quoted from Shakespeare. “Will you sleep soundly, Mr. Anson?”
“Ay, there’s the rub,” Anson finished the quote and stalked out of the room, his heavy footfalls on the wooden floors echoing his anger.
Marino watched his friend leave and turned back to Gilford, whose face had gone blank, as if he were trying without success to remember something. He stared into the flames of the gas burner with something akin to longing, fascination. Marino almost expected Gilford to reach out and thrust his hand into the fire, flesh versus flame, knowing that flame always wins. Gilford’s eyes blinked rapidly several times; then the color returned to his face. He became animated once more.
“Have you ever studied flames, Mr. Marino?” he asked, “The way they dance so seductively? You can almost feel your soul separating from your body, yearning for release from its fleshy prison. That’s why they burned witches and warlocks, you know, to cleanse their souls and free their tortured spirits. Maybe Torquemada wasn’t as demented a bastard as the history books make him out to be and the Inquisition not as bloodthirsty. After all, they were doing God’s work,. So were we, here in the little Eden we had created for ourselves. Our forbidden fruit was much smaller than Eve’s apple, and our serpent wore a uniform and had medals on his chest, but our intentions were honorable, noble.” Gilford pursed his lip
s and nodded to himself. “Yes, noble. We were doing God’s work and God, in his infinite wisdom and limitless grace, reached down his mighty hand, stirred the waters of our creation and fashioned a tool, a tool of destruction. He promised that the earth would not end in flood, but he lied. It did end in a flood; a flood of blood as our tiny nanites sought to procreate, repopulate the world, remake it in God’s image.” He held his arms up and turned in a circle, as if allowing the dead to see him in full. “The Bible says the meek shall inherit the earth. What can be meeker than a microscopic virus with only two compulsions driving it; to procreate and to decimate. Where there is life, it brings death. It is the antithesis of life.”
As Marino watched stunned, Gilford clasped his arms tightly to his chest as if hugging himself, closed his eyes, and began rocking on his heels. After a few moments, he stilled, opened his eyes, and gazed at Marino, who had the strangest feeling that Gilford was looking through him, rather than at him.
“Yes, sleep, Mr. Marino. You will certainly need your energy.”
With that, he left the kitchen. Marino watched him stop and stare down at Basky for a full minute, before returning to his bench and wrapping himself in his blanket. Marino felt suddenly colder, but doubted his chill came from the room’s temperature.
“As Elliot would say, ‘Bloody hell’.”
Anson was asleep, or appeared to be. Marino chose a spot across the room from Gilford, made certain his rifle was within easy reach, and lay down on the floor. Then he remembered Gilford’s pistol and shuddered.
“Bloody hell,” he repeated and closed his eyes.
15
Aug. 31, 2013 Cooper Pedy, Australia
Alex moved and agony exploded in his side. He yelled out in his pain, but no one heard. He found he could open his eyes a narrow slit before the pain attacked him, but that was about it. Any slight movement sent icy slivers coursing through his body that immediately burst into bolts of white-hot flame, doing a Waltzing Matilda on raw nerve endings. He tried to remain motionless to determine what had happened. He remembered. He was still in the ditch into which he had fallen after Gore had shot him. The sky overhead was dark, but diamond studded with clouds of scintillating stars. He tried to remember the constellations he had learned in school, but the effort birthed a throbbing pain in his temple. He recalled the stars had appeared much different in Afghanistan, alien, cold, and distant. There had been pain then, too, from a gunshot, but the bullet had come from the enemy, unknown and unseen; unfamiliar like the stars.
Gore had shot him. The memory hit him like a bolt. He tried to sit up and agony showered down his body like an erupting volcano, a molten lake of lurking lava just beneath the skin of his right side. His mind relived the excruciating pain as the bullet had torn through flesh and muscle. He was weak and shivering from loss of blood and the night’s chill. Moving agonizingly slowly, he gingerly touched his side. The blood was tacky, clotted. He silently thanked God for small blessings. Another millimeter or so and the 9 mm slug (One he had given Gore, he remembered grimly) would have nicked a kidney or spleen or even an artery. As it was, it took all his determination, aided by his anger, to roll over and look up the seemingly Mt. Everest of an embankment.
“Can’t lie here and wallow in self-pity,” he said through teeth clenched against the pain as waves of dizziness swept over him. “Don’t want to be food for the dingoes. This is what I get for trusting the bastard.”
Summoning every erg of strength remaining in his battered body, he rose to a sitting position. The effort produced a torrent pain flooding through his body that threatened to surpass his capacity to endure, but he did endure. Nicole was in danger and his stupidity had placed her there. He tried to focus on the features of Nicole’s face, but her imaged melded with that of Jiselle, confusing him.
It had been years since he had recalled so clearly the delicate features of his dead wife’s face, her golden hair like winter wheat in a western wind, her full lips as soft as a spring rain, her summer sky blue eyes that laughed even before her mirth reached her lips. Old memories burst upon him with the suddenness of stolen glimpses into a crystal ball, reflecting not what he wished to see, but instead the raw awfulness of the truth. Tears rolled like shed guilt down his cheeks but not from the agony of flesh. They came to him unbidden from the depths of his despair. He could not save his wife, could not even save himself from the pit into which her death had flung him. Only the end of the world had done that.
With a shudder, he abruptly began crawling, before his body could refuse his command to move. Each jarring movement up the steep slope produced echoes of anguish from his tortured side. The earth left him, and then clasped him again to its bosom as he crested the lip of the ditch, and collapsed onto the dirt road. He could see his Jeep so tantalizingly near, but beyond his reach. If he could not crawl, he would pull himself along the ground like a baby. After an eternity of heartbeats, his hand touched cool metal. Clinging to the Jeep’s side, he pulled himself into the driver’s seat, but was too weak to turn the ignition. He closed his eyes to rest, only for a moment.
* * * *
When he again opened his eyes, a slow dawn had replaced the stars of the night sky. He was still weak, but his mind was clearer. The morning sun warmed his face, brushed away the cobwebs of the cold night. As the sun brought life to the harsh land, it lifted his spirits, brought hope. Alex focused on what he needed to do. He knew where Gore would go. He would find Gore and kill him as he had killed the two marauders, as he had killed his enemies in Afghanistan. Only this time, he would enjoy it.
There was only one problem; two if you counted the fact Gore had taken both his rifle and his pistol, leaving him weaponless. He had also stolen the keys. Luckily, hotwiring a Jeep was one of the things he had learned in the army.
The drive was difficult. Each turn of the wheel, each shift of the gears renewed the throbbing in his side. He drove recklessly, heedless of the deeply rutted road. Time was not on his side. However, as he neared the crossroads to the dynamited bridge, he turned toward the town Gore had described. He had to check something out.
The bridge, a narrow metal and concrete structure crossing a dry creek bed, lay in ruins at the bottom of the ravine, but he located a wooden footbridge a short distance away almost hidden by a stand of coolabahs and red river gums. The town, a small collection of wooden buildings smaller than some cattle stations he had seen, looked deserted. Only the wind through the trees and an occasional caw of a crow broke the eerie silence. He knew he didn’t have the energy or the time to explore. One dead town looked much like any other. He walked directly to the bridge.
He found what he had dreaded, but expected. The bodies of three old men, one with a rifle, lay in decaying heaps on the edge of the truncated road. Animals had scavenged the bodies. Even in their deteriorated condition, he could tell the town’s defenders had each died from a single gunshot wound. They had not been zombies when Gore had shot them.
Alex cursed. Gore had coldly shot them down when they had attempted to turn him away. Alex did not have the heart to investigate further. Gore had claimed no one remained alive in the village. Alex doubted that had been so when Gore had first arrived. He cursed again for stopping to confirm what he already knew. Gore was a killer, probably an escaped convict. Nicole was not safe in his hands. He picked up the rifle; then tossed the old WWI relic away in disgust. The rusty Lee-Enfield MKIII didn’t even have a clip. Its owner had been bluffing.
He returned to his jeep without casting a parting glance at the dead town. In time, saltbrush, spinifex and porcupine grass would take over the streets, willy-willys would blow in from the desert and deposit dust on the houses until they collapsed. The town would disappear, leaving not even a memory or name on a map. Before leaving, Alex bandaged his wound and swallowed two antibiotic pills from his first aid kit. He looked longingly at a bottle of painkillers, but knew his mind was clouded enough. He had a job to do.
16
September 4, 2013
Resurrection City, Oates Land, Antarctica–
John Gilford stood urinating in the corner of an abandoned room. The storm was still raging outside after five days, preventing him from relieving himself outside. His penis ached from the cold, and his urine stream steamed like a hot spring geyser, but began to freeze upon contact with the floor. He smiled at the golden puddle of ice. He zipped up his trousers and listened to hear if any of the others were awake. Then he took out his .45 and caressed the barrel. He winced as the memory of what he had done leaped from cold steel to warm flesh.
Ghosts, ghosts and zombies – that was all that stalked the still hallways of Resurrection City. They haunted him like wolves with the scent of the stag in their nostrils.
“The dead should stay dead,” he announced to the empty air. The shades obligingly retreated into the frozen walls.
Basky was as good as dead. He could see it in the man’s face. The others, the American and the cocky Aussie, wanted to take him home. Gilford chuckled. He was home. He belonged among the dead. All that had been John Allen Gilford had died on Day 1 of the plague. He wondered if they had named it as it had decimated the world. Probably. The press named everything. His mind was clear now. He had shed himself of the guilt of killing the innocents who merely wanted to share the safety of his secure cubbyhole. When he had learned of the general’s probable infection, he had clearly seen his role as the Hand of God. Those responsible for its creation had no further purpose in God’s plan for the world’s destruction. Their part in the play over, there was no reason for their continued existence. They had to join with God. Briefly Gilford wondered if Cromby had shot himself because of guilt, or because of the knowledge of Gilford’s actions.
He caressed the flash drive in his pocket with his fingers. The answers were all there, how to construct the nanites and how to kill them. He thought about crushing it under his heel, but his whole life it seemed had gone into the data stored there. It would be his epitaph and the graveyard of the world would be his headstone. Like the others, he was a walking dead man. It was simply a matter of time.
