by Morgana Wray
“Spacemen? What do you mean by that?” I tapped Diane’s hand.
“By the window! They were just there!” Diane turned her gaze to the opened windows.
“Well, there’s nobody there now. You must be a bit stressed. But I’ll check it out anyway. Just to be double sure.” I yanked myself up from my seat.
I gripped my gun, and took a defensive stance. My eyes were glued to the windows, as I took slow steps towards one of them. I stood uneasy in front of an open window and stared intently out of it. There was nothing but the blackness of night out there. Not a soul was staring.
“You see kid, there’s nothing out there. Just your imagination.” I turned my back to the windows.
That was to be a regretful mistake. Taser hooks came flying into my back. In seconds, bolts of electricity shook my body violently and I slumped and passed out from the shock. I could feel foamy troth bubbling away over my face. That was some real nasty shit.
I woke up in tent at the edge of town. I could still feel the pain inflicted by the currents of electricity tingling in my sides, and even my balls felt as if they had gone a round with David Haye’s fists. My face went red with raw agonizing pain. I could feel my nose rub against something that felt like a small, glass screen. The rest of me was covered in an unfamiliar plastic material. It felt bulky and restrictive on me. Someone had put me in a fucking spacesuit and my clothes were gone. I felt violated in more ways than one.
I limped to my feet, only to be shoved back down by two guys in some sort of biohazard suit. They looked like blooming spacemen behind all the protective gear they were wearing. They had their guns pointed at my head.
“Please give us a reason to pop you! You sit back down until we tell you to move!” One of the guys in the spacesuits barked.
“The other two females that were with me? Do you have them as well?” I rubbed my achy head.
“We are not at liberty to answer your questions. We advise that you keep your trap shut until you’re spoken to.” The guy that had spoken earlier snapped angrily.
My spacesuit-wearing captors were in no mood for talking. They didn’t seem to be the friendly type either. They were not in charge of things. They seemed to be hired muscle. I couldn’t just seat there and do nothing. I knew that the only way to get answers was to cause some trouble. That would smoke out someone higher up the chain of command for sure.
“My chest! There is something wrong with my chest!” I wriggled on the bed, feigning pain.
“You had better not be faking this!” One of the spacemen grunted.
He leaned in slowly to check up on me while the other guy in the spacesuit had his gun still aimed at my chest. When I could feel his hands on my chest. When he was close enough, I snatched the gun from his hand and shoved him forward, but not out of the reach of my newly acquired assault weapon. With my gun pointed at the spaceman’s back, I frowned threateningly and said, “If you don’t want your mate’s guts all over your disinfected floors, take me to someone that isn’t a butt-kissing lackey.”
“Sure! Just don’t shoot him, okay!” The other spaceman lowered his gun.
“You sure he ain’t doing you up the arse?” I smirked. “Because you sure roll over real easy.”
I was lead through some tunnel made of a plastic interior. Everything around us seemed sanitised. I had never seen anywhere so clean before. I was repulsed by the sight of it. The smell of all that medical chemicals made my stomach churn.
We soon came to another tent. Well, it felt more like a spacious room on the inside. It was definitely well ventilated. There was someone in a spacesuit in the centre of the room. The suited up person appeared to be in the middle of some sort of head surgery on a human cadaver. Well, the body was sort of human, except for all the bulging veins and the freakish black pupils streaked across the white if the cadaver's eyes. The hands of the body fucking moved while the spaceman cut into it’s brain. That was bloody disgusting to watch.
The scientist in the spacesuit soon turned around to acknowledge our presence. I was taken aback by the face that greeted me. She was a ghost from a life that had been completely destroyed and buried in the dark recesses of memory.
“Interesting that I should meet you here, Lanfen! Mind filling me in on what exactly it is that you are doing here? What is all this and when did you get a medical degree?” I squawked, pushing my hostage away from me.
“Give the man his gun please. Then we can talk.” Lanfen rolled her eyes at me.
I obliged her request, pushing the gun into the hands of the spaceman I had taken it from. He shot me a killer look and walked away from my personal space.
“Leave us!” Lanfen shook her head suggestively.
The men trooped out of the door without a single word in protest. They almost seemed robotic in the manner in which they took orders. They must have been soldiers of some sorts. Only soldiers are ever that obedient. I knew that. I used to be one of them.
“I am sure you are wondering who we are? What we do here?” Lanfen peered through a lens over the exposed brain tissue, hanging out of a skull that had been cut open.
I did not breed a word. I was simply shell-shocked at the way she could just switch off her emotions and indulge in such brutal and messy work. All I could do was nod my head concurringly.
“We are the part of the British biohazard and disease control department-BBDCD. The Risers are like children, they’ve only just been born. They are completely blind and feel their way around by bashing into things. As with blind people, their other senses compensate for like of vision. We are not exactly sure how the mutations in the muscles in their inner ears work but their hearing seems to be heightened and six times sharper than the typical human. They can pick up sounds way below zero decibels.” Lanfen rambled on.
“What good is knowing all that stuff if you can’t use it to put those things down.” I muttered. “You named those things? Risers is such a crappy name isn’t it? Why not brain eaters or night demons?”
“I see you are as petulant as ever, Mack. I have not missed that. As soon as we find out what frequency they respond to, we could really start to do some damage,” Lanfen smiled, pushing the surgical blade deeper into the mutilated corpse on the makeshift operating table in front of her.
She was scooping out pus from the Risers brains and cutting through decomposing tissue.
“It astounds us that the brain is mostly intact while the other parts of the body are in a slow phase of decline. Its almost like a bizarre form of ageing.” Lanfen's eyes widened in excitement.
“How long can these things live for?” I interjected abruptly.
“Well, their decline is not exactly the same as ageing but they age quicker than we do. The necrosis will be complete in about four to five years. That’s how long each Riser can be biologically active for,” Lanfen rambled on with keen eyes fixated on the brains she was dissecting.
Better him than me. That was the thought that ran through my head, as I gulped down hot saliva. I felt sick to the stomach at the sight of brains scattered on the table. I couldn’t exactly throw up inside my biohazard suit. That would have been really nasty and very uncomfortable.
“That must mean we can wait them out! This is why you isolated this town? Are there other places like this? Other places like Rosewood?” I glared intently at Lanfen with eyes laden with anxiety.
“Perceptive as ever I see!” Lanfen raised her head slightly. “This town is being quarantined for the good of the people. The mindless violence only puts them in harms way. We are trying desperately to isolate the pathogen. We are almost certain that the cause of the diseased state in the Rosewood residents is a rabies-like virus. The Eliza virus to be exact.”
“So this virus? Have you guys got any clue what it does and how to neutralize it?” I asked inquisitively.
“We think this could be the Eliza virus-discovered by Professor Eliza Hogan of the Cambridge GTECH genomics research institute. She was a seasoned, brilliant geneti
cist. She isolated the virus from wild dogs somewhere in Sub-Saharan West Africa. She kept large volumes of her work under wraps. Little is known about the virus except for it’s penchant for triggering a neurological shutdown and subsequently a temporary condition of death which is usually followed by some sort of spontaneous resuscitation. The virus causes a sort of Lazarus syndrome effect after it kills the infected. But victims are too brain damaged to function normally when they return. They are prone to violent and cannibalistic tendencies after they have risen.” Lanfen blinked intermittently behind the lenses that was hanging over her eyes.
I paced around in utter disbelief of what was being fed into my ears. I would have resisted listening to every bit of it if I hadn’t seen how sick people were getting, and how bad they looked.
“I had no idea those people were coming back from death. Death should be a permanent nail in the coffin. No do overs.” I cupped my chin, as I tried to make sense of what I was hearing. “So how does a virus from Africa end up inside people in Great Britain? Aren’t there screens for signs of sickness at the borders and airports?”
“An anonymous tip exchanged between various western spy agencies made references to suspicious packages. The messages suggested that these packages were delivered to several parts of the world. Rosewood was the first to release what was in those packages. Locations of the rest of the said packages are still unknown. Interpol is still working on very thin leads to identify the source of the Rosewood package and where the rest of the packages were sent.” Lanfen shoved a narrow tube into the brain that she was examining.
“What exactly were in those packages?” My eyes fluttered in the most naive of ways.
Lanfen paused and took a deep, long breath. Her concentration seemed to have been broken for the first time since we started our conversation. Hands pressed against the makeshift operating table in front of her, she turned to look me straight in the eye. “You know what was in the packages! Isn’t it obvious?”
“You mean whatever was in those packages is making people sick? Turning them into mindless cannibalistic monsters?” I threw my hands over my head in shock.
“No, the evidence strongly suggests exactly that. The world isn’t short of people with crazy and dangerous world changing ideologies. Imagine one of the self-righteous pricks getting their hands on a weapon of immense and limitless potential to alter life as we know it.” Lanfen shook her head.
“You are talking about some terrorist or dictator weaponizing hazardous material, aren’t you? Are we talking chemicals or some bioweapon?” I slung some more probing questions at her.
“I am talking about a virus. The Eliza virus to be precise. Her research was stolen after someone had broken into her home in the Maldives and slit her throat.” Lanfen stared blankly at me through unshifting eyes.
“What was she doing in a place like that? Why would anyone want to kill a civilian?” I enquired.
“She wasn’t just a civilian? She worked secretly for unnamed interests! And she wasn’t just killed! She was tortured too for whatever secrets she held in her head!” Lanfen replied in a cold and emotionless manner.
With my head cupped in my hands and my back against some plastic coverings, I slid down the wall of the room, and landed on my bottom. I felt way out of my depth and a bit more shocked than I was when the whole incident started. I shook the cold sweat off my forehead and raised my voice. “Will I ever see my friends again? Diane Dearlove and Miss Chastity Maple?”
“You know the answer to that.” Lanfen smirked before having the spacemen under her command remove me from her presence.
As they dragged me away, the flat screen monitor in the room displayed some disturbing news. The sombre voice of a reporter boomed from the speakers at the base of the monitor. “This is Carol Banning of the BBC. Worldwide outbreaks of a strange disease that kills people and reanimates them in minutes are being reported in Beijing, Nairobi, Belfast, Russia, Istanbul, Bombay, Brussels, Berlin and even the white house in Washington has not been spared. There are rumours that the president of the united states hasn’t been seen for weeks because he has been compromised by the contagion that has spread all over the globe. WHO are saying a virus could be responsible for the outbreak. Be advised to wear masks while outside your homes and do not under any circumstances allow yourself to get bitten by the infected.”
CHAPTER 12
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Table of Contents
They Rise
Table of contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
