Jeremiah’s eyes went wide. “Oh dear God!” He fumbled amongst the vials, sending one crashing to the floor where it shattered at his feet. Ignoring the mess, he kept searching until he found a brown plastic bottle that sloshed with a dark liquid and a clear packet that contained a syringe.
“Where is she?” In his frenzy, he didn’t notice Hannah standing behind her with the girl in her arms. When he finally locked eyes with his wife and saw that she was holding Cassie, they exchanged a look of solemn desperation. “Put her on the bed,” he said. It’s a miracle that she’s still with us. We may have only seconds to spare.”
With great gentleness, Hannah laid Cassie down, gently placed her head on the pillow then kissed her cheek. She only backed away after a gruff order from Jeremiah. The others were in the room now too. They crowded around the bed, watching quietly, some with their arms folded across their chests, looking on with a forced sense of detachment while the rest covered their faces with their hands and seemed to be breathing in rapid gasps of suspense. Aidan was back among them now, having abandoned his imaginary task of searching for the missing digit.
Cassie watched all the fuss around her with a bemused look on her face, but her expression changed dramatically as soon as she saw Jeremiah open the package containing the syringe. She jerked herself upright and began to protest. “I don’t want a shot…I don’t want a shot…”
“You have to do it, baby,” Hannah pleaded. “It’ll be quick. You have to!”
“No…..” Cassie started to bawl and flail her arms.
“Hold her!” Jeremiah shouted.
Zach and Diego shoved their way through to help pin her down as Kai and Aidan grasped her ankles. Even with that much constraint, Cassie flopped and twisted, continuing to cry out in the most agonizing, ear-piercing squeals.
Jeremiah filled the syringe with the liquid from the bottle then stood hovering over her for a moment. “It’s not good for her to be so agitated, increasing her blood pressure…her circulation. I don’t even know how she’s lasted this long without—”
“Shut up and just give her the damn shot!” Hannah’s hand flew to her mouth as soon as the words came out.
Without further hesitation, Jeremiah plunged the needle into Cassie’s right arm and injected the fluid.
Cassie gave one last bloodcurdling wail. She stopped thrashing and panted in rapid, shallow gasps as she stared up at the ceiling.
“What did you give her?” Kai asked.
“We’ll talk about it later. Right now, I want to give her a sedative so she’ll calm down and rest.” The group parted as he turned and went back into his lab. When he returned, there was another filled syringe in his hand. Cassie’s eyes grew wide again when she saw this one, but she didn’t resist when he gave her the second shot.
“She should sleep for a while now. If what I gave her will do any good, it’s going to take an hour or longer before we’ll know the results. “Jordan…no…Kai…will you stay with her and watch over her while we go wait in the sanctuary?”
Kai nodded.
“I’m staying too,” Hannah said. “I’m not leaving her.”
Jeremiah gave his wife a hug. “She’s in God’s hands now. She needs your prayers.”
Hannah sat on the foot of the bed, wringing her hands as she stared at Cassie. The girl’s eyes were closed now, but she didn’t seem to be sleeping, because she was still breathing heavily and twitching.
As they filed out of the room, Aidan paused and handed his revolver to Kai. “I really hope you won’t need this but—”
With a solemn nod, Kai took the gun. He pulled out the wood chair next to the dresser and sat down on the edge of its seat.
When they were back amongst the pews, Jeremiah went to the cross and knelt, praying for a couple of minutes then he sat down amongst them.
Cheryl led the charge of questions. “I’m assuming what you gave Cassie was some sort of antidote, but how about we start at the beginning? Before you got your divine calling, you weren’t a janitor for XCGen, were you?”
Jeremiah began to rhythmically stroke his beard like it was a cat he was petting. “No…I wasn’t.”
“Why did you lie to us?”
He tugged harder on the next couple of strokes and a couple of grayish hairs floated to the ground. He let out a long exhale before he began to speak. “Why did I lie to you? Maybe that will become apparent after I tell you my story.”
They waited a couple more seconds, and he sighed again before he began his tale.
“I have a Ph.D. in biological chemistry from MIT. My focus was pathogenic diseases, and I was teaching at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas when I was recruited by XCGen about five years ago. One evening when I was working late and all alone in my wing of the building, a couple of their representatives showed up at my office and offered me a job with their laboratory in Las Cruces. It came as a surprise, and I had no interest in relocating, so I turned them down. They were not easily dissuaded. After they tried to sweeten the deal with more money and other perks, I asked them to leave. That’s when things got nasty and they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
Jeremiah looked down at his dusty shoes. His lip quivered for a moment before he was able to continue.
“They showed me pictures of me, my wife, Naomi, and our two grandsons. They had been taken at various locations around town, and they were clandestine photos that proved they’d been stalking us and knew our routine upside and down. At first I was angry, and I tried to throw them out again. Instead of giving up and leaving, one of them very calmly asked if I wanted to phone my wife and ask her what she thought about the offer. Of course, I told him ‘no’ because I had no interest in even suggesting a move to her. The men sat down in the chairs across from my desk, opened their jackets to show me their guns and told me to pick up the phone and dial. Hoping to resolve the matter and send them on their way, I phoned home. When Naomi answered, I knew by the tone of her voice that something was wrong. She said there were visitors there, and that a couple of them had insisted on taking our eight-year old twin grandchildren out for ice cream sundaes. I didn’t take any of their threats lightly at that point. I agreed to do whatever the men wanted as long as they promised not to hurt my family.”
Cheryl tensed as she knew the story wasn’t going to have a happy ending. She hadn’t known that Hannah wasn’t Jeremiah’s first wife, and she had never heard him talk about having children or grandchildren.
“I was forced to give some bogus reason for my resignation to the university and not tell anyone where we were going.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?” she asked.
Jeremiah grimaced. “What good would that have done? They’d already put a mark on my family, and I didn’t doubt their threats were serious, especially after I got wind that they had ties to the One New Earth organization. I’d heard rumors about it being some sort of Illuminati type group that had been buying up large companies and infiltrating the government because they wanted to consolidate the world under their control. I’d scoffed at such conspiracy theories in the past, but now I had evidence in my face that it was true. And, if they were that big, it seemed possible that they also had people on the local police force.”
Cheryl envisioned the day Jeremiah and his family made the coerced trip out of state, worrying about his wife and kids mile after mile. “Did they tell you what they wanted you to do?”
“Not until well after we were settled in to our new home on the laboratory campus. Then, it was a slow indoctrination. They started me with mice, rats, guinea pigs. I was told it was groundbreaking research—that their discoveries had led them to the brink of prolonging life by continuing it after death. I was fascinated at first, coming home excited every night to share details of my day with Naomi. Then, they moved me next door to the canine facility…”
In that moment, Cheryl wished with every fiber of her being that Mark was here with her, listening to these revelations. He’d put some of the det
ails together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle back when they were at Fort San Manuel. Everything Jeremiah was telling them validated his theories.
“I had trouble with the dogs—the shepherds, the labs. It was hard not to bond with them before I had to inject them, or use a nasal spray, or a treat to infect them with various forms of the experimental viruses. Most of them simply died. One day…when one of my co-workers successfully revived a pup that had been clinically dead for three hours, we had success—if you could call it that. The pup had to be put down immediately, because it bit its handler. Nearly took his hand clean off. I never saw Donnie again after that day. Back then, I figured he either quit or was released from his duty. Now, I know he was put down and probably thrown in the incinerator like all of the other lab casualties.”
Everyone was staring at Jeremiah as he continued to talk. Most had grim faces, looking both fascinated and horrified by what he was telling him, because this was all a revelation from the infection’s ground zero. The look of anger on Aidan’s face was worrisome though. He looked like he might leap at Jeremiah at any moment and squeeze his hands around the man’s throat.
“There were more dogs after that?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. Plenty. The work got more dangerous, though. Before infecting them, they had to be restrained, because we never knew how quickly they would turn. After a couple more technicians were bitten, we were given a couple of weeks off without explanation. Then, we were told to report to the on-site medical office. We were given a pill. A vaccine, they told us. It would prevent us from coming down with the virus if we were bitten. Well, that was plenty reassuring, until I returned to the lab. All of the dogs were gone, and we were never given any explanation of what happened to them.”
Cheryl knew. As Mark found out, they were sold to the military and eventually shipped to Afghanistan where a latent infection kicked in, causing them to die, revive and go wild, eating garbage, and attacking villagers who in turn began to attack the soldiers.
“The next delivery of experimental patients came in a truck they brought up from Mexico. They were all men—frightened fellows who didn’t speak a word of English. When I refused to infect them, my superior punched me in the face then pistol whipped me and threatened to kill my family. That day, with a bloody nose and shaking hands I took away the life of a young man named Antonio, barely twenty years old. Some semblance of life came back to him when he revived, but it was clear to me that the spark of humanity had gone out of him. His eyes were dead, and the only thought in his brain seemed to be to feed…on me…or anyone else in the room that he could latch his teeth onto. My superior shot him point blank in the head. Afterwards, he yelled for his body to be removed and the next subject to be brought in. I thought, my God…what have we done?
“There was little time to ponder the moral ramifications. I was directed to help test the virus on dozens of subjects, using differing methods of delivery. When we’d emptied the truck of men, some of O.N.E.’s henchmen scoured the city for anyone they could find that they didn’t think would be missed. They brought in homeless people, runaways, prostitutes, junkies, ex-cons fresh out of prison. At that point, I didn’t care about my own life anymore and tried not to care about the lives of all of the strangers that I was cutting short. I only hung in there to save my family as I doomed the lives of innocent people who knew something bad was going to happen to them once they were strapped onto a gurney. We injected them, gave them potions to drink, infected their food, blew mists up their noses, affixed patches to their skin, put them in isolation chambers and let the virus seep in through the air. We even had to swab the solution on our hand and shake their hand to see if transmission was possible with simple skin to skin contact. It worked. There were countless ways to spread the virus. Once that was figured out, I hoped they’d release me and say, ‘Diabolical mission accomplished’, but it didn’t end there.”
Aidan interjected then. “Wasn’t there anyway you could have—”
“Escaped?” Jeremiah asked, with a laugh that sounded hysterical. “You were in Sedona. I know you saw an example of their totalitarian control around the city. Imagine the lockdown in a small laboratory compound. We couldn’t have dreamed of getting past those gates with our lives intact. We could only hope that we’d be released from these mad scientists at some point.”
“Mad scientists?” Cheryl said. “More like demons.”
Jeremiah exhaled. “You know…I’d never been a religious man before then. I was a man of science. But this…this was just too much evil for me to comprehend. I felt like I’d been thrust back in time to a Nazi death camp, some horrible nightmare that wouldn’t end. Do you know what they called the virus? They called it Dio3F. I later learned that the Dio was for Dionysis, an ancient god with a cult following that had orgiastic and cannibalistic rites. F represented the sixth letter of the alphabet. I don’t have to spell out the number of the Beast, do I?”
And they call them Beasts. Cheryl felt a surge of nausea surging up from the pit of her stomach. The names they used were some sort of religious mockery, and their deeds were certainly the blackest evil.
“It only got worse after that. One day, they brought in a little girl. She was deaf and couldn’t speak.” Jeremiah swallowed hard, his gaze floating to the other side of the room as pools of wetness collected on the rims of his lower eyelids. “That was when I said no. I couldn’t do it, I told them. They threatened Naomi and the kids. Still, I said no. I figured let us all die then, rather than let this misery continue by the vector of my own hands. They didn’t let me off that easy. They brought in Brian, my youngest grandkid, and shot him point blank. Then, they handcuffed Aaron to my wife and took out a needle, preparing to inject him.”
Jeremiah looked down and buried his head in his hands. The room was so quiet; Cheryl could hear Kai and Hannah whispering in the other room. She touched Jeremiah’s shoulder and waited a minute until he looked up, ready to continue.
“They broke me then. I said I would continue to do whatever they wanted, but asked if I could have a temporary reassignment to another duty so I could recover from the loss of my grandson and wrap my head around their bigger mission. I had no idea what O.N.E.’s ultimate plan was at that point, but apparently I convinced them that I was sincere. To prove my loyalty, I was given one of the lowliest, most disgusting tasks. They had people in cages. Some were infected with the virus, and the others became their prey after they turned. I was put on clean up detail. A few days later, when I was contemplating suicide because I saw no other way out, I was reassigned to the procurement group. The last truck from Mexico had been stopped by Border Patrol, and enough people had gone missing in Las Cruces that the public’s suspicions were raised, so it was getting harder to find test subjects. They’d started to just kidnap people of all sorts from the streets. Even knowing it was immoral work, I agreed to do it if it would keep Naomi and Aaron alive…but when I asked to see them before my first outing and was denied…I knew they were dead just like the families of the other scientists that I worked with.” Jeremiah sighed. “I went on the ride into town and convinced my consorts that I had an idea to lure a victim into our truck. When they let me out to approach a young man at a bus stop, I bolted. I ran and ran and didn’t look back until I was a few miles away.”
As Jeremiah paused, everyone stared at him with sadness in their eyes, seeming to appreciate how miraculous it was that he was here at this moment telling them his story.
“I ended up on the streets, panhandling just to get enough money for a meal and enough beer to get through each day, as I avoided being seen by any vehicle that I knew came from the XCGen laboratory or O.N.E. A few weeks later, a group of bikers pulled up near the sidewalk where I was sitting with my cardboard sign. One of them asked me if I’d been saved. I just laughed at him and tried to tell him to fuck off. Then, this beautiful woman with long silvery hair hopped off the back of one of the Harley’s and came over to talk to me. I could tell she wasn’t one of them e
ven before she said she was riding with her brother and just helping out that day to hand out some pamphlets for their church. Her name was Hannah.”
Cheryl and some of the others smiled at this one positive turn in his story.
“Well…fast forward a couple of years. Hannah saved my life by helping me along my path to giving my soul to the Lord. She and I got married, and we came out to Tucson to try to make a fresh start. When we were out riding one day, we happened upon this this ice cream shop for sale and figured it was the perfect place to start a church for travelers.”
When Jeremiah paused for a moment, Aidan asked, “And your lab?”
He cleared his throat and continued. “Before my family was murdered, I had stolen some of the test samples and shipped them to a friend, because I figured it might be the only ace I could hold against my captors. Since I eventually decided it would be futile to try to fight an organization that big, I just hung on to them. I brought them with me to Tucson, and ever since the outbreak, I’ve been working on reverse engineering the virus to create an antidote that can at least stop it from killing the person if not outright halt the progress of the infection. I’ve been trying for almost a year now with only limited success. This infectious agent truly is like some beast out of hell. Its prion like properties cause cell death throughout the body, essentially killing the host, but it just causes spongy holes in the brain, keeping it active in an altered state with a maniacal focus on eating anything decayed or made of flesh.
“Do you think your medicine will help Cassie?” Zach asked as his forehead wrinkled up into an accordion of worry lines.
“I don’t know,” Jeremiah said. “So far, it’s only worked on about ten percent of those I’ve tried it on. The success rate is generally highest when it’s been admitted immediately after someone’s been bitten, but there was one case where a boy had been scratched by an Eater the day before he told anyone and started coming down with a fever and a pallor the next morning. I figured it was useless to give him a dose at that point, but his mother begged me, so I injected him. He recovered a few hours later.”
Eaters: Resurrection Page 5
