Plagued: The Rock Island Zombie Counteractant Experiment (Plagued States of America) (10 page)

Twenty-One

Mason staggered up the stairs, leaning against the railing and the wall, dragging his
good shoulder along the smooth, cold concrete. The chill revived him and the solidity of the wall helped ground him so the spinning in his head didn’t deceive him.

“How long will it take?” Mason asked the doctor.

“For what?”

“Until this fatigue wears off.”

“Look, you need to lie down and rest. Your body has been through enormous trauma. The logistics of how long and—”

“Logistics!?” Mason
echoed. A thread of memory appeared and he snatched it, yanking it in a frenzy of desperation, hauling the thought closer and closer…
this isn’t the time to get into a discussion about logistics, Lieutenant
, Kennedy had said.
Entire states can be restored.
“Why didn’t I see it?”

“See what?” the doctor asked.

“Can the cure be administered another way, like an airborne pathogen or gas or something? Something big like cloud seeding or…or…or with rats or deer or something.”

“Probably. The original strain mutated from an airborne
transmission pathway.”

“What happens when you give the cure to normal people?”

“It doesn’t give you an immunity, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Does it kill normal people, too?”
Mason asked as the doctor reached the landing.

“You’re not going to die,” she assured him
, stopping to face him.

“Does the cure
harm
normal people?”

“We haven’t encountered any cases,” the doctor said.
She backed up to lean against the door to the cell block.

Mason
reached the top of the steps, still using the wall for support.

“You look terrible, Jones.”

“Matches how I feel,” he replied. He reached into his cargo pocket and pulled out his card. The door sensor beside him, the one that led to the interior offices, was blinking yellow. He swiped his card over it anyway. The sensor went red and chirped, then started blinking yellow again.

“Shit,” he said, stuffing his card back into his pocket. He looked across at the door leading to the cell block. The sensor was solid red. “
Open it,” he said with a wave of the pistol. She looked at the door, then at Mason as though the idea were absurd.

“Help is on its way,” she argued.

“Really?” Mason asked skeptically. “How long ago did you call Kennedy? Five minutes?”

“It takes time to get into the facility.”

“There are guards already
in
the facility, on the roof, on the outer wall, at the gate tower. Where are they? Where did Johnson go? Why isn’t the alarm going off?”

“
Let’s calm down,” she said. “You’ve had significant brain trauma because of the consumption pathogen. Things that seem perfectly reasonable to you right now are
not
necessarily reality.”

“I can still tell time,” Mason said sharply.
“Why hasn’t anyone come?”

“They’re
—” she said, but couldn’t finish her answer.

“Th
at’s the last door she can lock out remotely. Let’s get through it.”

The doctor didn’t move.

“Doctor, please,” Mason said.

She sighed and swiped her card over the reader. Mason held his breath. The light blinked red and it chirped. There was a loud clack and Mason sighed as the air fans started and the door began to roll open.

“Come on,” Mason ordered, taking her arm as he passed through the door. The moaning in the cell block erupted as it always did, and at the far end he saw the bloody remnants of the accident. No, it was no accident, he told himself. Chavez freed that biter. Even if it was just an accident because he was lazy, then he was still guilty. It was that same laziness that got his squad killed in Egypt.

Mason reached the first cell door and let the doctor go. She shook her arm free and stepped away from him, away from the cells and toward the safety of the center of the room.

“Run on down there to the rolling gates,” Mason told her. He saw the yellow blinking lights on the door sensors from here. The building was in lockdown. Even though Kennedy hadn’t sent for help, she
had
sealed the facility. Mason knew
someone
was coming, and they wouldn’t be
any
help. “Hit the red alarm button next to the door.”

“What? Why?”

“Because,” Mason said, digging his hand into his cargo pocket to withdraw his access card again. “This is an emergency.” He swiped his card over the cell door sensor. It beeped and buzzed, and the door jerked open under the weight of the zombie that was leaning against it.

Mason walked
straight toward the next cell door, looking up at one of the video cameras mounted on the ceiling. If he was going to break through the lockdown, he needed zombies. An army of them.

“Wait,” the doctor said
desperately, taking several frightened steps toward the rolling gate door. Two zombies stepped out of the cell, lurching toward her in a slow shamble.

Mason swiped his card on the next door and kept walking.

“Run,” he shouted at her. His command startled some sense into her and she bolted into a run. Mason slid his card on the next cell, then the next, freeing cell after cell of biters. They shambled out in a wave of slow moving death following in his wake. He didn’t tell her that he was freeing only the safe zombies, the ones that already had their glands removed. The only danger with this bunch was their appetite. The other hundred or more biters on the other side of the cell block were best left behind bars.

The doctor reached the door and whacked the button. The alarm began to wail and all the biters ducked in a collective fright. Mason continued to open cells as he marched toward her. She was frantically waving her card over the door sensor, trying to escape.

“It won’t open,” she shouted, turning and pressing her back to the wall. She tried both the rolling gate sensor and the man-door sensor, and neither worked. She looked back at Mason, riveted to the spot with fear.

“Don’t worry,” Mason called, swiping his card over the last cell he planned on opening. He had opened over a dozen
, and behind him there were at least thirty biters roaming freely. That would be enough. He couldn’t run. Walking was taxing enough. The room tilted and he found himself trying to correct for it, leaning as he marched, his sight set on the yellow button next to the red one. Hands reached out toward him and he edged toward the center of the room to avoid leaning in their direction.

“The door won’t open
,” the doctor screamed when Mason finally reached her.

“Close your eyes,” Mason yelled back at her as he reached a hand out and pressed the yellow button. It triggered the bug zappers, or so
Matty called them. High luminosity LEDs mounted throughout the cell block erupted like a thousand flashbulbs, pulsing with rhythmic strobe, forcing Mason to close his eyes as he put his hands on the wall to steady himself. The flashing light had the same effect on the zombies. Their moans became groans of anguish, and although Mason couldn’t see them, he knew they were all raising arms to cover their heads, maybe even swinging blindly at their formless assailant.

“Jesus
,” the doctor swore.

“It only lasts ten seconds,” Mason said loud enough to be heard over the wailing of the hundreds of tortured zombies.
The white flashes suddenly ceased and the patchwork of spots in the darkness of his closed eyes began to swim and glide in his vision. He opened his eyes and still felt partially blinded. The wailing of the alarm kept blaring, echoing in the cell block, drowning out in rhythmic fashion the dazed groans of the zombies. Mason turned around to see most of the ones he had freed collapsed on the ground. Several were flailing their arms randomly.

“It stuns them for about a minute or two,” Mason told her. He reached past her and took a fire extinguisher off the wall, pushing it into her hands. “When they get close, use this to confuse them.”

“What!?”

“Standard protocol is for the wall guard to be first responders. They have the clearance to override a lockdown.”

“But a lockdown only occurs when an alarm is raised,” she argued. “We could have just gone out if you hadn’t made me press that button!”

“
Kennedy already had us in a lockdown. Why do you think I couldn’t get through that other door?”

“Your card’s
been deactivated,” she reasoned “They knew you’ve been bit!”

“Really
? Then how come I can open the cell doors?”

Her mouth was open
, but she didn’t answer.

“
They’ll be here within five minutes,” Mason assured her. “But this might be close.”

Twenty-Two

Strange how his memories tumbled and rolled like the liquid in a wave machine. He remembered some of his conversation with Kennedy, and he had an idea now of why he had been sent here. Someone had wanted him to come shut it down, but how anyone would go about shutting down a facility like Biter’s Island was unfathomable.

The path of that thought careened into a wall. How was he even supposed to get out of this place in one piece? He stared at the zombies he had let escape from their cells, blinking to recover his full sight, still dazed by his ordeal. The zombies began to sit up or roll to their knees one by one. They looked lost, like the soldiers in the mess hall of the psych ward he’d been sent to after the Egypt incident. The military hospital he had been stationed at. He sat alone, staring at a television that played some breaking news. It showed images of columns of smoke that rose on the other side of a wide river behind a newsman who told of a tragedy at a Breckenrock Corporation facility inside the Plagued States. A helicopter roared over the newsman, making the newsman duck with a hand over his head as though the chopper might actually hit him. The camera panned to watch it race across the channel.

“That was close, Phil. Are you OK?”

“Yes, we’re fine here,” the newsman replied while waving a hand toward the chopper. “But as you can see, rescue crews like that one have been making regular runs across the channel for hours looking for survivors. And we’re told that there
have
been survivors, but the concern right now is that contaminated individuals may have been thrown into the channel by the earlier explosions, so authorities have been warning all towns and cities along the channel to alert them of any survivors, or their bodies, that wash up on shore and to avoid contact with them at all cost.

“Also, the Army is still enforcing the no-fly zone and there are at least a dozen shore patrol boats in the water looking for survivors
, as well as keeping all watercraft out of the area.

“I don’t know if you can see it, but there are literally twenty or more drones flying down the shoreline, specifically looking for victims of the explosion who may have been thrown into the channel…
.”

Mason scooped his lunch, spooning it slowly and purposefully into his mouth as he stared
over the heads of his fellow soldiers in the mess hall, all equally glued to the scene. The footage didn’t strike him as real, as though it was just another replaying of old footage. For Mason, the television reports first started in grade school, but by the time he finished high school he was studying the origins and immediate effects of the outbreak. Endless reports and papers on the same thing, over and over again. A monotonous drilling, like scooping the bland potatoes into his mouth.

“Thank you for that report, Phil,” the anchorwoman said as the picture changed to a video showing an aerial approach of the affected area. “What we’re seeing now is exclusive
drone video footage obtained from the Skywatch blog,” she continued.

Mason stopped chewing, staring with sudden interest at the video feed. He recognized the appearance of the hundreds of scorching blasts enveloping the hillside. The sheer volume of craters scoring the ground made it appear like the surface of the moon, but with blasts so close
together it looked more like a carpet bombing, levelling the entire hillside and every building, shattering even concrete foundations, toppling the ring wall that once held back the rest of the Plague States.

The sentry ring.

Mason’s thoughts returned to the present. He wondered if that’s what they wanted him to do. Blow this place sky high? It would make sense. How else do you put an end to the slave trade except to destroy the places where the trade is sanctioned?

Mason couldn’t believe that they thought he would help them blow
up this facility up. Blowing the sentry ring would kill everyone, his fellow soldiers included.

“Are you married?” Mason asked
the doctor. O’Farrell’s name sounded Irish, and with her red hair he suspected it was her own name.

“What?”
Her incredulous expression turned in his direction.

“I’ll get you home to your family, is all I mean. I owe you my life.”

“No, I’m not married,” she said tersely, shaking her head. Her eyes softened. She adjusted the fire extinguisher in her hands. “You?”

“No,” Mason
said with a sigh. “At least, I don’t think so.”

A brief laugh
escaped with a grin. Her smile faded as quickly as her breath. Several of the zombies were on their feet again and slowly lurching toward them, still dazed, but with enough sense to hone in on their voices.

“
Spray the face,” Mason instructed, pointing at the fire extinguisher. “They hate it. Wait until they’re less than ten feet away. Don’t waste that stuff.”

“Can’t
we hit that light show again?”

“Not until the zappers recharge.”

“How long does that take?”

“About five minutes,” Mason told her.
They both shook their heads.

Across the cell block
someone appeared in the open doorway of the stairwell. It was Johnson. He froze in his tracks at the sight of the freed zombies. Mason tapped the doctor and pointed him out. Johnson’s mouth uttered curses as he backed out of sight.

“So much for
his
help.”

Mason levelled his
pistol at an approaching biter and took aim.
Blam!
A collective flinching rolled through the cell block like a wave. The noise echoed long after the biter fell to its side, collapsing over its shot out leg.

“Why didn’t you kill it?!”

“We’re not allowed to use lethal force,” Mason replied.

“What idiot thought that up?”

Mason turned to face her, wondering why her words felt so familiar in his own mind, as though he had recently thought it himself. He looked back at the flailing biter, at the blood smearing across the tile. He saw more biters behind it. He struggled to recall why this scene seemed so familiar. He knew how he had been bit. The remnants of
that
struggle were still plain to see. Mason lifted his pistol again and took aim on another biter. The shock of recognition jolted him physically and he lowered his aim.

Matty
killed himself. He’d been bitten, so he killed himself. He didn’t know about the cure. Only that man—the hunter named Opland—only he knew. He had a beer and a duck and a half-breed. Was it his half-breed downstairs?

Mason hit his forehead with the palms of his hands, the pistol butt striking the crown of his eye. Why couldn’t he remember things the way they happened, or even at all?

“Jones,” the doctor said anxiously. “Don’t freak out on me now. They’re getting closer!”

Mason wrung out
his eyes. Nothing came. No memories, no tears, no rage. He opened them and took aim on the first biter.
Blam!
The bullet knocked its head back and splattered blood in the air behind it. O’Farrell was right about killing them. It was a stupid rule. The zombie fell backwards, collapsing over its legs to its side. Mason took aim on another.
Blam!
It fell with a life-ending bullet through the skull, a spray of gore and blood erupting behind it, painting the ground and two other biters.

Like sharks worked into a frenzy
, several biters fell over the dead.

“
This won’t make a lot of sense, but I have to tell somebody. It’s driving me crazy,” Mason said. The doctor looked at him with caution. “Kennedy enlisted me to help close this place. I remember that much. Someone else assigned me here,
for her
. God, I wish I could remember who. They gave me information about how to blow this place up.”

“
Jones,” the doctor said, her voice wavering as she tried to control her fear.

“I have to tell you,” Mason cut her off.

“You may be confusing some of your memories,” the doctor said over him.

“Doc
,” Mason growled. He looked at the biters that were moving past the two he had killed and took aim on one.
Blam!
The biter collapsed where it stood and two more advancing biters fell over it, greedy for the taste of flesh. Beyond the wall of carnage, twenty other biters shuffled to move around the blockade.

Mason levelled his glare on the doctor. “We don’t have a lot of time.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to me once they get here, but Kennedy wants me dead, or at least out of the way. Let me ask you, what do they do with people like me? People who have been cured?”

“Rehabilitation,” the doctor replied. “
There’s a clinic on the Rurals side where we keep several under observation.”

The word knocked him so hard it jarred another thread of memory to the surface.

“You’re only here for observation,” Doctor Liu had said months ago, maybe years by now. Liu wore an Army uniform, rank of colonel. He tried to seem friendly, but wore the fatigued look of a man with too many responsibilities to be genuinely interested in one man’s problems. Was it even really a problem at all, Mason had wondered.

“How long do I have to be here?”
Mason had asked him.

“Until you’re fit for duty again,” Colonel Liu replied with a disarming smile.

Until you think I’m ready, you mean
, Mason remembered thinking. Who gets to decide what “fit” meant anyway?

“Did I do something wrong?” Mason asked.

“Why don’t you tell me what you think? Do you think you did something wrong?”

“I killed a fellow soldier, sir.”

“That’s right, but you didn’t exactly answer the question, now, did you, lieutenant?”

“Well, neither did you, doc.”

The doctor smiled and looked down to write in his notes.

Mason remembered now. He had killed a man in Egypt.
It wasn’t Chavez who had killed his men. Mason had killed one of his own. The crazy thing was, he couldn’t remember ever having done it in the first place, but the feeling was there, as though guilt had been feeding on him, ripping apart his mind and spirit. Just like the consumption pathogen was crippling him.

“You know why I’m back home, right?” Mason heard himself asking, the memory of his voice echoing just above the drone of the hundreds of zombies in the cell block.

“Yeah, I do. That’s kind of the point,” the driver that had ferried him from and to the airport said.

“They don’t care about me,” Mason
gasped in realization.

“What?” Doctor O’Farrell asked. “Jones, snap out of it!”

“They never cared about my photographic memory.”

“Jones
,” the doctor pleaded, staring up at him, putting a hand on his shoulders.

“
They only cared about my record,” Jones told her. “They let me get bit so they could pin destroying the place on me. An unstable, disgruntled soldier.”

“Jones, the gates
,” O’Farrell yelled, shaking him by the shoulder. She let his arm go and pointed. The haze of thought blurred and Mason looked into her frantic eyes. She turned her attention toward the cell block, flush with despair.

“The door
s all buzzed open!”

She was right. The cell doors were all opening
. Biters on both sides of the aisle were stumbling out of confinement.