Okay, so I was bluffing. Nevertheless, like a mother cub, I was very protective of Jamie and didn’t want to see her in danger. I raised the shotgun’s barrel into the air and fired. The boom of the shotgun was strangely muted by the thick canopy of trees and the beanbag contents of the shell. My ruse was effective at showing these men in uniform that I was serious. Effective enough to get shot by the soldier with a tranquilizer dart in the left shoulder, the impact knocking me back against the side of our vehicle and my shotgun falling from my hands as waves of paralysis and sleep hit my body from the drug. As I slid to the ground and right before I passed out, I saw Jamie stagger forward and then down to one knee as she too took a dart to the leg.
Chapter 11
I jerked awake from a deep, velvety slumber but was held down by an unseen force. My heart raced in a way I’d never experience before as I gasped for air.
“Relax, you’re safe.” The man in the green surgical scrubs with ‘Hospital Mersing’ printed on the front said in an unmistakable French accent as he finished injecting a shot of adrenalin into my arm. I thrashed around and realized I was strapped to a hospital bed in what looked to be a small infirmary.
My head was pounding and I was disoriented, the lingering effects of the animal tranquilizer sending me back to dusty memories of Changi Hospital in Singapore when I was in a motorcycle crash a few years back.
“No, no! Let me go!” I thrashed around some more against my restraints to no avail.
Jamie was lying on a bed beside me snoring vociferously. Like me, she had been changed into a hospital gown and leather straps ran across her arms, legs and chest. The room was dimly lit, but from what I could see there were at least eight or nine other beds in the room, all of them holding unconscious patients strapped to their beds. Some of the patients had IV drips and some of them had large tubes protruding out of their mouths and snaking down into large cumbersome machines at their bedsides. Above the beds and opposite to us were large windows open to the night air for ventilation. For a brief moment, I thought I saw Quaid peering through the pane glass window into the room. I strained to get a better look and shook my head. That was impossible. Why would he be out there?
Ceiling fans twisted leisurely above.
The fog in my head cleared a bit and I remembered the men in camouflage and the pain of the dart piercing my shoulder. My thoughts turned to the race. I looked up and saw a clock overhead that pointed to half past nine. We were running out of time. We’d lost two hours. Who knows where we were, what had happened to us while we were unconscious, or why we were here, for that matter.
“We had to test you for IHS before bringing you back to consciousness for the safety of the unit,” the male nurse said who’d given me the injection. “The good news is that you tested negative. Now, now, stop struggling and relax a bit while the adrenalin works its magic. Stay calm while I wake your friend. Maybe if you’re cooperative, I’ll get you a bite to eat. Supervisor Bertrand will be in to see you shortly,” he leaned over and whispered in my ear conspiratorially, “He wants to ask a few questions about why you’re in the quarantine zone and where you got your gear so prepare your answers carefully. Plan your answers carefully. He doesn’t suffer fools or industrial espionage for that matter.”
The nurse in green scrubs left my side and attended to Jamie. I watched as he injected the adrenalin and she jerked around into consciousness yelling, “Juju bees!” again and again, no doubt suffering from the same disorientation I had felt when I was given the dose of stimulant.
When she came around, she began screaming.
I croaked to her, “Jamie, I’m here.”
She quieted down slightly when I caught her eye.
“Where are we?” she whispered when the man in green scrubs began attending to one of the unconscious patients a few beds away.
“I think we’re in the Mersing hospital in town. We’ve been out a few hours but if we can get out of here, we can still reach the evacuation beacon in time. There’s still time,” I repeated.
The patient that the man in the green scrubs was attending to awoke and began convulsing. Maybe Jamie’s screaming had disturbed his rest. He began to yell in Malay, “Pembunuh! Pembunuh!”
The man in the green scrubs turned a small knob on the patient’s IV drip and his tremors subsided and his yelling became incoherent mumbles.
We continued to lay there watching the man in the green scrubs walking up and down the room attending to each patient, meticulously recording his observations and actions on papers clipped to prehistoric clipboards hooked to the foot of the beds that you’ve seen in infirmaries in old war movies.
Time ticked and ticked by as we lay there, first a half hour then a full hour. Both of us were wide awake but both of us were also terrorized by this new set of circumstances. We were now being held captive and both knew that ‘Penbunuh’, the Malay word that the other patient was shouting translated to ‘murderer’ in English.
A South African gentleman in an immaculately pressed pin-striped suit came into the room just after ten o’clock and spoke to the man in the green scrubs in low tones. Then he walked over to our beds, took a chair from against the wall and sat down between us.
He was very direct and not very polite.
“Ladies, I’m going to presume you’re from Qual pharmaceuticals, here to spy on our clinical trials as that is the only logical explanation why you are traveling to Mersing from Kuala Lumpur in a fake UN vehicle.” He shook his head sadly, “You know we signed for exclusive rights to the Malaysian outbreak months before patient zero was ready for deployment. I really don’t know what your two-bit little corporation was thinking it would accomplish by violating our research zone. Well, you’re in luck because you’re right in the thick of the final phase of our program.” He motioned to the other patients in the room, “As you can see from these hosts that the inoculation has delayed and, in some cases, even eliminated the virus in these test subjects. But in all seriousness, a cure isn’t what we are after. And what we’ve found … is … spectacular. You see, unlike your little outfit, we’ve been hunting for a more virulent form of the fever and a vaccine to help facilitate the spread of the disease in a more, shall we say, judicious manner.”
What the heck was this guy talking about? Jamie was the first one to try to redirect the conversation.
“Sir, with all due respect, we’re not here to spy, we’re in the quarantine zone because we are filming a reality TV show. The show’s about a car race for a million dollars. We didn’t mean to intrude. We’re just trying to get to our evacuation point in Kota Tinggi and get back to Singapore. We don’t know Qual pharma-who-dicals or anything about what you’re talking about.” Jamie said, her incredulity and desperation was evident in her trembling voice. “We need to get out of here or we’ll miss our ride and lose out on the money. Please sir, I’m begging you, let us go.”
I echoed her pleads.
Supervisor Bertrand listened until we ran out of steam and lapsed into silence. He let out a hearty laugh, “Hilarious! You’re colleague we captured earlier had the exact same cock and bull storyline. Is that the best cover story they can come up with? And am I supposed to believe there are healthy people racing around in the quarantine zone for a television show? That’s insanity! I’ll ask you the same thing I asked your colleague, where are the television cameras? Why are you driving phony UN trucks, wearing state-of-the-art protective suits and equipped with non-lethals? No, that story doesn’t hold water.”
He took out two vials of murky liquid from his right lapel pocket, one of them colored blue and the other green, and held them up in the light, “This, on the other hand, is truth and I know this is what you are after. It’s the breakthrough every pharma would give their eye-teeth to patent. These two vials contain the future of our planet. What you see here is the answer to the world’s environmental problems and man’s unchecked population explosion.
This is IHS-2,” he held up the first vial, “an engineered mutated strain of IHS that we’ve designed. It incubates faster and makes the host more agile and quick to facilitate the spread of the virus. Instead of one to two days of fever followed by lethargic lurching catatonia, this strain burns through the host’s higher reasoning within a one to four hour period, leaving motor skills intact and producing a swift, motivated, and more importantly hungry specimen.
And here is the vaccine,” he held up the other vial. “Combined these two are man’s ultimate answer to social engineering.
From today onwards, Vitura Research has accepted the anointed role of savior of mankind. We will take these two miracles, which I like to call the ‘Hawk and Dove’ and save the industrial nations exploding populations while eliminating poverty and hunger in the third world.
How? Well, ‘Dove’ will be given to those who can afford it and those who deserve it. After ‘Dove’ has been administered and those who have received it have been evacuated or given enough time to find safe haven, ‘Hawk’ will then be unleashed in a controlled fashion in those parts of the world where the birth rate is out of control, state by state, country by country. With ‘Hawk,’ we can break the cycle that is leading mankind to Armageddon. Hawk will reduce the world population to pre-World War II levels within ten years, saving the world’s natural resources, reducing green house gas levels and solving any future food shortages brought about by the exponential billions of people projected to be born in within the millennia.
This new more virulent strain IHS-2 we’ve created has been the true breakthrough. The faster the incubation period, the quicker the hosts die out. Malaysia was the first field test of the original IHS, to see if the spread of the contagion could be kept in check and to provide a place to conduct detailed studies on a vaccine. The Malaysian outbreak has lasted two weeks and will wind up in about another week. Next outbreak, when we use the new version of virus and the down time for a country will be less than ten day. But the net gain will be at least a quarter reduction in the most troublesome and economically draining parts of a country’s population.”
This guy really loved to hear himself talk. I’m surprised he even continued as I’d checked out after he said, “Hawk and the Dove” and I’m pretty sure Jamie had too by the glazed look in her eye.
“We released IHS-2 for testing into some of the smaller villages south of here after confirmation that the original virus was spreading in the area, just to see what would happen,” he chuckled. “Those farmers didn’t know what hit them. Within a day, one day, nearly the entire populace of those bergs had turned zombie. The infection spread so quickly, we had to evacuate our teams out of the area and leave a lot of expensive equipment. Not to worry though, in a couple of days they’ll all be dead of exposure and we’ll retrieve everything we left behind; reducing our environmental footprint because being ecologically friendly is Vitura’s first and foremost mission.”
Was that Quaid again? Maybe I wasn’t seeing things earlier. I could swear I caught a flash of his bald head looking around that corner outside the far window on the other side of the room.
“Of course, we’ve had some setbacks and unexpected leaps in the spread of the contagion. Give it up for the WHO paratroopers who’ve admirably held the line north of Johor, providing a buffer from the contagion and Singapore.
Speaking of Singapore, since it’s the closest and wealthiest nation in the vicinity, we’ve decided to extend an invitation to their government to be the first to inoculate its citizens from IHS, for the right price, of course. But obviously, we aren’t going to extend the same courtesy to, say, Somalia.”
By now, Jamie had also noticed Quaid poking his head up every now and again outside the window. Supervisor Bertrand, speaking more to the two vials in his hand than to us, continued blabbering but we weren’t paying the slightest attention to what he was saying now.
“With this vaccine, the fever is rendered inert when an unwitting host comes in contact with the infection. We can now prevent the fever and stay the inevitable brain damage that causes the infected to display those ‘zombie-like’ symptoms so popular with the media these days.” He paused letting us take in what he thought was what we wanted to here. “However, the vaccine still requires fine tuning to deal with the new IHS-2 strain. It prevents the original fever outright, but this new more virulent strain still takes hold in about one in every four recipients. This is why we still have patients in this infirmary and haven’t finalized our results. These last subjects have been given the final two versions of the vaccine and then a dose of the new IHS-2 strain to see which inoculation is more effective.
In fact, you’re going to get to see the effectiveness of the vaccine firsthand. We are conscripting you into our study. Jonah here is going to administer the final version of the vaccine to the two of you and first thing in the morning you will receive a dose of IHS-2.”
Okay, that got our attention.
“We’re giving you the batch of vaccine that has seen the best results, so rest assured that you will not succumb to the fever. If you survive, we’ll see about releasing you, that is, once we’ve finished our research and you’ve been properly interrogated,” he flashed his perfect veneer smile.
“So get some rest, Jonah will be prepping you with a fluid drip to keep you hydrated and then he’ll administer the vaccine. I wish we could provide you with a last meal, but we’ve found that food in the stomach interferes with the serum’s effectiveness.”
Supervisor Bertrand put the two vials back in his lapel pocket, flicked a piece of lint off his knee and stood, smoothing out his suit pants with his hands. He set the chair back against the wall, walked to the foot of our beds so we could both see him clearly and pulled out Jamie’s tiny mini-phone from his trouser pocket. He leaned down, set it on the floor and then smashed it with the heel of his Italian loafers, grinding into the tile. “You can forget calling for help. For the time being, you are property of Vitura Research.”