Necrophobia #3 Read online

  Then the guards came in and shoved me away.

  “Nice work,” Jiggs said.

  “You could have helped me.”

  He laughed. “I would have if you needed it. Once you got his eyes, I knew you had him. Nothing works better than that.”

  Wild Bill came to sometime later. He went crazy, beating and clawing at the dirt. But when he climbed to his feet, he staggered, clutching his ribs. He wasn’t going to be any good at fighting for some time to come. I was lucky he hadn’t killed me. Because he could have. I knew that much. He was strong enough and crazy enough to have snapped me like a twig.

  That was the kind of day it was.

  By sundown, I’d had enough. I couldn’t stay in that fucking cage another day. I didn’t much care if I got killed escaping, but I knew I couldn’t handle anymore of it. I would lose my fucking mind. That was the state I was in when the sun went down and the air went chilly. I could see my breath it got so cold. While the others hunched in their blankets, I sat against the wall, getting more and more pissed off all the time. The anger kept me warm, I guess.

  The only positive thing that had occurred was that I still wasn’t feeling any weird effects of Necrophage infection. That was a plus. Maybe Hillbilly Henry had saved my bacon when I ate…his wife’s bacon. I tried not to think about that part. It was not easy to live with.

  I was still sitting there maybe an hour later when the guards came over and opened the gate. A few of the men stirred, others were wide-awake in panic. Three guards came in and grabbed two of the guys. One of them wasn’t even conscious. The other was Wild Bill. They dragged both of them out and used their rifle butts on Bill until he calmed down.

  After they’d gone, Jiggs shared his last couple of cigarettes that he’d gotten from Louis DeCree. He, Frenchie, and I smoked in the dimness, staring out through the fence at the compound. Nobody was speaking.

  “Tomorrow night it’ll be you or me,” I said to them.

  “I know it,” Frenchie said.

  “We got to get out of here.”

  “Ain’t no way.”

  But there was a way and it was absurdly simple. I told them about it. They didn’t say anything for a time. Then Jiggs said, “Dig a tunnel? That’ll take days. They’ll have our asses at first light.”

  “No,” I said, “not a tunnel. This fence is nothing but a storm fence. We dig a hole under it three feet by three feet and squirm underneath. There’s nothing to it.”

  “Then what?” Frenchie asked.

  “Then we get out in the compound. We wait until it’s late. Real late. Like three in the morning. Guards never come around after midnight. We dig and if we see them coming, we lay over the hole and they don’t know shit.”

  “They’ll shoot us down out there,” Frenchie pointed out.

  “Not if we’re quiet,” I told him. “Real, real quiet.”

  That was my plan. As I said, it was absurdly simple. The dirt at the fence was fairly loose. Using our metal cups, we could dig our hole in not much more than an hour, I figured. It would be easy. Once out in the compound, we would have to move real quiet, but I thought we could easily escape because the ARM troopers would all be sleeping. If worse came to worse, we could steal a truck. I had all kinds of ideas, but first we needed to get out of that fucking cage.

  We waited until after midnight, by then the guards ceased being so vigilant. They had never had an escape, so they weren’t real aggressive security-wise. After sundown, I was told, there was a few guys watching the gates, but that was about it. The others were sleeping. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the gate guards were, too. In situations like this, soldiers tended to get a bit apathetic and not give a shit.

  Lester still had his watch, so after the midnight hour we started to dig. The first five or six inches were a little tough going because the dirt had been tromped down by so many feet. Then it was loose and pretty easy. Lester wasn’t in much of a condition to dig, so he kept watch while the three of us scooped out cups of dirt. It took us longer than I expected, but within two hours or so, we had most of it done.

  Then Lester said, “Guard coming.”

  Frenchie was a big guy and he laid over the hole on our side of the fence. If our guard was the curious type, then we were in trouble. But he wasn’t. He didn’t approach within fifteen feet of the cage. I had a feeling he was no guard on his rounds, but a guy making his way to the head.

  After he went on his way, we went back to it. I got down in the hole and dug it out deeper on the other side of the fence. Then Jiggs took his turn. Then me. Then Jiggs. Frenchie was just too damn big. When he went through the hole, there would be no backing his way out.

  Finally, we were ready.

  We were dirty, but we were excited. Even Lester was excited. Jiggs was concerned about some of the other guys in the cage. They might rat us out, but I didn’t think so. I thought as soon as we were through, they would go, too. And as callous as it sounds, I was hoping for that very thing. If shit hit the fan, the more guys creating confusion out there, the better.

  I went first.

  Jiggs next, then Frenchie, finally Lester. Lester said the compound had been a prison farm at one time. There were a couple Quonset huts in the distance, both long and low. I saw what might have been a bunkhouse and another that was probably a mess hall. Mostly what I saw were cages. At least a dozen of them.

  “How we going to do this?” Jiggs asked.

  I showed him what I thought was the best way. On the other side of the mess hall, ARM had parked several trucks lengthwise up against the fence. It was only a matter of climbing up on their hoods, getting on the cabs and climbing over the fence. The barbwire on top was going to be trouble, but I had that worked out, too. I brought two of our blankets along to lay over it. They wouldn’t give complete protection, but it would keep us from getting snagged for the most part.

  I got them up on the trucks and Jiggs climbed over first. He did it very carefully and dropped over the other side. Frenchie had a little more trouble and I had to get up there to help Lester over. It went really, really good. Too good, I suppose. My plan was to get the boys out, then sneak back across the compound to the womens’ cages and see if I could find Robin. Something which, I knew, was suicidal, but there was no way I could leave without her. If I did, I’d never be able to live with myself.

  As it turned out, that was the only thing that saved my life.

  As the guys got clear of the fence, automatic weapons opened up. I heard Jiggs shout and Frenchie yell, then they were cut down. We hadn’t taken in the possibility that ARM had patrols beyond the fence.

  I ran back the way I had come, but by then the compound was flooded with light.

  The next thing I knew, there were rifles pointed in my face.

  SPIDER

  They knocked me down, of course. Called me a few names. Kicked me a couple times. But I didn’t get the beating I thought I would or the one that they thought, I’m sure, that I deserved. They left me face-down in the dirt. One of them had a boot planted in the middle of my back so I wouldn’t try to squirm off like a sidewinder. I was there when some other ARM pukes dragged in the bullet-ridden corpses of Jiggs, Lester, and Frenchie. In the brief time I’d known them, they’d been my friends. I had, inadvertently, caused their deaths. I felt remorse, but not a lot of it. And that wasn’t because I didn’t give a shit, but because I figured they were better off.

  Going down in a hail of bullets beat the hell out of being fed to the zombies or sucked dry by the Bloodlords. At least, in my way of thinking.

  I waited there on the ground while my friends were tossed over the fence into the zombie corral, as it was known. The dead converged on the offerings and for the longest time there was only the sickening sounds of feeding and slurping, bones being broken open for marrow.

  A soldier came over. “Get him up. The old man wants to see him.”

  “Poor bastard,” one of the troopers said.

  I was hoisted to m
y feet and dragged over to one of the long Quonsets. I figured I was really in for the shit and I was, but not in the way I expected. I was led through the door and tossed down on the floor. The room was dimly lit. It looked like a banquet hall or a meeting room. Like the Quonset itself, it was very long. The soldiers left. I heard the door shut behind me.

  On my knees, I said, “Well?”

  There was no reply. The room felt…strange. I was getting weird, conflicting vibes that are hard to explain. I felt a curious mixture of threat, anxiety, and claustrophobia. The air was hot and stagnant. Beads of sweat ran down my forehead. That made no sense because the room had felt almost chilly when I was brought in. I felt sick to my stomach. Waves of nausea rolled through my belly and I thought I was going to throw up.

  What the hell was going on?

  “Well, Steve Niles, so you are here,” a voice said…a soft and almost mushy sort of voice. I figured if a bloated mushroom spoke, it would have a voice like that. It was disgusting.

  I looked across the room.

  Yes, there was someone sitting at a table. A simple folding card table of the sort that people play Rummy or Canasta at. The insane thing was, not a minute before there had been no table and no man sitting before it. I was sure of it. I thought I had seen a moving shadow over there, but that was about it. Regardless, he was there now. He was a heavy man, soft like putty, bald and pale, sickly-looking. A mutation, I guessed.

  “A forced mutation,” he said, reading my mind.

  “You’re a Bloodlord,” I said, still not certain what that even was.

  “Yes. That’s the term used.”

  In the back of my mind, I had culled together an image of the Bloodlords. I was imagining them as being tall, regal, and deadly looking. Too many late night movies, I guessed. This guy was no Lugosi or Christopher Lee. He was the antithesis of a Hollywood bloodsucker.

  “What is this about?” I asked, standing up.

  “It’s about you. You’ve had a long, long, long run of it, haven’t you?” he said. “You’ve survived one ordeal after another and it seems the closer you get to your goal, the farther away it is. Fate has a way of throwing one roadblock after another in your path.”

  “We’ve all suffered.”

  “But you’re no closer to your son and your friends.”

  This was getting a little freaky. “How do you know about that?”

  Though we were separated by over twenty feet and the room was dim, I could see his eyes. They were like cold fire. He sat forward and stared at me and I felt that heat again, the waves of nausea in my belly. He grinned at me. It was like seeing a toad smile up at you.

  “The same way I know your name. The same way I know your son’s name is Paul and your wife’s name was Ricki and you suffer great guilt over her death and you place great faith in Tuck who is a fiddle-playing ex-Marine war hero who was known once as Sixty-Five for the amount of enemy soldiers he killed in one day and that you hope beyond hope that Tuck is keeping Diane and Jimmy, Ginny and Maria and all the others safe. And let us not forget Sabelia, our Latin vixen with the checkered past, because you have firm plans in mind for her. You not only believe you love her, you’re desperate to, ah, shall we say, plow her field and plant your seed—”

  He rattled all this off along with a lot of other stuff and I heard it, of course, but while he spoke it was like the searing breath of a brick oven was blowing over me, making me go dizzy, making sweat run from pores, making me gasp for breath. It was as if I had been transported from that room to the barren, furnace wastes of Death Valley at high noon.

  When he was done telling me all about myself and espousing my innermost secrets, I was down on my knees again. I had a few crazy ideas about rushing him and beating him down. I knew I could do it. There were no soldiers in the room. But as I thought about it, the room seemed to lengthen and my host seemed not twenty feet away but fifty or sixty. I saw it happen. The space between us stretched like hot taffy.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “You can call me Spider. It’s appropriate for reasons you’ll soon learn about.” He pointed a soft white index finger at me. “But there is a choice. You can suffer as you have been and look for your friends blindly or I can help you. All you have to do is join us. It’s that simple.” He smiled again and chills went up my spine. “No, I don’t know where your friends are, but I can find them. It might take time, but I can.”

  I swallowed. “How? By looking for their minds?”

  “No. It won’t do any good. Once I’ve locked onto a mind, I can find it anywhere. Its frequency, so to speak. But until I do…well, a needle in a haystack, eh?”

  “How did you learn to do that?”

  He laughed. “Learn? I didn’t learn. The gift was developed in me.”

  Without another word, I knew what he meant. I knew everything. It flooded into my brain with crystal clarity, so much of it and so fast that my mind was quickly saturated like a sponge. Spider was Richard Donegal, a neurobiologist who’d worked on a clandestine research program called PHOBIC for the CIA back when the world was still running. The goal of PHOBIC was to amplify latent psychic gifts within the human brain for possible military/intelligence applications. This was done by rewiring the hypothalamus with computer chips. PHOBICs, such as Donegal, were able to interrogate enemy personnel by reading their minds. That was the ultimate objective and it worked. But there was more, much more, only it all rushed through my brain so quickly like a computer downloading data at thousands of bits per second that I couldn’t contain it all and most of it simply leaked right out. But I did glean one thing: PHOBIC was still active and it controlled ARM. It was the puppetmaster and ARM were simply drones and workers in the greater hive. PHOBIC had every intention of restoring world order and when they did, they would control it. They would control every facet of it. There would be no more personal choice and no democratic societies as such; the guesswork of free will and the ineffectiveness of independence would be eliminated. Without such beleaguering philosophical concepts, the human animal could once again be productive. PHOBIC would not only tell them how to think, it would tell them how to feel. Likes and dislikes, motivations and ambitions would be as carefully orchestrated as would be the breeding stock of the population.

  Fascism taken to an alarming, inhuman level.

  PHOBIC was evil. Blatant, stark evil that made even the genocide of Nazi Germany or the purges of Stalinist Russia seem like a Sunday picnic in the park. Even in those places, the human mind was free to dream even if the body was shackled. But the new world order would not allow even that. There would be no defiance because the will would no longer exist. It would be crushed not only by the minds of PHOBIC, but by dosing the populations with psychochemicals. This had already been done somewhere and it had worked. It had worked very well.

  I pulled myself to my feet.

  “And you feed on blood?”

  He uttered a quick laugh. “You think I’m a vampire?” He thought the idea was funny. “There’s much more to it than that.”

  I looked at Donegal, Spider, and he repulsed me. He absolutely repulsed me. He was, in my mind, not only a spider in name but in body…a swollen, soft-bodied parasite, leggy and grotesque, astride a web of human victims that had been drained, sipped dry. I wanted to crush him. To step on him until the juice was squeezed from him. He was offensive and disgusting. As I looked on him, I knew he sensed my revulsion, my hate, my need to destroy him. His image became hazy. He was still there, but he was making me think he wasn’t. Hallucination. It was another tool in his kit.

  He talked and I listened. PHOBIC began as a clandestine research program with military applications. But the PHOBICs themselves—he indicated that there were forty or fifty of them—soon began to realize that they were the new world order. It was easy for them to manipulate people and events, particularly when they joined their minds together and formed what was called the PHOBIC Consciousness. They were very powerful. Then…the Awakening. World govern
ments falling. Chaos. Disorder. The PHOBICs were so arrogant, of course, that the idea of them dying with the rest of the human herd was unthinkable.

  But there was an answer.

  It was experimental and highly classified, but it had potential.

  It was called X-Plasma: synthetic blood. Synthetic blood was not new, he pointed out. Trials had been going on for some time involving Polyheme, Oxyglobin, Hemotech, and a variety of others. Pharmaceuticals were pouring millions into the development of it. It would be the cutting edge of biotechnology: blood that was pure, free from infection of any sort, and universal: it could be given to anyone regardless of blood grouping. The thing was, as corporations scurried about trying to develop their synthetic blood products, it had already been perfected. The Department of Defense had given DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—nearly unlimited resources and biomedical teams at the Army Medical Research Institute had developed a functional synthetic blood from embryonic stem cells: X-Plasma. The PHOBICs had their blood completely replaced with X-Plasma, making them completely immune to Necrophage infection.

  “But it didn’t work out like you thought?”

  “Not completely.”

  What he didn’t tell me, I saw in his mind. Because without even realizing he was doing it, he had uplinked with me yet again. X-Plasma cells transported oxygen just fine, but after a time they created a sort of systemic bacterial infection that caused the immune system to withhold iron. Lack of iron created an enzyme imbalance which resulted in an exotic form of Porphyria. The sufferers needed iron and the richest source of iron in nature was blood. It was thought that Porphyria victims helped advance vampire folklore in the Middle Ages because they needed blood, were photosensitive and could not go out in direct sunlight. The disease made their skin yellow, their teeth and fingernails to grow unnaturally. It also caused psychosis, bloodlust, and mental aberration.