Necrophobia 4 Read online

  I knew I had.

  Then…weirdly enough…my body looked normal again, even though I was still starving, my stomach growling loudly. The beard was still on my face, though, and if I had to judge, I would have thought it was at least five or six days worth of growth.

  My second real sensation was that I was not alone.

  When I craned my head over to the side, I saw a body. It was not some revolting slaughtered corpse, but the body of a woman that was hung by the feet. Her ankles were roped together and tied off to a beam overhead.

  I sat there, staring at her, fearing for a moment that it was Sabelia. But it wasn’t. This woman was a redhead and her long shiny locks were brushing the floor as were her fingertips. From what I could see, there didn’t seem to be a mark on her so it was really hard to say how she died.

  I crawled over to her.

  Unsteadily, I climbed to my feet. It took some doing. When I finally stood, I was dizzy and nauseous. The room spun and then spun again. I held onto the wall until it passed. Sweat ran down my face and my teeth chattered uncontrollably. I felt like I needed to throw up, then I thought I was going to pass clean out.

  Don’t fold up now, I cautioned myself. This is all part of it somehow. This is part of the game, the test, whatever this is about.

  The world slowed down and I began to feel better. Again, as surreal as it all was, I couldn’t convince myself that it wasn’t real. I knew it was real.

  So I would play along.

  I had no choice.

  I walked over to the corpse of the redhead. The nausea was gone. The hunger, however, was back. Again, I’d never known such hunger before. I felt woozy, lightheaded. Christ, I would have sold my soul for a cracker or a slice of cheese.

  I stood there, staring at the corpse.

  The redhead had been an attractive woman, athletic but not sinewy. Her thighs were meaty, powerful-looking, her breasts heavy. She was the sort of woman a man would have wanted badly in life. Her lips were full, cheekbones high, a sort of exaggerated sexuality around the mouth that made me want to kiss her, to suck her tongue into my mouth. I wanted to nibble on her lips…no, that wasn’t true. I wanted to bite them. I wanted to sink my teeth into their juicy plumpness until her blood ran free and filled my mouth.

  Jesus.

  The desire was so strong I stepped back. What I was thinking was insane. It was…cannibalism, ghoulism. But the hunger was so intense it had nearly driven me to it. Even as I backed away, it chewed at my insides. I turned away from the body. For the first time in my life I was actually afraid of myself, afraid of what I was and what I was capable of if I didn’t maintain control. There was something in me. Something that did not belong. The animal at the core of my being was trying to claw to the surface. If it got free, if I turned my back for a moment or let my resolve weaken, it would take over. It would rise up, fangs bared, and begin devouring the woman.

  This was what must have been at the root of the zombies themselves: voracious animal hunger laid raw. Intellect, culture, ethics and morals—all of it was pushed aside, cumbersome baggage rejected, and the savage, gluttonous, primeval reptile brain lorded over all.

  Somehow, it had been set loose in me.

  It took every ounce of willpower I possessed to keep it at bay, to suppress its horrible appetites. My entire body was shaking. I was caught in an internal struggle to save my dignity, my humanity. My muscles strained and stood out like cords under my skin. It was all I could do not to turn and look at the woman.

  And in my head there was a voice, a mocking guttural voice that constantly tormented me. Don’t be stupid, Steve. You have to eat. All things have to eat. Nobody will ever know. I won’t tell. You won’t tell. We won’t tell. C’mon, look at her hanging there, soft and luscious. Think how sweet her juices would be, how delectable the meat of her thighs. Think of how wonderful it would feel to seize her in your mouth, to rend and tear until her blood flowed like red wine and ran down your chin. Her breasts would be the softest loaves, her lips tender and sweet, and that delicate budding flower between her legs would explode with honey when you bit into it—

  No!

  Glut yourself, Steve! Fill yourself! Use your fingers, your teeth, let the beast free!

  NO! NO! NOOOOO!

  Oh, don’t be a dumbass, Steve. I’m talking survival, I’m talking continuation here. You’re empty inside and I’m empty inside, but together we can be full and satisfied. You don’t want to starve…do you? Do you know what that’s like, Steve? Do you have any idea? The hunger pangs do not go away, they only bite deeper and deeper until it feels like your belly is filled with razors, forever slicing and cutting until you lose your mind! When that happens, Steve-o, when you reach that point where every pang is excruciating, you’ll eat anything! Anything! Insects, toads, snakes, dead rats, even your own fingers! You’ll kill Sabelia so you can taste her meat and pull the blood-juiced mass of her heart fresh and pumping from her chest! By God, you’ll even feast upon your son’s cold corpse—

  At that point, I screamed and kept screaming until the voice was gone, until it was expelled from my head. I wouldn’t listen to it. I wouldn’t allow myself to taste human flesh. I had once before but that was trickery, it was not choice. I’d never taste it again. I’d kill myself first.

  Still…I could feel the draw of the corpse hanging there like a succulent side of beef. Its pull was practically magnetic. But I wouldn’t look at it. I would not sink my teeth into cold human flesh. I had been tricked into it once, I had eaten human bacon, but never again.

  Then you’ll starve, boy! You’ll starve like a rat in a cage!

  I ignored that.

  There was a door on the other side of the room. It had no knob like the others. It was locked and I couldn’t move it much as I bashed my shoulder into it again and again, kicking it, and beating on it with my fists until my knuckles were skinned and bleeding.

  It did no good.

  There was only one other thing in the room besides me and that corpse: a little cabinet pushed against the wall. It had three drawers. I went over to it, getting precariously close to the corpse of the redhead. Two of the drawers were empty, but the third held gleaming stainless steel cutlery. It looked very much like the set of Rada that I had gotten my wife for Christmas before I went off to Iraq. A meat cleaver. A butcher’s knife. A carving knife. A long roasting fork. Two paring knives. And all of them, I knew, surgically sharp.

  The tools of a butcher.

  And like the K-Bar and flashlight in the other room, placed there for the job I was expected to do: the gutting and filleting of the woman. They would have made it all very easy. And like the voice said, nobody would ever know.

  Except that wasn’t really true, now was it?

  Somebody would know.

  The very same twisted asshole that had arranged all this and put me in this predicament in the first place. Whatever sort of fucked-up games or tests or feasibility studies these were, I was being watched and I knew it. I was a rat in a maze and the cheese was hanging only a few feet away.

  But I wasn’t going to bite.

  I slid the drawer closed.

  I went over to the door and sat there with my back up against it. The hunger pangs hadn’t gone away. They were worse if anything. Absolutely debilitating. They came and went in peaks and valleys. The valleys were about what you got when you hadn’t eaten all day, but the peaks…a living hell that actually made me cry out. Maybe not even peaks. That wasn’t descriptive enough. More like spikes and stabbing blades that were so agonizing, I kept doubling over.

  “This can go on for a month,” I said out loud, “but you won’t break me. I swear to God, you won’t break me.”

  You’re wrong, Mr. Niles. You’re already broken.

  “The fuck I am.”

  The mind games grew even more intense then because as I looked over at the body, I saw that great sections of flesh had been cut from the thighs. The breasts had been carved free, spongy red cavities in t
heir place. Somebody had been at her. As I saw this, the hunger in me was gone. I was full. I was stuffed.

  I had been eating her.

  And how you enjoyed every morsel and every bloody mouthful.

  “Bullshit!” I cried out and the rage in me overcame the hallucinations I was being fed. I looked over at the corpse. It was untouched. Completely.

  I got it then, or at least part of it.

  This was all as real as I had thought, but suggestions could be placed in your drugged mind. Suggestions so powerful that you would not doubt their truth and your overheated imagination would do the rest. I had to guard against these fictions, even if my mind wasn’t entirely my own.

  “You can’t break me,” I said and I heard a voice laughing at me with an evil cackling. It took me a moment or two to realize that as I said this, I had been staring hungrily at the corpse…and salivating.

  DR. CRIPPS

  You can wake up now, everything is all right.

  I heard the voice and it was like a hypnotist’s fingers snapping me out of trance. I seemed to jump from sleeping to full wakefulness very quickly, then I fell back into the former only to once again emerge into the latter, back and forth, back and forth like a bouncing rubber ball.

  I said you can wake up now. Open your eyes.

  There was something commanding about that voice and I didn’t dare refuse it. If it wanted me to be awake, then I wanted to be awake, too. My eyes opened and stayed open. I could hear a voice speaking, but I couldn’t be sure of what it was saying. Was it speaking English? It sounded like gibberish to me.

  “Why don’t you get the shit out of your mouth?” I said.

  The voice droned on and on and I still couldn’t be sure what it was saying. It was like half my brain was awake and the other half was still sleeping. Was that even possible? It seemed so at that moment.

  Then I could not only hear the voice but understand it and I knew I had heard it speaking many, many times. “…is something we use, Mr. Niles. Do you see? Fear exists in the human mind. It is a mechanism like any other. That’s what I need you to understand.”

  I was strapped to a bed. I knew that much. And sitting at my bedside was the old guy with the white hair and steel-gray mustache. The one I remembered from my dreams. The man with the hypodermic needle. Now, my friend, all I need is a little bit of what you have and then we can begin. That’s not asking so much is it? Yes, his voice had a flat, droning quality to it and his eyes were dead like chips of tombstone marble. This was Dr. Cripps, the engineer of nightmares, the mind-stealer and brainwasher. Thank God for him. Oh yes.

  “What the fuck have you done to me now?” I asked him.

  He scribbled on a clipboard. “I’ve put you through another series of tests to determine if you’re of the right caliber to continue on with the drug trial.”

  “I don’t want any part of it.”

  “You don’t have a choice. I selected you,” he said, as if he was talking about a kitten he’d plucked from a litter. “You meet the necessary qualifications in just about every way. You’re an excellent subject.”

  “Where’s Sabelia? What have you done to her?”

  He smiled. His lips were thin, his grin arrogant, the whites of his eyes nearly pink. “I’ve done nothing to her. I really have no plans for her…of course, if you don’t cooperate that could change. How much fear do you think she could take?”

  I wanted to rage at him and tell him she could take more than a candyass like him could ever hand out, but I knew it wasn’t true. Cripps was an expert at breaking minds. He knew how to do it. You didn’t want to taunt or toy with a guy like him.

  So I kept my mouth shut. A first for me.

  Cripps hovered over me, shining a light in my eyes and testing my pupil reactivity. “Right now, Sabelia is fine. She’s living in the bunker above with the others, going about her life and attending to her tasks and asking no more.” He grinned again and it was big grin of gums and yellow teeth. “She doesn’t remember a life before the bunker and you are a stranger to her.”

  “Like all the others up there,” I said. “Mindless slaves.”

  “Peaceful people who are working towards the common good. Not a single revolutionary or troublemaker among them. They are the future, Mr. Niles. They are my people.”

  “Your puppets.”

  “Have it your way.” He grinned again. “Not to sound like a heavy from a bad movie, but resistance is really futile. You can’t stand against us. The future is coming and they are part of it. People like you will either fall in line or they’ll be crushed.”

  “You’re part of ARM, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so are they?”

  “Yes…only they don’t realize it which is fine. They are a test group. One of many.”

  Cripps explained that he had been part of the original PHOBIC research program whose aim was to amplify latent psychic abilities in the human mind via implants in the brain. Those with implants were considered too special to die out with the rest of us, I knew, so they had their blood replaced with a synthetic hemoglobin called X-Plasma. Unfortunately, while it kept them free of Necrophage infection, it created a mutant strain of Porphyria which made them anemic, mentally unbalanced, and in need of fresh human blood to rejuvenate themselves. They were called Bloodlords. And I knew all about them and the way they could manipulate your mind just as I knew about the blood farms they ran where people were kept like cattle, their blood siphoned off drop by drop.

  “But you’re not one of them are you? You’re not a member of the PHOBIC Consciousness?” I asked him, referring to the powerful uplink shared by the Bloodlords.

  He shook his head. “There was more to PHOBIC than the creation of psychic supermen. Its original aim was behavioral science. Developing certain psychochemicals that could be used by the military. We searched for the perfect compound and found it in a derivative of BZ which is—”

  “I know what it is. Pratt reeled off all the info you programmed him with.”

  He smiled again. “Of course. What we came up with was something called Agent 17. Depending on its dosage, it was something of a miracle. Undiluted and sprayed down on an enemy population, it would create confusion and panic, incapacitating fear and paranoia by unleashing all the phobias and secret fears of the subconscious mind. But that was at full strength. Diluted, it could render an enemy population into a herd of sheep who were extremely susceptible to behavior modification techniques and hypnotic suggestion. Hence, you have the residents of the bunker.”

  He went on to say that had been the original plan. Dose an enemy population before you invaded and they destroyed each other, running wild and confused. Then, before you hit the beach, you dosed them with a highly diluted dose and there were no more enemies, only friends that would help you reach your goals even if said goals were their own enslavement.

  “But then came the implants and all that and our funding was severely curtailed…but now all that’s changed.”

  Yes, it had changed, all right. The PHOBICs—as the Bloodlords liked to call themselves—were not many in number. They lorded over ARM, but that wouldn’t last. They were dying out. ARM was in the process of changing from a destructive force in the world to a constructive force.

  “They are the antidote to chaos, Mr. Niles. Already we have several towns out there that are safe zones. The inhabitants work and live together. They marry and have children. They are re-creating what Necrophage took from us. And as the walking dead are eradicated, there will be more and more towns until once again we have states and nations,” he told me, a despotic gleam in his eye. “Like it was before, but much better. Mild doses of Agent 17 will assure that. No more fighting, no more racism, no more religious persecution, no more political division, no more hate and violence. What we will have is a positive force that will create a positive world free from strife and poverty and disease and starvation.”

  Yes, a doped-up world.

  But Dr. Cripp
s didn’t see what was so alarming about that. The United States for example, he said, was already doped-up on booze and drugs, sex and violence, greed and self-indulgence. Such narcissism would be a thing of the past. Our egocentric, self-destructive behavior would no longer exist. And as a unified people on a unified planet no longer divided by religion and politics and social boundaries, there was no limit to what we could achieve.

  I had to admit, it sounded pretty damn good in some ways, but doping people was still doping people. They were still the same under the skin and in the depths of their minds. Sooner or later, all the dark and negative urges were going to reassert themselves one way or another and when that happened it would be like a human atomic bomb. Besides, even all that aside, Cripps’ plan left out certain things like human dignity, freewill, and choice.

  “And what do you want with me?”

  “I want you to be part of the process.”

  “Another brain-dead puppet up in the bunker?” I said, even though I knew it couldn’t be that or I’d already be up there with them. “Another sheep?”

  “On the contrary, a wolf.” He let that lay with me a few moments. “You see, Agent 17 can do more than incapacitate, confuse, or sedate. Combined with other psychotropics it can create killers. It can set the animal within free. And with proper hypnotic control, those violent tendencies can be turned off and on like a switch.”

  That was my job.

  I was to be an exterminator, as he put it. My job and those like me would be to clean out Baneberry block by block, putting down zombies, berserkers, ragtag survivalists, and insurgents like McTeague and his raiders. That’s what this was all about and what my testing had led to.

  “Consider it a clinical drug trial,” Cripps said. “We want Baneberry. It will be our next settlement. We already have the people waiting to move in there, but first it has to be cleaned out and mopped up. And that’s where you and others like you come in. We want that town and you’re going to get it for us.”