Necrophobia 4 Read online

  The door was open a few inches.

  I swung it open.

  Lights.

  There were lights on down there.

  I went down the metal steps, moving as quietly as I could. When I reached the bottom, I saw a long corridor stretched out before me. Lots of the doors had biohazard symbols on them. But the most interesting thing was the video cameras. Everything was being monitored. There were little red lights on top of them and they were lit which made me think they were in operation.

  I had no doubt I had just entered Dr. Cripps’ playhouse.

  Down here, somewhere, must have been the medical wards where I and the others were drugged-up and conditioned. I approached the first door, adrenaline rising in me. I was dearly hoping I would find Cripps behind it because I was going to kill him.

  I opened the door and threw it in.

  I was expecting zombies to rush out at me, teeth bared, but there was nothing there to greet me. It was black inside and I couldn’t see a thing. I clicked on the tac light on my M4 and saw what looked like some kind of lab. There were tables with straps. They were gleaming and stainless steel and had drains set into them. I panned the light around and saw…wreckage. Drug cabinets had been tipped over, equipment smashed on the floor. It looked like a bomb had gone off in there.

  I scanned the wall for a light, but I couldn’t find one.

  The room was pretty big and there were shadows everywhere that jumped and pranced as I moved my light around. Something was telling me I wasn’t alone in there. I felt tense. The back of my neck was crawling with gooseflesh.

  You’re here and I know it, so why don’t we quit playing games? If you want to kill me, then why don’t you get to it already?

  But there was no movement.

  The heavy, breathing darkness was like a pall.

  I stepped carefully forward, glass crunching under my boots. I moved around an IV stand and a table set with shattered glassware. I moved my light slowly from side to side, trying to find anything that didn’t belong, trying to find a target to spend my anxiety on.

  Something like a bottle crashed to the floor off to my left and I turned, firing three rounds which harmlessly drilled into the wall and knocked a digital clock from its bracket.

  “I know you’re here,” I said. “So why don’t you cut the shit already?”

  I thought I heard a low, sibilant laughter.

  I turned to the right and saw a low, slinking shadow slide along the wall. A form disappeared behind a tipped-over metal cabinet that was leaning against one of the tables.

  I heard a sound right in front of me and brought my weapon around. I saw someone standing there and right away I recognized it as Pratt.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” I asked.

  He just stared at me with blank, dark eyes set in red-rimmed sockets. He was grinning, drool running from his mouth. I knew right then he wasn’t normal. He had been dosed with Agent 17…or maybe something even worse.

  His mouth opened and closed, more saliva coming out along with something that looked like yellow foam. In my light, his eyes were shining glass balls, his face pale and set with shadows. Whatever he had been given, it had twisted his mind and turned him into some kind of raging beast far beyond anything KIA-9 had known.

  I stepped back two, three, then four steps.

  Pratt let me. He was watching me, giggling.

  I heard movement behind me and turned quickly, just in time to see something like a shrieking demon with long black hair come jumping out of the shadows at me. It was a woman; I saw that much, but little more. Hair was plastered to her face with snot and blood, her teeth bared and stained pink as if she had been chewing on raw meat.

  Her fingers were talons that reached for me.

  Her mouth was hooked in a bestial snarl.

  I pulled the trigger and put three rounds into her that knocked her back and away. She struck the wall, then slipped on something and went down, howling and throwing gouts of blood in the air.

  I turned back around quickly and Pratt was reaching for me.

  I busted a few more into him and then backed from the room. I slammed the door shut and waited out there for them to come for me, but they never did. I didn’t know what Cripps had done to them. I only knew they were no longer human.

  I had the worst feeling that by coming down here I had descended into the lower labyrinth of hell itself.

  LAB RATS

  I tried two more doors and they were both locked, both set with security keypads and I wasn’t about to waste time trying to blow them open.

  I moved down the corridor and found another door.

  It was open.

  Inside, the lights were out, but it was lit by various security monitors set into the walls and a laptop with which to manipulate them. I closed the door behind me. It had a lock and I set it. This was some sort of security station. That wasn’t surprising. When it was a CDC facility back in the good old days it must have been a high security installation.

  There was a high-backed, leather chair and I sat in it.

  The monitors showed various corridors. Some were lit, others were the green fields of night vision. There were six monitors and I watched them for a few minutes as I pulled on a cigarette. It looked like a real maze out there. It wasn’t going to be easy finding my way around and, worse, it was going to be damn dangerous if I ran into anymore crazies like Pratt and the woman.

  The laptop had a mouse and I moved it around until I got a feel for how it worked. The screen was fairly simple. It read:

  A CORRIDOR

  B CORRIDOR

  C CORRIDOR

  D CORRIDOR

  I clicked on A and found it was the one I had entered through. I saw the corridor outside and it was empty. That was good. There was a submenu with hyperlinked settings that read BIOCHEM, PHARM, MICROSCOPY, ISOLATION. I checked out several of then and saw nothing of interest. BIOCHEM was the room Pratt and the woman had been in. In the green night vision, I saw nothing moving in there. The two locked rooms were more labs, untouched and sterile-looking. There was no one in them. I went to ISOLATION which led me to a sub-submenu for ISOLATION A and ISOLATION B.

  There was movement in A.

  Not crazies, but zombies. I saw five or six strapped to tables. They thrashed their heads back and forth and chattered their teeth, but they weren’t going anywhere. I saw two that weren’t strapped down and they were feeding on another that was.

  I had to remember to steer clear of ISOLATION A.

  The lights were off in ISOLATION B, but I could see more forms strapped to tables in the green field. I could see that they weren’t zombies, but that’s all I could see. The other rooms held nothing of interest save MICROSCOPY where the lights were on and I could see two corpses on the floor, a lot of blood around them.

  ISOLATION B was my target.

  I got back out into the corridor and moved slowly down it past a door marked ELECTRON MICROSCOPY and another marked PHARMACY. The corridor ended there. I went through a swinging door and found that the corridor split to the left and the right. A sign on the wall told me that B Corridor was to the left and Isolation was to the right. I went down there, giving the door to Isolation A a wide berth.

  The silence of the place is what was really bothering me.

  It got under my skin. It made me nervous. Regardless, I went over to the door marked ISOLATION B. It was locked. There was a key pad there and I blew it free with a few rounds. The door still remained locked. I pulled out a frag grenade, wedged it on the bracket that had held the keypad and pulled the pin, dashing down the corridor and hitting the floor. It went with a tremendous, rocketing explosion that echoed from one end of the labyrinth to the other, coming right back at me.

  But it worked.

  The door was blown open.

  I waited for a few minutes, ready to kill anything or anyone that came to investigate, but no one or nothing did. I was alone. That feeling of being watched persisted, but I put i
t down to the cameras spying on me.

  Sucking in a breath, I pushed the door open the rest of the way with the barrel of my M4. The tac light showed a row of switches on the wall and I flicked a few until the lights came on. I scanned with my weapon quickly, but saw no danger in there. Beds lined the walls like a hospital ward in an old Warner Brothers movie. Most of the beds were empty. The light was dim, but it was enough to see by. Some of the people I saw in the beds were ones that I had seen in the bunker when Pratt had given me the grand tour. One of them was Jeggs, one of the snipers from the firing rooms above.

  He was alive.

  His breathing was shallow, but he was alive.

  “Jeggs,” I said. “Jeggs…can you hear me?”

  There was no response. He was hooked up to an IV and I didn’t know if what was in there was giving him life or zombifying him. I took a chance and removed the IV needle from his arm. I found a Band-Aid and stuck it over the bleeding pinprick.

  “Jeggs,” I said. “Wake up.”

  After a minute or two, his eyes opened. He looked up at me, but his eyes were glazed and unfocused. It was like he was seeing me through two panes of glass. He tried to speak, but no words came out. He was really out of it and I imagined the others were, too. I left him strapped down just in case he might come to and act like Pratt, though I doubted it. There were eight more people in the room and I pulled their IVs and put Band-Aids on them. I spoke to each and everyone, giving a couple a few light slaps in the face to shock them out of it. They were all stirring by then.

  It was a start.

  Still, I wondered about all this. Had Cripps been creating another group of brain dead killers to fill out the ranks of the KIA teams? Or was it possibly something worse? Was he turning these people into nightcrawlers or berserkers as Pratt had called them? Dosing them slowly and continually with Agent 17 or fear gas until they were no longer human exactly?

  Questions.

  Too many damn questions.

  I noticed there was a door at the other end of the room. It was off to the side, partially hidden by a drawn privacy curtain. I pulled the curtain aside and went to it. It was open. I clicked on the light and saw another ward. Three beds were occupied. The one nearest me was the one that drew my attention.

  “Sabelia,” I said under my breath.

  I rushed over there. She was breathing, but her pulse was slow. I unhooked her from the IV. I shook her gently, saying her name again and again until her eyes flickered. Chances were, she might not even consciously recognize her name if she was drugged like I was, but apparently something in her did because a slight smile touched her mouth. I found that I couldn’t swallow. I pursed my lips tight. There were tears that wanted to come but I could not let them. This was not the time to become an emotional wreck.

  When she started slipping back into her fugue, I gently slapped her face until her eyes opened. She looked at me blankly. She looked confused. Probably from the drugs but also partially from the fact that even though she didn’t recognize me, something told her that she should. I wished I had some of the adrenaline we had in the Army. It was pre-measured. You just injected it into somebody and, bam, they were wide awake. That stuff could have brought the dead back to life…a very unfunny exaggeration under the circumstances.

  “Sabelia,” I said. “It’s me, it’s Steve. Try and stay awake. Try and concentrate on my voice.”

  I kept blabbering on as she fought to keep her eyes open.

  There was probably adrenaline in this place somewhere, but I wasn’t about to use it even if I knew where it was. A pre-measured, pre-loaded syringe was one thing, but to fool around with unknown dosages was quite another.

  I undid the straps that held her and made her sit up. There was a water cooler nearby and I got her some to drink and some more that I rubbed her face with. She didn’t care for that. She groaned and moaned, but I knew she was nearing full consciousness.

  “…then I went there,” she said. “I told them…no more houses…”

  She was making no sense, but that was okay. I knew she was slowly connecting to reality.

  “Stay awake,” I told her. “You have to fight it.”

  “…no more ribbons in the box,” she said, her lower lip jutting out in a little girl pout.

  I went to the others and unhooked their IVs, shook and slapped them awake and gave them each a sip of water. When I got back to Sabelia, her eyes were beginning to focus and she watched me distrustfully.

  “You, everyone here, was doped up by Dr. Cripps,” I said.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” she said.

  “Yes, he would.”

  She shook her head. “Thank God for him,” she said.

  I tried not to smile. I went into the other rooms and the people in there were coming around. I brought them water and undid their straps. None of them seemed to be dangerous. I helped them to sit up, telling them that they had been drugged, just not by who.

  When I went back in the other room, Sabelia still eyed me warily. “Did we go to school together?” she asked.

  I told her I didn’t think so.

  She stood up, swaying from side to side but holding her hand up, palm out, to keep me away when I tried to help. Her hospital johnnie was undone in the back and it slid from her shoulders, exposing her breasts. I saw the rose tattoo on one, the 182 on the other. She didn’t seem to be aware that she was showing her charms for a moment, but when she did she covered herself and gave me a fierce look. “What are you looking at, perv?”

  She turned away from me, cinching up her johnnie in the back, but giving the guy in the next bed a good view.

  “Hey,” he said. “Nice tits.”

  “Fuck you, man!” she said, the venom I knew so well rising in her. “Chinga usted! Hijo de tu puta madre! Pinche idiota!”

  I thought that her Latin temper rising to the surface was a good thing. She went up one side of the guy in the bed and down the other, holding her johnnie closed as she shook a finger at him. When she was sure it was cinched properly, she flipped him off, telling him his mother was a whore in Spanish. I recognized that one. It was a common insult amongst Hispanics.

  “Okay,” I finally told her. “Just take it easy. No one will touch you.”

  She turned on me then, her eyes molten and black. “No me jodas! Beso mi culo!”

  I didn’t know what she was saying, but I’m sure it wasn’t good.

  She stormed past me, almost daring me to open my mouth. I knew better. She started searching around through closets until she found her clothes which she promptly took behind the security curtain, still bitching in Spanish and what I thought might be some Portuguese thrown into the mix. That didn’t surprise me because she was born in Brazil and lived there until she was five or six years old.

  “That’s a hot tamale there,” the guy on the bed said.

  I smiled and unstrapped him and the other woman three beds down. After that, there was little to do but let them come out of it. There was no black coffee available so it was pretty much a waiting game. Sabelia was keeping her distance from everyone. She watched me with hating eyes.

  About an hour later, I was still wondering what to do with them. Some of them were slow coming out of it, but most were okay by then. They were still bunker people, though. Some of them wanted to go to the kitchen and make coffee and eat and I figured that was probably the best idea…as long as the water up there wasn’t treated with anything. I knew it was getting late in the day and it would be getting dark out soon. I wanted to get them out of there, but I had a feeling most wouldn’t go, at least until their memories returned.

  Sabelia came over to me. “Why do I think I know you?”

  “Because you do. When the drugs wear off, you’ll remember.”

  “Maybe you’re just full of shit,” she said.

  “If I’m full of shit, how do I know about the One-Eight-Two Posse?”

  “Because you saw it on my tit.”

  “Then how do I know it was a
posse?”

  She shrugged. “Ah, man, you probably heard of us. We don’t take no shit.”

  “Give it some time. You’ll remember.”

  “When I knew you before, were you a sonofabitch, too?”

  “No, you liked me.”

  “You better hope so. I remember I didn’t and maybe I stick a knife in you.”

  Yeah, she was coming around, but the Sabelia I was seeing was the tough-talking girl gangster she’d been as a teenager.

  About thirty minutes later, the natives were getting pretty restless, so I suggested we go up and get food.

  The guy who’d ogled Sabelia said, “There’s others. They’re in C.”

  “We better get them,” I said.

  One of the men opened the door and some of the people moved out into the corridor. Zombies were waiting for them. I heard them cry out as they were attacked. Some of them were too dopey to do anything but fold up, others fought, but it did them no good. The dead grabbed them and bit them.

  “OUT OF THE WAY!” I cried out, elbowing my way to the door and shoving people aside. “LOOK OUT!”

  I charged out there with my M4 and opened up on the dead and, unfortunately, their victims. I blasted heads open and shot down stragglers, victims caught in my volley of bullets. When I was done, there was blood and body parts all over the corridor.

  “We’re going to C now,” I said and nobody argued with me.

  KILLSHOT

  They lined-up behind me, keeping their distance, all except Sabelia who stayed real close. I had the feeling that her respect for me had gone up after I wasted the zombies. Some of the others were still pissing about the fact that I’d killed people back there, too, but once you had been bitten, you were no longer a person in my book. Nothing could save you unless it was some completely bizarre and still poorly understood series of events that had give me supposed immunity.