Necrophobia 4 Read online

  “I saw them marching people off like slaves,” I told him.

  “Sure. Squatters, mostly. People who came here, found empty houses and decided to stay. Mostly transients from the larger cities. ARM believes them to be allied with McTeague, but I doubt that they are.”

  “Where are they taking them?” Sabelia asked.

  Pratt shrugged. “Labor camps? Blood farms? Take your pick. Those that are willing will probably join ARM. Those that aren’t…well…”

  He explained to us that we had been hit by a psychochemical weapon that was generally known as fear gas. It was a new toy ARM had been playing around with and no doubt had its origins in the dark catalog of PHOBIC, who I knew were the puppet masters of ARM. He said that this fear gas was very similar to anticholinergic 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, an incapacitating agent tested by the U.S. Army back in the 1960s and called BZ for short.

  “The Iraqis had limited stockpiles of it, we discovered, during the Gulf War. They had used it against their own people more than once,” he said.

  I had heard of BZ when I was in the Army.

  “So it makes you terrified? Drives you insane?” Sabelia said.

  Pratt shrugged. “The experience can be very subjective, Miss, and vary from person to person. Some people scream with terror and others can’t stop laughing, sometimes it alternates between the two. From what I’ve been told, it causes detailed illusions and panoramic hallucinations, confusion, blurred vision, speech difficulties, sporadic mood swings, violent behavior, incapacitating fear, even what’s known as primal regression, in that people act like animals. They tear their clothes off and crawl around on all fours or sit around picking imaginary nits off one another. Lots of weird, strange, very fucked up things.”

  He told us that the point of BZ was to hit the enemy with it in aerosol form, creating absolute chaos, disorienting them and the civilian population in general. A good dose and it would be impossible for them to organize a defense. They’d be too terrified and weirded out, most of them tripping their brains out.

  “We tested it on our own troops back in the ‘60s,” he said. “Volunteers…or so I was told. They were so out of it they couldn’t even recognize men in their own units. Their best friends were strangers. Hostile strangers they had to run from or fight. Terrible stuff, all right.”

  “But a gas mask would protect you?” I asked, remembering that some of the night fighter corpses had them.

  “Yes. But a heavy enough concentration on the skin might be absorbed, but not with as much of a dynamic effect.”

  “So can we leave?” Sabelia wanted to know.

  “No,” Pratt said, puffing off his cigar. “Not until we’re sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure of two things, Miss. The first being that you’re not carrying Zombpox and the second being that you’re still not dosed on fear gas.”

  “We’re fine,” I told him. “Neither of us have been bitten and we’re over the gas.”

  “We’re running blood tests on both of you just to be sure. It’s strictly procedure with us, you understand. The problem with fear gas is that it can have a lingering effect up to forty-eight hours. We have to be sure. There’s enough berserkers out in the streets as it is.”

  The berserkers were the crazies we saw in the streets. They were people who had been dosed again and again by fear gas until they were no longer normal, hysterical and raving and savage.

  “They’re dangerous. Many of them have even changed physically…but for the most part, you have to pity them.”

  He said there was a rumor going around that the berserkers were really just homeless people plucked from the streets and experimented upon by PHOBIC, dosed continually with high concentrations of fear gas and then released here in Baneberry to cause trouble with the local insurgents.

  He pulled off his cigar. “Maybe, maybe not. Thing is, they just started appearing in the past month or so. Who can say?”

  “So tomorrow we can leave?”

  “Yes. Or you can stay here with us. It’s up to you.”

  “We’re looking for some friends,” I said. “We just want to find them.”

  “Ah, yes, I’ll bet you do. Do they have names?”

  “Tuck,” I said. “That’s short for Tucker. Diane, my sister-in-law. Robin, Ginny, Carrie.”

  He smiled. “I’ll see what I can find out. If they’re around, chances are they’ve been seen. But for now, you have to finish your time in isolation.”

  Sabelia didn’t look too happy about it, but what choice did we have?

  “We’ll get you out of here just as soon as possible. We tend to be cautious…maybe too cautious.”

  “I’d like to see Jimmy, the guy we came in with,” I said.

  Pratt was no longer smiling.

  GOING TO YOUR GOD LIKE A SOLDIER

  Jimmy was strapped to a metal-framed bed. He looked very old, much older than I had ever seen him as if he had aged a decade in a matter of hours. I sat with him for two hours and he never woke up. The nurse who watched over him wore full biohazard gear. It was a man but I never saw his face. He made me wear disposable latex gloves and a mask so I would not breathe in any airborne particles or blood if Jimmy sneezed. I didn’t bother telling him I didn’t think it was necessary in my case.

  It’s never easy to watch an old friend die and in Jimmy’s case it was even worse. He’d always been so good to us. When I was off in the war he took care of Ricki and Paul like they were his own. He was a kindly old guy with a good heart and enough great old stories to fill a book. I sat there by his side, staring down at him, tears running down my cheeks. It wasn’t going to be easy to tell Paul about this when I saw him. Jimmy had been like a grandpa to him.

  I went back to my room and slept for about four hours. Sabelia was sleeping and I didn’t bother her. She was fond of Jimmy, too, but her roots with him didn’t run as deep as mine.

  Around seven a.m. I went back over there.

  Things were getting worse.

  The nurse said it wouldn’t be too much longer. He carried a 9mm sidearm and I knew exactly what he was planning on doing with it. I think if it wasn’t for Pratt, they would have just marched Jimmy outside and put a bullet in his head. The fact that they were allowing any of this was simply out of respect for us.

  Jimmy thrashed from time to time, chattering his teeth and smacking his lips very loudly. Sweat poured from him in rivers as his fever spiked. Now and again, his eyes would open and they would roll back into his head as he strained at the binds that held him.

  I knew in the next few hours the real ugly stuff was going to start and the idea of it broke my heart. Hell, it broke everything inside me.

  After I’d been there about an hour, his eyes opened again. They were bleary, but they looked over at me and he managed a lopsided smile that was about as close to a grimace of pain as you can imagine.

  “Hell, you doing here, Steve?” he asked in a scratchy voice.

  “Just visiting. They got me and Sabelia bunked in across the hall.”

  He coughed and gritted his teeth. “You got that…that pretty long-legged woman over there and you’re nursemaiding an old duffer? You get the hell out of here…I’ll manage…”

  But, of course, he wasn’t going to manage and we both knew it. I think he did want me out of there, though. I don’t think he wanted me to see him this way, to witness his suffering and degradation. He wanted very badly for me to remember who he was and not what he was becoming.

  “What is this place, Steve?”

  I told him the best I could.

  “You…and Sabelia be careful. I got a bad feeling. A real bad feeling.”

  “We will.”

  He coughed a few more times. “When…when I was in ‘Nam, I had a Viet girlfriend. She was a wash girl. She’d come around…” his voice trailed off, his eyes closing, then they snapped back open. “…she’d come around the base and wash clothes for us. Pretty, petite thing. We hooked up and I spent every
minute I could with her. Her skin was like Sabelia’s, her hair real dark.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Jimmy laughed, then coughed. Pinkish sputum ran down his chin. “She was…she was VC, Steve. All those washer girls were VC. She just disappeared one day. I heard she got executed…who knows. Stories over there, crazy stories…guess I’ll…guess I’ll take ‘em down into the deep with me…”

  “C’mon, Jimmy,” I said, wiping tears from my face. “You can beat this. You’ll get better.”

  He smiled at me again, but didn’t bother commenting on the absurdity of what I had just said. “Laying here…thinking stuff, lots of stuff.”

  “What sort of stuff?”

  His breathing was very fast and it seemed to take great strength on his part to get it back under control. His teeth chattered and more of that pink drool ran from his mouth. “Remembering things. Lots of things. When I was kid…back before the war, me and my old man…we’d go up to Morgan Lake. Rent a cabin every summer, spend a week fishing for bass and pickerel. Those nights by the fire…stars out…more than you’d ever see in Yonkers…pan-frying fish and listening to the old man’s stories about being a teenager in the depression. Ha…funny shit, chasing ice wagons and stealing potatoes, the CCC camps. He had some wild yarns.”

  “Those must have been some times for you and your dad,” I said.

  “Sure. Good to go to sleep remembering…remembering how good things were when you were a kid. The sky was the limit then.” He broke into a coughing fit, his entire body trembling. “You tell Skip…you tell him I died fighting, Steve. I don’t…I don’t want him to know I died in the straw like this. I want him to think good of me.”

  “Skip” was the name he always called Paul. I never knew why and at that moment I knew I never, ever would.

  “Steve…I need to turn over…loosen these straps…I won’t try nothing.”

  I did, helping him roll over onto his side. Then I tightened them again. I knew the nurse was outside the door and he was watching us through the observation port.

  Jimmy’s breathing got a little easier. “That’s better…getting the bedsores, I swear.” He made a hoarse chuckling sound. “Remember how Skip…how he’d get a real kick out of those foot long hot dogs I’d get at the deli…sure, we’d grill ‘em up in the backyard, me and you and Ricki…oh dear sweet old Ricki…and the boy. A cold beer, a hot dog, Yankees on the radio, crickets chirping, and stars out above…those were times I felt good about the world and I think…I think it felt good about me, too…”

  “Jimmy,” I said. “Do you need anything? A drink of water or something?”

  “No, I’d just throw it up anyway. What I need you to do is listen real good, real good. See, now I ain’t looking into your eyes and you ain’t looking into mine and it’ll be easier…what you have to do. Real easy. I’ll just yarn on and you can put me to sleep so nothing gets worse…okay, Steve?”

  I knew what he was asking. I knew what he wanted and if I was a real friend, if I really loved him, then there was no way I could refuse. No way in hell I could let him become one of those things. It would have been an insult to our friendship and all that it stood for. But the idea was almost more than I could take.

  “Anytime, Steve, anytime,” he said. “You’re like a son to me and I wouldn’t ask it of you if I didn’t love you so much.”

  I motioned the nurse in and asked him for his sidearm. He hesitated, then he seemed to understand. He gave it to me. It felt cold and deadly in my hand. I could barely hold it still because I shook so much. It felt like everything inside me was draining out. Tears ran down my face and I had to clench my teeth to keep from crying out.

  Jimmy shuddered and made a strange barking sound. “Hurry…Steve…hurry…I can…I can feel things happening…please…”

  I walked over to the bed and my feet felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each. I pressed the muzzle of the gun up to the back of Jimmy’s head. My entire body was shaking now, my breath coming very fast, rushing in and out of my clenched teeth as sobs broke loose in my throat.

  “…you were off to war and I said to Skip, I said, Skip let’s go do us some camping and we’ll catch our fill up to Morgan like me and my old man did,” Jimmy said, his voice scraping like a knife, old and dry and wheezing. “So up we goes, me and Ricki and little Skip, pitching our tent and what a weekend that was. All the time…we…we thought about you, Steve. Sure…sure we did. It was just like it was with my old man…the sun was warm and the water was blue and flat, frogs hopping and fish jumping and Pauly’s eyes were bright and the air, the air smelled so fresh and sweet and, dear God, if I could just go back there…just for a minute…just for…”

  I pulled the trigger.

  Then I stumbled away from what I had done, half out of my mind, seeing that lake and Paul there and Ricki so pretty in the sunlight and Jimmy, good old Jimmy on the grassy shore smiling at me and waving goodbye.

  GIMME SHELTER

  I wasn’t much good for anything after that.

  When I got back to my room, Sabelia was awake. She had heard the gunshot, of course, and she saw the wreck I was. I sat down by her and all I could say is, “He’s gone now. He won’t be coming back.”

  We laid there together for an hour or so and she soothed me as best as she could, but there was no peace and there was no comfort. I was bleeding inside and I knew I always would be. Days would pass and the memory would dim, put parts of it would always be crystal clear and the pain would always be real and cutting.

  I did what I had to do and I did what Jimmy wanted me to do, but that made me feel no better. I had just killed a man I loved and respected more than anyone else. And if it makes any sense, I did it out of love and for no other reason.

  NICKEL TOUR

  The next morning, Pratt came and got us, telling us we were all done with our period of isolation and we could re-join the real world. He muttered a few condolences about Jimmy and told me that his remains had been cremated. He went through it all quickly as if it made him uncomfortable and I’m sure that it did. He moved us to a different room that was much smaller, but at least we got to stay together.

  “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like,” he said. “You’re welcome. I imagine you’re not leaving the area until you find your friends.”

  “No,” I told him. “We have to know one way or another.”

  So he gave us the tour which didn’t take too long. There were two underground levels to the bunker. Most of it had been laboratory space but had been converted into sleeping quarters and the like. We visited the supply rooms and armory, dining hall and kitchen, walked down a lot of long grim concrete corridors. We met people and they smiled at us and chatted informally, but none of them really had anything interesting to say. Pretty much, Hi, how you doing? Glad you’re with us. It’s bad out there but we’re getting by in here. Nothing much more than that. If they had anything more to say, they weren’t saying it. But, then again, we were strangers and with the way things were you didn’t automatically trust people until they had proven themselves.

  I understood that.

  I practiced it.

  You had to.

  It probably didn’t help that Pratt was with us. If he was the commander of the bunker, the man in charge, then they weren’t about to speak their mind. I wouldn’t have either, I guess. For the most part, the people there were as gray as the walls that hemmed them in. Theirs was a sunless, subterranean existence. Living like moles, I knew, was not conducive to the human mind or the human spirit. Under such conditions, people tended to lose their focus and to degrade morally and ethically. Sooner or later, they just didn’t give a shit. It was the sort of psychology you found in any situation where people were confined. And these people, I thought, seemed lackluster and disinterested in general. They were on the edge.

  Later, we sat in the dining hall which was gray and utilitarian, tables lined up in rows, bored-looking people sipping soup and barely talking. Ther
e was not a spot of color on the walls, not so much as a cheap print or still life. Nothing. I wasn’t much into interior decorating, but even I with my purely male lack of style and ambience could have improved on the place. The people were equally as colorless. As I spooned some soup into my mouth—chicken noodle—I kept looking around as Pratt blathered on about this and that. The dining hall reminded me less of a school cafeteria and more of a mess hall in a prison movie.

  “I haven’t seen any children,” Sabelia said.

  “There aren’t any right now,” Pratt explained. “In general, they’ve been real susceptible to Necrophage. We’ve lost quite a few.” He lowered his voice. “Some of the parents are still here so you need to watch what you say.”

  After lunch which, I have to say, wasn’t much even by post-apocalyptic standards, Pratt took us upstairs. The top or cap of the bunker was built right into a hillside with firing ports to all four sides. The men up there were armed with M107 .50-caliber sniper rifles. Outside the firing ports, I could see they had a clear killing field of about a hundred yards in all directions. At the outer perimeter there were a series of concrete berms and crash barriers, as well as row upon row of razorwire emplacements. Trying to attack the bunker would have been suicide.

  “Even if they make it through the wire, the inner perimeter is mined,” a guy named Jeggs told me. “And I guarantee if they get through that, they won’t get through us.”

  “Which brings up an important matter,” Pratt said. “The reason why both of you will need to stay with us a bit longer.”