End Days Super Boxset (110 page)

“There you go,” Douglas said. He released the cuff from the railing and Veronica was free. As she moved her arm away, the cuffs dangled, still connected to her wrist.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No problem,” Douglas said, standing over her bed indecisively.

“Have a seat,” Veronica said. She glanced at his pistol, then looked away.

Douglas hesitated and stammered but slowly took a seat on the bed next to her. The mattress sank as he sat down.

“So what did you want to talk about?” Veronica asked.

“Oh, you know. Maybe just get to know you some. Where are you from? What did you do before all of this shit went down?”

“I’m originally from Colorado, but I moved to Carson City about two years ago where I work at a bookstore. I love to read. It’s just my thing.”

“Me too!” Douglas said. “What’s your favorite book?”

“I don’t know,” Veronica said, pausing. She laughed. “What about you?”

“I like Science Fiction. Maybe
Dune
?”

“Me, too. I love
Dune
.” His face brightened as she continued. “And what are you doing here? You’re not one of Hodder’s men, are you?”

Douglas paused, looking upward. “Yes and no. I mean, I wasn’t originally, but I volunteered for prison duty.”

“What did you do before this?”

Douglas laughed nervously. “I worked for a correctional facility in Reno.”

“Really? Well, that makes sense. Might as well keep doing what you know.”

“Yeah, I had just got the job a few weeks before the outbreak.” Douglas looked down as his voice took a more solemn tone. “Things got really bad there. It was terrible. Ebola spread throughout the prison…there was…just nothing anyone could do about it.”

Veronica sucked up her pride and placed her hand on his shoulder, startling him. He looked over to her with surprise. The light from above reflected onto the thick lenses of his glasses. He was slouched over like some big child, and she felt the time might be ripe to try to appeal to his better nature.

“Listen, Douglas. What they’re doing here, it’s not right. You seem like a good person. You need to help me get out of here.” She tried to read his expression. “I was kidnapped and taken here, beaten, and locked up. My friend came to get me, and they got to him as well.” Veronica moved closer to him on the bed. “Our so-called
trial
is scheduled for tomorrow. I think they plan to kill us. Please, you have to help me.”

Douglas’s eyes dropped, and then he stared forward with a large sigh. Veronica quietly waited, hardly breathing.

“Douglas? Please listen.”

His backhand flew across her face before she could even finish her sentence. After a loud, startling pop, she fell back onto her bed in shock. Douglas rose from the bed and stood up over her as she buried her face into the mattress, trying to crawl away from him on her knees.

“You must think I’m pretty stupid, huh? Like I’m just some Joe you can toy with? You bitches are all the same. Flash us a little smile and try to get what you want. Well, I’m in control now, and the games are over.”

She lifted her head. Her eyes watered and her face stung with pain. “They’re going to kill me! Do you even care? What the hell is wrong with you?”

Douglas took a step forward and then fell onto the back of Veronica’s thighs as she squirmed underneath him. He leaned forward and placed his hands on the back of both her arms, pinning her down. Her face dug into the mattress as she screamed. Douglas ignored her muffled pleas for help, unfastened his pistol belt, and tossed it to the side of the bed.

“All I care about is that you’ve been cleared for Ebola. Now we’re going to have some fun.”

With his heavy weight crushing her, Douglas struggled to pull off Veronica’s jumpsuit. He was anxious and consumed with lust. Her head shot up and she screamed, “Wait! You’re doing it all wrong!”

“What?” he asked, pausing.

She could barely breathe, her face was turning red, but she continued. “Get off of me and let me take this thing off. Would you at least do that?”

Douglas stopped and seemed to consider it. He nodded and slowly pushed himself off of her. “Don’t try any funny business.” He grabbed the pistol belt on the bed and stood up as Veronica turned over.

“Let me catch my breath,” she said. The sumptuous shape of her breasts underneath her jumpsuit, combined with her exposed cleavage, excited him even further. As she pulled down her jumpsuit, Douglas could see that she wasn’t wearing a bra. He dropped the pistol belt to the ground and then began to unfasten his pants.

“Look into my eyes,” she said, pulling her jumpsuit down, exposing her breasts. Douglas couldn’t take his eyes away from her. It was just the moment she was looking for. Once his pants dropped to his ankles, Veronica fell back against the bed, drew her leg back, and flung it forward full-force, delivering a hard kick directly into his crotch.

The thrust sent him stumbling backward shouting with pain. He tripped over his pants and hit the tile floor on his back. In haste, Veronica jumped to the ground and pulled his 9mm pistol from its holster. Douglas struggled like a turtle on its back, holding his throbbing crotch with one hand while trying to pull up his pants with the other. Despite the immense pain running from his groin to his stomach and then spreading all over, he remembered his gun.

The moment he sat up, however, Veronica was already there. She pushed a pillow against his face, held the pistol against the pillow, and pulled the trigger. The back of his head exploded like a watermelon and his brains dumped onto the white-tiled floor. His body flew to the ground in an instant. The ordeal was over in no time.

Veronica gripped the pistol tightly while the handcuffs dangled from her wrist. As much as she had tried to muffle the sound of the blast, her ears still rang in pain. She shifted her aim directly at the entrance door, fully expecting others to rush in. She waited and waited, but nothing happened.

Without wasting another moment, she crawled over to Douglas’s corpse and yanked the key ring off his trousers. She jumped up from her knees, zipped her jumpsuit up, and ran to the door, clutching the pistol in one hand and the key ring in the other.

She pressed her ear against the door and couldn’t hear anything. The room was silent, and the body of a dead man was sprawled in the middle of the floor. Blood was everywhere. There was no turning back now. She ejected the magazine and examined how many rounds she had. The tiny hole on the side of the magazine indicated six rounds left. She thought of Greg and how he had shown her how to do that.

She pushed the magazine back in and chambered a round with one pull of the slide lock. She was ready. After another quiet prayer, she slowly turned the door handle and pushed it open a crack. It seemed as though no one was coming down the hall in either direction. She knew the minute she stepped out of the cell, she’d be a target. The bright hallway before her was equally long in both directions. There were no windows of any kind in sight, only doors—just like hers —and all closed. She had a strong feeling that Greg was in one of the cells but had no way of knowing which one. She’d have to try them all—roughly ten rooms on each side.

Once outside, she closed the door, hoping to never have to look at those walls again. She walked to the next room over, and as she held up the key ring, the sound of footsteps came down the stairs at the end of the hallway to the left side of her. Silhouettes formed in the glass panes as the figures neared. She turned around the other way and ran to the other side of the hall, right through the door and into a darkened stairwell.

After shutting the door, she leaned against it and listened. The footsteps continued toward her. She heard voices—the sound of two men talking, and they were getting closer. Veronica had no choice but to run down the winding stairs into what felt like a dank cellar. She stopped at another, dimly lit and smaller hall with one room on each side. She had to choose.

From atop the stairs, she could hear the door into the stairwell open. The two men began walking down. There wasn’t much time to act. Her eyes darted between both doors, trying to make a decision. She hurried left and pushed the door open. It was unlocked. She shut the door lightly and looked around the room for a place to hide. Instead, what she saw horrified her.

The room looked like some kind of lab. There were lights everywhere, hanging over black countertops sitting in rows like some high school chemistry class. There were microscopes, freezers, test tubes, scales, and medical tools lying about—sharp tools: surgical saws, scalpels, and small, circular electronic cutters. A stereo in the back was playing light rock music. Aside from the medical equipment, everywhere she looked there were corpses.

The room was filled with wheeled gurneys—some openly displaying bodies, and some with bodies zipped in black body bags. It could have been a coroner’s lab, but nothing about the mutilated bodies conveyed the idea that these were conventional autopsies. It was quite the opposite. Veronica covered her mouth in shock and gagged as a sickness clutched her stomach.

Two torsos—a man and a woman—lay on the table in front of her, covered up to the neck with a small blue sheet. On the next counter over, the severed head of a man sat in a petri tub with wires coming out of his head connected to electric modules. At the end of each wire were long needles that had been inserted through his skull into his brain.

The skin of another body had been completely peeled away, leaving only the red muscle. The more Veronica looked around, the more terrified she felt. She couldn’t take another minute in the room and turned to go. Just as she was about to run as fast as she could from that horrific place, she heard footsteps outside, heading right for the very room she was in.

She looked at the grotesque displays surrounding her and desperately searched for somewhere to hide. There was a bolt on the door from the inside and she quickly locked it. The handle on the door jiggled, and she ran to the far right corner of the room, past the countertops and to a large filing cabinet. She squeezed into a space between the wall and cabinet and waited.

The door unlocked and swung open. She peered out from the side of the cabinet and could see two men enter, both dressed in white medical gowns, like doctors. They walked into the room, holding small brown paper bags and chatting up a storm. Veronica hadn’t seen the men before; they looked different from most people at the base. But there was a reason their faces were new to her.

Dr. Kagan and Dr. Costa, former CDC representatives, had primarily lived underground since the beginning of the mutiny, with free rein to conduct their experiments. They had promised Bill Hodder and his men that they could discover a cure for Ebola, or at least a breakthrough treatment; so confident were they in their abilities.

However, time had passed and their research had shifted to other, more unconventional experiments that had nothing to do with Ebola whatsoever. Soon their surgeries and autopsies didn’t seem to have much scientific merit, but nonetheless, Hodder frequently sent them fresh test subjects, some alive and some dead. There was no doubt that the time spent underground had had an unexpected effect.

“Did you lock the door?” asked the skinny balding man, whose name was Dr. Kagan. His counterpart, Dr. Costa, the heavier man with a ponytail, shook his head.

“No, I didn’t, did you?”

“Well, someone did.”

“How many times have you locked yourself out of this room?” Costa said. He held up three fingers. “Three fingers. Count ‘em.”

The men set their paper bags on the only clean table in the room, well away from their “experiments.” Arms, legs, and ligaments were lined up in clear bags at the last long counter directly in front of Veronica. She couldn’t believe her eyes as she watched the two men empty the contents of their brown sacks onto the table. She saw a sandwich and a pack of crackers fall out of each bag. The doctors then unwrapped their sandwiches and dug in.

“You know, if we don’t start showing Hodder some results, we’re going to lose certain privileges," Dr. Kagan said, talking with his mouth full.

“What privileges are those, exactly?” Dr. Costa said. “You call this job a
privilege
?”

“These turkey sandwiches, for starters,” Kagan answered. “They don’t grow on trees.”

“Well, if I gotta slice up one more perfectly fine-looking cadaver for signs of Ebola, I’m gonna scream.”

“Patience, my friend, we’re on the cusp of a medical breakthrough. I can feel it,” Kagan said.

Suddenly, a voice called out to them from the shadows. “The only thing you’re going to feel is a bullet through your head.”

The two doctors dropped their sandwiches and looked over to the side where Veronica stood, aiming a pistol at them. Dr. Kagan was first to put his arms in the air. Costa soon followed.

“What do you want?” Kagan asked.

Without further hesitation, Veronica pulled the trigger and shot him in the head. The bullet burst through his skull and his body collapsed against the table and onto the floor. Costa jumped back and began choking on the food that was still in his mouth. He struggled to breathe, chew, and swallow at the same time. Losing air, he hacked until the chunk of moist warm bread and turkey flew from his mouth.