Plagued: The Rock Island Zombie Counteractant Experiment (Plagued States of America) (8 page)

Seventeen

Mason felt the jaw slacken against his arm. His weight sank over the zombie as it went completely limp beneath him. Its arm thumped onto the pallet. When the pistol went off, blood burst out the back of the biter’s head like a water balloon hitting the ground. Small bits of brain and skin and bone lay randomly scattered around the exit wound. Its remaining eye slowly lost its fierceness as the eyelid sagged with the rest of its body.

“What the fuck?” Chavez shouted from the cell door. “What the fuck happened? Are you all right, man?”

Mason turned his shoulder to pry his arm free of the teeth.
He pushed the jaw open wider to slip his skin out of the dead biter’s top teeth. Pain erupted again like a red hot coal being pushed through his skin. He let out another cry of pain as blood oozed out of the wound and into the biter’s open mouth.

“Holy shit
,” Chavez said as he knelt down next to Mason. “Hold on, man, I’ll call for help.” In a second Chavez was gone.

Mason slid the rest of his wounded arm out of the biter’s mouth and rolled onto his back, dropping his pistol onto his chest. He put a hand over the wound and felt the sting of it over the slick heat. He felt light headed, not from the wound so much as the adrenaline and the sudden realization that he was a dead man.

No wonder Matty pulled the trigger.

He picked up the pistol off his chest and sat up. He looked at the biter sprawled out on the pallet beside hi
m and aimed the pistol at its head again.
Blam!

The biter’s head knocked sideways as another bullet ripped through it.

Mason fell backwards over the dead biter, leaning his head on the biter’s chest.
Keep your head elevated to prevent going into shock
, he told himself. He brought his knees up and used one to take aim on the other biter in the cell.
Blam! Blam!
Two rounds struck the back of its head, splattering blood and gore onto the wall and out onto the floor in front of the cell. The biter sagged in its restraints, but didn’t fall. Mason wanted to kill more of them. He aimed at one of the contained biters across the cell block. It leaned against its bars, arms reaching desperately toward the bloody dead. It could smell the fresh kill, but its wild eyes were empty of understanding. It hungered. Mason hungered too, for revenge.

He dropped the
pistol onto his stomach. He was already one of them. The anguishing thought hovered over him, pressing on his chest. He struggled to breathe, to control his anger. The pain in his arm reminded him where he was. He put his hand over the wound to staunch the blood loss.

Chavez ran into view, sliding to a halt in front of the open door, staring wide-eyed at the two dead biters and Mason.

“Someone’s on the way,” Chavez said. “I called for medevac.”

“Inhibitors,” Mason groaned. The pain on his arm was still like fire
, pulsing with each beat of his heart.

“They’ll bring them,” Chavez said.

“Get the first aid kit. I need a compress and bandages.”

“On it,” Chavez said and started to leave. He stopped suddenly and came into the cell to
kneel beside Mason. “Look, I’m—” He shook his head. “I can’t let you keep this,” he said, taking Mason’s pistol. Mason reached toward Chavez, but he was already standing and stepping back. “I’m sorry, man.”

Mason didn’t have the strength left in him to fight Chavez over it, nor did he think it mattered.
Matty had killed himself thinking there was no way out. Mason had other ideas. They cured Mike. Maybe if they got to him fast enough they could cure him before he turned.

Chavez was quick in coming back
, kneeling beside Mason with the first aid kit. Mason took three compresses and held them over the wound. The sting was worse than any wound he had ever sustained before, although this was probably the worst trauma he had ever had, too. Chavez rolled a bandage around his arm as tight as he could. Mason sucked in a hiss of pain, but Chavez didn’t stop.

The buzzing of the door and the redoubling of the moaning all around them announced someone had arrived.
Chavez hastily taped the bandage.

“Hang on,” Chavez said and went to the cell door. He stopped and held out a hand to wave
as he looked down the cell block. “Are you
alone
?” Chavez yelled in anger.

“I’m on patrol,” another voice called back
defensively. “I was on sub-floor two when I got the call.”

“Where’s
the medic?”

“It’s fucking two in the morning,” the voice replied irritably. The voice had a body that came into view of the cell
, a soldier wearing black body armor. He looked in at Mason and assessed the dead biters. “Holy fucking shit,” the soldier said. “What the hell happened?”

“We need the
lab medic on duty,” Chavez said.

“It’s two in the morning.
Ain’t nobody
in
the lab!”

“There’s always someone in the lab. Go down there and get them!”

“I don’t have access,” the soldier complained.

“
I’ll go. You stay here with him. Don’t let him have a gun.”

“Did he do this?” the soldier asked Chavez. “Did you do all this shit?” he asked Mason, pointing between the t
wo biters. Mason nodded wearily. “Yeah, your gun privileges need to be revoked, man.”

“Cut the
shit, Johnson. He’s been bit,” Chavez growled, which sobered the soldier and made him step back from the cell bars. Chavez looked in on Mason. “I’ll be right back. They’re just downstairs.”

Mason nodded, but didn’t think anyone was down there. Why would they be? It was two in the morning, just like Johnson said. Chavez ran off anyway and Mason listened as the door hissed and clacked and the moaning all around them rose in volume again.

Johnson didn’t say anything once they were alone. He stood outside the cell, worriedly looking in at Mason from time to time, looking both ways up and down the cell block nervously the rest of the time. Now that Mason had a tight bandage over the wound, the fiery sting gave way to dull throbbing that pushed small needles of pain up and down his arm with each pulse of his heart. Mason imagined small shards of glass being forced through his veins. That would have been tolerable except that the fire of it left him numb where it had already torn through. He couldn’t feel part of his arm anymore and that concerned him.

Mason didn’t like waiting. It was the military way, but in the line of fire or when a man was down, soldiers always took action. It was part of their training. Mason sat up abruptly. His heart rate was normal
. He had avoided going into shock. His blood loss was controlled. He should have gone with Chavez.

“Hey, man,” Johnson said, holding a hand up. “You should just chill out.”

Mason moved his hurt arm with his other hand, lifting it gingerly to get it out of the way so he could stand up. The moment it moved, though, the pain flared up again. He sucked in his breath through clenched teeth, closing his eyes to wait out the pain. His heart pounded harder and it felt as though he could hear each beat. He dug the foam plugs out of his ears and threw them to the ground, hoping the moaning around him would help drown out the sound. Hearing his own heart like that made him think he was too close to death.

Mason tried to stand. Blood rushed to his head and it felt as though he were on a ship tipped sideways. He kept thinking to correct himself by leaning, but each time he did it seemed the boat switched angles and he had to correct himself again.

“You’re looking really pale, man,” Johnson told him from outside the cell. “Just sit back down before you fall down, OK?”

Mason started to agree with Johnson when he saw black spots fill
ing the ring of his vision. He fell back to a sitting position and tried to control the blackness. It wasn’t shock. He knew that much. This meant he was about to faint. He took deep breaths to counter the effects, ignoring the pain clawing its way down his forearm toward his hand.

Why was it in his forearm, he wondered, looking down at his arm. His vision was hazed over with blackness, leaving only the center of his vision unaffected, and even that seemed to
have trouble focusing. He watched his hand clench against the pain. He could feel his fingers and wrist moving, but not his elbow.

The stairwell door clacked and hissed again
, and Mason was relieved by the rising volume of moans in the cell block. Chavez and a woman wearing a white lab coat arrived and both stopped at the entrance to the cell. The woman was a thin redhead in her forties with deep worry lines, and he hoped they were her normal appearance.

“We’ve got to get him downstairs,” she said.

“Come on, Jones,” Chavez said, moving into the cell. “I’ll help you.”

“No, I can’t,” Mason replied, shaking his head. He was still seeing black spots dot his vision at the edges. “I’ll faint. I tried standing.”

“You’re way too big for me to carry you,” Chavez admitted.

“Blankets,” Mason said
, feeling breathless from his controlled breathing. “Noose poles. Stretcher.”

“Good idea,” Chavez said with a smile. “Johnson, get two of those nooses off the cart!”

“Doc,” Mason said. She gingerly stepped over a pool of blood left by the biter’s head wounds and knelt down beside him. “Doc, my arm is going numb.”

“Do you feel that?” she asked.

He nodded.

She began walking her fingers up his arm. “Tell me when you stop feeling it.”

“There,” Mason said.

She stopped and made a quick slicing motion across his arm, scratching his skin with her nails, enough to make a welt. Mason didn’t feel it, but instinctively pulled his arm away. The pain of doing so shot through him and he groaned in agony. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“I thought you said you couldn’t feel anything,” she told him.

“I didn’t.”

“Did you feel me cut you?”

“No!”

“Good. We’ll use that mark to see how fast the pathogen is neutralizing your nervous system.”

“One field stretcher,” Chavez said proudly as he came into the cell with Johnson behind him. “Let’s get you downstairs.”

Eigh
teen

Mason held his arm tight against his chest
as they carried him into the lab. They passed through a large steel door and into a hallway with plate glass on both sides. To the left were offices overlooking the hall. To the right was the laboratory.

The doctor swiped her card and the door to the lab opened. She held it to let Johnson and Chavez carry Mason through.

“I ain’t never seen this place, and I don’t never want to again,” Johnson was saying as they lugged Mason through.

The lab
was an enormous open room with two surgical tables. Rolling medical equipment was scattered throughout. A countertop with cabinets above and below ran the length of the far wall. A row of eight cells took up the wall nearest the door. Mason glanced at them as they carried him to the center of the room.

“Put him down here,” the doctor said.
“Get him off the blanket. I need to make a call.” The doctor went to the far wall and picked up a telephone to punch in an extension. They eased Mason onto the surgical bed.

“Come on, Jones, turn a little,” Chavez said. Mason was hardly paying attention to him.
The cells weren’t empty. Every other cell had an occupant, four in all. Two were strapped to beds with ventilators and other devices keeping them sedated and alive. A bearded man and a woman occupied the other two cells. The man paced back and forth in his cell like a caged lion, his eyes glaring at Mason and the others. The woman, on the other hand, sat on the bed in the back of her cell with arms wrapped around her legs, a blanket over her shoulders. The light in the laboratory was bright enough to reflect off their eyes, and in both of them he saw the milky haze he had become accustomed to seeing in all zombies.

A half-breed.

Both Hank and Matty used that word to describe the woman that came back from Midamerica. Mason wondered if this was that woman, but if so, who was the bearded one? Another half-breed, for sure. Maybe they experimented on them here. Maybe they made them. Or maybe that was what he’d become.

Mason tried to sit up.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Chavez said, putting an arm on Mason to keep him down. “Doc!”

The doctor turned with the phone at her ear.
“I’ll call you right back,” she said and hung up. She hurried to the table and stepped in front of Mason, who was now sitting up with Chavez holding his good arm to keep him from falling.

“Jones, I need you to listen to me,” the doctor said. “We’re going to administer the curative, but it has to be dosed against the level of toxicity in your blood.
”

“
Them?” Mason asked, pointing at the cells. He could hardly think of how to form a sentence or say what he was feeling. Crippling pain gripped his hand, and now he felt the sensation of fire in his shoulder. He squeezed his pained hand, trying to smash away the ache.

“They’re
special
test subjects,” she said. “We use them to incubate the cure.”

Mason looked at her.

“Now lay down on your side so I can work on that arm.”

Mason reluctantly slid back onto the table with Chavez’s help.
They helped him on his side, lifting a padded plate so he could lean against it as she could work on his hurt arm. The doctor instructed Chavez to put restraints across him and around his wounded arm to keep him from moving. They restrained his other arm and legs as well.

“Just so you’re aware, Lieutenant, I’m going to clean and dress your wound as best I can. We’re not going to give you anything for the pain or put you out. We need you lucid when we administer the curative, but I don’t want that arm getting banged around or hurt any worse than it already is. The only
good side effect of being bitten by an infected subject is that your pain receptors in the area are all dulled to the point you won’t feel a thing.

“I’m also going to put this weird looking helmet on your head and this bite guard in your mouth. The bite guard has holes so you can breathe through it even with your teeth gnashed, so just bite down on it and keep it like that. I know
it all sounds strange, but you’ll thank me for it later.”

She slid the helmet over his head and clicked the chin strap on, then held out the bite guard.

“Open up,” she said and placed the guard over his upper teeth. He bit down on it and sighed. “Let me get a tray setup,” the doctor said and went toward the long counter, opening drawers and cupboards to collect things.

“Hang in there. Don’t worry,
” Chavez told Mason to assuage his fears.

Mason wondered if his
concern was that obvious in his eyes.

“The cure works. I’ve seen it before.”

Chavez patted him on the shoulder, but Mason hardly felt it.
Seen it before?
How did Chavez know something like that when no one else did, and how had he seen it before if he hadn’t been down here with someone who needed it? Suddenly, Mason didn’t trust Chavez
or
this doctor. He tugged at his restraints, but they were solid. He was trapped.

And that wasn’t even the worst of it. The pain he felt in his sh
oulder was climbing up his neck, causing his hands and feet to tremble. His arms and legs came next, involuntary spasms jolting him against the restraints.

“Hey, doc,” Chavez called. “He’s hitting stage one!”

“Already?” she asked, looking his way.

Mason’s convulsions hit harder suddenly
, and although he could hear Chavez and the doctor arguing, he couldn’t make out what they were saying. The light intensified, washing out everything, leaving behind what seemed like the inside of a cloud, obscuring sound and sight and everything else. He felt cold, as though he was naked and outdoors in the winter. His skin burned from the chill.

T
he world around him grew foreign, absent of time and substance in his fog of consciousness. The here and now faded to memories swimming near and far, some ringing him in a wide arc, hinting at their existence, but not coming close enough to be recognized, while others rushed him in a frenzy. Memories with bites, razor sharp teeth like ravenous sharks, savagely striking and pulling away, each coming from different angles and without warning. He started to recall Christmas when he was eight, the year his father bought him his first pistol—no, that was his fourteenth Christmas, when he was having sex with his girlfriend before leaving for Egypt, and the fight on the tennis courts with that bully Tim Hadowick in fourth grade. By the time he realized none of them were the same memory, he couldn’t remember what the first had been at all. He just remembered Tim Hadowick standing over him and laughing, calling him a pussy, and him wondering what that word even meant.

He hated grade school. Clumsy, uncoordinated, un-liked, and poor. He hated his father for putting him through hell, moving them from city to city, never settling down. Construction. Mason hated construction,
but didn’t know why. He was just certain he hated it, and it had something to do with his father, the son of a bitch.

And then there were the eyes. They watched him through the fog of his thoughts, waiting for their moment to strike, and he feared them like no other. Whatever
memory they represented, he knew them to be the most painful he had ever endured, and yet they waited, lurking, watching him, and biding their time.

Mason took a deep breath
. His body shook violently, uncontrollably. He was screaming and he didn’t know why. The doctor stood next to Chavez, both several feet back, both staring at him with grave concern. Behind them the two half-breeds watched as well, the woman from beneath her blanket, which she now wore tightly over her head, her hands cupped over her ears. The male glared with unabashed interest as he held the bars with both hands, his head pressed between.

“Fuck me,”
Johnson said from where he stood against the glass near the door. “Can I go? This is freaking me the fuck out.”

“Yeah, get going,” Chavez said. Johnson didn’t hesitate. He
swiped his badge, fumbled for the door handle, pulled it open, and rushed to get through and into the hall. He may as well have been running, and Mason wished he could be with him, free of this place. What other tortures did they have in mind for him?

“Lieutenant, are you a
ll right?” the doctor asked.

Mason nodded.

“Well, before you have another spell, I’m going to get that arm sewn up.”

She pushed a chair and a tray next to him and picked up a pair of scissors as she slid a mask over her mouth and nose. She was wearing protective goggles already. Mason watched her cut off the bandage on
his arm. He felt the tug of it when she pulled it away, but his arm was otherwise numb. It interested him a little to finally understand why the zombies had no fear of injury. Even though he watched her squirt water into the holes left by the bite, something that should have ignited unbridled pain, he felt nothing.

This was what it
meant to be a zombie.