Continuing from my last post a few days ago…
So, we’re not sure exactly who showed up, but we saw video of some SWAT looking guys breaking down our front door and trashing the place. I am pretty sure it was Interpol, but Tim thinks it was a US team, which would make no sense…they have no business in a small village in rural England. Either way, they didn’t find our hidden bunker entrance (thank you Tim) and left with nothing, other than maybe the satisfaction of fucking up someone’s house. Tim was smart enough to make his lab in the bunker so in the event of a raid, it would take a serious team of experts and a lot of time to find and break into the bunker entrance. He wanted his research protected after the bullshit that went down in that warehouse. Anyway, after that team left, we gave it an extra 24 hours, and then some, before going back out and checking our stuff. The only things in the main hut were clothes, food, and general supplies, all of which was still there, albeit strewn about the hut floor. We keep every bit of personal items in the bunker at all times, unless we are going out, which is extremely rare these days. The only time one or both of us goes out is if we need something big or unique and we don’t want to deal with special courier services. Those are more traceable than the standard food runners. Otherwise, we stay in, keep ourselves quarantined, and do our work. Nevertheless, it took us a few hours to clean up the mess those guys left for us. We made sure to do a full scan of every inch to make sure they didn’t place any surveillance equipment. We also searched around the outside area, going out pretty far. They either were waiting to come back at a later time, or they assumed we had left, being that there were no personal items in there.
Anyway, back to where I left off before being rudely interrupted…
Oh yeah, so we took the train out to this little rural village, which is on a flat plain, miles of open land visible. That sort of thing is good when you need to keep an eye out for governmental types. Tim’s Google Earth obsession payed off yet again. We got to the village with only our backpacks full of clothes, things which were sad and worn, but all we had after the years spent getting to that point. We walked into the center of the village, where there was a small outdoor park with benches, the area surrounded by small houses and old looking buildings. A few of the buildings were public places, like a tavern, a market, a coffee shop with outdoor seating area, and a café, also with outdoor seating. It was quiet, but there were people all around, all seemingly friendly, at least with each other. We put our packs down next to one of the benches in the park, and Tim sat as I walked over to the coffee shop to get us a couple drinks. The usual - a cappuccino for me, and a mocha latte with low fat soy milk for Time (pretentious bastard, I know). I got back to the bench and Tim was talking with who I assumed was a local man and woman. I sat down, handing Tim’s cup over, and introduced myself as Patrick (newly made up name, for obvious reasons), to which they introduced themselves as Jane and Garrett. Tim had already fed them a story about how we traveled from Canada, on an epic journey around the world, and we just needed a place to stay for a few nights, until we could figure out our next steps. It was a spontaneous, unplanned journey, see, and every place we went was pretty much on a whim, just places to chill that weren’t super touristy. Tim always was a great story teller.
After a few days with Jane and Garrett, who were very kind and gracious, feeding us and letting us sleep on the floor of their attic space, we found an old house, more of a hut, on the edge of town that was vacant. We talked to the village manager, who explained that the old man who owned the house died several months back, and there was no next of kin to contact about it. If we wanted it, we just had to pay a small tax fee to pay off what was owed to the village, and it was ours. It needed work, as the roof was leaking in a few areas, and the front door definitely needed a better lock. The windows were okay and the rooms were small, but would work fine for us. Tim knew the spot would be perfect for us, having already planned on building an underground bunker and needing a space that was more open. Being that the front of the house faced toward the open plain, it was perfect to keep watch for anyone suspicious. After we got the roof fixed and the front door properly secured, Tim started looking into private companies to hire for the bunker buildout. We had plenty of money, but the biggest challenge was that we needed to make sure whoever we hired was going to be discreet and would allow us to pay in cash to avoid transactional traces. It took some time to find the right mix of qualifications and discretion, but we found it and got started quickly afterward. It was a one-man company, but he hired out subcontractors, which worked in our favor. We could pay our guy in cash, and from there it didn’t matter how he paid or who he used. He never told us how, but he said he had ways of making the subs stay quiet. We didn’t ask, nor did we really want to know, as long as the job was getting done and nobody would talk.
It took a few months for the job to get done, and Tim was getting anxious and impatient. He knew it was only a matter of time before someone would find us, someone who we would need to hide from. Fortunately, during the whole debacle, nobody strange ever showed up, only the head contractor and his subs, who were always the same guys for the entire job. They dug, and dug, and then dug some more. We had the trailers bring the containers during the night to avoid being seen, and they were dropped in the ground the same night and covered by huge tarps. The next day, they had everything all welded up, sealed, ventilated, and then completed the passage into the hut. At that point, they covered it all up and sodded over, again, bringing the sod in over night. From there, they just had to finish the hidden door in the hut and secure everything. It was done. Well, the hard part was done. From there, we wired it all up ourselves, adding tiny hidden cameras all over inside and outside of the hut, wired to screens in the bunker. We had materials delivered and built Tim’s lab ourselves, mostly using portable plastic tables, and wire shelving units. It was starting to look like something decent. The entrance wasn’t huge, so we had to buy small furniture that could be brought down in pieces and assembled in the bunker. We had a couple recliners, a small TV just for entertainment purposes, and a smallish futon in case we had to sleep down there. Sure, we would have to sleep together, but it’s a small sacrifice to make when you’re basically international fugitives. By the time we were satisfied with everything, the bunker was actually a nicer space to hang out than the hut itself. We laughed about that one.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that we had been in that warehouse for a little over a year before the raid on Tim’s research. so to catch you up to where we were at when the bunker was completed, it had been five years to get into and out of Mexico, a year in Canada, then about a year and a half in the warehouse. So we’re about a year and a half behind today at this point. Damn. We’ve been in this hut for that long? Anyway…it took some time for Tim to arrange deliveries of all the chemicals and solutions he needed so he could start working on the antidote again. He did have to pretty much start from scratch, although he had his initial notes on the little drive, which did in fact still work. What we weren’t aware of is that “Robert” had dropped a tracking program onto the drive in a hidden partition that Tim didn’t notice until it was too late. So he knew where we were and it was only a matter of time before someone would show up to check on us. It wasn’t until after the first encounter that Tim got overly obsessed and finally found the hidden partition. A man knocked on the door, dressed in a courier outfit, so we masked up and opened the door. The man only had a small package in his hand and started asking all sorts of questions. That was when we knew something was up and Tim got extra goofy with checking things. We never opened that little package and eventually sent it with one of the food service carriers so it would be out of our possession. I was curious, but Tim was adamant that we not even consider opening it. No matter what it was, it wasn’t going to help us in any way.
So, any time we had an unexpected “delivery”, we would just go into the bunker and wait until they left, hoping that “Robert” would eventually think we cut bait and run. That’s when we really made sure to keep anything personal that would make it seem like we were home in the bunker. We eventually had a small refrigerator delivered and managed to squeeze it down the hatch into the bunker, and would keep all of our fresh food in there. The upstairs fridge only had old, expired food items, to make it appear we were gone for a while. We kept any newer clothing items in the bunker, leaving only worn down clothes upstairs. The only thing that could make it seem lived in is a clean kitchen with no dirty dishes, but that’s not a major giveaway. Tim was also really weird (but smart) about making sure our food and supply deliveries were on random schedules, never repeating a delivery time or day within a few month’s time. That way if someone was paying attention, they wouldn’t see any patterns and be able to hijack a known delivery. Smart. Smarter that I would be at that sort of thing, at least. Regardless, every four to five months, someone unknown would show up. We already knew everyone in the village by that point, and had a set group of runners for our own deliveries, so it was easy to spot the randoms. We even had our runners trained over time to not knock, but glance at the camera in the light fixture over the door, so that was another easy giveaway, if someone knocked rather than looking up at the camera. But we had enough security measures over time where we wouldn’t even need to wait for someone to knock. If there was any unscheduled movement within several hundred feet of our hut, we would know, and we would go right down to the bunker…if we weren’t already down there.
Maybe a year after the bunker was complete, Tim was well on his way to formulating the antidote. He was close to being back where he was at the warehouse, before the raid, but needed one more solution to complete it. It was a unique enough item that he wasn’t going to have a runner acquire it for him. He was going to source it himself. He had found a few places that could potentially have what he needed, although two of them were factories that bought in bulk and he would pretty much need to steal it. The third option was a lab that manufactured synthesized solutions, using methods I couldn’t begin to repeat, as I barely understood when Tim explained it. He wanted the true form, so stealing was the only good option. I would need to go with to help him, be the lookout or whatever. We spent a good couple weeks planning out the heist, although it was still in rural England, so it’s not like it was going to be some Breaking Bad level thing. We just needed to scope the place out, see what the schedules were for workers, for deliveries, and then plan the best time and method for taking the stuff. The only reason I was fully on board was that Tim did plan on leaving money with a note explaining how much was taken and that it was for good cause. I laughed, but he was serious. He only needed so much to make his samples, and if it worked, he would then work with someone to mass manufacture the antidote. When we finally did it, I was nervous as hell, sweating the entire time. There was nobody around, and getting a door open was nothing. There was no surveillance, but I was still nervous. It took minutes to find the solution and fill a large glass container, then we left the money and note, and ran. We never did hear anything about the break-in.
It was maybe two weeks later when we first started to hear about some weird events near that factory. We were unsure of what was going on, since we were only getting “local news” from our runners, but they were saying that people were starting to act strangely, starting with workers in that factory. Tim and I sat one night, pondering, questioning. We had worn masks and gloves, so there was no way we could have spread the virus…and then I remembered the sweat dripping from my forehead. Tim claimed there was no way, that it was purely an airborne virus, not spread through bodily fluids. I couldn’t argue that he was wrong, since that was true ever since we left home. But I did insist that he look at some sweat under the microscope and see if there was any way to detect the virus. He attempted to do that, but wasn’t able to see anything. He needed better equipment. That meant leaving the hut again. Instead, he contacted one of our runners and was able to arrange a special service to deliver what he needed, service that would be discreet and would send their credentials on the day of delivery to prove who they were. Tim signed an agreement with the service, setting a date and time for delivery. That ended up being the go-to from that point on, that way we wouldn’t have to leave unless there was some weird circumstance. The driver sent her credentials on the day of the delivery, and Tim was basically jumping up and down all day, excited for the new equipment. When the woman showed up, as instructed, she looked up above the door and waited. Tim went up alone, mask and gloves on, to greet the woman and collect the boxes. He brought it all down and started setting up. It was only minutes before he was running a new sweat sample through some machine that told him there was an unknown viral load. Suspicion confirmed.
With the knowledge that the virus could spread via bodily fluids, and then also through the air from there, we knew we were up against something much bigger that before. Time was of the essence. Having completed his antidote in the first form, Tim needed test subjects. At first, it was difficult, since we would have to go out ourselves and scout, find someone and follow them home. Then we would wait for them to “shut down” as they did, right on time at 7:00, and then we would tie them up and take them out to the car to bring back to the bunker. Easier said than done. The first one was a total blunder, being spotted during our scouting mission, and then waking a neighbor while trying to carry a heavy dead-weight body out to our car. Sure, it was night, but we hadn’t had the foresight to turn off the outside lights on this guy’s house. Lesson learned. Once we had the guy back at the bunker, getting him down the hatch proved difficult, since it was barely large enough to fit two grown male bodies down at the same time. We basically just had one of us at the bottom and the other slowly dropped the guy down the hatch. We nearly killed ourselves and the subject before getting him into the cube. Yep, we had built a nearly impenetrable plexiglass cube to keep the subject in during the trial. He was tied to a chair so he wouldn’t hurt himself, and locked in the cube, after being injected of course. That first trial…ugh…not good. The guy woke up, as if being shot with adrenaline, and then started violently trying to throw himself and the chair onto the ground. It was mere minutes before he had bashed his own head to a pulp on the steel floor. Whoops. adjust and try again. Needless to say, Tim was disappointed.
It was a few more trials before things started looking more positive. Tim had put too much of one chemical in, causing blah blah blah…things I didn’t really understand. He managed to get it at least to the point where it was when he injected himself and me. It was working in the trials. But then we started hearing things from the runners that were concerning, even more so than the original effects of the virus. Those who were affected were starting to attack other people, especially unaffected people. Before they were just acting strange, like they were robots, but now, this is different. We needed to capture one of these newly infected people and figure out what was going on. It was a task we weren’t properly prepared for. Tim nearly got bit on the arm while I was trying to tie up this woman’s hands behind her back. We also had to ward off a few other crazies before managing to lock ourselves in the back of the café, where the woman was going to town on innocent victims who were just there to eat some late night grub. We finally got her bound well enough and snuck out the back door, shoving her into the back seat, writhing and grunting at us. When we got her back, it was yet again another challenge just getting her out of the back seat of the little compact car without ending up becoming just like her. We finally got her to the hatch of the bunker and literally just dropped her down by her shoulders, landing on her feet and crumpling down to the steel floor in a pile of flesh and rope. Neither of us felt bad for her, she was barely even human at that point anyway. We stuffed her into the cube, chained her to the chair, which was bolted to the floor, and Tim drew a few vials of her blood before locking the cube up.
Watching that “woman” go from a monster, devoid of any sentience, to a pile of mush was disturbing, to put it lightly. It took a couple hours, the body thrashing about, testing the limits of the chains and the bolts holding the chair down, until eventually, skin starting melting off the body, followed by muscle, and then everything else just kind of quickly fell apart at the end. Tim was disappointed, to say the least. More like angry that this mutation had become such a problem and it was looking to be far more challenging to reverse it without degenerating too much of the existing structure. The trials continued, tweaks made to the antidote with every new subject, and still, the same result every time. He just wasn’t sure what was causing the meltdown, but he knew from testing the tissue afterward that the virus itself was indeed being broken down. So there was some level of success, but with a pretty major hindrance. He pulled apart all of his formulas, picking out every single chemical and component until it was all individual pieces he could observe. He had three tables in the bunker covered with papers, all filled with information that looked like an alien language to me. A few months of frustrating analysis led him to find that it wasn’t specifically his formulas or the final mix, but the way he was mixing it. After he had made that discovery and made changes to his methods, the next subject was, well, better, but still ended up in a pile of goo. That guy actually became sentient, asking where he was and why he was there. We were both in utter shock when actual words came out of his mouth, so much so that we didn’t speak quickly enough before the meltdown started, which filled the room with the worst screams and gurgles I’d ever heard in my life.
And that pretty much brings us up to date. We are in the bunker, myself on a recliner watching the news with complete consternation while Tim is working on more analysis, trying to figure out this whole meltdown thing. He’s so close that we can’t help but be excited, but it’s still not there, and who knows how much longer it will take. Who knows how much longer we have before there’s nobody left but these things. The uglies, as the girl who wrote that entry calls them. God, I hope she’s still out there and hasn’t made the change yet…or worse, used one of those bullets. I feel bad that she lost her sister and can’t get her back, but maybe, just maybe we can find her and save her. I know she’s close. We just need enough cover to go out and find her.