Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
The spiral staircase leading up to ground level was one hundred meters of winding concrete. The rugged steps were unevenly and oddly spaced, making me wonder whether the engineers who designed the military base were either hungover or feeling lazy on the day they came to the emergency staircase. Either that or they considered whoever was to use them fucked.
The concrete steps were also incredibly steep, so that by the time we had climbed the first dozen, Karen and I were exhausted. Add to the equation we were thirsty and hungry, and you didn’t get two happy campers.
“You know what I miss?” I called out as we ascended, my tired body leaning on the banister for support.
“What’s that?”
“Remember every evening after work you used to make me that lemon drink? Five ice cubes, two lemon slices, sparkling water. Sometimes even a touch of mint. I got so accustomed to that drink I could tell if there were four ice cubes rather than five, three lemon slices instead of two. Well, you know I could really do with one of those right now.”
I wiped the sweat from my brow and nearly walked right into Karen, who had stopped dead in her tracks.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?
In the darkness of the stairwell, her silhouette took a deep sigh. “Yes … fine,” she replied and cleared her throat. “Just I haven’t made that drink in a while…”
She took another deep sigh before continuing. Onward we went until the stairwell gave way to a small concrete platform, where a single fire door stood.
“Here’s level 1,” I said, half shivering at what lurked on the other side of that door.
Karen went and pressed her ear against it. “Wanna go take a look?”
I took a step backward. “Are you mad?”
She turned and raised an eyebrow. “It’s a joke, Frank. One thing I used to remember about you is that you had a better sense of humor.”
Ohhh, well, I guess I probably did. I think I lost it when you started screwing our boss.
The rest of the climb up was accompanied by a growing dread that the final exit might be locked—and after all our considerable efforts (and sheer luck) of making it this far, we would find ourselves trapped; doomed to reside underground for all eternity. When we did reach the top, light seeped underneath the door, teasing us at the world which lay beyond.
I took a deep breath. “Do you want me to do the honors, or do you? I sure hope we are not going to burst into a surprise party. Imagine if this was all a setup and we were being filmed for a reality TV show? Virus X on Fox.”
Karen smiled.
“What?”
“You,” she whispered, still smiling. “You think you’re James Bond with that gun.”
I dipped my head in acknowledgment and cocked the gun. “I’m more Jason Bourne.”
She laughed. “How about we do it together?”
A little embarrassed, I nodded and put my hand over hers. Then we pressed down on the handle, and with a click, the door gave way, revealing the research facility’s entrance lobby.
We were greeted by a rush of cold air, and for a few seconds were blinded by the daylight spilling in through the doors. Or wait—they weren’t open doors but smashed curtain walls. Shattered glass covered the lobby floor. And that rush of icy air was the stiff Alaskan breeze flowing over the military base, cold enough in March to freeze Mr. Jimmy down below if you didn’t have your thermal pants on.
But we didn’t really get a chance to think about the cold because, after getting accustomed to the brightness, we saw the true extent of the devastation in the lobby. Strewn across the marble floor were dead soldiers and other military base staff in civilian clothes. Most had visible chunks of flesh missing—no prizes for guessing why—and lay about the place where they had made their last stand. It hadn’t gone well for them—that was clear, but the bullet holes peppering the walls and the US flag that hung from a parapet gave an indication they had struggled to the last.
Karen gasped and began to shake her head. “It doesn’t make sense, Frank … none of this makes sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said, miserably and looked glumly out of the shattered glass and over the military base. Underneath the bright sunshine, the other buildings stood solemnly, piles of cleared snow stacked high beside their sidewalks. Beyond a small row of barracks, I could see the outer Bremer walls that ringed the base. They were twelve-foot-tall reinforced concrete walls which I had always joked were to keep us in, rather than keep others out. I didn’t find that so funny now that we had to contemplate getting over them somehow.
“Come on,” I said. “We can’t hang about and find out what happened. We need to salvage warm clothes from …” I hesitated, glancing around at the mutilated bodies in the lobby. “We need to steal from these people and get the hell out of here.”
Karen grimaced but did not argue. She understood the logic. God only knew where the infected were—and there was a big fat plural in there because these people weren’t killed by a Timmy the janitor. No, this was the work of a horde. Somewhere out there in the snow was a whole load of Timmys running around.
I walked up to the nearest soldier and stooped over him. His eyes were closed, but his arms were jerked in the air. Twisted, in a sort of way which seemed unnatural. I ignored it, hoping it was the fast onset of rigor mortis, and began unbuttoning his military-issued thermal coat. Karen was doing the same nearby to another corpse.
With my breath fogging, I started to feel that Alaskan cold bite. It was the one thing you never got used to. You could spend all day underground—and every evening you would be surprised about the cold that lay in wait like a faithful dog at the surface. The sky could be as clear as the desert, the day as sunny as Bermuda. But when your skin felt the pinch of subzero temperatures, your teeth naturally began to chatter away.
For all the years I’ve spent in Alaska, it was the one thing I couldn’t wait to be away from. And I might have been closer to that wish than I thought, for the dead soldier whose coat I was unbuttoning, opened his eyes.
At that moment, however, Karen screamed, “FRANK, LOOK BEHIND YOU.”
As I stared into the dark pupils of the dead soldier, I wanted to reply that I was a little preoccupied honey. The baby’s awake.
“FRRRAAAANKKK!”
This second scream instinctively took me back to last year during the breakdown of our marriage. I had a flashback of being awoken at 1 am by Karen, who had been heavily drinking. FRAAANNK, WHERE’S THE REMOTE YOU MORON?
It was for that very reason, therefore, that the scream won, and unable to focus on the dead (alive) soldier, I glanced behind to find a horde of infected approaching across the snow. They were pouring out of the nearby buildings, like hundreds of bees being sent out to protect the colony. Possibly the whole goddamn base was heading our way.
“Oh, shit,” I mouthed—just as a hand grabbed my ankle. If this had been a cartoon, then my bones would have jumped out of my body and left only my skin—so much was the shock of feeling the ice-cold grip of the dead soldier. I turned back round to see him grinning at me.
Now, the old Frank would have squealed and half died of fright. The old Frank might well have even wet himself. Well … the new Frank did all of those things … but the new Frank also had a Glock in his hand, which I aimed at the soldier’s forehead.
The grin seemed to fade on the infected’s face, as if the lingering intelligence realized he was in trouble.
I smiled. Oh, not so big now, are you, tough guy?
The bullet exploded from the gun and rocked the man’s head back against the marble floor. I brought up the gun and blew the smoke away. Or at least I wanted to, but Karen fled past me and yanked my arm as she went. Dragging me towards the door—not back underground, but towards the offices where the paper pushers, as we liked to call them, worked. It was a huge office block attached to the research facility, in part to cover up for the true nature of the work being done underground. It was where we had our big meetings. Sometimes in those board rooms, we would get important “suits” from Washington join us. Usually the serious type wanting to climb the ladder, and to do so they had to get up the first few dirty rungs which included biological warfare. They were always pleased about “our” progress—not “yours.”
I wondered what they thought about “our” work now? I imagined the suit in Washington mumbling to the president about Virus X-93, trying to explain the concept about the zombie virus.
We crashed through the door and into the offices. In stark contrast to the lobby, the space was relatively unscathed. A few papers lay scattered, and the occasional office chair lay toppled over, but other than that, the place was fairly tranquil. Hell, I’d seen more chaos during the Christmas party. But I didn’t really have time to think about it because the infected were hot on our tail. They tore through the offices, spilling into the rooms after us. We soon found ourselves cornered down a long corridor with all the doors locked.
There was no escape!
As we backed up against a set of locked doors at the end of the corridor, waiting for them, I felt Karen’s fingers slowly interlace with mine, and I turned to find her eyes filled with tears. She whispered, her voice barely audible over the growing noise of the approaching infected, “Frank, what I meant to say earlier on level 2… I—”
—She was interrupted by the locked door behind us opening, and the face of an old, grizzled man appeared. He was dressed in high-ranking military attire, medals fastened to his overcoat. He squinted at us like we had woken him from a deep slumber. “Are you kids gonna come inside or keep yapping out there?”
We both gaped in disbelief. The grizzled man, however, took the initiative and invited us in with a yank of our arms. He then slammed the door shut on the oncoming infected, as cool as a cucumber. The infected smashed against the doors but the military man merely shrugged. “Its bomb proof. She’ll hold.”
I looked about and found we were inside a long boardroom, dominated by a large oak table and plush leather chairs. Panoramic windows offered a view of the base and the outer perimeter walls which glistened underneath the sun.
The military man, whose array of medals clinked as he walked, moved over to the end of the board table and settled into a chair. On the table sat a whiskey bottle and an ashtray with a smoldering cigar. He took the cigar, had a drag, and through the drifting smoke said, “You want a drink?”
Neither Karen nor I moved.
The man chuckled. “What are you both, sober or something?”
With the infected still banging on the doors, I plucked some courage and said, “Look, what’s going on here? Where’s General Martens?” He was the military commander of the base.
The man took another long drag from his cigar and leaned back in his chair. “Martens is dead. Everyone’s dead.” He turned his gaze out of the window, and the sun cast his long shadow across the room. “I’m General Hunt … and I’m the man responsible for this mess. Now, are you two gonna sit down or what?”
I pulled out an office chair and motioned for Karen to sit. She shook her head and folded her arms. I nodded and remained standing.
General Hunt shrugged and began to pour himself a large glass of whiskey. “Which level are ya?” he asked. “Two or One?”
“Five,” Karen answered. “We worked on Virus X-93.”
The general’s head rocked back and emitted a crazed, drunken laugh. He seemed to be trying to compete with the infected outside the room. “Honey, every level worked on Virus X-93. Four, three, two, one. The whole lot of ya.” Our surprised faces made him grin. “Oh, let me guess, you thought you were the clever ones? Well, newsflash honey. We had all you miserable bastards working on the virus, so don’t think you’re special They played you all like a fiddle. Damn … they played me like a fiddle.”
“That’s enough,” I growled, my anger and dislike for the man growing. “Explain yourself. Where is the army?”
“Where is the army, where is the army,” the general mimicked. “Are you stupid, son? They told me you scientists were clever.” He turned back to look out the window, his eyes glazed from the drink. “This was planned. Every little detail. Virus X-93 was meant to escape. Inside these walls, the Pentagon is monitoring every little detail—”
“You’re lying,” I cut in. “Why would they do that?”
Hunt shook his head slowly. “Damn. You are really a stupid son-of-a-bitch, ain’t you?”
I moved towards him, but Karen grabbed the back of my shirt and shook her head. “Leave it, Frank. He’s not worth it.”
The general got to his feet, cigar in hand, and walked over to the corner, where attached to the wall was a small round camera. He blew smoke into the camera. “They’re watching us whether you like it or not. Watching us right now. Aren’t you? You sons-of-bitches.”
“How do you know all this?” Karen said.
“I know this because the last two years I have been responsible for planning a contained outbreak of Virus X-93 in this base, codenamed Projected Escape. We wanted to investigate the viruses effects in the field. See how potent it was. Three days ago, my team and I entered the military base to go through a practice run. Little did I know that the bastards in Washington had other ideas—and we would be releasing the actual virus instead of water vapor as planned. My enemies in the military must have planned it. Sixty percent of the base were infected. The rest were going to be observed to see how they survived.”
He looked back at the camera and growled, “I hope you’re happy now.”
On the other side of the room, my hand curled into a fist, and Karen’s nose flared.
The general sensed our rage. “Yes, go on. Be angry. I would. Are ready for that drink yet?”
No—I was ready to bash his face in. “Why?” I said through gritted teeth. “Why did they do this?”
“Why the hell not!” General Hunt shouted. The consumed alcohol was beginning to cause his face to flush. “Did you ever stop and think why you were doing what you were doing? No, I bet you didn’t. I bet you thought you were the next little Einstein, didn’t you? We’re all pawns in their little system. Each and every one of us. If they want to see an outbreak in a confined environment, to study its effects, they’re gonna do it, okay? And there’s nothing you, me, or your pretty little girlfriend here can do about it.”
“I want that drink,” Karen snapped, and made her way up the boardroom.
“Ha! Good,” the general said. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”
Meanwhile, scowling, I went and stood by the glass. The compound was littered with dead bodies and the churned-up snow had been turned red in large patches. So much destruction, I thought bitterly. After all these years, this is how my research ends. It made me more miserable to think that others had been working on the virus and that maybe my own breakthroughs hadn’t been my own after all.
“Is there any way out?” I asked, quietly. “Can we escape?”
I heard the general rise to his feet and found him walking towards me. Confused, I thought he was going to pass me, but before he did, he lunged at me and landed a clean punch on the side of my jaw.
The pain sent me sprawling to the ground. Karen screamed, but before she could help, the general grabbed my gun and pointed it at her. “Stay right there, honey!” he said, “Not a move.”
Seeing stars, I felt a boot plant on my back. Then the general’s voice whispered in my ear, “Sorry about that, had to do it for the camera and in case there are any bugs in the room. Yes, there is a way out. I came in on a seaplane two miles from here on a secret airstrip. We have to make our way to the airstrip, and I can fly that plane out of here.”
He dragged me to my feet and offered a hand.
“You could have just written it on a piece of paper,” I muttered, rubbing my jaw.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I could have written it down, I guess. I suppose I just wanted to punch you. You have that kind of face.”