Ever Onward (2 page)

‘Hey, sarge! How they
hangin’?”

Deadly Dave’s response was to shoot
Lavin twice in the face.

The corporal’s body slammed back into
the heavy door, then slid down into a lifeless heap. A thick smear
of blood and brains marred the door’s stainless steel
surface.

Grinning like the madman he was fast
becoming, Henderson stepped over both the sanity line as well as
the body and punched in the secret code. It had been changed that
morning, but he knew that. He wasn’t supposed to. ‘Eyes Only’ shit.
But they’d taken his gun and turned him into a paper shuffler, a
fucking desk-jockey riding a computer console; a main-frame faggot
who could surf the fucking net with the worst of them! Yet with
knowledge came power, and the more knowledge the more power! So now
he knew all about the famous-fucking ‘Door’ and what really went on
behind it--- and that knowledge had driven him over the
edge.

“Bastards!”, he muttered, saliva
flecking the corners of his twisted smile. “Cock-sucking
job-stealing bastards!”

The door swished open like the ones on
Star Trek. Beam me up, Snotty. Henderson was through in an instant,
the M-16 now on continual burst. Full metal jacket rounds tore
through the guard just inside the door. At such close range the
man’s stomach vaporized. Henderson was past the body before it hit
the floor, the M-16 still coughing out death.

Estelle Dority, one of several
non-military technicians working on Agent C.D., turned and
screamed. The tumbling slugs ripped into her left side and spun her
like a top. One more entered through her open mouth, exiting stage
right and taking half her head with it. A mental picture of his
wife flashed before him. Henderson began to smile.

Walking forward, Deadly Dave shot
three more people. ‘Time is precious’ his mother had often told
him, and Mrs. Henderson’s obedient offspring knew her to be right.
He had a lot to do. Miles to go before I sleep. With that he
commenced spraying poetic justice at the white lab coats scrambling
madly for cover. When his fifty-round magazine finally emptied, a
total of nine people lay dead, among them, Willard ‘Wee Willie’
Larsh.

But Sergeant Henderson’s one man
crusade was far from over. He had eliminated the creators, but
their job stealing creation itself still remained.

The smell of blood and cordite filled
the room. Trembling as adrenaline pumped its way into his veins,
Henderson tossed the spent clip aside and inserted a fresh one. His
gaze tuned now to the room itself. Test tubes, beakers and jars
littered the lab tables. Electronic machinery, each costing more
than what a dedicated soldier like himself made in a year, lined
the walls. From one corner a computer glared at him like an
accusing eye. Henderson held the stare for as long as he could,
then fired. Spent casings tapped out a staccato beat as they
clattered on the tile floor. The thunder of the M-16 punched out
the base, while his own screams filled in the high notes. ‘Rock n’
roll!’ the old Nam vets used to yell, joyfully wasting friend and
foe alike. Henderson could do no less. Shattered glass fell like
broken dreams as Deadly Dave boogied on down.

The noise was deafening.

He didn’t hear the door swish open
behind him; the M.P.’s shouted command; the harsher, crisper sound
as the M.P. fired his sidearm. So intent on blasting beakers was
ol’ Dave that he never even felt the .45 slug that swung him
around, his arms wide like Christ on His cross.

Startled, the two men stood facing
each other. The silence hung in the air like a pop fly at its apex.
Then gravity intervened and his smoking barrel began its fall back
to earth. Half way through its arc, the M.P. fired again --- three
times in rapid succession. Bang! Bang! Bang!

One after another, small holes
stitched their way up Henderson’s chest, the last one hitting his
nametag. Dead on his feet, Henderson’s finger tightened on the
trigger. The dozen remaining rounds emptied into the far wall. One
of them struck a small vile encased in clear plastic, exploding it
like a grenade. The contents of the vile, left there by the late,
great Estelle Dority, escaped unseen into the room.

Sergeant Henderson had just killed ten
people in order to stop the experiment that Estelle and her
esteemed colleagues had labored so long to create. Agent C.D. The
ultimate weapon; a type of nerve gas that killed only apes, monkeys
and humans, leaving all other forms of life unaffected. Entering
through the pores of the skin, it attacked both the red and white
blood cells, crystallizing all the liquid in the body and causing
almost instant death.

Estelle’s team however, had been
working on a little added bonus --- a way to make C.D. dispose of
the bodies as well! Her team had found a way to continue the
process so that not just the blood crystallized, but the entire
body, including hair, bones and teeth. Only a gray, fragile
parchment-like substance would remain, akin to an old wasps nest,
easily blown away by the wind.

Just how this all actually worked, the
recently late but far from great Sergeant Henderson could have
cared less. When he’d finally broken the code on the ‘eyes only’
document Agent CD and read the bitter truth about what Eager-Beaver
Estelle and her geek buddies had done, he decided to act. ‘The
faggots are taking over!’, a long – deadyet familiar voice had
warned him. ‘Someone should do something about those queer bastards
right quick before they get the goddamn farm!’

In his own twisted way Henderson had
set out to do just that, to destroy the creation of the wife/job
stealing faggots before it was too late. In so doing he had killed
the creators but set their creation itself free. The recently
deceased Estelle Dority, B.A., M.A., Doctor of Nuclear Chemistry
and an acute sufferer of P.M.S., had neglected to mention one small
detail in her last report, (the same report that Sergeant Henderson
had inadvertently read and that had set him off on his own personal
stairway to heaven). The neglected detail was that there might just
be one tiny drawback to the ‘new and improved’ version ofCD.She
suspected that this new gas she and her team were working on might
not dissipate quite as quickly as the older, non-body disposing
kind did.

It might, in fact, NOT dissipate at
all!

Months earlier, junior adviser Willard
‘Wee Willie’ Larsh, after checking and double checking simulated
tests on his computer, had reluctantly informed Ms. Dority of his
findings. Young Willard claimed that once exposed to the air, said
new gas would most probably undergo a chemical change --- a rather
serious chemical change. Wee Willie had even gone so far as to call
it a double-scoop mother-fucking RADICAL change! Not only wouldn’t
it die off like smoke on the wind --- it would MUTATE AND
MULTIPLY!

As was Sergeant Henderson when he
‘ruffled the placid governmental waters’, Young Willard was quickly
and firmly shuffled off to shuffle his own endless stream of
computer printouts. But by then the damage had been done. The
divorce papers had been served, the farm had been sold, the scotch
had been drunk --- and the seeds of destruction had been
sown.

And Agent C.D., known affectionately
as Crystallized Deterrent and/or Completely Demented, was set free
on an unsuspecting world.

Had he lived long enough, Young
Willard would have had the last laugh, perhaps even renaming it
Agent Complete Destruction, for he had been right about the
chemical change all along; new and improved Agent C.D. did indeed
multiply. The only part Willie had miscalculated was just how
fast.

Almost everyone on Nellis Air Force
Base was dead by morning.

The rest of the world would take a
little longer.

Chapter 2
: HEAVEN AND
EARTH

High Peaks Region,

Adirondack Park,

New York. June
22

The boy, in his mid teens, scrambled
easily up the steep, rocky slope. The heavy pack on his back seemed
to bother him not at all. With the scorn for fear that only youth
can muster, the blond boy smiled down on the two older men
below.

“Piece of cake, Dad! How’s Uncle Bob
doing?”

Josh Williams grinned up at his son,
then glanced back at his brother-in-law. They were in the High
Peaks Region of the Adirondack Park, a vast stretch of mountain
wilderness only an hour’s drive away from the sleepy little college
town of Hawthorn, New York. Having hiked the High Peaks for years,
Josh Williams and his son Jesse were completely in their element.
Uncle Bob, however, was another story.

Robert Fuller had gone on a few
day-hikes and canoeing trips with Josh, but this was the first time
he’d attempted a week long ‘expedition’, and it showed.

“Think of it as a pilgrimage!”, Josh
had explained. That had been the 24
^th
of May. At the
time they were sitting in Bob’s expensive fishing boat in the
middle of Lake Champlain, the hundred mile long body of water
separating Vermont and upper New York State. The gentle shores were
crowded with quaint summer cottages for those with enough money and
time to escape the crowded cities. Bob had reached for a Miller
Light and laughed. Bob’s idea of ‘roughing it’ was having to
contend with warm beer and cold Big Mac’s.

“A pilgrimage to
where
?
Deliverance Land?”

Josh had gone on to expound on the
beauty of the High Peaks Great Range. Names like Rooster Comb, The
Gothics, Haystack, Marcy had rolled off his tongue like honey, his
green eyes flashing.

Bob had belched and reached for
another Miller. “Sure, Josh, I’ll go. Just go easy on that ‘Spine
of God’ crap, eh?

Josh Williams had grinned and shot him
the finger.

“Ya? Same to you, fella!”

It was a very old Bob Newheart joke,
not funny to anyone anymore but the two old friends.

Now, a month later and over four
thousand feet higher, Robert Fuller found himself struggling up
some god-forsaken goat’s trail called the Shorty Shortcut and
heading for a place with the heart warming name of Panther’s Gorge.
The view, he had to admit however, was incredible! For as far as
the eye could see, towering peaks stretched away in all directions.
Fluffy white clouds floated in the green carpeted valley below
them. A hawk, drifting on the thermal updrafts, hung suspended high
above them, its sharp, predator’s eyes watching for the slightest
movement. The air felt clean and fresh as it must have on the first
day of creation.

Just after dawn they’d left Josh’s
camper back at The Garden, a hiker’s parking lot several miles up a
twisting, stream crossed road above the quaint little mountain
village of Keene Valley. Backpacks loaded with all the gear and
food they’d need for a week in the ‘great outdoors’, the three
‘bold adventurers’ had hiked up to their present position. Now,
dirty, sweating, heart pounding and back aching, Bob leaned against
a boulder the size of his insurance office back in Crown
Point.

“I’m fine, Jessie,” he gasped. “Just
giving your old man a head start!”

Josh Williams, making sure his son
couldn’t see, shot Bob the finger.

Both men smiled.

Jessie called down from above. “You
guys coming or what? I’m getting hungry!”

“You’re
always
hungry!”, Josh
replied. “Have a Granola Bar!”

Jessie’s face hung over the boulder
thirty feet above them. His long blond hair covered all but his
smile. “I finished those off back at the lean-to.”

Josh shrugged at Bob and started up
the open rock. “Better get going before he eats my supper as well
as yours.”

Bob sighed and adjusted his shoulder
straps. “Let him. At least these bloody packs will be
lighter!”

They made camp soon after on a flat
outcropping just under a mile above sea level and just over nine
miles from the nearest road. After a meal of noodles and Josh’s
wife’s spaghetti sauce, washed down with tea and hot chocolate,
they watched the sun set in all its fiery splendor, then turned in.
Bob was dead to the world as soon as his head hit the non-existent
pillow. Jessie gave his dad a hug and crawled into his sleeping
bag, eager for the morrow’s climb. By candle light, Josh smoked his
pipe, wrote in his log and thought of his wife. Soon he too sought
his bed.

As he lay in his sleeping bag watching
the stars appear in the heavens, Josh wondered what Bob would say
if he knew he was sleeping on what the locals called The Spine of
God. All three hikers were totally unaware of the catastrophe that
had taken place at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada some twenty four
hours earlier. Josh turned on his side. Thoughts of tomorrow’s long
climb up Mount Marcy filled his mind. Hoping the weather would
hold, he drifted off to sleep, while over half a continent away,
silent, swift, death raced towards him.

Chapter 3
: THE DARK
STRANGER

China Lake Naval Weapons
Center

California. June
22

Private Jocco Wellington let the jeep
role to a stop, hardly noticing the quiet crunch as the front wheel
passed over yet another half empty uniform. Jocco was confused.
Everyone was dead, and that bothered him. Not the fact that they
were dead exactly, but the fact that he had no fucking idea how
they came to be that way!