The Romero Strain (12 page)

“What!?”
he said, as if he did nothing wrong. “The lights are out ahead. My flashlight doesn’t work.”

We didn’t acknowledge his comments.

I continued. “A glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor, GDNF, is a small protein that potently promotes the survival of many types of neurons. The virus is stimulating the neurological pathways and receptors of the nervous system and brain at a rapid rate… re-animation of sorts. When this happens within the body, glutamates, a natural chemical in the body, can build up allowing calcium ions to destroy cells that make up the neuroreceptors. But he says the virus is keeping this from happening by eating the calcium ions and promoting the survival of neurons.”

“How do you know all of this stuff? Aren’t you
just
a paramedic?” Joe said, being condescending.

I snidely retorted, “
Wikipedia
.” Without missing a beat I returned to probing the doctor. “And how long does the virus sustain these functions,” I questioned.

“I do not know.”

“What’d ya mean, you don’t know?” David asked, with obvious irritation at the doctor’s answer.

“I
do not
know. The pathogen was… not intended to be used on the living. We were re-animating dead soldiers.”

“What?” Joe said, startled with disbelief in his voice.

“It is called the Resurrection Project. We have been trying since the late eighties to develop a virus that would temporarily reanimate a dead soldier on the battlefield. Can you imagine the fear this would instill into our enemy?”

“You come up with that idea all by yourself, Doc?” I said sarcastically. “A man-made combat virus. What was that called,
Trixie?”

He knew what I was talking about, but ignored my comment and tried to continue on.

“You fucking bastard,” Joe yelled out.

The doctor looked at him as if he was a complete dimwit. “Your ignorance is exceeded only by your charm. Are you so lacking in intelligence that you believe our government does not conduct secret experiments of biological and toxilogical nature?”

“Hey, hey! Are you calling me stupid?”

“Ignorance is often misinterpreted as a synonym of stupidity, and is as thus often taken as an insult, when really it is, in its correct form, not an insult at all but a criticism.”

“Hey, don’t pull any of that fancy, superior intellect on me. I may not know much about things with proteins and compositions and things with… molecular stuff. But you said on our own troops!” Joe exclaimed this with anger and astonishment, as though it was a personal offense against him.

“Doc, get to the point,” I said with impatience. “I don’t need a history lesson in U.S. bacterial warfare. Anyone with half a brain knows you’ve been doing this since Captain Ecuyer gave infected small pox blankets to Native Americans in 1763. What did
you
do?”

I listened to the doctor’s vocalization and watched his body language as he spoke. He was lying. I was adept in body language; knowing and understanding a person’s body language was essential for any paramedic, and martial artist.

The doctor was not at ease looking at us and turned his face away, looking at his leg where I was wrapping the gauze. He spoke mainly in a monotonous inflection, adding unnecessary details to the story, trying to convince us of its authenticity. He was uncomfortable with silences or pauses in his conversation, prattling on as he spoke; all sure signs of lying. He was also irritating me with his non-use of grammatical contractions.

With his wound completely dressed, I let him continue his story, not letting him know that I knew the truth. I wanted to hear his fabrication, mainly for my amusement and to see home much of a horror film buff he truly was.

“There was a problem, just a small one.”

“Of course, there always is,” I interjected.

The doctor did not stop at my interruption.

“The virus did not do what it was supposed to.”

“What was it
supposed
to do,” Joe question, again the doctor ignoring the interruption.

“The virus was engineered to re-animate a soldier with the purpose of completing their mission. But over and over again, all we could get was primal, absolute, pure base rage. First we thought it was because our post-mortem subjects had too many depleted neurons, having been deceased for several weeks. We tried with more recently deceased subjects, but still the same result. So we started experiments on post-mortem subjects directly from the battlefield. I—”

“All right, stop! Stop right there.” I had heard enough. “You really are a pretentious lying little bastard. I know most of what you’ve been shoveling has been
bullshit!
I see it in your body language; I hear it in your voice.” I put my foot down on his wound and pressed hard. He let out a piercing scream of agony. “If you’re going to bullshit someone you should do it to someone who hasn’t seen every damn living dead movie ever made. I want the truth this time, or I swear to your God I’ll kill you where you lie!”

“God, it hurts! It hurts!” he cried.

“Does it?”

“Yes, it does! It hurts!”

“I’m very good with pain. Now talk!”

“All right, all right,” he gasped. “I thought you wanted to hear the whole movie scenario. Is that not what you want to believe? That the dead have come back to life because of some evil government plot?”

“I want to know what the hell is going to happen to me and what the hell you did. Tell me the fucking truth!”

I pressed my foot again against his wound. He pleaded for me to stop. Tears of pain began to well up and roll down his face.

“All right! All right! It does not matter anymore. Some of what I said is not entirely inaccurate. The virus I described is exactly what I developed. The experiments during the Persian Gulf War are also true. There truly
was
a Resurrection Project. But I have embellished… having failed to create a reanimation virus, the project was decommissioned and my predecessor reassigned. I was brought in several years after the 2003 invasion of Iraq for a new project. It was to develop a biological weapon of mass destruction, one with a short, but destructive lifecycle.”

I gave him an evil look. He was still being evasive.

“All right. My research was to develop a repertory tract pathogen that would destabilize the enemy and have them destroy themselves. However, we were unable to attain a satisfactory exponential decay rate, which meant the probability of widespread contamination beyond the target area. Negatively impacting a non-combatant populous is bad for business. I abandoned that concept and went to a gastrointestinal tract viral agent, which would allow for a more controlled and direct system of delivery. But again, the strains failed to go inert at the target time; instead would mutated. I used the CCR5 receptor with avian DNA. The results were unbelievable. Instead of the virus taking control of the test subject and causing psychotic, homicidal rage, it killed the test subject and took control. I had discovered, by accident, a way to reanimate the dead… it was Trixoxen! But there was also a peculiarity with the most recent strains. It had an unexplainable side effect. The infected would come back to life, kill, and eat their victims. I named this anomaly the Romero Syndrome.”

“You weren’t experimenting on dead soldiers, were you!?” Joe said, all ready knowing the answer to his question.

“You are quite the master of the obvious,” France sarcastically replied.

Joe was outraged. “You fucking bastard! How could you!?”

“They were soldiers who had been court marshaled and found guilty.”

Joe kicked him. David pushed him away.

“God damn it! The program was voluntary… for bad conduct or court-martial offenses. In exchange, their criminal records would be expunged and they would be granted an honorable discharge.”

“Bet you didn’t tell them what they were in for, did you, Doc?” I declared.

“That was not my job. My job was just to conduct the clinical trails and oversee the project.”

“So much for your Hippocratic Oath,” I criticized. “Explain to me how the virus got out.”

The doctor paused for a moment. “It does not make sense.”

We all looked at him suspiciously.

“Do not blame me. I did not cause this. It was the oversight committee. They wanted to close down the project, discontinue my research, when I was this close––” He held up his hand, separating the tips of his thumb and index finger by less than an inch. “––to solving the decay problem.”

I asked,
“Who?”

“That psychotic Captain Robbins! The administration said the project was no longer viable and enough money was wasted on a venture that did not help the war effort. They sent Robbins in to oversee the facility’s closure. He caused the accident. We went into lockdown. It contaminated everyone in the complex. It must have gotten out through the exhaust system into the general populace.”

“That’s very reverse
Night of the Comet
, D—”

Marisol interrupted.
“Punta,”
she yelled, and kicked the doctor in the bad leg. “You’ve ruined my M.I.T. scholarship!”

The doctor clutched his leg. The blood seeped through the bandage. “Bitch,” he cursed at Marisol.

“
Puto,”
she replied, and kicked him again, striking his knuckles.

“God damn bitch,” the doctor yelled.

I grabbed Marisol before she could inflict any more damage. “Hold on, Marisol. I need him to finish before you kick the shit out of him.”

She continued to curse him in Spanish.

I turned to the doctor. “But you got out.”

“Yes. Through a top-level administrators’ exit. It connects to a stairway that leads to an unused exit of the Waldorf Astoria. But it would not open. So I—”

I interrupted. “The brass door marked 101-121 49
th
Street, below a sign that reads
Metro-North Fire Exit?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

They all looked at me.
“What?”
I asked. “Don’t any of you know anything about this city?” I turned my attentions back to France. “You tried to take your contaminated ass out into the city. That’s very ethical of you.”

“I could not get out, so I backtracked, and traveled up a long set of stairs which led me into the tunnels, but some of them were not marked or were dark. I got lost and wandered around, and I heard you.”

“You’re infected.” I placed my hand over his bandage.

He flinched, expecting me to cause him pain. When he realized I was waiting for him to speak before I aggravated his wound further, he quickly reacted. “No, no. As soon as I realized what happened, I got out during the confusion. I was never exposed.”

He was lying again, so I challenged him on his statement.

“You weren’t exposed? But you said it contaminated everyone in the complex. How can you be sure you’re not infected?”

“The Trixoxen has a pathogen route of entry through ingestion with a secondary parenteral
portal, and…”

“And?
And what!?”

“And… and because I have not exhibited any phase one symptoms.”

“Phase one symptoms?” I asked. I squeezed his leg, and he howled. “I’ll let Marisol kick the shit out of you in another second. What have you done to me?”

“All right, all right.” Tears of agony rolled down his face. “Phase one occurs within six hours.” His eyes met my face. He studied the perspiration on my forehead. “You first get a mild fever accompanied by the chills, followed by the onset of a severe headache,” he said as he stared at me, knowing I was infected. “In the eight to nine hour range, phase two will commence. You become disoriented, have an inability to concentrate, elevated fever and chills, highly irritable, then delusional. Phase three: blurred vision, lethargy, raging thirst, fever blisters, rigidity of the extremities, renal and kidney failure, blindness, excruciating pain, then death. Moments later, phase four: reanimation.”

“Night of the living, fucking, dead. Great! And the destroyer of the world thinks he’s infection free.” The doctor inadvertently glanced at his case. “Maybe you are! You’ve been lying… again. You have a tell!”

“What?” he asked.

“A tell,” I said. “Like in poker. You looked at the case. DD. Open it back up and show me the serum vials. After all, Doc, what’s a virus without an antigen, right?”

David held open the case to reveal the four vials. I illuminated them one at a time underneath with my flashlight. One showed an indication it had been used.

“You fucking bastard. You used this,” I said as I held the small bottle up. “You used this on yourself. That’s why you’re not infected!”

“No. I told you the truth. I did not get exposed!”

“Really? And what, you just took the antigen for shits and giggles?”

“I took it just in case.”

“Lying bastard. There is a cure.”

“I do not know if it will work.”

“It worked on you!” I declared.