The Virus (10 page)

Labor could not even be induced due to
The Virus, but at least there were still C-Sections to thank God
for, right? Wrong. This is where, if anyone doubted that something
of biblical proportions had taken place in modern day society, they
were converted. When a seemingly healthy woman was cut open to
release the child, as soon as her insides were exposed to open air,
she began to convulse violently and scream hysterically in pain
from her exposed regions. Before the doctor’s eyes, whatever
internal flesh of hers that was exposed to the open air, if only
for a few brief moments, would instantly undergo a graphic
deterioration whereby living flesh would dry to something like a
grey paste then into a thick, grey powder and finally, into fine
dust. It was something like morticians were used to seeing in fully
decayed corpses, only much more quickly.

If that wasn’t enough, as soon as the
freed child would take its first independent breath, it would gag
violently. Nothing any doctor tried to do seemed to make a
difference as newborns—every single one of them—choked to death off
of fresh air. Every procedure or variation thereof in the book, as
well as more than a few highly-controversial ones that were not in
the book, were performed, but they all ended with the identically
ghastly and fatal result. Somehow The Virus had further changed how
female bodies reacted to the oxygen in the air. Their
virus-saturated lungs and blood streams processed incoming air and
changed it so it could be continually propagated within them, but
if any unfiltered oxygen was introduced into the body (i.e.,
through an open wound) the disastrous effects already described
would follow. Harsh, considering that a skinned knee or a deep cut
could mean an agonizing demise. No one understood why men weren’t
affected.

The same was true for the baby. It,
too, was infected with The Virus and so, was fine as long as it was
being supplied with oxygen filtered through its mother’s now
diseased lungs, but as soon as it took a single breath of its
own…There were many questions that had yet to be answered, like, if
Doom’s Day had finally come at last, and why did the Grim Reaper
only have a thing for women, and especially, pregnant women? No one
(at least not the in the general public) had the answers. If there
was one thing that there was no lack of, it was sheer, head
balding, nerve wracking, panic.

After Dr. Crangler finished this
narrative, he gazed at Delilah, trying to gauge her response to all
she had just heard, but she just stared at the ceiling, neither
here nor there, vacancy obvious in her eyes. “Miss...” the doctor
began.

“Thank you.” Delilah answered before
he could finish. Her voice was as distant as her gaze, as if she
was yet far away on her space flight and was talking from the
International Space Station orbiting the planet. Dr. Crangler
couldn’t tell if she knew what she was saying, but it didn’t
matter. The information he had just given her would’ve been
overload for anyone’s circuitry. All things considered, he figured
she was handling things as well as could be expected. She continued
to stare blankly at the ceiling directly above her and the doctor
decided to take the opportunity to run those tests he had
mentioned. While he did, Delilah showed no further notice of him or
his lightly-whirring machines, or the cold attaching leads and
needles that came from them, but just continued to stare silently
at the ceiling, her gaze as uniformly empty as the white walls
surrounding her.

Chapter 10

After about five hours of deep,
unbroken sleep Geoffrey sat up, yawned, and stretched his limbs
until the bones in his jaw, shoulders, and fingers cracked and
popped like a symphony of ill-used elderly joints. Geoffrey felt
anything but old. In fact, this little rest of his had infused him
with new life. This entire roller coaster ride of unexpected events
had drained his physical and mental aptitude to the point of bare
boned exhaustion. He had slept harder than he could ever remember
sleeping before. Now, however, his returned energy infused him like
a tall frosty glass of cold water to a man who had been stranded in
the desert for days. The irony of all this was that he had, in
fact, recently come from a desert—a desert of ice. But for all his
replenishment, the all-encompassing white of the sheets, blanket,
and even the mattress on which he was now sitting—as well as
everything else in the room—reminded him of the unfathomable
reality at hand that he briefly escaped in slumber. That alone
seemed to tire him again, though in a very different
way.

Welcomed with this strange dichotomy,
he rubbed his temples, yawned again (this time with no popping),
and stood. He was still fully clothed, which meant that he went to
sleep like that (something he never did) and as he thought about
it, he didn’t remember going to sleep in the first place. A thought
crossed his mind and he took a look at the creases of his arms.
Just as he vaguely expected, there were small, nearly unnoticeable
imprints in his flesh that signified needles had recently broken
through his skin. He had obviously been drugged. He lifted his
shirt so he could see his chest, and when he did, he noticed the
second thing he already expected; small round areas of fine, sticky
grains left behind by the adhesion portion of chest
leads.

Things were so crazy
already that he wasn’t as alarmed by the fact that he was drugged
and tested as he would’ve been on any other occasion. He was still
not comfortable knowing that he was completely at the mercy of
people who were, for all intents and purposes, complete strangers.
The next thought that entered his head was, where was Mr. Reynolds,
and if anything had changed with him since he’d seen him last. He
turned his head this way, then that, searching for the large,
recessed wall mirror. He remembered how he, Lieutenant Dan, and the
doctor had observed the astronomer through the one way glass, but
now there was no mirror in this room. There were, however, two
large windows that looked out onto a hallway, but Geoffrey could
easily see through those so he was sure they were not for
surveillance. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway if anyone
had
been keeping tabs on
him while he slept. Judgment Day had apparently come for mankind
and somehow the loss of privacy didn’t matter much
anymore.

He stretched his limbs a
third time, not from a need to work out the sleep, as much as a
lame attempt to postpone dealing with the inevitable. As he already
knew, the inevitable, by its very definition
must
be dealt with, so he stood and
headed toward the windows, looking out onto an equally white
hallway. He had never seen everything so universally white in his
life.
There must be a special reason for
it
, he thought. As much as he could,
considering his limited vantage point, he looked this way and that,
but there seemed to be no one in sight.

“Hey…someone?” he yelled. Somehow, he
was certain that, though he saw no obvious surveillance equipment,
he had not just been placed in this room and forgotten about.
“Hey…someone?” he yelled again. No answer.

He turned and took a more thorough
look around the room, searching the walls and ceiling until he
found what he was looking for. At the very top of the room’s far
western corner, where the ceiling and the wall meet was a small,
off-white spot on the wall, a large dot about the size of a camera
lens, in an otherwise snow colored room. The only way Geoffrey
could even tell it from its surroundings was that it was raised
away from the corner. He walked casually to it, raising his hands
and waving. Before he even walked all the way to the corner, the
doctor from earlier opened the door and stepped in.

“I see you’ve located our hidden
camera, young man.” The doctor said, kindly.

“It would seem so, but,
um…”

“You want to know how things are going
with your astronomer friend, correct?” asked the doctor.

“Yes, and a few other things…if that’s
possible.”

“Well, I’ll answer what I
can, Mr. Summons, but only what I can. Lieutenant Dan is
responsible for guarding you while you’re here, and he’s much more
of a
government
man than I am. I’m sure you already know, the government
doesn’t relinquish
all
of its secrets that easily. As far as Mr. Reynolds is
concerned, you’ll be seeing him in just a little while. But first,”
The doctor looked over Geoffrey like a mortician in some movie or
cartoon trying to assess measurements for a custom coffin “we’ll
need to get you cleaned up.”

The doctor reached into one of the
deep pockets of his white lab coat and produced a white note pad
and a small, white pencil. He handed the articles to Geoffrey. “I’m
going to show you to the sterilization shower, but first, I need
you to write down the size of your clothes. Shirt, pants, shoes,
underwear, everything. And be very precise.”

Geoffrey gazed down at the colorless
writing material. “Why is everything white here?” he asked, turning
the pad and pencil over in his hand.

The doctor sighed lightly. “I just got
finished dealing with another Nosey Nancy not too long ago, Mr.
Summons. Can’t we get you cleaned up and changed before we begin
with the twenty questions routine?”

“What’s the rush? It doesn’t look like
I’ll be leaving this place any time soon…if ever. And who was the
other guy that had questions?”

“Other young lady.” The doctor
corrected. “And a very popular young lady out in the free world, or
so I hear. But you need not worry about her, you won’t be making
her acquaintance any time soon.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, let’s just say that
your astronomer friend is a very important person now, but if he’s
important, than this young lady is
extremely
important.”

Geoffrey could not decipher
the doctor’s mysteriously dark assessment and didn’t try. Instead,
he said, “
Okay
,
well…why is everything here white?”

“Right,” sighed the doctor, “You’re a
persistence one, aren’t you, Mr. Summons? Well, let me try to
explain it to you in as much of laymen’s terms as I can.” Geoffrey
could easily sense something of the same brand of egotism that he
had grown used to in his dealings with Mr. Reynolds, but it didn’t
chafe him nearly as much. There were more important things to be
concerned with.

“All the lights in this entire
facility,” began the doctor, gesturing toward the ceiling, “are
virtually identical to the Cleaning Lights in the entranceway,
except they are not nearly as powerful. They don’t need to be. As I
told you before, the Cleaning Lights that you passed through when
you first entered all but completely sterilized your body inside
and out, but your body needs a large array of bacteria and other
microorganisms to function properly. It is one of the many
necessary symbiotic relationships that man has been forced to
acquire in order for us to survive our atmosphere.” The doctor
paused to give Geoffrey a moment to digest the information. “So,
besides acquiring many of these microorganisms from our
surroundings, the body itself also produces a number of them. The
lights in this room as well as in rest of the facility are to keep
these newly-forged microorganisms in check…” The doc glanced down
at his watch (also white), “…as is the sterilization shower that
I’m supposed to be escorting you to.”

“Right, but you still haven’t told me
why everything’s white. Is it to help control
these…microorganisms?”

“Yes and no,” answered the
doctor cryptically, “The Cleaning Lights are just one variation of
this particular technology that we were able to garner from the
foreign intelligences we’ve been studying. What you experienced
with the fragment, we think, is that technology at full blast. Now,
I’m sure you can see why it wouldn’t be very beneficial for us to
have much contact with
that
, don’t you?” Geoffrey nodded
solemnly. “Now, what we’ve found,” continued the doctor, “is that
if we introduce certain variables into the equation, we can get
different applications from that technology. Safer applications.”
He glanced down at his watch again. “Well, anyway, we’ve found that
certain colors…excite this particular application and increase its
power. The only problem with that is that if the Cleaning Lights
are too strong, they’ll kill off more of us than just
microorganisms. They would start actually soldering organ cells,
which means goodbye lungs, heart, brain…you get the
point.”

Geoffrey certainly did.

“We’ve found a few colors that cause
this reaction, but until we know how every color will affect the
lights, we think it’s best just to keep things neutral. We believe
that’s why the fragment fell near the research station where you
were in the first place. That light was intended to carry the
fragment, but the miles and miles of unbroken white landscape in
Antarctica most likely altered its application.”

“These lights can kill us?” Geoffrey
asked, with some alarm.

“Mr. Summons, if we don’t figure out
what’s going on here and how to stop it, the human race is a goner
anyway. And besides, like I already told you, we can’t study living
alien specimens without them. You take a risk with every breath you
draw, Son, that’s just the nature of existence. This is no
different.” Geoffrey didn’t ask any further questions, and it
likely wouldn’t have mattered if he had, because after the doctor
finished talking, he made it clear that Geoffrey was to head to the
shower, without further delay. The doctor led Geoffrey through a
virtual maze of hallways that were as large as the entranceway
corridor but, as the doctor had said, not as brightly lit, until
the two of them at last came to the sterilization
shower.