The Wave (7 page)

18

We exited through the back of the residence. There was a good-looking forty-something woman working in a large garden. Her tan was heavily laden with freckles, and her biceps and calves were dense from physical labor. She looked at us and waved. Neither Dr. Wheeler nor I responded, but she smiled anyway.

There were two men in army fatigues waiting next to a bright lemon-yellow convertible Hummer parked outside the gate to the garden.

“We’re going to take a little drive,” Wheeler informed me.

He and I climbed into the backseat while the brawny white soldiers got in front.

We traveled over wide plains and dirt paths carved into forest landscapes. For a mile or two, we drove along the beach. We may not have gone any more than ten or twelve miles from the defunct orange grove, but it took us over an hour.

I didn’t mind. It was a clear day, and the breeze was exhilarating. The sun’s rays shone like crystals in the air. I could see sections of the sky that were different from each other. Some were orange, others violet.

The mild hallucination didn’t bother me at the time.

“Here we are,” Wheeler said.

We had pulled up in front of a large concrete bunker. Gray and rough around the edges, it was somewhat reminiscent of the face of the agent who had arrested me—James Werner.

“What is it?” I asked.

The soldiers had jumped out. One of them helped me down. I got the feeling that his supportive hand would have turned into a vise in an instant if I resisted.

There was a steel door to the bunker. It was painted drab green with
PROPERTY OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT
printed across it in red.

The door opened as we approached, but there were no obvious sentries.

We walked down a close concrete hallway and then entered an elevator that was built like a cage. The car descended a hundred or more feet, depositing us in a dark chamber that had only one blue light for illumination. The luminescence allowed me to see the men I had come with, but it was too weak to light up the room.

“Is this the man, sir?” a voice boomed from somewhere.

“Yes, it is.”

“Then shall we execute the process?”

“I believe we shall,” Wheeler said ominously.

I didn’t like the word
execute,
especially when the soldiers grabbed me by both arms. A bank of bright lights came on with a bang and a flash. The soldiers dragged me along without saying a word, heedless of my frightened complaints.

I let my weight go dead, but that had little effect on the men
executing
their
process.

While they dragged me along I thought about my sister. I wondered if she were doing well after the surgery, if she had survived. I decided that if she died while Wheeler had me locked away in his paranoid dugout, I would come after him. I would come up on him one day in surprise and shoot him through his left eye.

The hatred that rose up in me, the anger that burned in my heart—it wasn’t mine. I knew that as clearly as I knew the difference between my foot and the sock covering it. But for a moment rage and lust for retribution were all I knew.

We came to an infirmary with a long table and a few empty cots. The light here was low, but I could make out a man in a white doctor’s smock that was open, revealing his suit pants. He was a middle-aged man with small eyes and huge hands.

“What’s the goddamn emergency, Wheeler?” the doctor said. “I’ve been coordinating the presentation without you.”

“Dr. Gregory, I’d like you to meet Errol Porter, the son of XT-248.”

“I thought we weren’t notifying the families, David?” the doctor replied.

“XT-248 called Errol.”

The room was dark, but Gregory was definitely a white man; even in that dim light, I could see the blood drain from his face. He put his hand on the examination table to steady himself.

“What?”

“We need the full blood workup within the hour.”

The moment he uttered these words, the soldiers tightened their grip.

“And then,” Wheeler added, “we’ll take him to the pit—one way or the other.”

I was thrown on a gurney and secured by small straps at my feet and ankles, and also by larger restraints across my chest and thighs. Dr. Gregory started almost immediately cutting off my clothes with a small pair of scissors. He was good at this but also rather callous. He cut my skin a few times, the way a sheepshearer might nick an ewe. After he’d cut me, he slapped on a dab of plasterlike material that stung—to stanch the bleeding.

I cried out in complaint and demanded my rights, but the doctor and his military aides didn’t pay one bit of attention. They treated me as if I actually were a bleating sheep.

They rubbed my body with circular pieces of cloth that they shoved into the drawer of a big machine. Every time they did this, an amber light would come on. They took swabs of my chest and neck, hair and soles, rectum and genitals. Toward the end of this humiliating examination, the doctor began taking blood. He took ten samples, connecting each one to a different tube that came out of the big machine with the amber light.

Then he began examining my body with a Sherlock Holmes-like magnifying glass. It felt as if he were scanning each and every pore and follicle. When he got to my wounded finger, he asked, “When did you get this injury?”

“About seven weeks ago,” I lied. “It was at the pottery studio. One of the wires I use to cut the pot from the wheel had frayed, and the wheel started moving fast—”

“What about this nail injury?” he asked, interrupting my overly elaborate fabrication.

“That was about a week ago. I was arguing with XT-248 on the phone and—”

“What do you know about XT-248?” he snapped.

“That’s what you called him. He said that he was my father. You seem to think that he was, too. But all I knew was that he was a twenty-year-old kid who’s crazy on the streets of L.A.”

“All clear,” a mechanical female voice declared.

Dr. Gregory, who was staring hard at me, said, “Release him and get him some gear. I’ll guess that Wheeler wants him in the pit as soon as possible.”

19

I was given a suit of blue pajamas that came with a like-

colored pair of paper slippers and an orange sash. The soldiers accompanied me down a long hall and into a wide, brightly lit chamber.

The room was circular with a hole over twenty feet wide in the center. The hole was surrounded by eight-foot razor-wire fencing. The room was over sixty feet in diameter. And it was not empty. A group of people was milling around, more than fifty of them. Everyone except for the soldiers and Drs. Gregory and Wheeler was attired in pajamas of various hues. I hadn’t seen Gregory come in, but he was there talking to Wheeler. They were standing next to a large machine that I assumed was a computer.

David Wheeler smiled and approached me.

“Dr. G. gives you a clean bill of health, Errol,” he said.

“What does that get me?”

“Come over here and I’ll show you.”

My captor led me to the edge of the vicious fence. The hollow was about thirty feet deep, and the floor was somewhat wider than the top. I could see several subterranean cavities leading from the room.

In the center of the chamber was a small child with her arms and legs manacled and connected to a circular metal brace. Her limbs were stretched to their limit, and she was naked.

“That might have been you,” Wheeler whispered in my ear.

“What the fuck is this?” I replied.

“Survival, my friend,” Wheeler said in an assured voice. “Survival.”

“Shall we go on with the next test, Doctor?” a bodiless, amplified voice requested.

“Yes,” Gregory and Wheeler said together.

Pajama-wearing people, both men and women, crowded around the pit. They gazed down in anticipation.

A brawny soldier came out, dressed only in fatigue trousers and armed with a glistening bayonet.

“No!” the child screamed. “Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t.”

The soldier approached cautiously, even hesitantly. I thought at the time that his humanitarian side was holding him back.

The child, who seemed as helpless as she was naked, looked up among the faces of her persecutors. When her gaze came to me, she stared into my eyes. I felt a vibration at the back of my neck. The next thing I knew, I felt compelled to climb the fence, to jump down into that pit and free the child. I fought the urge. I kept fighting it, but the command seemed to be taking me over.

The loudspeaker said, “Now, Jennings,” and the girl’s attention turned back to her torturer.

He moved quickly, lopping off her right arm with a single thrust.

“No!” I cried. I was not the only viewer so affected.

“Stop this!” someone said.

“This is inhuman!” a woman shouted.

Three or four voices cried out in languages that I didn’t understand.

“Please,” David Wheeler said, holding his hands above his head. “Watch and learn what it is we are facing.”

The little girl was screaming loudly, using her remaining limbs to struggle against her bonds. She was bleeding, but not as much as I would have expected. She cried first in fear and pain and then in anger.

“You fools!” she spat. “You parasites. You troglodytes. You miserable scum. You have a path of diamonds at your feet, and you shit on it and plaster it over with your stench and fear and stupidity.”

“Look,” one of the women said, pointing to a monitor at the top of the depression.

It was a close-up of the little girl’s wound. From the center, where the bone had been visible, a small hand had formed. An arm was growing back from the bloody stump.

The girl kept struggling. The hubbub among the throng grew. The girl looked at me again, but this time there was no compulsion, just sorrow emanating from those eyes.

Suddenly the soldier screamed and rushed at the little girl. He began hacking at her with his razor-sharp bayonet. Off came her legs and remaining arm, off came her screaming head. He hacked away at the pieces on the ground until two more soldiers ran in and held him back.

Grim silence fell upon the crowd of onlookers. A woman near me went to her knees vomiting. My tongue had gone dry and the back of my neck quivered uncontrollably.

“Mon Dieu,” a man behind me uttered.

On the floor below an ever-widening circle of blood spread out from the flesh of the dismembered child. Her mouth opened spasmodically as if she were trying to speak. Her eyes, open wide, once again were gazing at me.

“Cut the pit lights,” David Wheeler commanded.

There was a loud clacking sound and the scene of bloody murder went black.

“Everyone listen to me,” Wheeler was saying. “What you have seen is terrible. The soldier that committed this atrocity lost control of himself. But do not let your eyes deceive you. It was not a child that was slaughtered before you, but a monster in the guise of innocence . . .”

Is he insane? I thought.

“You saw the arm regenerating,” Wheeler continued. “That was the least of this creature’s powers. Follow me and I will show you that your fear at this moment is nothing compared to the threat you face.”

The crowd was ushered through a door into a large amphitheater. Many complained loudly, shouting for law enforcement and to be allowed to leave. But armed soldiers blocked the exits, and sooner or later, everyone sat down and faced the small circular stage. David Wheeler stood quietly on the dais, before a blond-wood podium, waiting for the outraged audience to quiet down. He never once asked for silence, just stood there looking from side to side.

Finally, when only a few shattered souls were babbling, he said, “You have just witnessed the greatest threat that the human race has ever faced.”

I remember thinking that it was the mad soldier he was referring to. But the picture of the little girl in a plaid dress appeared on a large screen behind him.

“MaryBeth Coulder was born on June sixteenth, 1990. She died five years later and was interred in the Evermore Cemetery. She climbed out of that grave fourteen months ago.”

While the crowd muttered and complained, pictures of the child’s corpse, her interred in a coffin, and finally, the coffin being lowered into the grave were flashed on the screen in succession.

A complete hush settled in amid the throng.

“Why did you have to kill her?” a solitary voice asked.

“As I told you before, Major Jennings lost his mind in there, seeing the monster that MaryBeth had become. He will be relieved. But to answer another question, she did not die under that assault. The spores that animated her corpse are still active in a vault far below this room. We aren’t yet sure, but we believe that the body of this girl will rise again from the blood and muck she left behind.”

“Impossible.”

“Nothing on God’s green earth,” Dr. Wheeler said, “is impossible. You saw the hand growing back. You saw how a wound that would kill a normal human only served to enrage that creature. And you don’t have to take my word for it. Under this facility, we have more than two hundred ghouls in custody. All of them part of an invasion force, the likes of which the world has never known.”

“That’s crazy, man,” a man with a Scottish accent proclaimed.

Others voiced their doubt, but Wheeler smiled upon them. He raised his hands to the level of his chest to ask for silence and got it.

“You are all important members of the international community,” he said. “Capitalists and ambassadors, royalty and revolutionaries—you have all been invited by our government to see for yourselves the threat that faces our world. It is true that there have been moments when the United States government has taken the initiative, and when the rest of the world has questioned our authority. This time, however, we don’t want to make any mistakes. No public bickering, no petty blame by potentates and socialists. The threat that faces our world is clear and present. Without immediate action, civilization as we know it—mankind itself—may soon be destroyed.

“So that you might see the threat firsthand, Dr. Gregory and I will lead you through the underground prison where we have detained these agents. Please, all of you follow Dr. Gregory. He’s standing over there at the west door.”

I trailed the group. Somewhere along the way, completely beyond my control, I had fallen into an insanity from which there seemed to be no escape.

Wheeler came up beside me.

“What do you think about your GT now?” he asked.

“I didn’t see him torturing small animals.”

“They don’t feel pain,” Wheeler said with an affable smile.

He stopped walking and put a hand on my arm.

“You have stumbled upon the most important event in the history of mankind,” he said. “The pyramids, Pompeii, even Jesus Christ himself didn’t hold a candle to what happens today in these corridors. Every man and woman in this bunker will be remembered over ten thousand years for what we decide.”

There was definitely a deep passion in Wheeler’s voice. I wasn’t sure if it was tinged with madness.

“Why would the government bring the rest of the world in to see something so . . . so dangerous?” I asked. I didn’t really care about his answer; I was just afraid that if I didn’t seem somehow interested, he’d have me manacled and amputated.

“We need the scientific community of the entire world behind us, working with us,” he said. “And we need eyes around the world to make sure that the contagion is not rising in some other part of the globe.”

Contagion?

“And why am I here?” I asked with hardly a tremor.

“You, my friend, are even more rare than the spores that spawn these demons.”

“How’s that?”

“You are their only human friend,” he said with a wolfish smile. “Come on, let’s join the others.”