Transformation (39 page)

52.

Snip
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“What the…” Ben turned around.

Dawn was holding one of Ben’s longest dreads in her hand and a pair of scissors in the other. She was smiling apprehensively, waiting to see what he would do.

Amazingly, crazy, evil, cruel, unstable Ben smiled. “Did you just cut my hair?”

Dawn smiled nervously as she held the long dread up and waggled it at him. She let it drop to the ground and snip-snipped the scissors at him. “Turn around.”

Ben turned with a smile and sat in the street. Dawn knelt behind him and started cutting his dreads off one by one. He was ready for the change. It made sense to him because he was putting Willow behind him and this was symbolic. It was she that had started dreading his hair when they first met and it felt right that Dawn was cutting it off.

Dawn worked for several minutes pulling and snipping. Each dread she snipped off she tossed to the side as if it were a dead animal.

“Wow! I feel like my head is going to fly off.” Ben was rubbing the uneven short hair on his head. There was a pile of dreads at his feet.

“Let’s go.” He smiled and took Dawn’s hand.

“You look so cute.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I hate dreadlocks, especially on white guys. You have such a nice face.”

Ben’s head felt cold, naked, and too light but he liked having all that heavy hair off his head. He was still surprised at himself for not getting mad at Dawn for just clipping his hair off without even asking, but he just couldn’t get mad at her. He thought it was funny as hell. She was cute. He’d never thought that way about anyone. Willow had been a good companion, a partner in crime, an insatiable fuck demon, but Dawn was his soul mate. He felt a bond with her instantly and it kind of scared him. He had never worried about someone liking him back.

“Hey, what did you want me to help you with?”

Dawn stopped and faced Ben.

“You remembered.” She kissed him long and passionately.

He pulled away first. “Come on. Let’s get going.”

Dawn walked him over to where Hope’s body lay. They debated what to do with it and decided to try and bury it. Dawn wept as they lifted her spoiling body into a vehicle they found along the way. They drove around until they found a cemetery.

The Santa Clara Mission Cemetery was a spacious plot of land with small roads leading between blocks of headstones. There were a few crypts and they found one that looked befitting of Dawn’s beloved sister. It took Ben almost an hour to find and utilize a variety of tools to get the marble slab away from the crypt. He dragged the coffin out and pried it open. He dumped the body on the grass.

Dawn and Ben heaved Hope’s body into the casket, shut the lid, and shoved it back into the crypt without ceremony. Ben leaned the marble slab across the opening and they left. It was late afternoon.

They ditched the car as the smell of Hope’s body permeated it. They found a new car and headed north. They were quiet. Dawn was looking out of the passenger side window.

“I’m kind of glad she’s gone.”

Ben grunted his acknowledgement.

“I mean, I loved her but she was a real pain in the ass. Am I wrong for being happy she’s gone?”

Ben shrugged. He was wondering where they could settle in and party.

“Well, I did my best with her and I didn’t kill her, so I guess I’m OK.”

“Sure,” Ben was barely listening. He was hungry.

Dawn liked that Ben was such a great listener. She wasn’t used to someone who just listened.

“What did you want my help with?” Dawn asked.

“Ah, don’t worry about it.”

“No really. My thing took a lot longer than I thought it would and I said I would help you. So, what is it?”

Ben was quiet for a moment.

“It doesn’t feel that important anymore.”

Dawn lightly punched his arm. “At least tell me.”

“Just payback for some assholes. But now it doesn’t seem so important. I mean I got you now, and I don’t want to waste time on all that.”

“What did these assholes do?”

Ben thought of all the shit that transpired from the time he met Rachael, that Cooper dude escaped, and how it all led to him meeting Dawn. He smiled and shook his head.

“They put us together.” He grabbed her inner thigh and dragged her lithe body across the seat and next to him. He put his arm around her.

“Maybe if we run into them we can fuck with them or something. I just want to move on with you and leave all this shit behind. We have great times ahead of us.”

Dawn smiled. That was the sweetest thing she’d ever heard.

They drove back past the runways and towards the nearest onramp to the highway. They sped up the wrong way up and onto an elevated expressway. The sun was setting. Ben stopped the car and got out. Dawn followed.

They stood arm in arm and watched as the sun set.

Ben was looking over the world. He was excited to get on the road with Dawn. This was a rare moment in his life as he wasn’t angry, bored, or high as a kite. He was at peace. As the sun dropped, Ben saw silhouetted on the roof of a large structure, movement. Dawn, his soulmate and fellow predator sensed the subtle shift in his energy and looked in the direction he was alerted to. They were both instinctive hunters and any movement needed to be run down and investigated.

They looked at each other and smiled. They didn’t even need to speak to know that they were both about to stalk potential prey.

They walked hand and hand into the gathering darkness towards the movement that tickled their senses and peaked their lusts.

53.

Cooper had Rachael slung over his shoulder and was running in the dark away from the light. He needed to put her down soon. He got about twenty feet.

“Cooper! It’s me!”

It was Jeff’s voice.

The light flipped off. The darkness was complete until their eyes adjusted. Cooper called to Rachael in the darkness.

“Come on, it’s cool.”

Jeff lit up a less intense lantern. He rushed Cooper to hug him. It was a proper bro hug.

“Oh man, it is so good to see you.” Jeff lifted the lantern. He turned his attention to Rachael as Cooper was introducing her.

“This is Jeff. Jeff, Rachael.”

“Man we have a lot to talk about,” Jeff said. It was obvious he had some unpleasant things to say.

“Where is everybody?”

“That’s what we need to talk about.”

Cooper had a feeling really bad news was coming and he wanted to stay focused on the mission.

“Wait. If it’s something we can’t do anything about right now I need to talk first.”

Jeff nodded. “Let’s go to the sofas.”

Cooper tried to explain things to the best of his ability. He told Jeff about Trevor, how he survived, what was happening to him, and most importantly what he’d said.

Jeff was quiet for a moment. Cooper let him think. It looked like it might go on for a while so he waved Rachael over to the kitchen where they could look for something to eat and drink.

Cooper had seen the blood and bodies and was worried about what he was going to hear. Rachael almost stepped on Nurse Nancy, and did step in her blood.

After a few moments, Jeff arrived. It was only a few yards away, but in the darkness it felt farther. Cooper handed him something to eat and drink. He nodded his thanks and put the stuff in his pockets.

“Come on,” Jeff said and started walking up to the roof. He spoke as he walked away making it harder to hear him.

“We’ve seen some weird shit around here lately. All the dead dropped…dead. Then these weird creatures appeared.”

“I think we ran into some of the creatures. When we were walking here yesterday…”

“Yesterday?”

“Long story. Yesterday we saw hundreds of these things walking behind us as we tried to get here.”

Rachael piped up. “Actually, we didn’t see them. They were invisible.”

“Well I saw one. Nasty thing.” Jeff wasn’t fazed or doubtful about the invisibility.

“You said hundreds?” Jeff looked at Cooper with furrowed brow.

“Looked like it,” Cooper said.

“OK. I’m going to go try some stuff.” Jeff walked towards his corner of the roof. Cooper was used to his mannerisms and didn’t take offense at the abrupt departure.

“That’s the way he is. Really nice guy though.” Cooper watched Jeff walk away.

Rachael nodded. She understood but more so she trusted Cooper.

“What should we do right now?” She asked and looked Cooper directly in the eyes. He looked away. He needed to stay focused. He’d just started wondering the same thing. But that question was answered when Jeff called them over to help him.

For the next hour they hung around doing an odd thing for Jeff here and there. The sun was coming up and standing around was boring. But soon that would all change. He and Rachael had strolled over to the edge of the roof to look over the landscape and talk. There wasn’t much to say. Suddenly, Jeff was behind them.

“Cooper! Cooper! You have a…” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder.

“You have a video chat waiting for you. It’s Trevor.”

Cooper sprinted over to the laptop. Sure enough there was a full screen image of Trevor. There was nothing else, no user interface with any buttons or icons. But what was more odd was Trevor himself. He looked normal. His eyes were their normal color again and he looked scared.

“Trevor?”

“Hey Coop. We need to make this quick. I am almost completely removed.” He looked side to side every few words.

“What?” Cooper said.

“I don’t have much time. Once this connection breaks, I will be stranded. I am on an island way south of America off the coast of Costa Rica. I’ve been able to figure out the longitude and latitude from my connection with the thing—whatever.”

Jeff wrote as Trevor rattled off a string of numbers. They were the coordinates of the island.

“All the shit that’s happened started here, on this island. They have labs and stuff here.”

“How did you get there? Where’s Ellen?”

“Ellen is back at the house. She’s fine. I got here through the virus. I don’t even know what it is. It’s mechanical, that I know. It avoids certain metals and electricity. They created it here and it got out of control, but they still don’t know how that happened. They have no idea just how out of control things have gotten.”

“Mechanical,” Jeff said low and soft. “Mechanical. It makes sense.”

Trevor was still on the screen.

“Guys, I don’t know what good I am doing here. Soon I’ll be unable to contact you.”

“Not true,” Jeff was back at the screen nudging Cooper out of the way.

“With the connection you created, I’m able to open this chat up again. You can too if you just…” But what Jeff tried to explain to Trevor was so complex, so many steps, he had no idea how to use the connection again. But then Jeff concluded with:

“… or you can just open the chat application on probably any computer on the network and look in the history and click on the entry that has a different set of numbers in front of it.”

Cooper shook his head as Trevor’s eyes widened. “Why didn’t you tell me that first?”

Suddenly Trevor was gone. Jeff’s computer restarted itself. He looked a little worried about that but let it finish. It restarted normally.

“Crap, he’s gone.” Cooper felt deflated. They were no closer to figuring things out, or so he thought.

“What do we do now?” Rachael asked. She’d been mostly quiet up until now.

Jeff was working on his computer again, focused, typing, switching between windows.

Cooper motioned to Rachael. She followed.

“He’s on to something. Come on, I’ll show you around.” Cooper also wanted to take another look around in the light of day.

Cooper took Rachael around the garage. He pointed out a few things, noted all the new things, and told her stories about his arrival and the folks that had lived here. Everything he found just added to the questions in his head and the concern he had for the others. There were at least six dead strangers all about the place and blood everywhere.

“Hey look.” Rachael pointed out over the parking lot. The corpses were gone and very little of the fine dust remained. There was no wind so none of the stuff was being kicked up. She was pointing out to the far end of the lot.

Cooper came over and saw two people heading their way. He used his scope. It was a guy with short hair and a blonde. They were holding hands.

“Here let me see.” Rachael took the scope from Cooper and looked at the couple. She looked around a bit, then back at the couple. She lowered the scope and smiled at Cooper.

“Maybe when they get here we can have a double…” She stopped midsentence and turned back, raising the scope again.

“It can’t be.” She whispered, an edge of fear in her voice.

“What? What?” Cooper asked.

Rachael handed the scope back to Cooper.

“I think the guy is Ben.” The fear in her eyes was apparent.

Cooper held the scope up to his eye and spoke as he examined the couple.

“I don’t know, but you know him better than I do.” The guy was smiling, holding the girl’s hand. Very unlike Ben from what he’d observed.

“What do we do?”

“I guess we hope they pass us by.”

“Well, in case they don’t, I’m getting ready for them.” Rachael said. “What do you guys have around here in the way of weapons?”

§

Jeff was able to use information gleaned from Trevor’s video chat to access the servers on the island. Security was virtually nonexistent. The amount of information was overwhelming but he did find security feeds and could look around the island that Trevor had spoken of. There were labs, a block of nice homes, and on another island was a town surrounded by a large fence.

Jeff wasn’t a serious hacker not by the standards of real hackers, but he could get around a system that was largely unprotected. He looked for and found records of the scientific work going on at the island. There was a lot of it and most of it way over his head, but he was able to determine one horrible fact, they were using humans for their experiments.

He didn’t like what he was reading and wondered where all the assholes came from that would set this up and then carry it out. Human experimentation was clearly wrong, but still an academic concept to Jeff until he found the security archives.

He watched footage of a man putting nude corpses onto the back of a small vehicle that resembled a golf cart with a flatbed on it. In other footage he saw people herded into the same yards nude, clearly terrified, and then he watched the various results of the experiments. The people dropped dead, had seizures, attacked each other, had sex, and sometimes they were unaffected. These made Jeff the most ill, watching the unaffected trying to run, fight, climb the fence, even hide behind their hands until ultimately they were killed by the others.

Jeff felt himself getting physically ill and had to stop looking at the stuff. But he had to check one last thing. He scrolled through a list of hundreds of folders, each containing a week’s worth of archived footage, until he got to the folder for the current week. It was the last one which told Jeff that the security system was still active. A new folder was probably created automatically each week to store the footage for that time period. He opened the folder and it was filled with files, each representing an hour of footage, up to the current hour.

Jeff opened the last day of files and played through them a high speed to see what the people on the island had been up to recently. The experiments were still going on, but at a much slower pace. And they looked different now. At high speed it was hard to tell how they were different so Jeff had to watch more of the gruesome footage.

The people herded in to the pens now were far fewer, a scientist spoke to them on the other side of the fence for a few moments before leaving them alone. Then it was the same as before and always ended in the deaths of the people in the yards. He sped the video up again and leaned back.

“Fuck this horrible shit.” Jeff said out loud as he rubbed his eyes. When he looked back to the screen to stop the video and move on to other data something caught his eye. He’d almost missed it.

Jeff had gotten used to the pattern of activities. After the subjects died in the yard, no matter what time of day it was, it wasn’t until the next morning that they were hauled away. There was always at least twelve hours of inactivity after the last person died and he could see why. It wasn’t uncommon for a subject to kick or move hours later. Sometimes sitting up, sometimes standing and walking around before laying back down to finally die. But one time the pattern was different. When the sun was almost gone, he saw a flash on the screen. He backed it up and watched at normal speed. The flash was a man crawling from under a few bodies and running off camera, away from the gate. He never reappeared. It seemed he’d escaped.

Jeff took note of this but had to keep studying the mountains of data he had access to. He understood very little of what he examined, but the gist was nanotechnology. He had access to every bit of email ever sent to or from the island. With that he was able to get a much clearer picture of the activities on the island. There were many emails sent to all scientists discussing the rules of living and working on the island, protocols for handling the subjects, what to say and more importantly what not to say. He found a few emails between individuals who were talking informally about the island, the lab, the work going on and virtually everything else one could imagine. He got more out of these emails then any of the other documentation. A few sentences jumped out at him like:

“I am not so sure that we are developing what they tell us we are.”

And. 

“I’ve asked to go home three times already. I was ignored the first time, the second time I had to fill out forms that I am sure were shredded the moment I left the office, and the third time I was threatened with the loss of my position.”

And. 

“You are new here so take my advice. DON’T go to the cages during a run. You may be tempted but you will regret it. Trust me. I thought I had a strong stomach and no conscious, but after that I was shaken.”

He watched as the number of emails ticked up in real time. He looked at a few of the most recent messages and there was reference to the cloud of swirling mist that invaded the main lab. Several individuals were there, and they were all speculating on what it had been.