Chapter 45
The last thing Billy remembered was trying to stay afloat. The river seemed to drag him under the surface like a spaceship being sucked into a black hole. He couldn’t see anything in the darkness of the cavern, and all he could hear was the incessant sound of water splashing and swirling around him. The whirlpools and undercurrents kept pulling him under, like an octopus with its tentacles around his legs. He fought to stay above the water, gasping for breath and coughing up water. Finally, he could not fight it and he was pulled under.
He saw lights above him, shimmering like holographs through the water. And then he hit something, he never knew what. After that, he saw nothing but darkness.
And then slowly, his eyes opened and he saw lights again, bright yellow flares high above him. He smelled the lingering scent of smoke and rocky dust, and felt the cold surface of concrete beneath him. He took a few deep breaths, as if making sure he still knew how, and swallowed a few times to wet his throat. His head throbbed slightly, as if in remembrance of an old headache.
He sat up and an arm slipped off his chest, but it wasn’t his arm. He glanced down at the ground beside him and saw a girl laying there, asleep as well. She wore a green and white jumpsuit with the word “Medic” on her back. Her short reddish-brown hair hung in front of her eyes. Momentarily, Billy could not remember her name.
Rebecca. Her name was Rebecca. She was a cop.
How long had he been unconscious? He wasn’t wearing a watch, but it wouldn’t have helped. He didn’t know what time it had been when he fell in the river, so it didn’t matter what time it was now. But at least a few hours must have passed, because his clothes were almost dry. Behind him, he became aware of what appeared to be a train car, smashed apart and lying on its side. Metal support beams were twisted and tangled around the wreckage like pieces of rope. He tried to put the pieces together and only became more confused. Weren’t they already in a train crash? Didn’t that happen a long time ago?
Gradually, his mind thawed, returning his memories of what happened. That mutant creature, the thing that used to be a man dressed in a lab coat but now was something else, had attacked them again. Billy fell into the water and washed down the river. But where was he now? And how was it that Rebecca was here with him?
He clambered to his feet and steadied himself, his headache receding as his mind cleared. He shuffled forward and held onto the railing for balance. He turned and looked across the destruction on the other end of the platform. He counted three separate rail cars that had apparently broken off the overhead rail and crashed to the ground. By now, the dust had long since cleared, but he still smelled smoke and noticed the telltale flickering light of fire inside one of the cars. The damage to the railing support beams and opposite platform was almost total.
Rebecca mumbled something and he looked down at her. She shifted her legs and slid her arms under her head, moving in her sleep. Had she come for him? He remembered being under water, and now he was up on the platform, so she must have pulled him out. But how could she have managed that? He looked again at the wrecked rail car and his mind wandered. Had she done all this in an attempt to save his life?
He walked over to some wooden boxes in the corner and sat down, his legs still too wobbly for him to stand confidently. His stomach growled at him, but he had nothing to feed it.
Rebecca sleepily reached out her arm toward where Billy had been and came up empty. She moved her arm and said something, and then suddenly pulled back her arm and jerked awake. She scrambled into an upright position, looking around with a dazed expression on her face, her eyes still half-closed. “Billy?” she mumbled, her voice weak and scared.
“Over here,” Billy said.
She spun around and stared at him, reaching up to rub the sleep out of her eyes. “How long ... how long was I asleep?” she asked awkwardly, wiping her face and brushing her hair away from her face. She looked at her watch. “Oh, it’s already morning. I must have slept for hours.”
“Me too,” Billy replied. “I’ve only been awake a few minutes.”
“I pulled you out of the water,” she blurted, and seemed to regret it. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”
He shook his head. “Not really.”
“You fell into the river, and I had to use ...” She looked behind her at the smoldering wreckage of the rail car, and then gestured at it feebly, not knowing what to say. “I came after you, and found you over there in the water. I climbed in and pulled you out. And then I pushed you up here and must have fallen asleep.”
She trailed off then, realizing that she was babbling and tried to cover it up. She sat up, folding her legs underneath her and put her hands in her lap nervously, unsure what to do or say next. Billy could see that something had changed in her, something serious. It was obvious in every movement she made
“You came after me?” he asked gently.
“I was scared you might drown,” Rebecca said softly. “I didn’t know what else to do.” She made eye contact and then looked away, embarrassed.
Billy looked at her and realized just how young she was. He knew that she was younger than he was, obviously, but her attitude and macho front helped mask her age. With a gun in her hand, she seemed older and more experienced. But now, sitting on the floor in front of him, her act was gone and she showed herself for the kid that she really was. She looked helpless and terrified, and her wide brown eyes made her look like a frightened teenager. It was the first time he had seen her when she wasn’t trying to look harsh and strong. It almost surprised him that he hadn’t seen through her mask long before. She was just a girl, and she came to his rescue to save his life, crashing another train in the process. And now, she was sat on the floor like a child seeking approval from her parents.
“I didn’t know ...” she started, uncomfortable with the silence. “I didn’t even know if you were still alive, but I couldn’t just run away. I had to ... I had to do something, I had to try and save you. I was scared, and ...”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Thank you for saving my life.”
She exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath and let herself smile. It was what she had been waiting for him to say, and she was scared that he wasn’t going to say it.
He had never felt more awkward in his life. He had only a hazy memory of falling into the water, but the event must have changed Rebecca irrevocably. Gone was the tough cop who hadn’t wavered when he had a gun against her chest, the resilient survivor who had used a metal pole like a spear to impale the monster just hours before. In her place was the frightened young woman that she had tried so hard not to be. She must have felt so guilty or helpless or scared that she dropped all her masks and came to save him out of pure emotional drive.
“Billy,” Rebecca said, as if had built up the courage to speak, “I have to know something. I didn’t want to ask you, before but I really have to know.”
He knew what it was before she asked. “I told you the truth when I said I was innocent.”
“But I want to know what happened. Who was murdered, and why did they find you guilty of the crime?”
“Lots of people died,” he said, his voice low. “But I didn’t kill anyone.”
Rebecca walked forward on her knees until she was just a few feet from him, then sat back again. Her eyes were wide and anxious, as if the truth would make or break her. “Tell me what happened,” she said.
Billy closed his eyes and let himself remember. He had spent the last year not thinking about it, even when he sat in the defendant’s seat at the military trial. He forced himself not to think about it even then, because his commanding officer and former team members were right there in the room with him, and if he allowed himself to remember, he wouldn’t have been able to control himself. So he just sat there and let his lawyer rely on his previously recorded statements on the matter. He had not spoken during the
length of the trial except when ordered to, and said nothing when the verdict was handed down. It all seemed so long ago.
“I was part of a Special Forces group in Africa,” he said, his eyes still closed. “There were six men in my unit, not including the commanding officer, but we’d only worked together for about two months. We hadn’t built up the trust and teamwork that some other units have. We were still getting to know each other. We did a bunch of missions in Ethiopia to Somalia. Our commander liked to think he was some kind of commando, even though he only made Sergeant the year before. We were his first unit as a CO.”
Billy remembered the man’s face. He was always ready for a fight, sometimes having to pick one with a stranger if none would come to him. He wanted to make a name for himself, he wanted to be some kind of legend. Billy equated him with an ambitious news reporter trying desperately to break open some big news story. He was that type of person, which was to say he was the wrong sort of person to be commanding a group of soldiers.
“We kept getting sent into these little villages in the jungle to root out rebels and guerrillas, but we never found anyone. The villages were just full of old men and women, farming or hunting or whatever people in those villages did. We never found rebels, we never even saw evidence that rebels had been there. This went on for weeks, and our CO was getting frustrated. He was itching to find some hidden rebel camp and make a big impression on his superiors.”
Billy remembered it all as if it had just happened. He felt like he wasn’t talking at all, as if the voice was coming from somewhere else to describe the events of that fateful day.
“We came upon another village one afternoon, and the CO had us round everyone up and get them all in the center of town. We searched every hut and didn’t find a thing. No weapons, no radios, no stockpiled supplies, nothing. The CO was furious. We spent weeks searching villages and he had nothing to show for it, nothing to show his bosses in the Army brass.
“Some old lady in the village was crying about something. I didn’t know the language and couldn’t understand what they were saying, but our CO ordered one of the other men to shut her up. So he hit her with the stock of his gun. Not even that hard, just enough to knock her down.”
Billy felt his hands shaking as he spoke. His hands had shook that day as well, and it was all coming back to him now; the stifling heat, the buzz of the flies, the haggard looks on the faces of the African villagers, the sound of his CO’s voice.
“A young kid came out of the group and attacked the CO. I guess he must have been the old lady’s son or grandson, but when she went down he went right for the CO. I remember thinking that something bad was going to happen, but I couldn’t move, I just stared at it. The CO didn’t even hesitate, he just pulled out his pistol and shot the kid right in the head.”
Rebecca gasped, but Billy kept going as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “He announced that the villagers were aiding the enemy, that they were all rebel sympathizers. Honestly, I don’t know if the kid set him off or not. But he said that all the villagers were rebels and he ordered us to open fire. He ordered us to open fire on a group of unarmed villagers.”
Billy took a breath then, and his voice dropped even lower, so low that Rebecca had to strain to hear him. “And so the other guys all opened fire. They just raised their guns and pulled the trigger, all of them, like they didn’t even care. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and I just remember screaming at the top of my lungs for them to stop. I ran to the CO and yelled at him, I don’t even remember what I said. I tried to stop one of the other guys from shooting, but the CO grabbed me and held my arms back as one of the other guys hit me and knocked me out.”
“The next thing I remember was lying on the dirt with my hands tied behind my back. I could see the villagers, and they were all dead. There must have been thirty or forty of them, just lying in a pile like an open grave. I heard voices behind me, the CO and my former team members, talking about what to do with me.”
He looked up into Rebecca’s eyes and cleared his throat. When he spoke again, his voice had returned to normal volume, and he seemed calm and steady. “They blamed me for the whole thing. They testified that I opened fire first. The CO himself testified that he ordered me to stop and I refused. They said I killed the whole village.”
“But they could check the bodies,” Rebecca said in disbelief. “They could check the other soldiers’ guns. They would know it was all a lie.”
“Sure they could, but why bother?” Billy said. “What would be the point in incriminating an entire squad of men if you could blame it all on one? They all knew what happened. It didn’t take a genius to see that I didn’t have enough bullets in my gun to mow down forty people. But in court, it was their word against mine.”
“But the evidence,” Rebecca insisted.
“Like I said, military courts don’t follow the same rules. You aren’t innocent until proven guilty. You don’t have the benefit of the doubt. All my former teammates testified against me, and they convicted me based on that alone. The whole thing was pushed under the rug. They didn’t want to admit what really happened. It was all politics to protect the CO and the rest of the squad. I was just the scapegoat.”
Rebecca looked away and shook her head. “I just can’t believe that they would do that to you.”
“They had to, because I disobeyed my orders. If I opened fire with the others, I would have been fine and nobody would have gotten in trouble. They would have written it off as a successful mission. We discovered a rebel base and eliminated a bunch of rebels. But I wouldn’t go along with it, so they had to make me look like the guilty one to shift the blame. They couldn’t trust me to keep my mouth shut, so they just accused me of the whole thing.”
“That’s awful.”
“Tell me about it. I was on my way to serving a life sentence.”
Rebecca got to her feet and continued to fidget with her hands. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and looked nervously at the ground. “Billy, I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “About everything. I’m sorry I brought you into this, and I’m sorry about the things I said to you. I just didn’t know –”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t trust you,” she finished. “I should have, right from the start. I should have trusted you. You’ve saved my life more than once.”
“You’ve saved mine too,” he reminded her. “We’re even on that score.”
“Billy, I ...” She took a hesitant step forward and put her hand on his shoulder, acting as if she expected him to brush it off. “I want to help you if I can. If we get out of this, I promise I’ll do everything I can.”
He looked up at her and saw that she meant it. But it was getting too personal for him. Telling her his story was difficult enough. He stood up, gently removing her hand from his shoulder, and took a few steps away. “We should probably start moving,” he said. “That creature might still be after us, and we don’t have weapons anymore.”
Rebecca crossed her arms over her chest as if cold. “I’m hungry too. What chance do you think we’ll find food here?”
“If this place has been abandoned as long as that lab, we won’t find anything.”
Rebecca seemed to recall something, and said, “You know, I never turned these lights on. They were on when I got here.”
“That’s strange. If there was someone here, they would have come to investigate this mess by now,” he said, gesturing to the demolished rail car.
Rebecca shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t hear it.”
“Yeah, and maybe they wouldn’t have heard an earthquake.”
He sifted through the piles of broken crates and garbage and found a crowbar. Testing its weight, he patted it against his palm like a batter in the on-deck circle. Rebecca followed his lead and found a piece of broken metal with a jagged edge. She wrapped some old cloth around t
he base to serve as a handle and swung it experimentally. Their crude weapons would not do much good against the monster if it showed up again, but they might be enough to stop a zombie. Although they hadn’t encountered a zombie since they left the passenger train.
The walkway above the platforms led to doors on the right and left. Billy went up the stairs, with Rebecca close behind, and paused at the top step. “Which way?” he asked.
Rebecca looked left, then right, and then left again. Billy was almost amused by it, because he hadn’t expected a well-thought-out answer. Finally, she pointed to her left, but seemed unsure about her choice.
“Are you sure?” he asked, smiling.
She looked back to the right and started to say something, but when she glanced up and saw the look on his face, she realized he was kidding her. She smiled back and shrugged. “I guess I’m sure.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
They went through the doors to the left and entered a long, straight hallway much like the ones at the other end of the cavern. Pipes and vents ran the length of the ceiling and were covered in cobwebs and dust. The ugly yellow paint on the walls was stained and peeling. They had gone maybe twenty feet before Billy stopped and raised his hand to his mouth, grimacing in disgust.
“What is that smell?” Rebecca asked, quickly lifting the collar of her shirt to cover her nose and mouth. “It smells terrible.”
Billy couldn’t place it exactly, but he could take a guess. He knew the smell of death and decay from his time in the jungles of Africa, and the smell here reminded him of that same rotten stink. But there was an overlying acrid odor that he couldn’t identify. Whatever it was, it was getting thicker the farther they walked.
They came to set of doors on the left side of the hallway, and Billy took a chance by nudging one open and peeking inside. The room was dark and quiet, so Billy pushed the door all the way open to let some light pour inside.
It was an office, or at least it used to be. Worn, scratched desks were arranged haphazardly around the room, and a some cheap plastic chairs were stacked in the corner. Old filing cabinets were lined against one wall, some of them with drawers hanging open.
Rebecca came in and switched on the lights. Billy thought about stopping her, but guessed that it didn’t matter. But of course it did matter, since the monster might still be alive. If several dozen rounds of ammo did not kill it, Billy doubted that drowning would either.
Rebecca riffled through some of the papers in the filing cabinets, but soon gave up. “It’s mostly old banking statements and accounting files. Some of are dated from the 1970s,” she said, shifting her attention to random stacks of paper on a narrow table in the corner. She flipped through them, just letting them flutter to the floor when she was done. After a minute or two, it looked as if she was standing in the middle of a snow drift. Billy, beginning to feel uncomfortable just standing there, looked out into the hallway, but he neither heard nor saw anything.
“Eureka,” Rebecca said suddenly, holding up a few sheets of paper. “I found us a map of this place.”
Billy was by her side in a second. The papers were actually diagrams showing the emergency exits, but it served well enough. There were about a dozen sheets of paper, each one apparently showing a different floor. Billy’s mind reeled at the thought.
Looking at the maps, he saw that it was much, much larger than he had envisioned. It couldn’t even be considered a single building, it was more like a industrial compound or a factory complex. On the map, the room they were in was not even labeled, and took up about a square centimeter of space. The rest of the sheet was covered in a maze of criss-crossing hallways and supply rooms and maintenance areas, some labeled and some not. He flipped to the next page, the floor below them he guessed, and immediately noticed three large areas, each labeled simply “Disposal Pit.”
“Can you figure out how to get us out of here?” Rebecca asked, looking over his shoulder.
Billy traced his finger along the winding hallways, trying to see the quickest way to get to a staircase or, hopefully, a working elevator. Considering the number of floors in the complex, there was no shortage of either. Some of them did not go all the way to the top, though, and there seemed to be numerous places where the only way to go to an upper level was to first go down and then back up a separate set of stairs. Billy had to stand and examine the map for a few minutes before he could come up with a route that might take them out.
He neglected to mention that if Rebecca hadn’t destroyed the rail car, they could have driven it back to the lab and returned the way they had come, now that the monster wasn’t there to block the way.
“Okay,” he said finally, pointing at the map so Rebecca could follow his logic. “If we head down this hall and go this way, we can go through this room to get here, and then can use this elevator here to get to the third level. Then we have to go around these rooms and go along this long hallway to reach this staircase. That should take to the ground level, at least I hope it does. We’d have to go around this way to get to the front door.”
“It looks like they built this place to keep people from ever finding their way out,” Rebecca noted. “It’ll take us an hour to go through all that.”
“I guess it was their way of keeping their employees from leaving,” Billy said, trying to make a joke. He scanned the map once more to get a better idea of how to get to the elevator, which was labeled “Service Lift” on the map. It appeared to be an industrial elevator for hauling heavy machinery up and down throughout the factory, and Billy just prayed that it was still functional. If not, they would have to try to climb it like the other one. If that was not an option, he would have to consult the map and find another way.
“Let’s get going then,” Rebecca said, urging him on.
They went into the hallway and continued until they came to a T intersection. Billy instructed them to head right and they continued on for several minutes, turning left and right as Billy consulted and checked the map. After they had gotten thoroughly turned around, they came to a set of red doors at the end of the hall.
“Through here,” Billy said confidently, nodding as their surroundings matched what the map showed. He pushed the doors open and walked through, his attention on the paper in front of him, not on the ground in front of him.
“Look out!” Rebecca cried out, a split-second too late.
Billy took one step and his foot hit nothing but empty air. Before he could even attempt to regain his balance, he fell through the gaping hole in the floor and fell ten feet to the pile of rubble and scrap metal below. He twisted as he fell and landed hard on his side, landing on a piece of metal grating that once probably served as a floor, now slanted upward at a sharp angle. He rolled down the rest of the way until he hit the bottom. Bits of rock and debris tumbled down after him, but aside from a sore shoulder, he wasn’t injured. He looked back up the hole at Rebecca, who in turn was staring back down at him.
“Billy, are you okay?” she called down.
As far as Billy could tell, something broke through the floor on the level above Rebecca, crashed all the way through that level, and finally stopped where Billy was, effectively knocking a solid hole through two entire floors. He couldn’t tell what might have caused the collapse, since it was now completely buried in a ton of twisted metal. He considered himself lucky that he hadn’t fallen from the next level up, or he’d probably be dead.
“I’m okay,” he said, sitting up. “I’ll have to figure out how to get back to where you are. Just stay where you are for now.”
“Billy, we can’t go this way. The whole floor here is caved in. We can’t get to the other side of the room.”
He didn’t want to hear that. If that way was blocked, he would have to come up with an entirely new plan to escape. He needed to look at the map again, but just then he didn’t have it. He looked around him and saw a scrap of paper from behind a twiste
d chunk of metal. He leaned over to grab it, and just then did he notice where he was.
Just beyond the pile of rubble, there was a wide metal railing overlooking a huge enclosed square basin like a gigantic empty swimming pool. He hadn’t really thought about the smell that he and Rebecca noticed when they first entered the complex, but he suddenly knew where it came from. He was right outside one of the disposal areas listed on the map.
Although calling it an open grave might have been more accurate. That’s what it was, an enormous open grave.
He couldn’t keep his eyes from the horrific scene before him. “Rebecca,” he called up to her. “I think you’ll have to make your way down here. I don’t want to be the only one to see this.”