Artifact (6 page)

“Want me to go with?” Alice asked, matching my pace. When we reached the elevator, she punched the up arrow.

“How long do we have until someone comes to collect the artifact?”

“A couple of days,” she said. “Maybe a week.”

“I want you to find those notes. I know it was an algorithm, but I don’t remember what kind. If I had to guess, I would say it had something to do with rotation, angular–frequency, spectral output frequency… stuff like that.”

She pulled a strand of hair behind her ear. “I will.”

I waited a moment, imagining what type of person she would have been to me if I could simply remember what she was like before the accident. I really hadn’t given much thought to the extent of our friendship. Were we just friends? Colleagues? Was there something more to it? Would I have simply liked it to be something more?

“Good luck, Lance.” She gave me a few dollars, and a set of car keys.

“Thanks.” I looked at the keys for a few seconds, a bit embarrassed. “Which one is yours?”

She turned to leave. “The only car in the lot.”

“There is one thing that’s been bothering me,” I said.

“And what is that?”

“Patrick.” I stuffed the keys into my pocket. “When he and Joseph picked me up from the hospital, I mentioned something about there being copies of the algorithm.”

I searched her face, looking for that spark of understanding or comprehension, but it wasn’t there.

“He said we had direct orders from the top that I was the only person authorized to have access to that process,” I continued. “That the data from the artifact was too important to risk losing to the wrong people.”

She arched her eyebrow. “We do have backups of the algorithm. We have tons of documentation, audio and video – even the data from our accident was recorded. We’re just missing the last minute corrections you scribbled into your notes. Is that what you think he meant? Your notes?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “It was just strange. Because when they were asking me for the sequence, and when I suggested that we look for copies of it, that’s when Patrick shot Joseph.”

She studied the ground, confused. “Compromised.” She said softly, as an afterthought, mulling over everything that I told her.

“I’m sorry about all of this,” I said finally.

She nodded, lost in her own thoughts. We stood for a second in silence.

“Get to the hospital,” she said finally. “And let’s hope you’re wrong.”

“About what?”

She hesitated. “If you’re hallucinating, then there’s a chance that I may not be real.” She smiled, moving a strand of hair away from my eyes again. It was a very confusing and intimate thing to do. “If you’re not hallucinating, then we may have bigger problems.”

I guess I didn’t think about it that way.

Either she didn’t notice that her last comment caught me completely off guard, or she decided to let it hang in the air, leaving its supposition entirely up to me. Before I could say anything, she turned and headed back toward the filing–department.

I walked into the elevator and pressed the button for the ground floor.

Just as the doors closed, I heard Alice scream–

6.

–Something screamed in the distance while I dreamt of code. Barren rocky landscapes. Variables of redshift. Prime numbers and integers. Miles and miles of cable and wire. A block of sandstone worn smooth by millennia of tectonic pressure – an ancient artifact designed to protect the delicate secrets within its system. The screams grew closer and there was a crescendo and clanging and somewhere in the process I realized that this wasn’t a dream – that someone was screaming while I lay comfortably in a bed somewhere.

I shot out of bed, and fire ripped through my torso. I collapsed onto the floor, clutching the burn on my chest. My bandages soaked through again. I lay in the fetal position for some time, afraid to move – afraid to set off another string of painful convulsions.

When the ringing in my ears faded to a more tolerable distance, I pulled myself up against the night–stand, and sent salve and pain medication spilling onto the floor.

Alice was screaming.

Why was Alice screaming?

My knees where wet – my pajama pants were soaked through, sticking to my legs. I noticed that I was kneeling in a pool of blood that led to my holo–mirror. This was my blood. This was where I bled to death
.

I rose to my feet and stumbled toward the bathroom, spinning the environment into a hall of repeating mirrors. I grabbed a roll of gauze and messily twisted it over the old bandage that still clung to my chest.

I tried to focus. This was probably another hallucination – I took in the state of my bedroom and all of its macabre – dark clots of blood were smeared all over the floor – it looked as if someone had been ripped apart limb from limb with blunt instruments. It looked like the sort of murder scene where the killer had ample time to act out his fantasies without interruption. There was enough blood to account for several people.

I doubled over, collapsing onto the dresser. The pain in my chest was unbearable. I couldn’t lift my elbows away from my ribs, nor inhale a full breath.

I had to get to the lab. Alice was screaming.

I kept reminding myself that the moment was going to pass – that this was definitely another hallucination and most likely the byproduct of some latent, corrosive brain–trauma.

I tried to pick up my pace, despite the flaming embers underneath my skin. I suppose I was being fatalistic, reasoning that I had better push myself through the pain lest I slip away from Alice to an even deeper hallucination. I could be too late – the clock of this scenario was ticking, and I didn’t know if the next transition would leave me near the lake, in the hospital, in the lab, or wherever.

I left smears of blood on the walls and banister as I stumbled down the stairs. I kicked the stack of mail out of the way and staggered outside into my driveway. I couldn’t find my car anywhere – the garage door was open, but no car.

It was still dark outside. Morning. The street glistened with latent condensation and lamplight. Birds were chirping.

Someone – a neighbor I think – sprinted past me, his bathrobe flicking back and forth in his wake. He ran toward the next house and disappeared. Shortly after, I heard a scream from across the street. When I looked to see what it was, there was a woman lying on top of a man. He was screaming – shrieking, actually – a high–pitched wail, as the woman buried her teeth into his throat, gnawing at the sinuous fibers therein, until the scream was sharply cut off. Before I turned to run, I caught a glimpse of dark fluids gushing into the grass.

Another neighbor – a woman – was running from a man whose bowels were exposed and dragging on the ground. I suddenly realized that the entire neighborhood, in every direction, in almost every house, was screaming.

Everyone was screaming.

I proceeded to lose my mind.

I slowly turned, violated by a three hundred and sixty degree panorama of gore and macabre. The neighbor who was getting chewed on across the street slowly stood up and started stumbling toward me. The woman who bit him was only a few feet away, reaching with filthy, gore–smeared fingers.

I ran as best I could, each step I was able to raise my elbows a little farther away from my body, and I was increasingly able to take a slightly deeper breath than the one before it.

As I passed several neighborhood blocks, cars and homes pushed into each other with flames, people were dragged out of their dwellings – screaming bands of neighbors shot, hacked and occasionally bludgeoned slower, dead looking neighbors. Groups of walking dead people were eating living people, only to have them stand up, completely ripped apart and shredded, and melt into the mob. A police car sped past with its trunk aflame.

A helicopter passed low overhead, dazedly swinging around, throwing its searchlight on random things until it disappeared behind a wall of trees.

I ran. The evidence of my mental state began to implode. The implications were almost illimitable. Deep down I knew that everything – all of this horror, blood and guts – was a projection of some far more sinister part of my personality. This self–describing, cannibalizing freak–show was a part of me. It was a bad time to have a platonic schism. As I ran, as my emaciated neighbors in their sleepwear reached toward me with blood–soaked arms, moaning for brains, I was suddenly unsure about everything that I ever knew. It was all isolated and surreal, but everything was functionally certain.

I could feel the pavement beneath my feet. I could feel the pain in my chest. I could feel the peeled skin on those dead hands that brushed as I ran. I could hear the emergency sirens wailing in the distance. I could see flames consuming the houses around me.

I could be anything, anywhere, and still I knew that if I stopped running, I was good as dead.

FOUR

1.

A salvo of car horns pulled me in a specific direction. I resolved to simply run in a straight line until I could find something to climb, certain that I was going to succumb to the boiling sea of corpses that gnashed, clawed and closed in around me. I apparently lived in a middle–class suburb of leased vehicles, chemically treated lawns, perfectly trimmed hedges, and wooden privacy fences – many of those who lived in these houses were either running for their lives or trying to eat somebody.

It seemed that one of these neighbors was running parallel to me for a few blocks, trying to get my attention. Then, to my surprise, I realized that the neighbor wasn’t running but driving. The passenger door swung open as he matched my pace, and the driver, who I couldn’t see clearly, screamed for me to jump inside. I hadn’t realized that the wall of corpses completely engulfed me by that point, and I had to pull myself out of the vice–like grips of those cold, soulless shells that snapped at the back of my neck.

It was then I noticed that large segments of my bandage had been ripped away during the brief struggle. But I made it inside the car, and we hit the gas.

I curled around my burn and spent the ensuing moments trying to hold onto consciousness–

2.

“Holy Christ, that was close,” the driver said, and he stepped hard on the gas. “I thought you were a goner.”

As I tried to sit up, the driver twisted his wheel to turn down another street, sending me into the passenger window – the sensation of molten glass grinding into my chest blurred my vision.

“Apologies,” the driver said tightly. “We’re in a hurry – have to make it to camp Ripley before they close the barricade. It’s supposed to be safe there.”

I righted myself before he could take another sudden turn. Which he did, just as I managed to prop myself against the door. Flashes of tumbling under the wheel–well made me press the lock and fasten my seatbelt. He suddenly noticed my bandages and said, “Were you bitten?”

“I – I don’t know.” I rasped.

“Fuck
–”
he slowed the car to a grinding halt, sending more flares of pain shooting through my torso. “Try to remember. Check yourself – arms, legs, hands…”

I looked over my arms and legs but didn’t find anything.

“It’s the bites,” he said. “Everyone who I saw get bitten ended up like the others.” He nodded at the blood–soaked bandages around my chest, which were ripped loose and tangled around one of my legs.

“It’s a burn.” I said, “I had it before all this.” I looked out of the window, finally allowing myself to see the extent of what was happening. He waited a few minutes, and I noticed his hand slowly move away from a gun that was wedged into the cup holder. After a few tense moments, he seemed to have come to the conclusion that I was safe, at least for the time being, and stepped on the accelerator again.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

The driver looked like a lost child – disoriented and terrified, dried clots of blood around the collar of his tee shirt. Besides the revolver, he had an aluminum baseball bat between his legs that was smeared with blood.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’ve been trying to listen to the radio, but all I’ve been getting for the past half hour is this–” he raised a media screen in the center console and cycled the channels – the vehicle was flooded with an influx of emergency broadcasts.

“Someone will occasionally break in to tell people where it’s safe – that’s when I heard about the National Guard at Camp Ripley. They’ve only been allowing in a certain capacity, so I was heading that way when I saw you in the road.”

We drove in silence for a few minutes, trying to catch our breath. Everywhere I looked, something was burning, or there was a gruesomely injured corpse lunging at our car as we passed.

“Paramedics started carting off the bodies to the hospital, not really understanding the extent of what was happening. The earliest autopsies revealed encephalitis and myelitis in the brain – something about black bodies in the pyramidal brainstem and purkinje fibers in the cerebellum – they said it was a novel variant of the rabies virus.” He caught me staring and shrugged, “I teach biology…”

“Physics,” I said, tapping my chest.

“You teach physics?” He asked halfheartedly, distracted by some horror on the road. “Well, how about that.”

I used the interface on my armrest to turn up the console as a woman broke in to tell us to head to Camp Ripley – that there was food and shelter, etcetera.

“Last thing I heard,” he continued, “just before the news cut out for good, was that it started with some car accident at a lake a few miles from the hospital – somebody launched their car off of a dock – and then it spread from there to the whole metro area within a matter of hours.”

The car accident at the lake. Images of Joseph’s dead body lurching toward me with half his head blown off flooded my mind.

“You don’t remember me,” the driver said. I pulled myself away from the burning landscape. The man’s face was deliriously focused on the road, sweating so much that it stained his seat. In some ways he did look familiar – mid thirties, short cropped red hair with a little blond around the temples, medium build and fit – but I couldn’t remember.

“No,” I said finally. “I’m sorry – I’ve recently had an accident. My memory is all screwed up.” I shook my head and looked away. “You could be my best friend for all I know.”

“Well, I’m not your best friend.”

He braked pretty strong for another road, and I was able to brace myself in time against the window.

We were turning onto a frontage road.

“Or you’re not even real,” I added. “You could simply be another figment of my imagination.”

“You gave me a ride once,” he said. “When my car broke down on the highway.”

I looked at him again, trying to make the connection. It wasn’t an entirely strange thought, because we lived in the same neighborhood. It’s reasonable to think that we commuted the same way to the city proper. There was only one highway, after all, which connected our small town to the network of interstate freeways throughout the metro–area. What was familiar was his look of concentration – the same expression Joseph carried when he came to visit me in the hospital. “I’m sorry,” I said finally. “I don’t remember.”

“Name’s Sid,” he said.

“Lance…”

I glanced past the GPS console and saw the speedometer climb past seventy.

“Ease up, Sid.” I said, turning back to the endless destruction that stretched toward plumes of smoke rising on the horizon. “You crash this car, we’re dead.”

“We’ve got to get to Camp Ripley–” We blazed past a string of empty cars in the right lane – they were bunched up bumper to bumper and on fire. His voice trailed off, muttering to himself about avoiding the major highways.

“Going to the camp won’t help anything,” I said under my breath.

I could hear leather friction as he squeezed the steering wheel. He shook his head. “Look, I’m going – if you have other plans, you’ll have to go from here alone.”

I nodded, surprised at how detached I felt. I knew that this moment was going to pass, like the others had before it. This moment was going to pass, and I would suddenly find myself in the middle of another abstract mess of reality. My schema of thought was slowly slipping toward desensitization – reality became a fleeting thing with which I was certain had something to do with brain–damage. I was exhausted, and my chest began to contort itself, flexing into the pain so that my elbows had finally stuck to my ribs – I couldn’t even begin to move them.

“Sid, you have to listen to me,” I said, clenching my teeth against the pain. “Whatever happens in the next few minutes, you have to make your way toward the Center for Energetic Materials in Socorro, address 801 on Leroy Street.” I frowned, trying to get this last part out before reality slipped away again – it was somehow important for me to tell him. “I don’t know if reality continues after I’m gone or if time freezes until I come back, but if I disappear, head for the Center for Energetic Materials on Leroy Street–”

“Why there and not the camp?”

“Forget the camp – the camp is a dead end. I have to get back to the labs–”

“They have ar–fucking–tillary at Camp Ripley – soldiers, doctors, officials that can explain what the hell is happening–”

“None of this is real!” I screamed. I looked out of my window again, trying to find the exact point where the sky ended and the fires began. I tried counting the number of people we passed who were drunkenly stumbling around covered in blood.

“This is some – some sort of hallucination! A fantasy!”

“Stop –” He cut me off. “Now, I know you’re hurt, and I know this is all a bit overwhelming, but you have to try and keep it together, okay? Just – Just lay your head back and rest for a little while, okay? I’ll get us there–”

I turned in my seat, gently cradling my burn.

I said, “Can you tell me what your last name is?”

He thought for second. This wasn’t a very convincing argument, considering the circumstances. It’s not every day you happen to be driving through a zombie apocalypse. Stress can do funny things to one’s thought process. A name, for example, could be the farthest thing from the immediate need to survive the next few moments.

“I – I don’t know,” He said, shaking his head, frustrated. “Just relax, okay? When we get to the barricade, we’ll get you looked at. You’re going to be okay–”

“Or what year it is? What month?”

He opened his mouth, but hesitated.

“Well, can you?”

“No...”

“You said you teach biology – where?”

He thought again, and this time he seemed a bit surprised that he couldn’t recall. “At the high school not far from my house,” he said hesitantly. “I teach twelfth grade biology at the high school, somewhere...”

“What city is this?”

He looked out of the window at suburban homes arranging a meticulous distribution of lawns and blacktop driveways. He took in the newer, clean, upscale vehicles and the yellow fire hydrants. “I don’t know what city this is,” he said distantly.

“Do you know why you don’t know these things?” I said, “Because I don’t know them. And nobody that I’ve talked to since waking at the hospital this morning seems to know things that I don’t – date, time, location, and certain names of things – Don’t you think that is a little convenient?”

When Sid was able to blink again, after several attempts to understand what was happening by divining some sense from the nightmare we were driving through, he must have lost control of what panic he kept contained until that moment.

“Who are you?” Sid asked quietly, letting the engine’s hum fill the empty spaces.

I turned to look out the window again, at the world that was falling apart around us.

“I don’t know.”

3.

“Where am I?” Sid asked, unable to keep the choking panic out of his voice. I knew exactly how he felt. He felt like he was standing on a very high bridge that was falling away beneath his feet. This was the moment it finally crumbled and broke – when he finally realized the endless open maw below him, that his painful death was a matter of seconds away and there was nothing he could do about it.

For a while I just sat and listened to him. I let what I knew was a hallucination take me – and for just a moment, I wasn’t entirely sure that Sid was a projection or not – it’s possible that we could have been sharing the same dream. It’s possible. But it was also possible that, in that land of dreams, he was just another part of me. And so I entertained the thought that I was watching my own panic again through Sid by proxy. Like I was reliving that moment in the hospital again, much like that moment in my bedroom, as I lay on the floor next to my bed bleeding to death, watching my other self in the mirror. Except this time it was Sid, and the dizzying sense of vertigo was gone. I turned back toward the window and the burning cars in the road, and the hordes of zombies began to melt together to form a type of river – a fluid movement of experience as it bled into something that I figured was this reality collapsing – and the sound of Sid’s sobbing enveloped me–

4.

“We’re going to have to run,” Sid said.

I looked around the ruins. We were stopped amid a cluster of high–rises, as the mob of death poured at us from all directions. There was a group of people, maybe three or four – I could make out at least one young woman wearing a leather jacket, who had a fully shaven head – standing on top of a long semi–trailer a few blocks away, hopelessly watching the bodies pile up around them.

“Where?”

He pointed at a lone building a few blocks away, with a sign that said
Center for Energetic Materials
. There was a single car parked in the lot beside the building, and I wondered if that belonged to Alice, which made me think about the ripping sound of her scream as the elevator closed on me, which then made my stomach lurch.

Every road and alley that Sid’s car could have traversed was obstructed by another empty, demolished vehicle, or a large pack of the walking dead. The sun was still hours below the horizon.

Sid tried to hand me his baseball bat, but I couldn’t hold it. My burns were excruciating, and I couldn’t take my arms away from my side.

“I can already see a key–pad on the left side of the door.” Sid strained to see through a pair of binoculars. “And a card–swipe.”

I pulled the key–card out of my robe – unfazed by the contradictory nature of convenience at that point in the hallucination.

“We have to get in quick – there’s a rather large cluster of them on the side of the building – see there?” He pointed at a pack of zombies that were pounding on one of the emergency exits, leaving handprints of blood.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he said. “I know you’re hurt – but we have to move fast. We get there, get the door open, and get inside.” He readjusted the revolver in his grip. “I only have twelve rounds, and I probably won’t have time to reload.”

I nodded, already dreading the inevitable pain that was about to rack my chest. I didn’t bother telling him the access code, because we both figured that if I didn’t make it, he wouldn’t have my thumbprint handy to get in anyway.