Time Clock Hero (25 page)

Phoenix and Dr. Carson sat down on two softly upholstered chairs inside the small breakroom.  They faced each other, looking across a small wooden table, both guzzling from their plastic Coke bottles.  Alaia and the young girl sat on a long blue sofa, whispering softly to one another. 

With the door safely locked behind them, and another door at the opposite end of the room also locked, everyone ate something and rested, hoping to catch their breaths and lasso their wits.  Phoenix looked over at the girls, and he watched as the young girl leaned forward suddenly and vomited all over the light brown rug. 

The walls of the break room, papered up in twisting tan and beige stripes – something exquisite, he thought, only to some elitist scumbag decorator who’d probably stared at it long enough – reminded him of candy canes he’d seen in sepia-colored photographs. 

Dr. Carson was preoccupied with the last drop of cola stuck to the bottom of his bottle.  He didn’t seem content to leave that last drop behind, which he finally ended up doing, because he must have remembered he could get another.

“We’re in,” Phoenix said.  “Now what?”

Dr. Carson got up, walked over to the soda machine, and waved his card in front of the reader.  A robotic arm whirred and clicked, and another plastic bottle dropped noisily into the chute.  Dr. Carson watched the whole event without saying a word, took the Coke out of the machine, and said, “Now it gets hard, my friend.”

Alaia, trying to comfort the young girl, must have been listening.  “Like all of this has been easy?”

Dr. Carson bobbled his head, but with dignity.  “Relatively speaking, yes.”  He popped the lid off the bottle and sat down.  He took a long sip and set the bottle on the table while reaching for a Moon Pie.  “We have roughly three hours to turn on the reactors before the place goes down.”

“And we’re sitting here sipping soda?” Phoenix asked.

“There are about thirty employees who work in this lab,” Dr. Carson said, ignoring Phoenix’s last remark, “and another sixty who are family members of the thirty.”

“That’s good, right?” Alaia asked, looking at Dr. Carson and then at Phoenix.  “Why is that a problem?”

“That is precisely the problem, Detective Jenkins.  Every single one of them are, shall we say, intellectually incapacitated and roaming the lower levels of this lab – levels through which we need to travel in order to reach the reactor and the switch boards below.”

“They’re – what did you say? – intellectually incapacitated?” Phoenix asked.

“Psyke Virus,” Dr. Carson said.  “I received a phone call from my personal assistant while I was out – just before the CDC picked me up – saying there was an accident.  But I am happy to say that everyone made it to safety.  They have nothing to fear where they are.”

“They made it to safety?”  Alaia asked.  “You mean like Darkeem?  So they’re all dead?”

“Darkeem, Detective Jenkins, though he’s locked safely away for the moment, is in grave danger – as we are.  The halo drive has only so much power. But, no – Darkeem is not dead.  Not really. We have his DNA and we have what is truly Darkeem inside the halo device.  We just need to … to send him on his way.  Once we reach the switchboard, he’ll be fine – along with everybody else.”

Phoenix didn’t need to know anything else, wasn’t sure he wanted to know.  The work, whatever it was and what exactly it entailed, needed to be jump-started.  He stood up, pulled out his only remaining weapon, his combat knife, and slammed it point first into the wooden table.  “Ninety infected, you say?  And these levels.  How many are there and what do they look like?”

“Three levels below the ground level, and then the express elevator to the switchboard, the switchboard being the door to safety, the door to – how do I say it? – that place where we will wait until after Phillip Mercer is finished with his business.  Most of the levels are small laboratories connected by hallways.  Narrow hallways.” 

Alaia stood up.  “And this switchboard – you’re going to upload Darkeem and all of us?”

“And insert your DNA,” Dr. Carson said. 

“And do we have to do that?” Alaia asked.  “Why can’t we just wait it out down there?  Once whatever happens up here happens, that’s it, right?”

Dr. Carson looked at his watch.  “You’re willing to live out the rest of your fifty years in a cold, dark basement one mile below an earth-turned-to-ash and die?  The earth, Detective Jenkins, will not be habitable for the next two-thousand years – not after Phillip Mercer is done with it.”

The young girl began to cry.

“Of course, after that, with Darkeem’s mind, soul, spirit – and his DNA – we will grow him back, just like we will do with all the rest.  We’ll leave this place after we’ve been reconstituted, and we will live where we were meant to live.  We have all the people in here we need to start over.  Funny you two detectives never checked into those children I adopted out.”

Phoenix tilted his head and made a funny expression.

“Oh, I’ve saved lots of them – and even a few thousand terminally ill patients,” he said.  And Psyke, as some of my people called it, was really something designed to numb everyone.  Phillip Mercer isn’t going to raise the temperature up there all at once.  He’s going to cook them all slowly, over a period of a few weeks.  I’ve done my part -  most of those unfortunate people walking the earth will never feel a thing.”

“There’s really no going back, is there?” Phoenix said, as he rubbed his hand over his head.

Dr. Carson drained his Coke bottle and threw it into the recycling container, a good environmentalist to the end.  “As soon as we open the other door, we will probably meet some of my coworkers – though I am not sure if they’ve made it up this far.  Just down the hall, we’ll come to a stairwell.  Just inside the stairwell, Detective Jenkins will find a fire ax.”

“No elevator, huh?”  Alaia asked.

“That’s the last thing we take,” Phoenix said.  “I want to know what I’m walking into.”  He picked up the access card lying on the table, the one Dr. Carson had used to buy sodas and snacks, and threw it to Alaia.  “Why don’t you load us up with sugar – take all you two can carry.”  He walked towards the other door and cracked it open, then he slipped out into the hall and disappeared.

Alaia did as Phoenix asked.  She got up off the couch and went to work filling her pack, which now contained the halo, and then she filled the pack the young girl was carrying.  By the time Phoenix returned, three or four minutes later, carrying the fire ax, she had everyone’s packs loaded and ready.

“Your call, Alaia,” Phoenix said.  “Knife or axe?”

Alaia didn’t hesitate, not for a second.  She grabbed the knife out of Phoenix’s hand with a speed that made him jump.  “I’m the detail girl, remember?”

“Then that makes you bait,” Phoenix said to the young girl.

“Bait?”  She yelled.  “Now I’m bait?”  She paused, then she said, “Okay, where … where do you want me?”  She pulled out a pair of black, telescoping combat nunchukas, extended them, and held them up for everyone to see.  “I’ve never bashed anybody with these, but the sooner the better.”

“You know those are illegal to have, right?” Alaia said, laughing.

Phoenix looked at her and smiled.  “You bring up the rear unless I say otherwise.  When I get tired, Alaia takes over.  When she gets tired, you’re in charge.  I don’t know how many calories were going to burn getting to
the other side
, but I’ve never had to kill ninety people before.”

Phoenix opened the door to the hall and set off at an easy jog.  The others followed.  He stopped at the door leading to the lower level.  “I can hear infected down below.”

Phoenix could feel his right shoulder beginning to throb.  A pain, sudden and sharp, stabbed through his lower arm, shooting up into his shoulder blade.  He dropped the ax, letting it fall to the floor, and he let out a yell.  He leaned against the wall, rubbing his shoulder with his hand, his face contorting in pain.  Alaia held him steady, a look of dread and concern in her eyes.

“Can you move it?” Dr. Carson asked.

Phoenix rotated his shoulder, like someone doing shrugs in the gym, and he acted like he couldn’t breathe.  “My arm is giving birth to a child – that’s just what it feels like!”

“How would you know what that feels like?” Alaia said.  “A man’s only contribution to child birth is only about fifteen seconds, so stop acting just like a … a man!”

Dr. Carson picked up the ax.  “Let’s get this done before we run out of time.”

Phoenix leaned out from the wall and took the ax from Dr. Carson.  He weighed it in his left arm, then he nodded and continued down the stairs.

At the bottom, Phoenix ran into two infected.  From a few steps up, and with great difficulty, he swung the ax, five times in all, and the infected fell to the ground, slashed, gashed, and smashed.  He pushed through the door, turned around, and asked Dr. Carson for directions.

No sooner than he heard the doctor’s reply, the hall to the right became a hive of activity. 

“Alaia,” Phoenix said.  “You take the first door on the left, and you – what’s your name?”

“Liz.”

“You take the right.”

The infected came on – young, old, even kids – and Alaia with her knife, and Liz with her amazingly fast nunchukas, piled them up in the hall. 

For the next two hours, Alaia and Liz, working together with Phoenix, made their way down to the third level.  Every inch, every foot, every yard, was fought for, and the bodies continued to stack up behind them.  Phoenix, now physically out of the game, led everyone into an office and locked the door.  Liz and Alaia guzzled two Cokes each and stretched themselves out on the floor.  Dr. Carson tended to Phoenix as best he could, moving his arm and shoulder gently, trying to keep it limber.

“At the end of the hall there are two metal doors,” Dr. Carson said.  “I can activate the reactors from there.  In that room, we will also find the elevator that runs down to the switch board and to – well, to the next step in human evolution.”

“You’ve kept count on the number of infected we’ve killed, right?” Alaia asked, with her eyes closed and her body as still as stone.

“I think,” Dr. Carson said.

Phoenix let out a yell and grabbed his shoulder.  “You … you’ve just gotta love the pain.  You know?  It’s kind of like a cross between – I don’t know – bad sex and a good beating with a hammer.  I still don’t get it, Dr. Carson.  Why the Psyke Virus?  I mean, this is your baby, right?”

Dr. Carson smiled.  “Yes, the Psyke Virus is a blessing, really.  It carries people away from reality very, very quickly.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Phoenix said.

“The only thing I regret about releasing it into the water supply is that I couldn’t do it on a global scale,” Dr. Carson said.  He knelt down and put Phoenix’s head in between his hands and looked into his eyes.  “They’re turning red.”

“Red?  And that means what?”

“You have an hour before your mind is completely gone, in which case you’ll kill us or we’ll kill you.”

Alaia sat up and took a breath.  “I still don’t get it – you say this thing is a blessing, and yet it kills people who kill other people.”

“Unfortunately, you’re right, Detective Jenkins,” Dr. Carson said.  “Psyke Virus is a virus that kills the consciousness of the mind very quickly when it is injected or imbibed.  It wants to spread itself – but now, I’m not so sure.  Of course, the people who are infected have gone mad because their minds are dead.  But I think the animal instincts remain and it has so happened that – and now we know for sure – humans like food more than they do---”

“Sex?” Phoenix asked.

“Not now, Phoenix,” Alaia said.  “There are people in the room.”

“Very funny,” Phoenix said.  “But I feel so stiff right now that I wish I had a dose of Viagra Falls, you know, what they give you when you can’t---” Phoenix stopped talking and struggled to his feet, waving off Dr. Carson who had tried to help him.  “I’ve got about four minutes of fight left in me and, if it’s all the same to you guys, I’d like to get this world over with as quickly as possible!”

The air in the electrical control room at the end of the hall was hot; and it smelled of burnt oil and warm, melting plastic.  It reminded Phoenix of what he smelled as a child, when he walked into his mother’s sewing room after she had used her sewing machine all day. 

Along the walls on either side of the room, and for as far as he could see to the left and right, ran gray panel after gray panel after gray panel.  In the center of the room, sitting atop matching white cabinets, was a continuous line of black terminals of some kind.  Black cables ending in silver plugs, thousands of them, were plugged into the cabinets and terminals, and a thousand lights blinked in yellow, green, and red.

“And I’m supposed to figure this out?” Phoenix asked.

“Of course not,” Dr. Carson said.  “Unless you can figure out the air conditioning.  But that’s not an issue, not really.”  He pointed to the right.   “Let’s hope we’re alone in here.”

Phoenix took the lead even though he felt mere inches from death.  He walked forward, steadying himself with his hand on the panels.  He stopped when he heard something drop.  A wrench maybe? Some kind of tool?  The ring of it, and the way it seemed to bounce, sounded something like a piece of bright, shiny, stainless steel.

Dr. Carson seemed unconcerned, and he started to walk past Phoenix.  But Phoenix stopped him.

“And what happens if you die?”  Phoenix asked.

“Don’t be foolish.  I am not going to die – not in my own lab.”  He started forward and Phoenix pushed him back. 

“If we don’t activate the reactor in the next few minutes, then we die a dark, cold, miserable death down here in the darkness.  So if you’d stop dragging your feet, Detective Malone, we might be able to get to where we are going.”

Phoenix held up his knife.  He angled it in his hands and rotated it in the white glare of the vapor lights above him.  “I’ll lead.”

Just as Phoenix took another step, the sound of falling metal, not just a few bits and pieces, but something the size and scope of a wall, tore through the room.  Phoenix told Liz to stay with Dr. Carson, and he and Alaia ran forward.  As they did, they heard something pop, like a light bulb that had been dropped, only much louder.  The lights blinked once, then twice, and then total darkness swept the entire level.

“Something must have fallen over and shorted the power system.  And that would mean---” Dr. Carson broke into a run, coming up behind Alaia and Phoenix who’d stopped. Liz, surprised by Dr. Carson’s speed, broke into a run and followed, running into him, knocking every one down.

“I got it, I got it,” Alaia said, as everyone tried carefully to untangle themselves.  She pulled out her flashlight and flipped it on.  The LED lights lit the room better than the vapor lights. 

Phoenix saw movement out of the corner of his eye.  He grabbed Alaia’s flashlight hand and turned it in the direction of the noise.  “Infected!”  He yelled, and he stood up, his knife at the ready.  “Alaia, you’re on flashlight duty!”

Liz stepped forward, swinging her nunchakus out from her back pocket with incredible speed.  She telescoped them with a click of her wrist, lengthening them, and had them humming in the air, their hollow metal handles whistling like someone playing tunes on a pair of old glass Coke bottles.

The sound of a body hitting the concrete floor came from behind them.  Liz turned, as did Alaia, and the light from the flashlight fell upon the faces of as many as twenty infected, all of them with their arms outstretched and their mouths open.  Liz swung into action, but she lacked the speed she had earlier.  It took her as many as four or five blows to an infected’s head before it collapsed.

Alaia turned around, facing forward, and lit up the floor in front of Phoenix.  Five or six infected faced him.  Phoenix rushed forward, jabbing upward into the necks of the infected, pulling and pushing his knife in and out multiple times before they collapsed.

“We have got to get to the power switch!” Dr. Carson yelled.  “Remember, it takes power to get the reactors up and running!”

Phoenix, having taken down the first of his five attackers, slipped is knife into the throat of another.  “How are you holding up back their Liz?”

“Two down!” She cried.  “They’re bottling up, but my arms don’t want to move!”

Phoenix, already bitten, already beginning to feel the effects of the Psyke Virus, grabbed one of the infected Psykes by the throat with one hand and kept thrusting his knife into the soft flesh of another. 

When Alaia turned her light back towards Liz, Phoenix could still see.  He took down his second and then his third attacker.  The fourth went down with a single thrust of the blade into the brain, a feat he would not be able to do again.  He held the last infected off with his left hand, getting bit in the process, and tried his best to catch his breath.  “Coke, Alaia … I … I have to drink something!”

Dr. Carson, useless up until now, reached into Alaia’s pack.  He found a Coke bottle, the last remaining, and quickly removed the lid.  He turned towards Phoenix, grabbed the knife from his tired and swollen right hand, and made sure Phoenix had his hand tight around the bottle.  He lunged forward with the knife in his hand and sent the bloody blade straight through the skull of an engineer he recognized. 

“We’re clear!”  Phoenix yelled, as he handed the half-empty bottle to Dr. Carson.  Liz had piled up six or seven dead between her and the infected, and she and Alaia, with the light in front of them, backed up one step at a time.

Dr. Carson handed the Coke to Liz.  She finished it in a rush, careful to drain it to the last drop, and threw the empty bottle at the infected.

“We are going to have to run!”  Dr. Carson said, and they all turned and ran towards the end of the long, dark room, leaving the infected to crawl over the piles of dead Liz had left behind. 

They came to a corner, skidding to a stop just in front of a pile of heavy, metal shelves that lay tumbled and jumbled like something dropped from the back of an apocalyptic garbage truck.  Rolls of unraveled wire and small pipes, probably electrical conduit, lay in an almost impenetrable heap. 

“The switch is on the back wall – it’s just been tripped!” Dr. Carson yelled.  “It’s like a breaker of sorts.  We’ve got to get to it.  The reactor switch is behind us in the opposite direction.”

“Keep us safe, Alaia,” Phoenix said, and he began picking his way through the tangled mountain of wire and debris.  He looked up at Dr. Carson.  “I can do this.”

Phoenix crawled in between the shelves of a heavy, commercial-grade shelving unit, pushing a few rolls of intact wire out of his way as he went.  He crawled through the shelf and found a small, tight space, and he called back to Alaia.  “I’m going to need some light!”

“Go, Alaia!” Dr. Carson yelled.  “Liz and I have this!  Go!”

Alaia, with her flashlight in her hand, crawled in behind Phoenix.  When she reached the small, tight place, she shined her light ahead, looking for Phoenix.

“Over here!” he yelled, and she moved her light to the left.  She saw Phoenix’s face looking back, and she crawled on her knees, hurting them on the pipes on the floor.

“Where is the switch?”  Phoenix yelled.

“At the back!  Right in the middle of the wall!” Dr. Carson yelled.  “You’ve got five minutes!  Move!”

Phoenix moved a tangled roll of wire out of his way and, when he did, a pipe came down.  It hit him in the back, cutting his shirt and his back open.  He cried out in pain, but he never stopped moving.

“Are you alright?” Alaia yelled.

“I guess I am, considering that I’m bleeding from my arm and that my back feels like It’s just been fileted.  Oh, and I’m forgetting that I’m about to turn into an infected and turn around and kill you!  Other than that, life’s good, right?”

Behind them, where Liz and Dr. Carson were holding off the infected, Alaia heard the grating and creaking of metal.  She turned and aimed her light in the direction she’d come.  Dr. Carson and Liz had crawled into the debris pile, but just far enough to keep from being mauled by the Psykes.  Liz had found a lose pipe, and she was goring the eyes out of one of Dr. Carson’s employees.

“Light, Alaia, light!” Phoenix yelled.

Alaia scrambled forward.  Her hands got tangled as she tried to push gnarls of loose wire out of her way, but she quickly freed them.  “You’re almost there, aren’t you?”

“A few more feet!  Bring that light up!”

Alaia hurried, cutting her hand on the edge of a fallen shelving unit.  She ignored it, choking back a cry, and kept on moving.

“I’m here!”  Phoenix yelled.  “But there’s a shelf or something blocking me!  I can’t get up onto my feet!”

Alaia reached Phoenix.  She tapped him on the backside with her light and said, “I’m here, Phoenix!” 

Phoenix turned around with his eyes closed and he shook his head.  He began to twitch, first in his hands, then in his arms.  His shoulders convulsed, and then his whole body jerked and danced, marionette-like, hitting the shelf above him.  His head, hitting the corner of the shelf’s leg, began to bleed.  Then he became still and silent and breathed in a long, deep, sucking breath.

Phoenix Malone opened his eyes.

Alaia gasped in horror.

“You’ve … you’ve got to … g … g … go and lift the sh … shelf,” Phoenix said, as he twitched his head to the right.  “L … lift it now.”  Blood ran out from the corner of his mouth, thick, black, and dead.

Alaia, tired, weak, and frightened, saddened beyond grief, found the strength to do what Phoenix had asked her to do.  She put her flashlight in a pile of unraveled wire, aiming it up towards the wall, and she put her back up against the heavy shelf.  She set her feet apart, gripped the metal brackets and screamed, pushing up with a strength she’d gotten from where she did not know.  Metal pipes tumbled all around her, and rolls of wire and tools came raining down, crashing and banging brightly.  Tears rolled down her cheeks as she watched Phoenix bleeding, struggling to get himself off the ground.

Phoenix looked out through fading eyes, eyes that could no longer sense the glow of Alaia’s flashlight.  He remembered seeing the switch up on the wall above him.  He knew exactly where it sat and, as he got up on his feet, with metal falling all around him, he raised his left hand up as far as it would reach.  He felt the gritty texture of the wall and an indented seam, then a warm, metal box. 

His hand felt something rubbery, something soft; and he wrapped his fingers around it, recognizing the rubber grip of the lever.  With the last bit of strength left to him, he pushed up with his knees, yelling as he did.  The switch clicked upward and the lights returned.  He fell back, landing on the floor.

And out of the depths of darkness, a darkness so deep and final, he heard a familiar voice calling his name, a crying voice.  And that voice, rich and musical, so full of longing for life, instead of drawing near, caught itself on the edge of a passing breeze, or so it seemed to him, and then it floated away.