Torn Apart (23 page)

“
So we should just commit suicide?”
I said. “Is that what you’re saying? We just wait here to
die?”

“
Maybe it’s the better option,” he
answered. “Quick. Painless. The soldier is right. We are trapped in
a prison within a prison within a prison. There is no escape. No
escape from death. No escape but death.”

We were waiting to be executed. It was a weird form of
psychological torture. The end of it would be the end of
us.

Two days passed.

We were so weak. We were dehydrated and
starving.

I began hallucinating. My vision was blurry. I
could barely stay awake.

Suddenly, the General returned again. He opened
the doors to the shipping container. He opened them as wide as they
could go. His bodyguards stood behind him. The light from their
torches poured into the shipping container, sending me
blind.

The General stood in the doorway. He knew we
could not run. He knew we were too weak to run. We had no strength.
None.

We had been broken.

He walked into the shipping container. He
walked right over Maria and me. He stepped over Doctor Hunter. He
moved to the rear. He knelt down next to the Evo Agent. “You were
sent here to kill me,” he said. “You were sent here by the company.
You are an assassin. Do you know the fate of an
assassin?”

The Evo Agent did not respond. He was barely
alive. His lips were cracked and covered in black vomit. His skin
was pale.

“
Your fate is death,” the General
said.

“
Do it,” the Evo Agent whispered.
“Please.”

“
You were sent by the company,” the
General repeated. “You are the company. And all of you are weak.
Incompetent. You should’ve burned the cities. You should’ve burned
this nation. You have the power. You have more than enough
power.”

“
How can you say that?” he
asked.

“
Because I know. I now have the
strength to do things that normal humans can’t do. I have the
ability to go above and beyond the call of duty. That’s what it
means to wear a uniform. To hold rank. To lead men. If you can’t
order the necessary deaths of the few to save the many, if you
can’t make that call, then you do not deserve freedom. You are not
fit for duty. You cannot be allowed to live as a soldier. You need
to be punished. And the only punishment is death.”

He retrieved a gun from the waist of his
pants.

He gave the gun to Doctor Hunter. “Shoot him,”
the General instructed the doctor.

“
What?”

“
Shoot him.”

“
And… and you’ll let me
live?”

General Spears did not respond.

Doctor Hunter looked at the gun in his hand. He
realized this was his one chance. He raised the weapon, aimed it at
the General. But before he could squeeze the trigger, the General
reached out and grabbed the barrel. He moved faster than the eye
could see. He twisted the gun, snapping Doctor Hunter’s
wrist.

The doctor screamed in pain.

“
You have survived against all
odds,” the General said. “Yes. You are a survivor. And I admire
that.”

Doctor Hunter was doubled over, holding his
broken wrist. “What the hell are you going to do to me?”

“
You have caused death on a massive
scale. And you are now useless. A surgeon with one broken hand. You
have failed to contain this virus. To control this weapon. To
control power. You have failed. You should be dead. You should have
died a long time ago. Now you must earn your life
again.”

The General dragged Doctor Hunter out of the
shipping container.

“
Take him,” he said to his soldiers,
his personal body guards. “Throw him in the labyrinth. Let's see if
you can survive down there,” he said to Doctor Hunter, taunting
him. “Then, I will truly be impressed.”

“
No!” I shouted. “You can’t take him
away. We need him. You need him.”

“
He is just a surgeon,” the General
said. “A butcher. He is replaceable. We have other resources. He is
not as important as he thinks he is.”

Doctor Hunter screamed as he was taken
away.

General Spears came back into the shipping
container and I fully expected to be killed at this
point.

But we weren’t.

He dragged the Evo Agent out by his hair, and I
never saw that man again.

Hours went by. Days. I’m not sure how long. I’d had completely lost
track of time.

The General eventually returned. He opened the
door and left it open. He tied our hands behind our back. And then
he stood over us for what felt like an eternity.

At that point we were at his mercy. He could’ve
killed us so easily. The only reason we were alive, is because he
wanted us alive.

For what reason? I had no idea.

As he stood over us he looked like a beast. Or
some sort of ancient, mythological god. And I’m pretty sure he had
convinced himself he was a god.

One of the soldiers handed him a metallic
briefcase. He placed the briefcase on the floor in front of
us.

“
I want to better understand my
enemy,” he said. “Know your enemy as you know yourself. This is the
first step.”

He opened the briefcase. Inside were four glass
vials. Two vials of clear fluid. And two vials of black fluid.
There was also a row of hypodermic needles.

And a gun. A dart gun.

He took up the gun and then threw it away. He
picked up one of the glass vials of clear fluid. “This is the Oz
virus. Concentrated. And pure. It has caused untold horror and
death. It has destroyed this nation. Within months. Weeks. It is a
weapon, a biological, evolving weapon of mass
destruction.”

He snapped the glass vial in half. The glass
cut his hands up. He spilt some of the fluid and it ran down his
hands and his arms, and mixed in with the blood.

I backed away.

He drank the rest of fluid in the vial and
wiped the blood on his bare chest.

“
You… you just drank the virus?”
Maria said. “Are you mad? You’re a dead man.”

“
No. I will not die. This is how I
become immortal. This is how I become invincible. Know yourself.
Know your enemy. In one thousand battles I will not know defeat. I
will survive. You are not the only one, little girl. You are not
the only one who is immune.”

He held his gut and grimaced in
pain.

“
My rank. My power. I have ordered
the deaths of many people. I have killed more people with the
stroke of a pen, the push of a button, the nod of the head. Confirm
access code. Launch code. Every time I turned a key. I massacred
thousands of people in a heartbeat. This will test you. The fear
and the weight of the dead will test you. Abraham Lincoln once said
if you want to test the character of a man, give him power. You
must embrace the fear of death, the power to kill. Embrace it. Or
it will break you, it will destroy you.”

Beads of sweat had formed on his head. He began
to shiver.

“
Do you believe me when I say I
acted for the greater good of mankind? Will anyone believe me? I
ordered the nuclear strikes. Me. I had the power of God. And I used
that power. But how could anyone ever understand. I killed
thousands, to save millions. I killed millions, to save billions.
How could anyone without true power understand that?”

He threw the broken glass vial away. It smashed
against the far wall of the shipping container.

“
The doctors tell me that infection
spreads quickly. Sometimes it spreads within minutes, sometimes
hours. I have consumed the Oz virus. Soon, I will know my enemy.
And then I will know immortality.”

He stood. He was about to leave but then he
paused in the doorway. “You will know your fate soon.”

After the General left, the soldiers blindfolded us again, placing
black hoods over our heads. We were inmates on death row, awaiting
execution. We were alone in the dark. We were miles below the
earth’s surface. We were in a prison within a prison.

Doctor Hunter and Ben had been taken away. They
had been thrown into some sort of labyrinth.

Kim had disappeared. We hadn’t seen or heard
from her in days.

We had no idea where Jack was.

Or Kenji.

I think I had convinced myself that Kenji was
dead. And I had convinced myself that Maria and I would join him in
the afterlife very soon. We were basically waiting in the dark for
the General, or one of his men, to come back and finish us
off.

We were waiting to die.

The worst part was not having the strength to
do anything about it. We were so unbelievably weak. There was no
point in trying to escape. We were trapped in the deepest, darkest
part of hell. Our only option was to try and bargain our way to
freedom. Or at the very least convince them that Maria was worth
living for. Worth saving.

We spent one last night in that shipping
container.

All throughout the night we heard
screams.

And gunshots. Rapid machine gun
fire.

More screaming.

The howling moan of the infected.

We had no idea what was going on.

How did the infected get in? How did they get
through the blast doors?

Did the General turn? Was he now an infected
undead monster? Why the hell would he drink a vial of the Oz virus?
Was he really that delusional? Did he bite and infect his
bodyguards?

The noises, the gunshots and the screaming
lasted for a few hours.

And then there was silence. The only noise we
could hear was our own ragged breathing.

Suddenly the doors to our makeshift prison cell
opened. I tried to make a move. I tried to grab Maria. Tried to
run. I failed. I was too weak. I couldn’t even stand.

Maria was crying.

I tried to bargain for her life. “She is
immune! Don’t you people get that? We could fix this! We have
to!”

A voice spoke. It was threatening. Almost
mechanical. “There is no way to fix this world. We must start
over.”

“
Who… who are you?” I asked. “Where
is the General? Where is Kim?”

“
The General is dead,” the man
answered. “Victim of his own hubris.”

The man dragged us out of the shipping
container. Forced us to our feet. “The General and his men became
infected,” he said. “The General had deliberately infected himself
with the Oz virus. He believed that he was God. He believed he
would become immortal. He believed he was immune. No one is
immune.”

“
I am,” Maria whispered.

“
Are we sure about that? The virus
changes. Maybe you are no longer immune. Maybe we should find
out.”

“
Who are you?” I asked. “What the
hell are you going to do to us?”

“
I am going to give you a choice,”
he said. “I am going to give you freedom.”

My blindfold, the black hood is removed from my head.

I can see that I am in a room. An interrogation
room.

I can’t see Maria. We have been
separated.

I am sitting at a table. There is a large one
way mirror to the left of me, and in front of me is a man. He is
wearing a gas mask that has been stitched into his scalp. The
goggles of the mask are tinted. I can’t see his face or his eyes.
He looks like a monster. An alien. Something inhuman.

His shirtless body is scarred and mutilated.
His right shoulder is pockmarked with shrapnel wounds from where I
shot him.

He pulls out a gun. It was strapped to a
holster that was strapped to his chest.

He aims the gun at me.

I close my eyes and he fires the
gun.

There is no gunshot. Nothing loud. No bang. No
boom. There is a noise but it was weird. It was muffled and soft. I
can’t describe it.

And there was no bullet.

I look at my right shoulder. There is a
syringe, a dart.

He has shot me with a dart gun. A tranquilizer
or something. Although I have a bad feeling it is not a
tranquilizer.

I have a bad feeling it is something much, much
worse.

I didn’t feel the dart pierce my skin because
earlier he injected me with a sedative.

The man in the gas mask places a paper crane on
the table.

What is this? What did you shoot me
with?

I say this in my head.

And the room spins.

“
What is this? What did you shoot me
with?”

“
This is a paper crane. It is a
symbol of hope. In World War Two, U.S. forces dropped an atomic
bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, one hundred
and forty thousand people were killed. More than just killed, they
were vaporized. They ceased to exist. Ten years later, a young girl
was dying of cancer caused by the radiation from the bomb. But she
believed that if she folded one thousand paper cranes, the gods
would save her.”