Sydney Bauersfeld waited for the cargo plane to come to a complete stop before she stood and stared out one of its few windows. She saw a one-strip airfield in the middle of Nowheresville, USA. At the whine of the large rear door opening, a black panel van started rolling toward the aircraft.
“Signal for them to stop!” she yelled at the guards on the plane. “We haven’t confirmed their identity nor told them to approach. Why the hell can’t anyone follow the goddamn procedures?”
Two men jumped to the tarmac and aimed assault rifles at the van. Its nose dropped as it braked suddenly. Other guards still in the plane readied their rifles while one of the men on foot approached the vehicle.
After nearly a minute speaking to the driver, the lead guard jogged back to the plane. He motioned for the personnel steps to be dropped so he could board. “Ma’am, they check out. Papers are in order and they know the passwords.”
“Tell them to proceed.”
The man nodded and waved the vehicle forward. Soon, the driver of the van climbed up the steps and approached her. “Miss Bauersfeld, I’m here to transport the prisoner to the facility. Please sign the release documents.” The man held out a clipboard.
She looked at it, and then at him. “I’m not signing that, because I’m not turning him over to you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re transporting both of us to Camp Pleasant. Your job is merely to get us there, safely and securely.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“That’s how it’s going to work. You know who I am. Do you really want to test me on this?”
The man thought for a moment, and then shrugged. “Makes no difference to me. The rules require two guards up front, though. The only other space is back with the prisoner.”
Bauersfeld smiled. “Finally, someone who follows proper procedures. Let us proceed.”
***
Within five minutes Larry had been loaded into the van and laid flat on his back. Bauersfeld climbed in after him and sat on one of the utilitarian benches.
He might have made a crude comment about being able to look up her dress – this strange, creepy woman never wore trousers – but he’d been gagged since the start of the trip. Evidently they were afraid of him spitting on anyone to spread the virus.
She looked down at him and stared, unfailingly meeting his angry glare. “You have no idea how important you are. However, that merely means you’ll suffer more.”
Larry tried to tell her to kiss his ass, but all that came out was, “Ihff ma ahff.”
“Shh,” she said waving her gloved hand in front of his face. “There will be plenty of time for you to talk later. You may even find it hard to stop. You’ll beg us to let you tell whatever it is we want to know.”
Larry wondered why they thought he’d tell them more than he already had, which was little enough. They’d already tortured him in ways he’d never even imagined, in ways impossible before the Eden Plague made him able to survive the abuses. Actually, the inability to respond, to taunt his oppressor, was the most annoying thing about the situation. The helplessness, not the agony. The pain had become…routine.
“We’ve never managed to capture someone from the FC inner circle. This is quite a coup for me personally. The information we gain from you could help us bring down your whole rotten structure, your ridiculous made-up alien pseudo-government.”
Larry closed his eyes and sought to ignore the woman for the rest of the ride. It would do no good to explain that, though he’d happened to be on the team that rescued Elise Markis and liberated the Eden Plague from the Watts island facility, he really wasn’t close to Markis himself. His wife helped administer the efforts of FC biological researchers, and he’d been educating himself on all manner of heavy weaponry and engineering, but he had nothing to do with FC politics or spy stuff.
Until, that is, Markis had recruited him for this fiasco.
Bauersfeld nattered on with her paranoid ramblings, things that reminded him of pre-Plague conspiracy theories of secret Illuminati or Templars or the Elders of Zion, or alien abductions complete with anal probes. The main difference was, now the nut jobs had wormed their way into power.
Hours later they arrived and the rear doors opened. Bauersfeld climbed out, and then the two guards pulled Larry’s dolly out and set him carefully upright, as if they would damage their package. This merely demonstrated their hypocrisy, like a man condemned to death being given medical treatment to ensure he was healthy when executed.
His eyes, mostly healed now, ached in the sudden glare. He soon saw he was in a prison yard, surrounded by high, triple fences.
“Go ahead and take him in for processing,” Bauersfeld told the senior of the two guards. “Afterward, make sure he’s placed in his own cell. No experiments, starvation, or head games. No one talks to him without my consent. Anyone violates my instructions, I’ll have them injected with the virus and thrown in with the sickos. Understand?”
The man nodded and Bauersfeld walked off toward what appeared to be some sort of central building.
“Why are the hot ones always crazy?” the junior guard said, eyeing Bauersfeld’s sleek, skirted backside.
The senior guard punched him on the shoulder and hooked a thumb toward Larry.
“Ah, don’t worry. Who’s gonna believe him? Besides, you’re not going to say anything are you? Man code, right?”
Larry told him where he could stick his man code, but all that came out were a series of vowels. Very frustrating.
The guard nodded and clapped Larry appreciatively on the shoulder. “See. I knew he was a stand-up guy.”
The other guard shook his head.
“Did you see what I did there?” the younger guard asked, grinning. “Said he was a stand-up guy, and here he is standing up because he’s strapped to a dolly.”
“Yeah, you’re a real comedian. Ought to be in stand-up.”
“Ka-zanga! That was pretty good, Joe.”
“Oh, shut up. Come on, let’s get him inside.”
They turned him toward the central building and Larry got a view of the camp. He saw large holding pens and smaller cages, all made of cyclone fence riddled with tangles of razor wire, concertina wire and old-fashioned barbed wire. Some had insulators holding it away from the rest, electrified, he figured.
Inside these enclosures were things that had once appeared human, living zombies. Emaciated walking corpses, alive only because the virus would not let them die. Men with vacant eyes, no flesh on their bones. Naked bald women covered in seeping scar tissue from horrendous burns. Children with both arms amputated, trying pitifully to regenerate without adequate calories.
And these are just the ones in the general population, held for the possibility of later use, thought Larry. These are the castoffs, the ones they’ve learned from. Now they will let them starve to death. Won’t even bother to waste the price of a bullet. Or maybe they’re actually collecting data on how long it takes to waste away.
And they call us sickos.
Thankfully, he saw no more after they wheeled him into the central facility. Laid flat on the ground again, the two men passed behind a metal screen and spoke with other guards.
After a few minutes, an elderly man in a lab coat, with surgical mask and eye guards, came to kneel beside him. He used one hand, sheathed in a nitrile medical glove, to lift an eyelid. Satisfied, he made a note on a clipboarded form. Then he looked into Larry’s ears with a small instrument.
I already had my physical, Larry tried to quip, but what came out was unrecognizable.
“I suppose you’re asking if I am a doctor,” the man said without pausing in his exam. “They always ask that. I am. I’m the Chief Edenologist here.”
Larry gave him a deliberately confused look, trying to communicate with his facial expressions alone.
“Edenology,” he said. “The study of the Eden Plague, hopefully leading to a cure. Like most who come in here, you believe yourself to be well, but you are extremely sick. Unfortunately, like many caught an epidemic before effective treatments are developed, you will probably not live, but you should be happy. Your suffering will be appreciated by all who live plague-free because of your contributions.”
“How’s he look?” the senior guard, the one Bauersfeld had given special instructions, asked from behind him.
“For all the world like a normal human being...well, except for the fact that it is a giant who would like to crush all our skulls. Though the mind-altering disease will likely prevent that.” The man put his tools away and stood.
“He gives me the creeps,” said the second guard.
The Edenologist looked at the man and nodded appreciatively. “It, sir. It. It should, young man. A healthy respect for the danger this organism poses is the beginning of wisdom.”
“Put him – it – in 12D,” said a man behind the cage. “Down the hall to your right.”
The two guards grunted with effort as they lifted the dolly back to an upright position. After being buzzed through a steel gate, they wheeled Larry down a wide hallway, unlit from above. A glow spilled into it from somewhere.
As his eyes adjusted, he realized the light came from cells on either side of him. Rather than being walled with steel or concrete, these were more like zoo displays, fronted by thick glass embedded with wire mesh. They were brightly lit, making it easy to see in but not out.
People occupied most of the cages. Some stood near the front, faces pressed to the glass, staring out into the dimness, but most lay on thin pallets on the floor. None seemed well fed, but they looked somewhat healthier than those in the yard. Yet, despair marked them all.
When they arrived at 12D, the door buzzed and opened, apparently remotely controlled. The two guards stepped in front of Larry.
The senior gave Larry a nasty grin. “I know what you’re thinking. I’ll wait until they start taking these straps off. I’ll be as gentle as a lamb until I’m unrestrained, and then I’ll make my move. Am I right?”
Larry merely stared at the man, refusing to give him the satisfaction of admitting he was right.
“Well, that just ain’t going to happen,” the guard said. “You should know this ain’t our first rodeo, cowboy.” He pulled out a syringe and shoved the needle into Larry’s arm. “Do you see what I did there?” he asked the other guard. “First rodeo. Cowboy. Good, huh?”
“Pretty good on the spur of the moment,” his partner answered, deadpan. “Now let’s saddle up and ride on outta here.”
Larry felt a burning spread outward from his arm, and then suddenly all his muscles turned to rubber. He fought to keep his eyes open, but they began to close and reality drifted out of focus.
Just before losing consciousness, one crystal clear thought occurred to him.
I’m never leaving this place alive.