The Perfect Weapon

Daubney and Underhill were the first two to enter the conference room, after me, and caught me up on their reports while we waited for the others.  Enemy numbers were still diminishing beyond the base walls, and it wouldn’t be long before civilian protection forces could be withdrawn.  The maps and figures looked promising, though I didn’t have much good news to give them in return.  Not much was coming out of the lab back then.

“Still no cure,” I shrugged.

The rest of the long oak table was slowly filled by more personnel, until General Brogan entered with his two cronies fumbling behind him.  He’d lost most of his best men out in the interior, when fighting was nearly at a stalemate.  Artillery flown in from the mountains was his savior, but at what cost?  I’d heard enough stories about soldiers drawing the undead into large groups (numbering in the thousands in some cases), only to be consumed in the same fire when the planes came through.  

“I’m glad we can all be here right now,” Brogan nodded, hands behind his back.  
He was standing at the head of the table, and we were all sitting except for the cronies, who struggled to get the projector system operating.  He shot them a glare to hurry their work, which was a success.  A map of the continent appeared before us, with varying shades of red denoting where clusters of disease still existed.

“The most recent numbers look to be headed in a new direction,” he continued.  “Forces in the plains have secured areas for civilian resettlement, and we’ve made headway closer to the mountains to secure a steady water supply.”

“The estimated end date for the outbreak will likely be in the next year,” Daubney piped up.  “We haven’t seen any new reported cases, or rebounding enemy numbers for months now.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Brogan replied, with a slight trace of a smile.  He turned to me, and before long, everyone at the table was staring in my direction.  “Well, Acheson, what’s the news from the lab?”

I sighed.  “Not much has changed in the last week and a half.  The rats still aren’t responding to treatment, so we’re exploring other options.”
Underhill added, “Well, we won’t have to worry about a cure if we kill all of them.”

“It’s something I’d rather have and not use, than not have and need,” Brogan said, staring him down.  Underhill sunk into his seat and avoided eye contact with the general, curling the stapled corners of his report.  

The meeting went on as expected.  The lieutenants from the coast gave their reports, Brogan showed us some more maps, and when he said that we could go, I was the first one on my feet and out the door.  The more time I got to spend in the lab, the better chance we had at a cure.  Impressing Brogan was worth all of the money and splendor in the world, and from what I heard, being on his good side got you a preferred spot in the new settlement.  Some of the contractors had been at our meeting, explaining that the site was ready for development as long as military security was present.  

We weren’t going to be out of the woods until there was no more moaning between the trees.
Faraji was in the lab when I returned, feeding a hairless rat that was minutes away from infection.  She was sincere with it, rubbing its back with her thumb while providing milk via an eyedropper.

“I hope you got some good news from the other departments,” she told me, as I reached for my safety glasses.  “I feel like we’re the only ones without anything impressive.”

“It’s the same as always,” I sighed, heading to the incubator to retrieve some of the virus samples.  One syringe was more than enough for one adult rat.  “Numbers are down, we’re a year from being free of the undead...the usual.”

“It’s better than bad news,” she offered with a smile.  I met her at the lab bench with a syringe.  “Do you mind going to the basement after this?  Jude is down there checking on the electrical system, and it’s been an hour already.”

“Did something happen?”

“I blew a fuse trying to revive Penelope this morning.”  We weren’t really supposed to name our pets, but Faraji insisted that it humanized her job a little more.  Infected rat #72 never sounded as nice as a real given name.  “Compound K3 put her into a coma that I thought I could take her out of.”

“And Jude volunteered to check?”

She nodded.  “We got the power back a few minutes after he left, but he hasn’t returned yet.”

“Strange.  I’ll go find him in a bit.”  

She tightened her grip on the rat, and I slowly inserted the needle underneath its front leg.  It squeaked as the needle passed through its skin, and a few seconds after all of the viral solution was administered, its eyes closed.  Faraji moved quickly to get it into a box, organized with the others against the wall.

...

Besides the electrical equipment, there wasn’t much in the base’s basement other than the furnace, cooling systems, and storage for weapons and supplies.  I passed a few soldiers on my way to the elevator, though the one who rode down with me asked what I was looking for.

“My colleague went down there an hour ago,” I explained, as the elevator car slowly inched down the shaft.  “He’s not the sharpest tack in the box, and I want to make sure he’s not sleeping on top of any grenades.”

When the doors slid open, the soldier went left and I went right, keeping an eye open for any sign of Jude.  It wasn’t the first time he’d wandered off for a significant amount of time, though I hoped he wasn’t down there getting his cock sucked by a nurse again.  I followed the stale concrete hallway towards the generators, hoping to see him around a corner, in a long discussion with someone.

I didn’t.

I eventually ran into the soldier from the elevator, who was standing guard outside of a closed door.  There was no room number, and no viewing window.

“You wouldn’t have happened to see anyone in a lab coat down here, would you?” I asked him.

He shook his head.  “No one besides you.”

I did one full circle of the basement after that, and walked through the halls one last time just to make sure.  There was no sign of Jude, and during my second pass, the soldier was gone from his post.

I stopped at the door, and looked up and down the hall for the soldier before I heard what was on the other side.  It was a soft sound, barely audible, but after three years, I knew what it sounded like when the undead opened their mouth.  

I looked again for the soldier, but I was the only one in that stretch of the hall.  Part of me knew better than to go looking for things I didn’t want to know, but there weren’t many good reasons for the undead being inside the base.  I looked up and down the hall one last time before trying to door, and found that it was unlocked.

The door led to another concrete hallway, though it was not as long as some of the others in the basement.  It went on for a few yards, though I noticed there was a railing at the very end.  The sound of moaning was much louder, coming from the other end of the hall.
I took cautious steps forward.  I’d been carrying a revolver on me since all of this mess started, so I wasn’t too worried about anything I couldn’t handle.  Judging by the sound, only four or five of the enemy were inside.  I could handle five, the number of bullets I had loaded.

I walked all the way to the railing, and I found them.

Maybe twenty feet below me, at the bottom of a wide concrete pit, were four members of the undead, wandering aimlessly as they moaned and groaned.  One was pressed right against the side of the wall, attempting to claw his way up, but going nowhere.  The sides of the pit were smooth enough that there was no way they could climb.

The only thing I could ask myself was, Why?

I noticed another thing down there with them.  A few smears of blood were on the floor, and it wasn’t the black stuff that spewed out whenever the enemy took a critical hit.  It was a fresh crimson, and by the looks of it, still wet.

A few stray pieces of white fabric were here and there as well, some on the ground and others stuck to limbs and open sores.

“Interesting, isn’t it, Acheson?”  I nearly jumped into the pit at the sound of Brogan’s voice.  He was coming up from down the hall, and stopped at the railing next to me.  “They do this all day, you know.  They wander around, try to climb up, and even now and then, they claw at each other.”  He looked down at them, and chuckled to himself.  “No shred of humanity left.”

“Why are they here?” I asked him, voice solemn.  “I thought we wanted all of them dead.”

“That is the plan,” he explained.  “Well, at least outside of the base.”

“I don’t understand.  We have enough samples of the virus in the lab.  We don’t need them to study it.”

“That’s not it,” the general told me.  “Do you know what we keep down here in the basement?”

I shrugged.  “Supplies and weapons, mostly.”

“Disagree with me if you want, but when the virus got out, it was a perfect weapon.  What’s to say that we won’t need it in the future, for one reason or another?”  There was something very dark to Brogan’s words, and I didn’t like to hear what he had to tell me.

“That sounds counterproductive to me.  Letting it out again would undo all of the work we’re doing now.”

“Which is why a cure is important,” he reminded me.

“This isn’t meant to be a weapon,” I said, my eyes falling back down to the four moaners below us.  Two had already noticed our presence, and joined the one against the wall in trying to crawl up the wall.  “I can’t support it.”

“I’m not asking you to.”

“Something still tells me that this isn’t something you want the whole base to know.”

“Well, you’re not alone in not supporting this endeavor, but I’d rather have them and not need them, then need them and not have them.”  I tried not to roll my eyes.  “Do you understand the world we live in now, Acheson?  Everyone is struggling for the same power, and believe me, we’re far from the end of the war.  Maybe they won after all,” he added, gesturing to our moaning friends below.

“There has to be a better way than unleashing it all over again.”

“A virus can be difficult to work with in some cases, and finding subjects to infect and send out is another matter entirely.  Imagine that our country is threatened in the next five years, because someone else wants what we have.  What will we do, when we’re already working hard enough?”  He tried to disguise a smirk, but I could still see it.  “We send these guys over to them.”

“I understand your thinking,” I started, “but it’s not something I would do.  There has to be a better way.”

He shrugged.  “There’s no one better way anymore.  What’s important now is having as many options as we can.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised by what I was hearing, but from the general’s viewpoint, he was right.  The virus was a weapon, and in the future, it could be more daunting than the mention of smallpox or anthrax.  It brought us to our knees, and it could do it again.

But was more fighting still necessary?  Was peace such an alien thing that we always had to have something new in our back pocket, to fight back with?

I looked back down to the four undead, and asked the general, “How long have they been down there?”

“A year,” he replied.

“They look well-fed for it being that long.”