The Wave Read online

  I let my weight go dead, but that had little effect on the men executing their process.

  While they dragged me along I thought about my sister. I wondered if she were doing well after the surgery, if she had survived. I decided that if she died while Wheeler had me locked away in his paranoid dugout, I would come after him. I would come up on him one day in surprise and shoot him through his left eye.

  The hatred that rose up in me, the anger that burned in my heart—it wasn’t mine. I knew that as clearly as I knew the difference between my foot and the sock covering it. But for a moment rage and lust for retribution were all I knew.

  We came to an infirmary with a long table and a few empty cots. The light here was low, but I could make out a man in a white doctor’s smock that was open, revealing his suit pants. He was a middle-aged man with small eyes and huge hands.

  “What’s the goddamn emergency, Wheeler?” the doctor said. “I’ve been coordinating the presentation without you.”

  “Dr. Gregory, I’d like you to meet Errol Porter, the son of XT-248.”

  “I thought we weren’t notifying the families, David?” the doctor replied.

  “XT-248 called Errol.”

  The room was dark, but Gregory was definitely a white man; even in that dim light, I could see the blood drain from his face. He put his hand on the examination table to steady himself.

  “What?”

  “We need the full blood workup within the hour.”

  The moment he uttered these words, the soldiers tightened their grip.

  “And then,” Wheeler added, “we’ll take him to the pit—one way or the other.”

  I was thrown on a gurney and secured by small straps at my feet and ankles, and also by larger restraints across my chest and thighs. Dr. Gregory started almost immediately cutting off my clothes with a small pair of scissors. He was good at this but also rather callous. He cut my skin a few times, the way a sheepshearer might nick an ewe. After he’d cut me, he slapped on a dab of plasterlike material that stung—to stanch the bleeding.

  I cried out in complaint and demanded my rights, but the doctor and his military aides didn’t pay one bit of attention. They treated me as if I actually were a bleating sheep.

  They rubbed my body with circular pieces of cloth that they shoved into the drawer of a big machine. Every time they did this, an amber light would come on. They took swabs of my chest and neck, hair and soles, rectum and genitals. Toward the end of this humiliating examination, the doctor began taking blood. He took ten samples, connecting each one to a different tube that came out of the big machine with the amber light.

  Then he began examining my body with a Sherlock Holmes-like magnifying glass. It felt as if he were scanning each and every pore and follicle. When he got to my wounded finger, he asked, “When did you get this injury?”

  “About seven weeks ago,” I lied. “It was at the pottery studio. One of the wires I use to cut the pot from the wheel had frayed, and the wheel started moving fast—”

  “What about this nail injury?” he asked, interrupting my overly elaborate fabrication.

  “That was about a week ago. I was arguing with XT-248 on the phone and—”

  “What do you know about XT-248?” he snapped.

  “That’s what you called him. He said that he was my father. You seem to think that he was, too. But all I knew was that he was a twenty-year-old kid who’s crazy on the streets of L.A.”

  “All clear,” a mechanical female voice declared.

  Dr. Gregory, who was staring hard at me, said, “Release him and get him some gear. I’ll guess that Wheeler wants him in the pit as soon as possible.”

  19

  I was given a suit of blue pajamas that came with a like-

  colored pair of paper slippers and an orange sash. The soldiers accompanied me down a long hall and into a wide, brightly lit chamber.

  The room was circular with a hole over twenty feet wide in the center. The hole was surrounded by eight-foot razor-wire fencing. The room was over sixty feet in diameter. And it was not empty. A group of people was milling around, more than fifty of them. Everyone except for the soldiers and Drs. Gregory and Wheeler was attired in pajamas of various hues. I hadn’t seen Gregory come in, but he was there talking to Wheeler. They were standing next to a large machine that I assumed was a computer.

  David Wheeler smiled and approached me.

  “Dr. G. gives you a clean bill of health, Errol,” he said.

  “What does that get me?”

  “Come over here and I’ll show you.”

  My captor led me to the edge of the vicious fence. The hollow was about thirty feet deep, and the floor was somewhat wider than the top. I could see several subterranean cavities leading from the room.

  In the center of the chamber was a small child with her arms and legs manacled and connected to a circular metal brace. Her limbs were stretched to their limit, and she was naked.

  “That might have been you,” Wheeler whispered in my ear.

  “What the fuck is this?” I replied.

  “Survival, my friend,” Wheeler said in an assured voice. “Survival.”

  “Shall we go on with the next test, Doctor?” a bodiless, amplified voice requested.

  “Yes,” Gregory and Wheeler said together.

  Pajama-wearing people, both men and women, crowded around the pit. They gazed down in anticipation.

  A brawny soldier came out, dressed only in fatigue trousers and armed with a glistening bayonet.

  “No!” the child screamed. “Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t.”

  The soldier approached cautiously, even hesitantly. I thought at the time that his humanitarian side was holding him back.

  The child, who seemed as helpless as she was naked, looked up among the faces of her persecutors. When her gaze came to me, she stared into my eyes. I felt a vibration at the back of my neck. The next thing I knew, I felt compelled to climb the fence, to jump down into that pit and free the child. I fought the urge. I kept fighting it, but the command seemed to be taking me over.

  The loudspeaker said, “Now, Jennings,” and the girl’s attention turned back to her torturer.

  He moved quickly, lopping off her right arm with a single thrust.

  “No!” I cried. I was not the only viewer so affected.

  “Stop this!” someone said.

  “This is inhuman!” a woman shouted.

  Three or four voices cried out in languages that I didn’t understand.

  “Please,” David Wheeler said, holding his hands above his head. “Watch and learn what it is we are facing.”

  The little girl was screaming loudly, using her remaining limbs to struggle against her bonds. She was bleeding, but not as much as I would have expected. She cried first in fear and pain and then in anger.

  “You fools!” she spat. “You parasites. You troglodytes. You miserable scum. You have a path of diamonds at your feet, and you shit on it and plaster it over with your stench and fear and stupidity.”

  “Look,” one of the women said, pointing to a monitor at the top of the depression.

  It was a close-up of the little girl’s wound. From the center, where the bone had been visible, a small hand had formed. An arm was growing back from the bloody stump.

  The girl kept struggling. The hubbub among the throng grew. The girl looked at me again, but this time there was no compulsion, just sorrow emanating from those eyes.

  Suddenly the soldier screamed and rushed at the little girl. He began hacking at her with his razor-sharp bayonet. Off came her legs and remaining arm, off came her screaming head. He hacked away at the pieces on the ground until two more soldiers ran in and held him back.

  Grim silence fell upon the crowd of onlookers. A woman near me went to her knees vomiting. My tongue had gone dry and the back of my neck quivered uncontrollably.

  “Mon Dieu,” a man behind me uttered.

  On the floor below an ever-widening circle of b
lood spread out from the flesh of the dismembered child. Her mouth opened spasmodically as if she were trying to speak. Her eyes, open wide, once again were gazing at me.

  “Cut the pit lights,” David Wheeler commanded.

  There was a loud clacking sound and the scene of bloody murder went black.

  “Everyone listen to me,” Wheeler was saying. “What you have seen is terrible. The soldier that committed this atrocity lost control of himself. But do not let your eyes deceive you. It was not a child that was slaughtered before you, but a monster in the guise of innocence . . .”

  Is he insane? I thought.

  “You saw the arm regenerating,” Wheeler continued. “That was the least of this creature’s powers. Follow me and I will show you that your fear at this moment is nothing compared to the threat you face.”

  The crowd was ushered through a door into a large amphitheater. Many complained loudly, shouting for law enforcement and to be allowed to leave. But armed soldiers blocked the exits, and sooner or later, everyone sat down and faced the small circular stage. David Wheeler stood quietly on the dais, before a blond-wood podium, waiting for the outraged audience to quiet down. He never once asked for silence, just stood there looking from side to side.

  Finally, when only a few shattered souls were babbling, he said, “You have just witnessed the greatest threat that the human race has ever faced.”

  I remember thinking that it was the mad soldier he was referring to. But the picture of the little girl in a plaid dress appeared on a large screen behind him.

  “MaryBeth Coulder was born on June sixteenth, 1990. She died five years later and was interred in the Evermore Cemetery. She climbed out of that grave fourteen months ago.”

  While the crowd muttered and complained, pictures of the child’s corpse, her interred in a coffin, and finally, the coffin being lowered into the grave were flashed on the screen in succession.

  A complete hush settled in amid the throng.

  “Why did you have to kill her?” a solitary voice asked.

  “As I told you before, Major Jennings lost his mind in there, seeing the monster that MaryBeth had become. He will be relieved. But to answer another question, she did not die under that assault. The spores that animated her corpse are still active in a vault far below this room. We aren’t yet sure, but we believe that the body of this girl will rise again from the blood and muck she left behind.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Nothing on God’s green earth,” Dr. Wheeler said, “is impossible. You saw the hand growing back. You saw how a wound that would kill a normal human only served to enrage that creature. And you don’t have to take my word for it. Under this facility, we have more than two hundred ghouls in custody. All of them part of an invasion force, the likes of which the world has never known.”

  “That’s crazy, man,” a man with a Scottish accent proclaimed.

  Others voiced their doubt, but Wheeler smiled upon them. He raised his hands to the level of his chest to ask for silence and got it.

  “You are all important members of the international community,” he said. “Capitalists and ambassadors, royalty and revolutionaries—you have all been invited by our government to see for yourselves the threat that faces our world. It is true that there have been moments when the United States government has taken the initiative, and when the rest of the world has questioned our authority. This time, however, we don’t want to make any mistakes. No public bickering, no petty blame by potentates and socialists. The threat that faces our world is clear and present. Without immediate action, civilization as we know it—mankind itself—may soon be destroyed.

  “So that you might see the threat firsthand, Dr. Gregory and I will lead you through the underground prison where we have detained these agents. Please, all of you follow Dr. Gregory. He’s standing over there at the west door.”

  I trailed the group. Somewhere along the way, completely beyond my control, I had fallen into an insanity from which there seemed to be no escape.

  Wheeler came up beside me.

  “What do you think about your GT now?” he asked.

  “I didn’t see him torturing small animals.”

  “They don’t feel pain,” Wheeler said with an affable smile.

  He stopped walking and put a hand on my arm.

  “You have stumbled upon the most important event in the history of mankind,” he said. “The pyramids, Pompeii, even Jesus Christ himself didn’t hold a candle to what happens today in these corridors. Every man and woman in this bunker will be remembered over ten thousand years for what we decide.”

  There was definitely a deep passion in Wheeler’s voice. I wasn’t sure if it was tinged with madness.

  “Why would the government bring the rest of the world in to see something so . . . so dangerous?” I asked. I didn’t really care about his answer; I was just afraid that if I didn’t seem somehow interested, he’d have me manacled and amputated.

  “We need the scientific community of the entire world behind us, working with us,” he said. “And we need eyes around the world to make sure that the contagion is not rising in some other part of the globe.”

  Contagion?

  “And why am I here?” I asked with hardly a tremor.

  “You, my friend, are even more rare than the spores that spawn these demons.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You are their only human friend,” he said with a wolfish smile. “Come on, let’s join the others.”

  20

  Wheeler and Gregory led us down a wide tunnel that spiraled like a corkscrew into the earth. Every twenty feet or so was an armed sentry standing against one side of the passageway or the other. These uniformed soldiers all carried automatic weapons and wore body armor.

  At last we came to a gigantic metal door that swung inward as we approached. Dr. Gregory ushered the crowd into a darkly lit passageway that was at least twenty yards wide, went on for hundreds of yards, and was lined with glass-walled cells on either side.

  Wheeler addressed us when we reached the first compartment on the left, a blue chamber cut from stone and sealed by an extra-thick plate of glass.

  “This man was dead and buried seven years ago,” Wheeler said.

  The prisoner was naked and in his mid-twenties. He was sitting on a stool, the only piece of furniture in the twenty-foot-wide room, and looking down at a spot between his feet.

  “You have proof of this?” a woman with a German accent asked.

  “There,” Wheeler said, pointing at a small table standing outside the glass cage. “Those folders give all the information you will need to believe our claims. There are fingerprints and gene testing, retinal scans where they have been possible, and family and public photographs of the prisoners in life and in death.”

  The audience lined up to see the folders, but I stayed back. I didn’t care what they said. I was worried about my sister and, at the same time, numbed by the notion that my father had possibly come back to life.

  “What’s so special about this prisoner, other than these documents?” a Spanish-sounding dark-skinned man asked.

  “The atmosphere in that cell is fifty percent carbon monoxide,” Wheeler said with a smirk.

  “No.”

  “Arnold,” Wheeler said to one of the soldier-aides. “Admit the bird.”

  The soldier went in through a door on one side of the blue cell and came out with a small cage that contained a gray dove. He went to the other side of the glass wall and opened a hatch in the stone. Placing the fluttering bird in the small space, he closed the tiny door and then pushed a button that opened a panel inside the cage, allowing the bird to enter. The dove took wing, crossed half the width of the room, and then fell dead before the naked man.

  The prisoner picked up the little corpse and stared at it a moment. Then he looked up at me. He shook his head, dropped the dove, and returned his attention to the space between his bare feet.

  “Carbon monoxide,” a bl
ack man with a French accent said. “How is that possible?”

  “These creatures are almost invulnerable to harm,” Wheeler replied. “They bleed but don’t die. They choke but don’t expire. They are extraordinarily strong, and for all intents and purposes, they don’t age.”

  “What are they?” the man asked.

  “Demons from hell.”

  We visited forty-seven cages in all. There were male and female prisoners. Some in subzero environments, others in temperatures above anything a human could survive. One man was completely submerged in water, while others were in various forms of poisonous atmospheres. All of them were alive and conscious, but none spoke, unlike the child who had been slaughtered by the soldier.

  The tour took over four hours. No one complained or asked to leave. I don’t even remember anyone asking for a toilet, though someone must have.

  I was sickened by the display. So far Wheeler hadn’t proved the threat of these creatures. All he had shown was that they were superior and helpless. It was as if a bunch of apes had captured a heavenly host of angels and were torturing them for their beauty.

  When we returned to the auditorium, the crowd was nearly silent.

  “There you have it,” David Wheeler announced from the dais. “You men and women represent nations and consortiums from around the globe. But more important, you are the last hope for humankind. If these creatures are allowed a foothold in our world, they will devour us.”

  “Where are they from?” a woman asked in a tremulous voice.

  As if her question had been planned, the lights went down and the screen behind Wheeler lit up. An image appeared, containing a few dozen small amoeba-like creatures, each of which had triangular trunks surrounded by myriad waving tentacles. The organisms were swimming around in a clear liquid.

  “These are the microorganisms that have been found in of all the prisoners,” Wheeler said. “They are DNA-based, so we are sure that they are of earthly origin. But they are unlike any life-form now extant on the face of the planet. They are small but extraordinarily complex.”