1

I cannot tell this tale lightly, as there is no frivolity in darkness. But perhaps my children and the children of the Earth can learn from a poor mistake, albeit one with marvelous intentions. Has not Allah proclaimed through wise men that the road to hell is paved with them? Maybe my thoughts have paved a road for the infidels. Perhaps my life has indeed amounted to something.

“As the clock runs down, the fountain overflows,” read the clear inscription on the doorway to Connelly Laboratories, carved into the decaying drywall. It stood there like a dark sentinel, read by everybody that passed through the threshold, and remembered by all who ran away. The Man himself had placed it there with a chisel, all the while somehow retaining his lilting style of handwriting. The Man was Robert Thurman, of course. Handsome, ambitious, ruthless, cunning, silver tongued. And brilliant. The Man was the perfect fit for head scientist at the lab, always professional, always hard-working. No one could stand against the Man and his team. They were as a pantheon, always squabbling yet creating worlds in their workshop.

He was a stalwart six feet, with a mane of jet-black hair curling down past his ears, as if straining to reach his broad shoulders. Intense muscles could be seen through the folds of his crisp lab coat, if you dared stare long enough. The sight of such power and strength was not for the faint of heart; young boys grew quiet and sullen when he passed by. His expression was always unreadable, like a wall of stone, with cloudy gray eyes that tracked any and all movement. He strode with fluid motions and efficiency, and he always moved with purpose. Purpose was the description of his life. There wasn’t a moment in which the Man did not do anything lighthearted. No one could match his magnificence.

Then came AD-952. The Cloudburst plague. And with it, Robert Thurman met his match.

“Julius! Hey, let’s go! We ain’t got any time to waste!” Terrence shouted, exasperation easily heard in his baritone voice. Julius snapped out of his reverie, immediately reorienting his focus to the task at hand. He shook his head, flicked his temples, and rubbed his eyes to bring his short attention span under control. He was still freaking out and marveling over the fact that, after years of research, they were finally about to crack the genetic code of AD-952, and solve the mess they had created.

Julius felt a sharp pain on his head, right next to the part in his hair, and he winced, rubbing the now tender spot on his head. The big man had just hit him with a test tube, a consequence of his mood. “I said, let’s go! You want the Burst on your skin a second longer?” Terrence shouted, his jowly face going beet-red as spittle flew from his lips to land on Julius’ quivering face. Julius waited while the big man walked away, then chuckled to himself as he wiped the saliva off of his face.

At that moment, the Man strode into the room, eyes narrowed and fire in his expression.

Speak of the devil and he shall appear. Julius thought, as he jumped to his feet, straightened his back, and held himself at attention. Old habits certainly died hard with him.

“Gentlemen, today is the day we have all been waiting for. Today is the day we beat this devil!” Thurman announced in his booming voice that echoed off the walls, reverberating into every ear in the building.

The Man walked around the room slowly, looking each technician in the eye, staring them down with his stormy grey eyes as he spit out harsh words of motivation. “AD-952. The Cloudburst Plague. The Bogeyman. Spawn of Satan. All of these are names for the same thing: the evil disease that is destroying our earth piece by piece. Allow me now to say to you: LET IT BE NO MORE!” He bellowed. “For too long we’ve been hiding in musty caves, afraid for our families. For too long we’ve had to sneak through empty ghost towns, scavenging for our next meal. You all have scars, both in your bodies and in your minds, from the horrors we have all had to face; however, I say that those terrible times are behind us. No more shall we do these things. Today, we cure this disease and take back our world from the horrors that have enslaved it!” The room erupted into yells. Julius thought it was like the roar of a thousand lions, although he did not actually know exactly what a lion sounded like. They were hunted to extinction by the starving people of Africa in the first days of the Burst. No one could even remember what they looked like anymore, let alone how they spoke to each other.

Robert continued to rant to his gathered compatriots, fire burning in the hearts of each scientist there. Several mouthed wordless agreements with his words, others shook their fists quietly, recalling the atrocities they were about to destroy. The Man himself was in a frenzy, spittle flying from his lips as they snarled out oaths and convictions that the disease would no longer hold sway over their lives. After a few fierce minutes, he concluded with a shout, and the building shook with the roars of the ones gathered there.

They all dispersed to their respective placements in the lab, each fueled with the desire to end this once and for all. Julius, however, was the clean-up boy, the outcast. His myriad of skills he had attained on the road would be of no use in this clean, logical place. So he simply watched these great men in their quest for a better life. But oh, was it a sight to behold! There was something romantic about the way these men executed their experiments. Something divine, god-like in the way they seemed to be searching for a better life. Julius was awed every day by the bravery they had in using their own precious time to help people. He revered how far these men had come from when they had state-of-the-art labs, trained assistants, and cutting edge equipment. And above all, he was shocked by the hatred they seemed to have for the disease that had destroyed their lives and the lives of their children. It was something akin to insanity, the pace they worked and the things they dreamed. And Julius loved it.

Except, it seemed that, whenever Julius looked at the Man, the strong persona he showed became nothing more than a facade, and Julius could see the weakness and pain in the Man’s eyes. He almost seemed reluctant, like he didn’t want to find a cure or an answer to this disease. Julius knew what he himself had gone through, but he shivered when he tried to think of what could cause someone as strong as Robert Thurman to break down and be afraid. Something terrible resided in the Man’s heart. Perhaps something almost as terrible as Julius’ demons.

Julius shuddered, and let the horrid memories die down. He was not then, he was now. It was the year 2053. He made a conscious effort to focus on his work, refusing to allow the trials of his past to affect the work that needed to be done now; indeed, there was absolutely work to do. The atmosphere quickly became heated with the anticipation of the day’s findings. This was the day they would write in the history book. This was the day they cured the disease. Serenity was operating the gene-splicer, sending modified DNA into the bacteria. Hopefully this would render their ravenous nature inert, and it would just become a harmless bit of bacteria in the rain. The splicer itself was one of the few remnants of the days before the Burst. A large part of the only technology they had. Everything else they had to make themselves. Terrence was using handmade glass Petri dishes to examine the modified bacteria, and The Man himself was using an old 1800's-style microscope to look at the behavior of the samples.

And he appeared to have found something in his search.

"Mother of-! Everyone come look at this!” He exclaimed, with something that sounded like joy coupled with confusion in his voice.

There was a scramble to see what the Man had discovered, what diamond had been found in the slag. Indeed, the Man himself seemed ready to even show them a smile, one of a select few signals of happiness left after the Burst.

The Man offered the microscope to Terrence, a glint in his eyes and a twitch in his nose. Terrence looked down the primitive lens, and the blood fled from his face as he drew back slowly from the instrument. His hands began shaking, and he lifted his head in shock.

“By thunder, you’ve done it.” He whispered, the reverence easily heard in his voice. Julius dove to see what they had created, but was pushed away by the superior scientists scrambling to get a look at history in the making. So he hung back, knowing his time would come.

It never did. At that moment, all hell broke loose.

It started with a simple movement. A slip, a simple error in judgment. That’s all it took to reduce the Cure to a mere pipe dream. Serenity bumped the Petri dish as she looked at it, and it splashed all over her arm. She let out a whimper that quickly turned into a screech as the bacteria began eating away at her flesh. Whatever the Man had seen in the dish, it obviously had no effect on the bacteria’s hunger. It made quick work of Serenity’s skin, and went to work on her muscles. The pain had to have been monstrous.

No. Omnipotence said in Julius’ head. You cannot allow this.

Omnipotence wasn’t anything new to Julius. It had been with him ever since the beginning of his exile, telling him how to survive, who to trust, and when to kill. It had been the only constant companion in Julius’ life, and one of the few things that Julius trusted completely. Yet, the question of what Omnipotence always lingered at the back of Julius’ mind. The first time it had spoken to Julius, it had named itself that, suggesting that it was some sort of divine power. Julius had no idea if it was God or the Devil or somewhere in between.

Whatever it was, the voice in his head, Julius agreed with it. There was no time to waste. He had seen what had happened to the victims of the disease first-hand, and he refused to sit back and watch as it happened again. While Serenity screamed, Julius ducked around and behind people to get to the alarm. He had been told the alarm would solve a problem like this.

“Julius, don’t!” Terrence yelled, wrapping his arms around him and holding Julius back. The youth struggled against the man’s crushing grip, his face red as he strained to reach the salvation of the lab. Terrence held on with his fingers laced together, pleading with Julius. “The alarm will destroy all hope of a cure for this!” He roared, but Julius managed to slip out of his grasp during the tirade. He was confused. What did Terrence mean, it would destroy it?

It did not matter. Julius had to save them. And the alarm would do it.

“I won’t watch another person I care about die because of this! I won’t! Never again!” He shouted back, diving for the button at the same time.

He almost missed.

Pressing the button activated the decontamination sensors in the room, and the sweep came up positive. A piercing alarm screeched through the lab, as panels in the wall opened up to reveal menacing tubes, each with a blackened end to illustrate the literal firepower they contained. This was the other half of the technology left over from before the Burst. Everyone rushed to door to escape the blazing inferno that would erupt. The Man himself made it to the door first, but he then turned to shepherd others out of the ensuing death. Men and women alike screamed in terror at the fate that would befall them if they didn’t make it to that gateway to safety. Almost all of them made it. Julius was not one of them. With a snake like hiss, the gas to the jets turned on. Julius watched in slow motion the strike of the sparker, and the expansion of the fireball coming toward him. He was caught in the titanic blaze, and at that moment knew what pain truly felt like. He could feel his skin burning and his voice screaming long after his lights went out.

*                *                *

“Robby, its time for wakey-wakey. You need to come take your pills, before I get angry. Don’t make me get the owie stick,” A seductive voice crooned in Robert Thurman’s ear. His mind swimming in blackness, he briefly wondered if it was his late wife.

That’s impossible, though. She died in the Burst. He thought, right before he felt a searing pain on the knuckles of his right hand.

“I said get up, you lazy bum!” More pain sprouted throughout his entire body, and Robert’s eyes flew open. He yelled, and bolted upright. At least, he tried. As soon as his spine became straight, a pounding headache resounded in his skull, and he immediately lay back down.

“Where- where am I?” he asked, fighting the intense pain. The Voice scoffed.

“Interesting. I thought that you said your best argument for sanity was that you knew where you were. Wrong-o! Look’s like Thurmy really is crazy.” The Voice cackled, and there was an audible click.

Robert looked around, his head spinning. What happened to the lab? The Cure? The last thing he remembered was seeing Julius swallowed by the jets, along with the only hope for mankind.

The Burst! Robert sat upright, ignoring the brass bells going off in his skull. Had it contaminated this room, and The Hungered were holding them? The wheels in his head spinning, he remembered that the The Hungered were the people living in rural areas before the Burst, and had gone wild. Their main food supply was each other. Robert had spent years running from them with his wife. Awful, horrible, demonic years.

Robert shuddered, forcing himself to think about something other than the Raze, those days immediately following the Burst, the years that took his wife and daughter from him. The years that brought him to the brink of madness, then immediately thrust him back to the clean, cold world of the laboratory. It was almost like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

“If you don’t move, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble, Robby. I might have to bring Olga in here to discipline you, and we both know you haven’t liked that in the past” The Voice said, the seductive silkiness gone, replaced by cold authority. Wherever he was, he was definitely a prisoner. Reluctantly, he rose from his bed and saw he was in a simple square room with padded walls. A mental hospital? What? Why had The Hungered taken him here? It was said that the Burst disrupted their brains, and that they were insane themselves. Maybe it felt like home to them.

A loud buzzer sounded, and Robert guessed that Olga was going to come in if he didn’t get a move on. Whoever Olga was. He strode to the door, and waited patiently until it opened. He noticed the multitude of locks on the door, and something that might even be blood on the handle. He tried not to think about it, just like he tried not to think about how the cure was gone.

“Now there’s a good boy. No more whining and screaming about some stupid Burst or whatnot. You know we don’t like it when you scream.” It said, somewhat deprecatingly. The Voice seemed sincere, but Robert was dumbfounded. The Voice acted like it didn’t know what the Burst was. But that was impossible! It was like saying you did not know what the end of the world was. A travesty like the Burst couldn’t be forgotten.

Staring at the walls, Robert walked down a long, gray hallway to another door. It opened into a cafeteria, with the largest group of people Robert had ever seen. There were hundreds in this room! Tens of time more than the largest clan Robert had witnessed when he was on the run. How could there be so many humans here uneaten? The Hungered had nothing to stop their appetites. This many people would’ve been devoured in weeks.

Until Robert noticed the lettering on the crowd’s clothing, and noticed he was wearing the same thing. The letters spelled out an acronym: CMHI.

Underneath that, it said Connelly Mental Health Institution.

Robert staggered backward, nearly losing his balance. What was he doing here? What happened to the lab?

“Robby! Robby, over here!” A warbling voice called, causing Robert to turn around in alarm. A rather large woman was waving her hand at him, a goofy smile plastered over her broad face. Judging from her outfit, Robert assumed she was nurse. She ran up to him.

“Robby, it’s time for your pills! I brought you water to wash them down,” She said in a condescending tone. Robert was perplexed. She acted as though he was a little child. He could recognize that condescending tone anywhere. He had used it himself with Jessica.

No. Not anymore.

He followed the nurse through the cafeteria, observing his tumultuous surroundings. This couldn’t possibly be real. The room was filled with tables and people; all with the same hopeless look in their eyes that said their world had shattered. Other than that they were as different as the sun and the moon. He saw gingers, brunettes, blondes, and even some people with green hair. Skin tones seemed to span the entire spectrum in this room. White groups, brown groups, even a sort of orange group were spread across the vast room. There was an entire table dedicated to Africans, and they seemed to be the most morose. They sat hunched over gray metal trays with disgusting looking food on them. No one was eating. Even the tallest prisoners looked haggard, their wiry frames sticking out through the jumpsuits. The room itself was virtually non-descript, the walls seemingly made of concrete. Not even a single crack or hole adorned the smooth material.

Then he saw some graffiti. Not blatant or obscene, but subtly strewn about in the darkest corners of the room. He counted several Chinese characters, handprints, stick figures, and even a decent rendition of the Mona Lisa. Above them all read the words: “I will not fail.”

“Ah, I see you’ve spotted the Contraband Sections.” The Nurse said in her sickeningly sweet voice. “Those are the areas that non-conformers congregated to violate our home back when rebellion was popular.” She smiled even wider. She said it as though he were a child, and she was a teacher trying to impress a student with large words. “But not anymore! All of our inmates are happy to be here.” She gestured to the crowd. “Aren’t we?” Everyone in the room suddenly leapt to their feet, raised their arms over their heads, and screamed maniacally, a roar echoing to the heavens. They immediately sat down again and resumed their gloomy rumble of small talk. It was the single most terrifying scene Robert had ever witnessed, and he had seen many things through his years

The Nurse started walking again, and Robert followed suit. Their path took them to a small room with a single table. On it was a glass of water, two bright pink pills, and a newspaper.

Newspaper?

Since paper was made of wood, an organic material, AD-952 gobbled it up like there was nothing else to eat in the universe. You weren’t able to find paper anymore, even at Connelly. The combined heat, bacteria, and exposure to the elements destroyed all the wood pulp in less than a month after the Burst. So how was this here? What haven had they found this in?

“Now Robby, since you’ve been a good boy, the Warden has decided to let you read today’s newspaper. He just dropped it off.” The Nurse crooned with a smile that seemed to be ever widening. Robert, however, stumbled back, away from the seemingly demonic document. He didn’t want to see what was on there. He didn’t want to accept that it was real, accept what had happened. Finally, though, curiosity won over, and he picked up the paper. The first thing he noticed was the date.

March 15, 2043. Two years before the Burst.

The last thing Robert felt after that was the cold linoleum floor against his cheek.

Reviews

[bob, small b. aka invs]

just a couple observations. first, the quote you begin with about the road to hell being paved with good intentions was not spoken by allah or god in any of the holy books. it may have been ascribed to a saint (bernard) many many years later. second, for the most part the writing here is well constructed and the story moves along nicely. though it's not a genre that interests me, i don't think it would be drudgery to read your writing. there is some real talent there. lastly, one thing i found very annoying. that being, at times your style is very formal and almost archaic (as in the first paragraph) and at other times it's casual and colloquial (the use of ain't. frack-hole. etc.). i found that very inconsistent and irritating. make up your mind what your style is going to be and stick with it. my personal preference is the more casual style since the story is set in the future and formal language by then will probably be a thing of the past. good luck with your writing. welcome to the cafe.

[CodyB]

Well, there is going to be an inherent difference between the narration and the dialogue...

[Wandering Monk]

The road to hell . . . was used by many people, including Lord Byron, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karl Marx. So why not Allah. You made a good choice.

[DuttonJ]

Intriguing concept.
Great writing style.
I anxiously await more. :)