Sedition Cuts: Ch. 4 - Let's Just Make it Out of Town

I cracked open the throttle on the big Beemer, doing a buck-ten down the dotted center line.  I figured it would take another three minutes at that speed to reach the bridge.  I had brought a handheld radio that was supposed to have twenty mile range, but one never knew with those things.  I had a pistol strapped to one leg and my long knife strapped to the other, but was otherwise unarmed.  I wanted to get eyes-on the bridge, make sure it was sound, and then get back to the group.

Two miles out from the bridge, I spotted the first car.  It was a mid-‘00’s sedan, and it was halfway off the right lane and onto the shoulder, canted inward.  I released the throttle a little, and the motorbike instantly responded, slowing down.  110 became 95 became 80.  There was another car behind the first one, arrayed in the same position, and one on the left lane, also pointed inw-…

I got hard on the brakes then, back end skidding lightly as I brought the bike to a halt.  One of those cars like that was explainable; somebody abandoned it, maybe ran out of gas, maybe someone was infected in the car and snapped, something like that.  Three though?  That was an ambush.  Memories of the sweep night came back full bore and I was on instant alert.  I slowly swung around until I was parallel to the interstate, and looked for movement from the dead cars, occasionally giving the A rock came from behind the cars, hurled with enough force that I heard it whistle through my helmet as it went by.  Four throttle a twist.  Between revs, I drew my pistol.

Beloved came charging at me, hurling rocks.  One of the rocks was on target and I lifted my arm to block it, the stone glancing off the crash guards sewn into my riding jacket.  The padding saved me from a shattered arm, but the force still caused my arm to go instantly numb, and I dropped my pistol.  Shit!  My fingers wouldn’t work, and I couldn’t grip the throttle.  I would have to fight four Beloved one-armed.

I got off the bike and put it between them and me as I drew my long knife, cursing myself for not bringing my katana with me.  I thought I could handle four with two good arms, but I wasn’t so sure with the way things stood.  Damn, I was barely outside of Boise.  D.C. was a million miles away now.

I gripped my long knife in my left hand as I banged my right with futility on my side, trying to get feeling back in my digits.  They were closing fast as they always did, and I couldn’t hit them from distance like I always did.  But I still had to win.

The first one came leaping over the motorcycle, arms outstretched, teeth bared.  I went with his momentum, gripping him by his shirt and slamming him down.  A boot to the skull stopped his threat.  The remaining three came on.  I backed up, giving ground and trying to make them rush me one at a time.  It worked.  Sort of.  One of them charged, and the other two approached behind her slowly.  Okay, then.  Baby steps.

Sedition Cuts: Ch. 1 - It's Real Now

“Brandon, she is bitten.  She will turn.  We will not be able to control her and she will kill someone here that much is certain.  There is not enough food here or at your mother’s to satisfy her.  You’ll see her change.  Her eyes will go hollow, she’ll complain of her hunger, her temper will fray to the breaking point, and then she will be unredeemable.  I’ve seen it happen, witnessed the metamorphosis first hand while I was East,” Jacob calmly explained, though a small catch in his throat betrayed his scholarly diagnosis.  He turned and walked toward the hallway.

I slumped down in a bullet-riddled couch, hammered there by his words.  My little sister would be gone in a matter of weeks.  I couldn’t believe it.  There was something my dad had said that didn’t stack up.  “Wait a second.”

My dad paused in the hallway, and looked back at me.

“Wait a second, Dad.  What you said before, when you were back East, you watched this happen?”

My dad pulled his glasses from his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger and sighed.  “Yes Brandon.  I witnessed the early clinical trials of the XS-044 serum on the first human participants.  The transformation averaged four weeks.  At the end, we realized the… untenable nature of the serum and the study was terminated.”

“So if the trial ended, how come we’re still in this doozy of an apocalypse?”

“The XS-044 trials ended, Brandon.  The studies continued.  Unfortunately, the XS-045, -046, and -047 trials yielded very similar results.  The issue was rooted around the connection of the human metabolism to the human ability to make high-order decisions while stressed.  The increase of the metabolism by an order of magnitude had equal and opposite effects on the neurological process.”

“What happened to the test subjects?”

“Terminated.  Quietly.  Medals of valor were sent home to the families, informing them of their loved one’s ultimate sacrifice in service of our country.”

“You sick sons of bitches.  And the program kept rolling, even with the failures?”

“Yes.  The need for a super-capable breed of warfighter was too great.  The talks between our research facility, the Pentagon, and the White House took a disturbing turn.  The Pentagon believed that there was enough variance in our research to suggest that the transformation our subjects had undergone would be controllable in a real world environment.”

“You’re shitting me.  A one hundred percent failure rate was explained by variance in a controlled, precise science lab?” I yelled.  I wanted to pull my hair out or strangle my father or eat a bullet, I couldn’t decide.  I realized the safety was still off on my handgun, and clicked it back on to at least slow down my decision to do something that rash and useless.

“That was their conclusion.  I excused myself from the test at that point, citing my belief that I could not approach and create the test with the fidelity they required of me.  After I signed the standard round of non-disclosure agreements, I returned home, and we began preparing…” his voice trailed off, no doubt thinking of the messed up decision tree that had lead us here.

“And that’s it, then?  Your daughter’s a goner?  Dad, there has got to be some way to keep her alive,” I said, any hope I had stored drawing away even as I said it.

His eyes regained their focus, widened for a moment and then narrowed, thinking.  He had remembered something.  He shook his head.  “No.  It’s too much of a longshot.”

“Whoa, Dad.  Wait.  What longshot?  Come on, this is Sheilah’s life on the line.  What longshot?” I repeated.

“When I left, a separate group of researchers was working on a serum schedule to mitigate some of the effects we had seen with the first test cases.  The talk was that a balancing serum would be manufactured that would drop a soldier’s metabolism back to a normal range.  The idea was that a soldier would take the XS serum before deploying, then cycle off of it before the transitive effects were permanent while still retaining enough enhancement before his deployment ended.”

“Like steroids.”

“No Brandon, not exactly like- well, actually, yes, quite a bit like steroids.  But I have no idea if they actually developed the serum before the President enacted his Beloved mandate, or if it got developed too late.  I wasn’t there long enough to get a sense of its viability.”

Hope crept back in, though I tried to hold it down.  “But there’s a chance it was produced.  Right?”