Purgatech: Jess' Horror

Chapter Five

Dylan was inputting the information from the applicant sign in sheets when there was a knock on his office door. Before he could say anything, the door swung open and has boss, James Marshall, came striding into the room.

"Tell me something good, Nixon."

Marshall sidled around the two over-sized leather chairs across from Dylan's desk and sunk himself into one of them.

Dylan cleared his throat. He knew Marshall deemed it below him to visit the small outbuilding where Dylan and his staff had set up their offices. But Dylan kind of liked being out there. He was close enough to still have a good view of the old house, which he’d always loved, but far enough from the action that he could take a breather when thing got too hectic.

Now, with his boss sitting across from him, Dylan’s zone of refuge had completely dissipated.

"Mr. Marshall, I was just inputting the information from the latest round of applicants."

"And? Do any of them look like they have potential? Or are we going to have to keep searching?"

"I think a few of them we will probably weed out right from the start. But there are a number of applicants who I think will be a good fit for our latest testing phase."

Marshall sat back in his chair and rested one foot on top of the opposite knee. He propped both elbows onto the sides onto the arms of the chair and intertwined his fingers in front of him. He let out that same passive-aggressive chuckle that Dylan had heard so many times before.

"I know what you're going to say, Mr. Marshall."

James raised his eyebrows and then gestured for Dylan to continue.

"I know that our initial user survey had some flaws in it. But I'm convinced, especially after meeting with our latest round of applicants, that the new line of questioning has brought us the best batch of potential users yet."

"That's because I spent a hell of a lot of money hiring the best psychological minds to come up with a questionnaire that word help us to weed out potential lawsuits after what happened the last time, didn't I?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Now, Dylan. I know I don't have to stress the importance of this next stage of testing. Considering how far behind we are on the roll-out, every day we fail to release these products to the market we're losing money. Now I don't want to alarm you, but if we are not successful with this latest batch of testers, I'm not sure how much further we will be able to go. And by we… I mean you."

Dylan swallowed hard and adjusted his collar. "Sir, you have my word that I will not rest until we have found the right applicants. Not only that, I'll make it my personal mission to oversee this latest round as they test our products over this coming month."

Marshall sat there for a few moments, drumming his fingers on the armrest of the chair. He nodded a few times a narrowed his eyes at Dylan before finally clapping his hands together and pushing himself up from the seated position.

"Great. That's exactly what I wanted to hear. I like you, Nixon. From the moment I met you, I knew you had potential. Now, let's just see if you can live up to that. I look forward to your weekly reports. As you were."

Marshall stood, turned on his heel and headed out the door. Only when he had left the office did Dylan breathe. But just as Marshall left, the door swung open again and Lisa Thompson came rushing into the room with a clipboard propped in front of her.

"Dylan, we have a problem."

"That's the last thing I need to hear right now, Lisa," Dylan said turning back to his work at the computer.

"This is something you're going to want to see."

She came around the desk and shoved the clipboard towards him. Dylan sighed before taking it from her.

"What exactly am I looking at here?"

"The Gamma group. It isn't going well. I – I think we need to pull them out of there."

"All of them?" Why the hell would we do that?"

"Here. Look at this." Lisa leaned over the desk and flipped through number of pages until she got to a detailed medical report clipped to the clipboard. "The latest psych eval from the group is showing an alarming number of disturbing recordings. And I'm not just talking physiological readings either. The brain waves of our subjects are showing huge spikes in alarming behavior. And that doesn't even take into account the daily logs and video diaries that I've been coming in.”

"The whole point of having a medical staff is for them to take care of this. You know how much pressure I'm under here, Lisa. Can’t you just have them deal with it?"

"You don't get it, Dylan. This isn’t just people going on about spirits and demons."

"Demons? When the hell did that come into play?"

“That's not even the worst of it. The actions of some of these trial users? The disturbing things they’ve been saying, that they've been doing. This – this just isn't right. We can't keep projecting these people to the sort of environment that is bringing up these disturbing behavior."

Before Dylan could respond, the door to his office flung open and Andrea, one of his computer techs, came rushing into the room.

"Dylan? You have to come with us."

"Why? What the hell's going on now?"

"The Gamma group? They're dead." Andrea said.

"What the hell does that mean? What the hell's going on?"

"Well, not all of them."

“Not all of them? What about Renee? She’s in there overseeing the group.”

Andrea just stood there blinking at him. "You just… You just have to come with us Sir. Now!”"

Before Dylan could say anything, Andrea turned and ran of the room. Dylan turned to Lisa who was nervously biting her fingernails. He cursed under his breath, shoved his chair back and got up from the desk, going around Lisa and hurrying out of the room.

By the time he got out to the hallway, the techs had already raced down the hallway to the observation room where the rest of the observatory staff were crowded around the series of the display monitors affixed to the wall.

All the displays showed black-and-white static except for one. The camera was focused on Jim Fisher, one of the users that Dylan had come to know well from the various reports from the medical staff on on a daily basis now. Renee and the trial users were nowhere in sight.

Jim stood with his back was to the camera but every now and then, his entire body shook.

"Bump up the sound, will you?" Dylan said.

Noah, head of the computer tech department, complied. There was a subtle sound that Dylan couldn't make out. He tilted his head to one side and listened for it again. When it happened, this time he realized it was Jim muttering to himself. Every now and then, he would giggle to himself and then he would look over his shoulder at the camera.

"You're watching me, aren’t you? The whole damn lot of you. Watching me like a rat in a maze, waiting to see what I'll do next."

Jim turned slowly to the camera to reveal his shirt sticking to his chest in dark red patches across the entire front of it.

"You're watching me just like they watch me. The only difference is, they're in here. They've been here this whole time. They're here and they're the ones who tell me what to do. They're the ones who told me to do it. I tried to get away from them. Try to block them out, see?"

Jim turned his head toward the camera to show his ear. Or what was left of it. It was gone. There is just the opening to his ear but the entire outer ear was gone. Blood had dried on the side of his face trickle down his chin to his shoulder.

A dark crimson stain ran down his cheek and ran down his neck to where it pooled on the shoulder of his once white shirt.

“It didn’t help me none. I could still hear them. But I’ll stop them. I will.”

Jim stared wide-eyed into the camera, then jerked his head to one side as though he heard something. He suddenly clamped one hand over either ear, then dipped forward, letting out an unholy scream that made the skin on the back of Dylan’s neck prickle with goosebumps.

Jim bolted from the camera and started swinging his arms around him in the air, spinning and twisting like he was a man possessed.

“Jesus!” Dylan said. “He’s already injured himself. We have to get him out of there before he hurts someone else!”

“Ha ha ha!” Jim yelled out. “It’s too late! Too late for the rest of ‘em! But I’m not going to let them get me, man! No bloody way!”

“That’s is. Get those doors open and get them the hell out of there, you hear me?”

But no one moved. No one even said a word.

Dylan spun around in a half circle then swung around again. “Didn’t you hear me? What the hell are you guys waiting for? You know what? Forget it!”

Dylan plucked his cellphone out of his jacket and punched in a number before he headed out of the room. By the time he made it out the front door, one of the officers in the security booth had picked up.

“What the hell are you guys doing about the Gamma group? Are you kidding me? Are you watching the same feeds I am? Then you can see that subject has clearly lost his s**t. One of our team members is in there!”

Dylan moved in double-time up the drive toward the main house.

“I don’t care what the book says about protocol. I’m running this trial group and I’m ordering you to get your assess up from behind those monitors and meet me on the main level. We’re shutting this s**t show down before that lunatic in there does something we can’t come back from!”

Dylan scrubbed at the back of his neck. This couldn’t happen at a worse time. Gamma was almost done with their trial. This next group he was recruiting for was going to eh be the final group of trial users before they went to market. If Marshall found out, he would blow a bloody gasket.

He practically twisted an ankle on the gravel road but by the time he got to the front of the house, the security team had made their way there from the small mobile unit parked in the woods just outside the main entrance.

“If any of you had half a brain, you would have done this without waiting for me to give you the heads-up. Let’s go,” Dylan said, gesturing angrily to the door.

He hated being a hard-ass but this wasn’t a bloody game. People’s lives were at stake but more importantly, if anything happened to those subjects in there, Marshall would throw him out on his ass.

“Sir, I think we should go in there first.” James, a big burly mountain of a man, said, moving ahead of Dylan.

“Oh, now you’re all about taking initiative? I don’t think so.”

Dylan reached for the door knob but the security guy moved in front of him, blocking his access.

“I’m afraid I have to insist, sir. It’s protocol.”

“f**k protocol, James. This is one instance where I’m taking control. Now move out of my way unless you want me to can your ass.”

“Yes, sir,” James said, reluctantly moving aside.

Dylan turned the door knob and pushed open the door…or at least he tried to. It wouldn't move. He pushed again, this time shifting his weight and shoving his knee up against the door. It moved, but only an inch.

He started thumping his shoulder against the door, but wasn’t getting anywhere.

“Sir,” James said.

Dylan reluctantly moved aside. The two guards moved in unison, both lunging at the door at the same time. It finally moved, and with a few more co-ordinated moves, it swung open.

“Jesus, H…” James said.

“What? What is it?”

Dylan pushed past them, but before he could get a look at anything, he tripped over something hard and fell on the floor. He went skidding forward on his hands, slipping in something wet. Something red.

Dylan tried to prop himself up. He finally managed to get up onto his knees, but when he did, he stopped. His stomach did a flip-flop when he was finally able to take in the scene around him.

Pale light from outside filtered into the dark room, but it was enough to illuminate the hardened faces of the Gamma group. Every last one of them was propped up against the far wall. All of them with a single crimson gash to their necks.

The thing he tripped over…it was Renee. She was slumped to one side, unmoving, the life completely gone from her eyes. All Dylan could focus on was the white Purgatech logo on her shirt, now stained forever red.

“I told you,” Jim said.

Dylan tried to scramble to his feet just as James and Gibson started shouting.

“Get down! On your knees! Get on your knees now!”

Standing over Dylan was Jim. He held a piece of jagged glass to his corroded.

“Jim, wait. Don’t do this, Jim. We can help you, man. We can talk about this.”

Jim shook his head at Dylan. “It’s too late. They already told me what to do. If I do it, they’ll leave me alone.”

“Jim, just hold on a—”

One swift slicing motion was all it took. Blood spurted from the wound Jim had opened up in his neck. He fell to his knees, collapsing to the floor with a wet thud.

Dylan wasn’t aware of anything after that other than the sound of his own heartbeat thumping in his ears and the sickly-sweet smell of blood flooding his nostrils.