Apocalypse: The Savior with System

7 Loyalty

Summer was indeed at hand as David Morgan watched the ice cubes melt in his brandy. Seated with him inside his office at the headquarters of the United Radical Party in Houston were two other people—a young man and woman—skin a dark honey brown, dark eyes and dark hair, almost identical but for the male who sported a half-pony while the female had close-cropped curls, shorn almost to the scalp.

Raul and Maya Valdez, twins from Colombia who had lost their parents during a gang fight near the US-Mexico border. They were too young when they were captured by the rival gang. Feisty Maya had fought and in retaliation, they cut off her twin brother’s tongue…at ten years of age.

David Morgan, who had been military, found and rescued them. Orphaned and not knowing a smidgen of English or the world outside the gang culture they grew up in, David Morgan took pity on them and raised them.

But it was not exactly a parent-child relationship.

They were indebted to him, he knew though he did not force them into servitude. He did make them train in the art and science of fighting, becoming premier fighters in Dark Night Rankings. Morgan knew that for his charity, the twins were loyal to him, as they have proven time and again, rooting out traitors, finding his assassins and taking them out before they even knew they’ve been sniffed. The twins would follow anything he said.

They have never failed him.

So when his people intercepted a coded message being transferred from Ulysses Pearse’s headquarters in his palatial home in Dallas to a laboratory north of Texas, Morgan knew they had stumbled upon something important.

And the decoded message talked about a Final Solution, not unlike the one Hitler employed in that old war from long ago. It was a means to end the disease, though it was not specified what “means” it were. All his decoders could get was a single name: Paul Justinos.

The publicly-available database of the infected or sufferers revealed that this Paul Justinos was an ex-Marine, his last mission being in Pakistan where Ulysses Pearse had established prototypes of his laboratories in America. There, the captain contracted the disease and according to the database, is now a walking Phase One.

And he was supposed to be on a train bound for the main UCL Virus Research laboratory in Dallas, which coincidentally, was under the auspices of Pearse-Sachly Corporation.

Morgan had sent the twins to stop the train and seize Paul Justinos but when they arrived, the train had been cindered with no sign of the man.

Again, luck was on his side when his database monitors alerted him to a Paul Justinos being scanned outside a safe zone inside Texas.

The ice cubes in his brandy had by now fully melted, creating a transparent layer of liquid above the amber-colored alcohol. Morgan placed the glass down on his desk and looked at the twins.

“Follow him and once you get the opportunity, you know what to do,” he told them.

Raul nodded. Morgan added quickly, “Just a reminder. No other casualties.”

“Where do we deliver?” asked Maya in a whisper.

Morgan shook his head almost absentmindedly as he continued to stare into his stale drink. “No need.”

At the moment, he had other pressing concerns, both political and personal. But the twins did not need to know that.

If Paul Justinos had to be killed to stop Pearse and his evil plans, it was just one man against the good of the many.

When he looked up, the twins had already left.

He picked up the glass of brandy and took a long swallow.

The sun was shining brightly right onto Paul’s face when he woke up the next morning. Before he would have buried himself under a blanket and the pillows to avoid the light but now, with his system needing to upgrade, he needed the sun like air. Paul stretched, gave his muscles time to adjust, and rose from the bed, padding over to the next room where he’d helped Rahu after changing his wound dressings.

Rahu was still asleep, buried under layers of blankets, which must be uncomfortable given the increase in humidity and heat as summer progressed. Paul reached over to pull the blankets down when he accidentally touched Rahu’s face and jerked his hand back.

Paul pulled all the blankets away and touched Rahu’s forehead. He’s burning up!

All the bedclothes were soaked with sweat, the bandages seeping again with some blood mixed with sweat.

“Rahu! Wake up! C’mon, man!” Paul said, shaking Rahu. Rahu managed to open his eyes which were bloodshot. His gaze was unfocused and his breath coming out in gasps. Much worse than the fever, Paul could smell the faint whiff of purulence.

“Damn! I can’t help with this! I’m no doctor!” Paul exclaimed, racking his mind for something or anything to help Rahu. He opened his system and pushed every available button to figure out what could help.

The navigation console opened and a map flashed. Paul tried to find a hospital or anywhere he can take Rahu—definitely not a safe zone because they were banned there. But there were no hospitals nearby, only a semi-private laboratory. Paul was about to skip on it when a distant memory came back to him.

Pakistan. Research. Really bad headaches. Tests. A cool-tempered woman in white.

Judith Merkel.

“Of course! Doctor Merkel!” Paul exclaimed, jabbing on the system to find out more about the Sachly Institute where he had heard she was transferred.

The institute was a long way from where they were and the only way to get there was to ride. Hitching a ride with a large, bleeding man was not going to work. So Paul went out to the garage and was relieved to find a slightly banged up electric car. After removing all the debris and garbage that had piled on it, Paul saw that the fuselage had been damaged.

“No, I can fix this,” he said to himself, going back to the house to get his tools. Tirelessly, he worked fixing the car, going back to the house every once in a while to check up on Rahu and apply moist compresses to the poor man’s forehead.

Soon, he got the car to start and run using a spare battery he found among the garage’s contents. Then, he took a barely conscious Rahu from the house and loaded him into the car.

“Don’t worry, buddy! I’ll get you to Doctor Merkel,” Paul said positively as he reversed out of the garage and drove out of the residence towards the main road. “You just hang in there!”

Rahu only grunted, which was still, to Paul, a very good sign.

As they moved to the road, Paul noticed a slow-moving train ambling on the tracks parallel to them. From the sound of the coughing coming from the inside, he knew they weren’t heading to wherever to be cured; they were on their way for extermination before progressing to Phase Five. He looked at Rahu worriedly but Rahu kept silent.

As they continued down the road, Paul saw a sign pointing towards the Institute.

“We’re almost there, man,” Paul said cheerfully. “You okay there?”

The grunt told Paul Rahu was still doing alright.

He made a right turn towards the institute and was distracted for a moment when the car bumped into something.

Or rather, ran over something.

Paul stopped the car and looked out the window.

“That’s strange,” he murmured. There were no cars on the road.

No other cars or other vehicles at all since they drove onto it from the foot of the mountain. And that was more than an hour ago.

And it was quiet. Too quiet.

Paul unlocked the door and heard Rahu slur something like, “Don’t.”

“No, it’s okay,” he told Rahu. “My system’s running fine now. Just stay in the car.”

Paul got out, his system primed to fire any fireballs should something jump out from anywhere. But when Paul trained his gaze down to the front wheels of the car, he saw what was unmistakeably a human hand…

..that was still attached to an arm and to the rest of the body of a man dressed in the uniform of a soldier.

“Holy—damn!” Paul cried, shocking Rahu into wrestling with the blanket wrapped around him and the seatbelt so he can take out the meat cleaver. “No! It’s okay, Rahu! It’s not a zombie! It’s a human!”

Paul finally looked down the road and what he saw filled him with dread.

The road was littered with dead people. He rushed and crouched down to one and to another and realized they were all men and women in military uniform. All the bodies were mutilated, half-eaten and chewed on by none other than zombies. The stench and bits of their rotting flesh were attached to the bodies they ravaged.

Paul dry swallowed and stood, tracing the trail of bodies leading down the road, then gazed longingly—anxiously—at the visible top of the graystone building in the distance that could only be the Sachly Institute.

Paul’s positivity fell down several levels.

“This is not looking too good,” he said to himself, sighing despondently at the scene of c*****e before him.

No, indeed.