Phantom of Apocalypse

Chapter 3

“Maybe these folks are right Jeff. Maybe no one can be helped because we need to feed on the virus. Before the plague, I’m sure Roy was a gentle soul like the rest of us, even like you ‘necros’. I’m sure he learned to be a mean son-of-a-b***h as much from the plague as from his God-fearing father. Isn’t that right Roy?” Staring at the necro-cultists, Roy acknowledges that his father Jed baptized him into the world of savagery. Long before the plague dropped the guillotine of violence on society, cruelty was the legacy he inherited along with the farm to which he longs to return. “Erasing horrifying childhood memories will not be easy for you. Even if you were to make it back to that abandoned farm, drones and the police will track you down. Unless you have some special hiding place, they will catch you and throw you in prison for good this time, that is, if they don’t shoot you down like a dog.”

Looking over her shoulder, she notices necro-cultist customers making obscene gestures at her for offering advice to Roy. To make sure the electronic police monitors at the diner capture her every word, she raises her voice. “Android smiles chiseled on your ruthless faces I see every day at work and all over town. I know it makes all of you sick to be around me. A pregnant woman who rejects your way of life in this day and age. It must be slow death for all of you to be around me. Do you honestly believe that your ceremonial ways of releasing aggression is anything but a way to feed the virus? At least Roy aims at something real when he dreams of escaping to his farm.” The former psychologist now working for the garbage recycling plant with her lover Sarah is hardly surprised that Cain, one of the necro-cultist customers, is visibly infuriate with her.

Pointing a jagged-edge knife at Red, Cain yells from the top of his lungs that she and the baby she is carrying are leftovers from the pre-plague world. “Do us all a favor and get the hell out of here. Take your Dr. Frankenstein with you while you’re at it. Why don’t both of you go live with the mutants in the Zone where you belong with those animals down there?” Short and muscular with a shaved head covered with art of devils dancing on his scalp, Cain wears expensive clothing befitting his profession as an insurance manager. His flamboyant body art depicts everything from miniature skulls and replica tombstones inserted into their skin to various historic symbols of war. “I always wondered,” Red continues to agitate him in a sarcastic tone. “Why do you want the world to know that your energy comes from that primitive ritualistic art depicting suffering and death? Maybe you’re so delusional that you think the suffering and death the plague has brought will pass you by.”

Undeterred by their intimidating appearance and threatening gestures, she turns her attention back to Roy who is fretfully pacing behind the diner’s counter. Busily arranging food trays and plates for the next wave of customers, he cannot lash out at the customers. Red and Dr. Jeff admire Roy who defiantly talks about escaping on Independence Day. Also planning an escape on the same day, Red and Jeff are as edgy as Roy. “You have nothing to prove to anybody,” Red encourages him. “When you ripped open your flesh to remove the microchip to escape, that’s when you proved who you are. How many infected cowards in this city would dare defy the authorities to gain their freedom?” Instead of thanking Red, the former street boxer says nothing. Women make Roy feel awkward, especially when they are complimenting him.

In a show of solidarity for his fellow-worker, Shorty hands him a paper towel to wipe his perspiring forehead. At the other end of the diner, Cain and his companions are drinking ultra-caffeinated beverages and playing with jagged knives decorated with skulls and bones. Making obscene hand gestures, Cain is indicating Red’s throat can be cut as easily as Roy slicing vitamin-and-mineral-enriched fried soy meal. Making matters worse, she sarcastically asks if they want Dr. Jeff to prescribe medication to quell their inflamed virus symptoms. Enraged by her attitude, Cain rises from his seat. “If you’re not careful Red, you may not make it to birth the bastard mutant child you’re carrying.” Red watches them guzzle down ultra-caffeinated beverages and harpoon the food on their plates. Sarcastically, she asks why they refuse to fight the virus that has fried their brains like the fried soy mixture they are eating. Like jackals in the wild, they yell at her in unison that she is a dead woman if they find her alone at night in some back alley in the f*******n Zone. Twitching in his seat, Dr. Jeff hints that there is no cure for them. They prefer to wallow in the misery of the virus. “On the other hand,” he asserts with confidence, “Roy still has a chance to save himself from the plague-induced madness.”

Red nods in agreement. Holding her belly, she has a drink of water and tells Roy that he will be able to stop yielding to tormenting violence once he is free of the terror his father injected into his mind. About to give birth and planning an escape on Independence Day, she feels a sense of freedom to defy authorities monitoring everything that takes place at the diner. Dr. Jeff repeats that the only way to destroy the killer instinct once and for all is to alter the DNA of the unborn. “Eventually we could create a more perfect non-violent Roy of the future. Who knows, maybe even a Cain of the future who will be just the opposite of the man sitting over there ready to attack us. Biogenetics could make it possible for the next generation to have no resemblance to any of us. If plague-induced violence persists humanity has no future.”

The doctor had made such claims in the past. No one takes him seriously. Roy blames scientists like him for the plague and for giving people hope for a better future. Neither Dr. Jeff nor Red disagrees. They know that medical science has failed to deliver salvation to those suffering from the plague. To convince employees and customers at the diner that he is working on a cure, he shares with them what transpired at the first Annual Biosynthetic Genetics Convention just a few months before the 400 th Independence Day anniversary.

“Two days before the convention, a hospital patient grabbed my hand. It was so tight I thought she was trying to drain energy from my body. Her eyes were clouded by tears. She asked if I would trade places with her. I said nothing. What could I reply to such a strange question from a terminally ill patient? She demanded that I donate my heart to save her, or at least pay for an artificial one. I remained frozen, just staring at her. It was difficult to tell her that she would be dead as soon as the insurance company notified the hospital that her HCS value did not justify organ transplant surgery. Finally, I said that I was not a cardiologist. Besides, there are more than 1500 people waiting transplants and I cannot save them all, I said to her. ‘I only need one heart so I may live,’ she whispered. I leaned over to check her pulse. She said that I might as well be an undertaker instead of a doctor. I felt better that she resented me so much right before she died. Of course, she was right that for her I was the embodiment of all that was wrong with society. Strangely at some deeper subconscious level, I felt superior that I continued to live, at least a while longer. This is what the plague has reduced us to. It all proves that she was right after all.”

Although the rest in the diner see him as a freak and a dissident, Red understands the doctor. She knows as well as he that people in higher positions of authority like him harbor a higher level of belligerent behavior, but it is manifested in socially-acceptable modes. He has the potential of high-level non-physical antagonism far more destructive than anything Roy can deliver as a street boxer. “There is something refreshing about Roy seeing the world as a boxing arena,” Dr. Jeff exclaims. “In his world escape comes only by obliterating his opponent right to his face.”

To test an experimental nerve-agent and help Roy suppress aggression, Dr. Jeff secured his early prison release. Ever since the experiment, the famed doctor felt somewhat responsible for the street boxer. His reflexes, reaction time, and processing of information slowed after the doctor gave him a cocktail of serum injections intended to quell a neurological disorder. No matter the cost to others and to his forsaken humanity that distinguish human from animal, Roy will do anything to survive; this includes killing an opponent with his bare hands, just as prison psychiatrists warned. Surviving incarceration helped him emerge more optimistic that the electric fence surrounding the city cannot keep him from reaching the family farm.

Feeling guilty about the experiment, Dr. Jeff admits that doctors probably caused damage to Roy as a patient. “Like businesspeople and politicians,” Dr. Jeff apologizes in a loud voice, “all of us infected with the virus are more savage than cavemen of a million years ago.” Fidgeting in his seat and running his hand over his head, he looks around at customers and diner employees. He wants to make sure the unmistakable hostility he senses is real and not paranoia.

Intrigued with the man who helped him secure early prison release, Roy’s hostility toward Dr. Jeff comes as naturally; as naturally as for his father Jed whom he credits for the will to survive. Teaching Roy that life means constant struggle against the world, former marine Jed admonished his boy to beware of cunning city folk. An alcoholic turned born-again Christian, Jed tried beating God into the boy’s head. In a world overtly or stealthily hostile, Roy’s only option growing up was to become even tougher than his father. Without displaying any emotion, Roy recalled how Jed treated him growing up on the farm.

“Listen here boy’ he preached at me every time we sat down for supper. ‘Jesus Second Coming ain’t taking place in some filthy bar where drunks like me and w****s like your mother used to hang out. The Holy Spirit ain’t coming out of a beer nozzle or a woman’s mouth. There were times, I sure as Hell thought I saw Jesus in all kinds of places; even staring back at me from your mother’s gate of Hell, like a demon about to pop out and bite my head off.”

Pausing to wipe perspiration off his forehead, Roy innocently asks Shorty if it is possible for Jesus to emerge from a beer nozzle or human crevices. Angry at such blasphemy, Shorty replies that Jesus fights with the devil for the souls of drunks and w****s, but only after they repent. “One thing you need to keep in mind Roy ,” Shorty warns for all in the diner to hear. “We are living in modern-day Babylon. We have defied the Lord and now we are paying for it with the plague sent to punish us.” Shorty’s religious admonitions about the plague aside, Roy insists that his father’s drunken sermons still ring true in his head.

After the initial outbreak of the plague, Jed fell from the combine, narrowly escaping death. While recovering at the hospital, he looked out of the window and saw Jesus wrapped in the American flag carrying the holy cross on his back. Oddly enough, the cross was made from two of Jed’s hunting rifles. Such an epiphany convinced the farmer to become a born-again Christian. Not satisfied to save his soul from eternal damnation, he also demanded Roy must follow martyrdom’s path.