Excerpt: The Hand of the Dead

“Blunt force trauma,” Alana read aloud from her home computer screen, glowing like a specter in her artificially arctic apartment. “Male, Caucasian, approximately 45 years old. Apparent… suicide.”
Neo purred from her lap. Soft country music played in the back ground. Alana hated the sight of blood, but she had to learn to stomach the sight. This was the career she was going into, anyway. She clicked on the icon for her flash drive and cued up the pictures she’d taken undercover at the morgue.
The naked, washed body looked emaciated, like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. Multiple bruises and cuts covered him from neck to toe. But his head… Alana closed her eyes and took several deep breaths to calm herself.
Gingerly, she opened her eyes again, focusing on Neo as he purred contentedly. She stroked him gently and turned her eyes up to the screen again. It literally looked as though someone had taken a jackhammer and chiseled every recognizable feature off of his face. Holes in cheek flesh revealed the broken teeth beneath. She only knew from long experience with the human face where the eyes and nose should be. Everything else was a purpled, garbled mass of flesh, with sharp bone sticking up in occasional places.
Alana gagged and closed the photo file. She should never have copied company photos to her own flash drive. It was past midnight, anyway. Now she wouldn’t be able to get a wink of sleep tonight, for the second night in a row.
Darlene had said they wouldn’t be able to print the pictures. “What are we, a tabloid?” she had asked.
“They might be useful to have on file. At least we can describe the body in detail if we need to.” Alana had pointed out, a little indignant that Darlene didn’t seem to appreciate her extra effort.
“Nice work, any way.” Darlene had admitted, grudgingly. “We’ll see what Mr. Schafly sends to press tomorrow. See you then.”
Alana had let Darlene’s little morsel of praise give her spirit wings all the way home. Now, alone in the dark with the picture of a dead man seared in to her mind, she felt sick. What kind of person could do some thing like that… to himself? It must have taken him hours, she realized. Hours, pounding rocks into his own skull.
She shuddered. He was crazy, that was all. Just pure crazy. Nothing more.
She hugged Neo to her chest as she got up to go to bed. At least the skies were quiet tonight, and the neighbors were silent as well. Still, she slept with the light on for the first time in years.
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Kevin carefully maneuvered his specimens inside the sealed safety tank with gloved hands inserted into impermeable rubber arms. He had been researching bioweapons on behalf of the university for several years now, playing with such deadly toys as Ebola, black plague, and flesh- eating bacteria. It was strangely comforting to him, to know that he, Kevin Shortner, could handle microscopic, deadly things with such ease and imperviousness. He could not be killed by these weapons; he was invincible here. He couldn’t wait to see the results of his studies being used in nanobot- driven virus carriers. When viruses were attached to nanobots, they could spread ten times faster then viruses alone, and could be controlled by remote operators and sent into wherever they chose to attack with these amazing little machines.
The whole world, to Kevin, was about structure, about orderliness. Even tiny deadly life forms had their own structure, their own sensibility, that made them cogs in the grand machine that was Earth. Human beings, their bodies susceptible to these tiny warriors, were an astounding assembly of gear works and cells stacked and connected with incredible engineering intuition. Only, the human immune system wasn’t as quick to adapt as were the viruses themselves, which altered their structure in order to fit into the cracks in humanity’s defenses. With nanobots, and the knowledge of science behind them, these viruses would become invincible. Just like Kevin.
The transfer from Petri dish to sealed container complete, Kevin withdrew his hands from the rubber arms inside the see- through tank.
He took a small vial out from the locked freezer marked “BIOHAZARD” and inserted a syringe into it. Classical music floated in the back ground, a reflection of the orderliness Kevin believed in. He found Vivaldi especially inspiring when he was working.
With expert deftness, Kevin sucked up the clear fluid into the syringe. The little white lab rats in their sealed cages nearby blinked stupidly at him, tiny red eyes glowing in the dim blue lights of the lab. Poor, stupid creatures. As senseless as humans, really. They had no idea what was out there to get them. Their poorly evolved brains still believed that only things they could see would be capable of killing them. Fight or flight responses, hard wired into their little brains since the days of the saber- toothed tiger, still only responded to threats their eyes could see, their noses could smell, or their ears could hear. The little white rats could not even conceive of an invisible entity that could make them die bleeding to death from the inside out.
Poor, stupid humans. They thought that only what they could see could hurt them. But, here in this room, in this body, Kevin was invincible. Kevin knew what was going on. Kevin could see all of the little cells and machines, could see how all the pieces fit together, could see the invisible. In fact, Kevin could create it.
Kevin leaned back in his chair, let the music caress him, its waves carrying his exultant brain to higher and higher levels of cognition. He expertly plunged the needle into his thigh, emptying all of its contents immediately into his blood stream. He let bliss carry him upwards and onwards.
The little white rats pawed uncertainly at their plexiglass windows, wondering what sweet freedom this was. If they had been able to read, they would have seen that the vial Kevin dropped had “Experimental Ebola Virus Nanobot Carriers” neatly printed on its white label in black, solid letters. But they weren’t able to read. They only knew when feeding time was, and that wasn’t until the morning fourteen hours from now, when their feeder would find Kevin Shortner dead from bleeding his organs out into the comfort of his desk chair, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing in the back ground.