The Arklay Outbreak

Chapter Thirty

He moved as if guided by remote control. In the back of his mind, he felt that he was only a passenger, watching from a distance as his body moved through the trees, unsure of what he was doing but strangely comfortable with it. He was not completely in control of his actions, and maybe he never had been, but he felt a soothing calmness in his mind, making it hard to resist the course his body was taking.

The rain subsided around him, the constant static noise reduced to damp silence. Not that it made any difference to him; even in the hardest rain he seemed to stay completely dry. And he moved so fast it was almost like flying close to the ground. When he raised his arms, his white lab coat flapped like wings.

He knew that his pets controlled him. It was as if he was merely the vessel for their desires, but the thought comforted him instead of frightened him. After all, they gave him this new life, and he felt that submitting to them coincided with his own desires as well. He wanted revenge against those who destroyed his body in a previous life and stole his dreams from him. From what he saw so far, his beautiful pets wanted the same thing, only on a much grander scale. His pets wanted vengeance against the world. The fact that they directed him to kill so many innocent people meant nothing to him. As long as the guilty were punished along with the innocent, his own sense of justice would be satisfied.

The girl on the train entered his thoughts. It surprised him that his pets hadn’t forced him to kill her too. She had been close enough to touch; all he had to do was point at her and let his pets swarm to the feast. But in that moment, he did not feel the urge. His pets wanted her to live for some reason he didn’t comprehend. And so she lived.

Or had she died in the crash? When he destroyed the train’s controls, he knew vaguely that the train would derail, but how had his pets known? They were the ones directing his actions, and somehow they wanted to crash the train. They made his hands hard as stone and demolished the controls. But why would they do such a thing? What possible purpose did it serve? Again, he was just the vessel.

He stopped running when he reached a wide cement courtyard with a disused fountain in the center and large concrete vases lined up on either side, the plants in them long dead. The enormous mansion in front of him glowed in his memory like a flare. Far to his left, even in the near-perfect darkness, he could make out the top of an astronomy tower. That stirred memories as well. This wasn’t his home, but he knew it well just the same.

He walked up to a pair of doors at the back of the mansion and pushed them open, shattering the metal locks effortlessly. Stale, dry, old air greeted him as he stepped inside, very different from the humid, organic, earthy smell of the forest he’d just left. The dusty floor tiles were cool and dry under his bare feet. As he entered the room, the doors swung shut silently, as if by their own volition.

Desks filled the room, five rows with four desks per row, each with a computer monitor built into it. All were blank, coated with a layer of dust. He could smell nothing but the dust and the scent of age. This room had not seen use in many years.

How long had he been gone? His memories were in pieces that he was just beginning to arrange into place, but he knew that the last time he had been in this room, it had been active and alive, full of noise and movement. Now it was abandoned and empty and had been so for years. How much time had passed since he had been betrayed? How long had it been?

How long had he been dead?

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