Tracking Blood: Episode 3
An apocalyptic serial
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Washington D.C.
Brentwood
Stanley had hit a dead-end. In the last twenty-four hours, he’d only left his chair three times, once to eat and twice to use the toilet. On the first trip to the bathroom, he’d made the mistake of looking in the mirror. His hair went in five directions and his face looked thin. He had chewed down his fingernails and there was a light ring of sweat on the collar of his shirt.
He didn’t look in the mirror the second trip.
His eyes felt as if someone had sucked them out and forcefully inserted two heavy stones in their place. No amount of coffee was going to fix this, but he couldn’t go to sleep just yet. He was too close to the truth to give up now.
It was time for a break. Stanley minimized the window and stood from the creaky chair. Pacing his apartment's small living room, he went over everything he had done to look for clues to what Warehouse Alpha was and where it could be found. Just as important was who was behind it. Someone was using their position of power to conduct dangerous and potentially illegal research on Armatol, and crushing anyone who caught the scent.
Stanley shook his head. Anyone who caught the scent. Who was he kidding? Not one of his contacts had known a thing. Only a few of them even agreed he was onto something. The rest told him he was looking too far into things, assigning patterns where they didn’t exist. These people were hackers and conspiracy theorists. They ran websites that claimed NASA and the Illuminati were working together to form a new religion, and they were calling him paranoid. Whoever it was pulling the strings, they were so deep in the shadows that no one seemed to know there were shadows. It was a ghost hunt, and so far, a fruitless one.
Stanley rubbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and pointer. He was losing hope. He’d been casting a wider and wider net, speaking to everyone he could, including a few Black Hat-types. That was a dangerous practice. If he wasn’t careful, he could get himself put away for a very long time.
A notification pinged from the laptop’s speaker, catching him off guard. Stanley’s eyes shot open. He spun to look at the screen and saw an IRC message had popped up.
In three steps, he returned to the laptop and clicked on the notification, not even bothering to sit. It was a message from M. Zero, one of his lesser-known associates. The guy- or girl, he wasn’t sure- had carried out a few high profile DdoS attacks, including shutting down the Brazilian stock market for close to two hours as a warning to their President.
Stanley opened the message.
“No matter what I try, I can’t open the second file,” he read aloud. “Don’t ask me where I got it. Don’t contact me again. Going dark.”
There was a compressed, unnamed folder attached.
The breath caught in his chest. Could this be what he’d been looking for, not just for the last few months, but most of his adult life? He ran it for viruses, trackers and anything else even remotely suspicious he could think of, but the scan came back clean.
He opened the folder.
It contained three files. Their names were long and meaningless, just jumbled collections of letters and numbers which, at a cursory glance, didn’t follow any naming system he recognized. For all he knew, M. Zero had named them, so he didn’t waste time figuring them out.
The mouse cursor hovered over the first file. This was it. No going back.
He double-clicked the first file. It was a long, jumbled text file which had suffered major degradation in the process of being decrypted. What had been salvaged amounted to budget and inventory records of an unnamed facility. Most of it was innocuous enough, ranging from computer hardware to stationery. The most telling sections detailed lists of medical equipment and chemicals, focusing strongly on decontamination. He thought immediately of Warehouse Alpha. No matter how much he searched, there wasn’t a single mention of that or any other name in the file. He closed it, intending to come back to it again.
The second file. That was the one M. Zero mentioned being unable to open. Just the idea of that was ridiculous. He wasn’t some script kiddie. Someone with the skills to take down a foreign stock market should be able to open anything you could throw at them.
Right away, Stanley noticed the file didn’t have a file type. He ran it through TrID to see what he was working with, but it came back with no results. He ran it again to be sure. Nothing. He updated the file extension definitions, a list of almost eight thousand file types, and ran it a third time.
Still nothing. Like the first file, he intended to come back to it.
The third file was a video. It opened in one click.
The progress meter showed the video was about a minute-and-a-half long in total. It was poor quality, possibly taken with a camera phone. Trying to make the window bigger only caused the picture to become blurrier.
Still paused, the video’s first frame showed a long, bright hallway in a clinical-looking location. There were no plants, no decorations, no colors other than the sleeping bulbs of emergency lights on the ceiling. There were half a dozen doors all the way down, all with nameplates too far away to read. Several of them had security card readers.
This had to be Warehouse Alpha. The place he’d been looking for, with ties to Armatol and God knows what else. He wiped the sweat from his lips and pressed play.
Screams leapt from the laptop’s speakers, causing him to jump. He turned down the volume as quickly as he could. He didn’t want to give the landlord another reason to think he was a nutjob.
He turned it back up just enough to hear. They weren’t cries of pain coming from somewhere down the hallway; they were the sounds of a man who had gone insane. It was primal, a high-pitched scream that made Stanley’s skin crawl. He’d heard nothing like it before, and now that he had, he wished he could unhear it.
“What the hell did you find, Zero?” he whispered.
Whoever was shooting the video began making their way to a door on their left. It was obvious from the cautious way they moved they were breaking the rules. Their free hand- a man’s- reached out and opened the door in painfully slow movements. They tried not to make a sound, even though the wailing from some unseen place drowned out most noises. The man’s hand was only visible for a second. The sleeve of his shirt was dark blue. Other than the lack of a wedding ring, it was the only clue to the cameraman’s identity.
The room was dark, the only source of light a dim monitor some ten feet away. A table and chairs were just barely visible at the center. The unknown cameraman shut the door behind him, almost completely cutting off the continued screams.
As he slowly walked around the table, the frame stayed focused on the lightly glowing monitor ahead. It was a camera feed; the contents pitched the small room back and forth in uneasy light. Stanley squinted to see what on Earth the monitor showed, not knowing whether he wanted to see or look away.
The man on the screen was sick in just about every sense of the word. He was deathly pale, with dark bloodstains coating the front of his clothes. He smashed his body against protective observation glass over and over as he screamed through a mouth full of broken teeth. It wasn’t a sound of pain coming from him; it was more like violent rage.
And his eyes. They were the color of blood.
“Terminate the subject,” a man’s voice said calmly from somewhere off-screen. Seconds later, a harsh hiss came through the speaker. Gas filled the small room, engulfing the sick man in a thick mist. Now, now the scream was one of pain.
When the cloud of gas cleared, the crazed man was on his knees but still moving. He slapped his hands out at the glass and made a gurgling sound deep in his throat. A jumble of concerned voices debated how it was possible that he was still alive. “Again,” the calm man’s voice cut them off.
The gas returned twice as strong. This time, when it cleared, the crazed man lay lifeless on the floor, blood oozing from his nose and mouth. Red eyes stared blankly at the ceiling.
Stanley stared in shock at his screen. If this was a hoax, it was the most convincing one he’d ever seen.
Someone on the monitor spoke. It was the calm man’s voice, but it was too low to be audible. Stanley turned up the volume as far as he could, but he still couldn’t decipher the man’s words. He took the video into an editing program and messed with the levels until finally he made out three strained words.
“-Call Major Richards.”
Bingo. He had a name.
Stanley opened a new window and typed the name into the search. It sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He’d investigated so many military men over the years, their names ran together in a cloud of deceit and corruption thicker than the cloud of gas he’d just seen kill some poor man.
The search returned immediate results. The first was a veteran of the French and Indian War who had died in 1822. Stanley felt comfortable eliminating him as a suspect.
The second hit was a bit more recent. An image came up of an older man with a stern face and dark gray eyes. Beneath the photo was a title.
Major Gerald Richards, Head of CBRN Defense.
Stanley’s mouth dropped. “Holy shit,” he said.
Tune in next week for the next episode. For more Bleeders action check out the two books on Amazon, with the third on its way.