Oh Hell No! (Pulse Science Fiction Series Book 3)

Oh Hell
No!

Oh Hell No!

ASIN: B016QIY6AO

© 2015 by John
Freitas

“Love is in a state
of dormancy in each one of us, just waiting for the right conditions to
germinate.”

The Quantum Brain (in exile)

Oh Hell No!

Loriei leaned against the cracked
brick of the building behind her. As she bent over and held her shaking knees,
she saw more glass broken on the ground than was left in the windows above her
head. She was not sure what the building had been used for before the city had
mostly collapsed with the rest of the world. Even if she went inside, most of
the floors and furniture would be collapsed down into the middle and stirring
the debris would probably bring out the homeless creatures whose hosts had died
in there at some point in the past.

She was having a bad day. Someone
had stolen her car out of the paddock where she had it hidden. Hidden, but not
good enough apparently. Walking through the city in the open was deadly, but
today was a special day. She could not afford to hide in her bunker today – the
world couldn’t afford it.

“That’s not right,” she said to
herself feeling the blood pound inside her head. “The car was stolen back when
you were a little girl back when your parents were still alive. They are dead
now and you are not a little girl anymore.”

Loriei knew she needed to get back
to the bunker and out of the open. Her father had always told her it wasn’t safe
to be in the open anymore.

“That’s not right.” She whispered
to herself and the broken glass. “You don’t live there anymore. You need to go
somewhere else.”

She had a last name, but even when
she could remember it, she didn’t use it anymore. It had been her parents’ last
name too, but she barely remembered them. She had a doctorate and the title
that went with it. Her only value to the world was her ability to
compartmentalize that knowledge safely away from the other bits eaten away from
her memory. Loriei knew like everyone she would one day lose it all and become
like most of the others that wandered the ruins of the city.

The city had a name too and she
used to remember that as well.

One fat louse fell from her bald
head and landed in the glass at her feet. Its legs writhed in the air as it
struggled on its back. It was a small one – only a couple inches thick. As it
struggled back to its feet sliding the shards aside with its mass, Loriei saw
it was striped black and white instead of the adult gray. This was a member of
a new generation of lice that infested her skull and skin. The husks of this
one’s dead parents had been falling to the floor of her bunker for days, so she
knew a few new offspring were on their way. This little guy had lost its grip.

A piece of skin fell from her
scalp and slapped raw against the ground. The louse poked at the loose skin as
if it was considering it or just trying to find its way.

It scurried through the glass
displacing more shards until it found the toe of her shoe and then climbed back
up her rail thin leg. She did not bother to swat it aside. As it disappeared
under the frayed edge of her baggy dress, she considered that one of its
ancient ancestors might have been hurt by the sharp glass. Those creatures were
much smaller though and were not as strong as the generations immune to
pesticides and treatments.

The creature used the protrusions
of bone under Loriei’s black and gray spotted skin as leverage to climb her
body under her dress. Loriei felt the progress as pain and itch. She fought the
urge to scratch knowing it would make the itch worse and accelerate the damage
to her mind. Serotonin would stunt the pain for a second and then would jump
the track from the neurons to make the itch worse. More scratching would
produce more serotonin which would eventually accelerate the life cycle of the
lice. They would feed more and burrow deeper. She would drift away from herself
more quickly than she already was.

The immature louse climbed out of
Loriei’s dress at the neck and scaled up her skinny neck to the base of her
skull. She found herself fearfully hoping it did not attach there. She could
not remember exactly why that scared her, but she knew there was a good reason.

Under the glass she saw an
advertisement from a magazine pasted to the pavement. It was glossy paper that
made the model shine even with the fading of the weather. Her body was skinny,
but proportional. The model looked wildly tall and her head was not bulbous
like human heads were in Loriei’s time. She had hair and her skin was a healthy
brown. This woman could be one of Loriei’s ancestors from before the plagues.
She would not be recognized by this model or anyone from her generation.

The lice that were already embedded
in her skull shifted as the tiny louse burrowed back into the scalp. They were
prepared to fight an intruder that did not match their flock. They recognized
the new generation as one of theirs and settled back down. The infestation in
her head went from pain back to a dull itch that could not be scratched.

“She would not recognize us,”
Loriei said to the glass and the model under her. “This won’t work.”

The words were important.
Something needed to be adjusted. Loriei knew she needed to get to the lab and
tell this to her colleagues, but then she forgot why and continued to stare
drifting further from herself leaning on the brick wall in the open like her
father told her not to do.

She felt hunger build inside her
and she started scratching at her skin through her dress. Her flock began to stir
within the bumpy skin of her broad skull.

It was the music that brought her
back. She heard it like a cry or a whine of something in pain. She thought
about going to see if it was something wounded that she could kill and eat. As
this idea bubbled like an unscratched itch in the lower part of her brain, the
strained, higher parts recognized the beauty and then realized it was the
strings of a violin she heard. The notes traveling to her ears through the air
registered as emotional strains more than they did as sounds. It pulled at her
mind and made her feel more attached to herself and her body again despite the
surreal haze that fogged her thinking.

She stopped scratching and waited
for her lice to settle back into a state of rest while she listening to the bow
draw music from the strings somewhere in the distance.

Loriei stood up straight and
waited for the wave of dizziness to pass. She shuffled forward through the
glass and away from the wall. She steered herself around the rusted hulks of
abandoned cars, dismembered androids and the debris of fallen cinderblock and
broken furniture.

She finally reached a field where
she stared out at a man. He was nearly naked except for the shreds of pants
that looked like they used to be denim. His skin was completely gray meaning
his ancestors had probably been European in origin. His enlarged head wobbled
on his thin neck as he played. His scalp was split open and Loriei could see
the lice feeding on the bloody wound and exposed brains. He was in the final
stages and would not last much longer.

He missed notes from time to time
as his fingers danced and the bow glided back and forth, but he otherwise had
the tune. She did not understand how he was still capable.

Two of his lice tumbled out of his
skull into the tall grass of the field. They were swollen as large as his fists
closed together. They lay still and sated not even trying to right themselves
as they had gorged themselves on their final meal of their dying host. Once
they became active again, these lice would seek out a new host and battle the
native flock for control on another’s skull. The unlucky target might not
survive the competition for territory. Loriei wanted to be far away when this
happened.

The man stopped in mid note. The
silence was thick. He held the violin and bow in place as his eyes went wide.
He seemed to be waiting for something – maybe to remember his place in the
performance.

His fingers went slack and both
the violin and the hairy bow dropped softy to the grass beside the shed lice.
The man looked down as he shuffled away. Whatever piece of memory that had been
touched by the feasting lice had been abandoned or consumed.

It might have saved Loriei’s life,
but it was gone now.

She reached behind her back at
something pressing on her spine. She feared it was one of the enormous lice
coming to claim a new host. She felt the notebook stuffed in the belt behind
her dress.

Now her eyes went wide with the
flood of memory returning to her. “I have to get back.”

Loriei turned and walked up the
street with greater determination than before.

She found the old bank building
and worked her way through the dark lobby over the molded carpet. The vault was
open and she entered the deeper darkness. Loriei felt along the bumpy faces of
the safety deposit boxes. She found herself wondering what might have been left
in them. They could be full of precious treasures that might be worthless now.

She found the smooth back wall of
the vault and slid her bony fingers down looking for the latch. It was
difficult to find in the dark even if one knew where to look. It was tough to
find on purpose. The others had probably discovered she was there by now, but
they couldn’t help. If she was too far gone and only searching out of a faint
hint of memory, then they could not open it for her and let a dangerous shadow
mind into the laboratory.

“Like a man remembering to play
the violin one last time.” She whispered.

If they heard her talking to
herself, that wouldn’t go over well either.

She found the slot and slid her
fingers in to punch out the sequence. She wondered if the fingers of a pre lice
human would be able to fit in there at all. Maybe a child? There weren’t many
children left either.

“All of the human race is a shadow
on the world at this point,” she said. “And stop talking to yourself, Doctor …
Loriei.”

The door broke loose from the rest
of the wall and slid backward. She pulled her fingers from the slot before they
were torn off. As the door slid aside to more darkness, she turned her head
carefully to look back through the open vault to the light of the street
outside. With the creatures boring and feeding constantly, there was the
constant paranoid itch that someone was watching. It made Loriei want to close
the vault door. She wondered if those below had chosen to keep it open on purpose
or simply because there was no one left strong enough to close it.

She stood and stepped through into
the space beyond the false wall. The door slid back closed and locked into
place. The red security light above her flickered on and the elevator lurched
downward. She held the wall to keep her balance. The wall behind her open and
she turned before stepping out into uneven, florescent light.

They were waiting coated in folds
of plastic that hung off of them like the skin of an elephant, if there had
been any still alive in the world.

One of them pressed the syringe injector
against her arm and she felt the warmth of the treatment course through her arm
and out into her body. The heat brought pain through her heart and fluttered
its rhythm for a moment. She waited for her flock to react. Sometimes they had
a bad reaction and fought the sedatives. She felt a few spiny feet move inside
her skin, but then they went still. Her mind grew clear and focused. The itch
subsided.

Loriei blinked and pulled the
notebook out of the back of her dress. “I found it. This is all the information
I collected on the gravitational wave that passed through the Earth over a
century ago. Everything we need is here. We can use this to recalculate the
jump.”

The other plastic covered
scientist took it from her and set it aside. “What took you so long? You said
it was in your old bunker.”

“It was,” she said. “I forgot for
a while and went back to living there before I remembered I was supposed to
come back here.”

The man that injected her with the
treatment pulled the old dress off her shoulders and down off her splotchy
body. “You are lucky you didn’t end up going feral like the others.”

“We all are.” The second man said
as they pulled a plastic suit on her body giving her an elephant skin of her
own.

They pulled a plastic cap over the
top of her head and sealed it around her brow. She smiled as much as the tight
skin around her face would allow. Having a clean room when everyone was
infested with super lice seemed like a silly precaution. She supposed two
flocks getting into a conflict in the midst of an experiment wouldn’t be good.

The first man pulled off her shoes
and replaced them with plastic boots like theirs.

Loriei’s smile faded as she
thought about the glossy picture of the ancient human model under the broken
glass with the sad violin playing in the distance. “They won’t accept us. We
need to rethink the protocol.”

The men exchanged a look and
returned their attention to her. One said, “We already made the jump to 1955.”

Loriei shook her head and grabbed
up her notebook from the table. “I need to get into the lab now.”

The men led her through without
question.

The glass door to the final
section of the lab slid closed behind her. Loriei stared at the letters “CDC”
etched backward in the glass. The lights overhead were oddly bright coming from
a world where everything had gone drab. This lab was left over from another
time when things were clean and the Earth was functional. They had once looked
for a cure here in the last desperate moments before all of humanity was
infected. Now they were looking for a cure again although they were breaking
the law to do it.

Loriei turned away from the
barrier and approached the railing to look over at the empty platform. It
seemed so barren and plain. The metal disc in the center of the room seemed too
simple to be capable of ripping an opening through space and time.

“Destroying the world is so much
easier than our ancestors ever imagined,” Loriei said.