Sick Bastards (15 page)

PART SIXTEEN

Before

The Last Days

The man whose head Father had split with the axe was consumed fairly quickly over a couple of days with not a lot of him going to waste. Sister had a fair amount (certainly more than I could stomach) but it was Father and Mother who seemed to eat the most. No doubt spurned on by Father’s ill-conceived belief that he felt stronger for eating the flesh of another human. Again, there was no sense arguing with him.

“The God you pray to... he hears you,” I had heard him tell Sister one afternoon. “He hears you and that’s how we keep getting sent more people, like these two. Come now, eat...Be thankful. It’s what your God would have wanted. If it wasn’t - why are we feeling stronger when we consume the flesh of others as opposed to getting ill? If it were a sin, like your brother seems to suggest, surely God would make us suffer? We are blessed. We survived the blast, we have each other - one big happy family - and he keeps sending us more food...”

I was in the other room. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to hear. Since our conversation in the lounge the other day, he had more or less given up talking to me - unless ordering me to keep watch out of the windows. I guess he knew my mind could not be swayed. Sister’s mind though was still in the balance. One minute she seemed okay, the next she seemed to take Father’s side. This conversation, another little act of brainwashing on Father’s part, would tip the balance back towards him, I feared.

Mother walked into the room where I was sitting.

“What are you doing in here all alone then?” she asked.

I didn’t answer her. Not because I was being rude. I just knew she didn’t care. There was only one reason Mother would walk into a room with me when there was no one else around. Again, our ‘normal’ conversations were at an all time low since the last two people came by the house and since she first started using me for her own sexual gratification.

She sat with me on the sofa.

“You look sad!” she said.

Of course I was sad. Sister was being brainwashed by a father who was desperate to bend her will into his line of thinking. Father had completely lost his mind - as had Mother - and I was close to losing mine too. Not forgetting my daily diet is
human
and I had killed a man - something else which was still weighing heavily on my conscience.

I killed a man to protect a family. A family I felt I was growing distant from.

“How ever can I cheer you up?” she asked. A schoolgirl giggle.

Again I stayed silent. She didn’t need an answer and wouldn’t have listened to the one that I had given her anyway. She never listened when I asked her to leave me alone. She moved closer to me on the sofa and ran her hand up my leg to my crotch. She gave it a squeeze. I felt my penis betray my mind as it responded to her touch.

“What about this?” she asked. “Does this cheer you up?”

Just let her get it over with,
I thought to myself. She fumbled around with the buttons on my jeans before reaching in and taking a hold of my shaft. I tilted my head back against the sofa and closed my eyes so I could pretend I was somewhere else. Somewhere normal. The world wasn’t broken. The world was perfect. I was with a loving girlfriend. We had been invited out for the night but chose to stay in instead. Chose to stay in together. Just the two of us. Some soft lighting, quiet music playing. One thing had led to another and my loving girlfriend had decided to give me some oral.

Not my mother
.

Sister’s voice, in the other room with Father, killed my imagination.

“God isn’t sending these people to us,” she told Father, “it’s not in his control anymore. The Devil won. The Devil and his minions...Humans in disguise...People like us. They’ve broken the world. They’ve made God blind to us. All we can do now is beg for his forgiveness. That’s what I do every day when we eat. I ask for his forgiveness. You should too.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. I wish I could see his face.

Mother stopped what she was doing and looked up at me, a naughty glint in her eye, “You like that?”

“Yes.” It meant sister wasn’t lost yet.

Mother suddenly jumped up from me when a door slammed from the other room. Clearly Father didn’t appreciate Sister’s comments as much as I had.

“You’ll have to sort yourself out!” Mother said.

I quickly put myself away and did my jeans up - just in time too as Father came into the room. His face; he looked angry. Yet when he saw me, his expression seemed to darken even more.

He slumped down in the armchair across the other side of the room.

“Everything okay?” Mother asked him.

“Sometimes I don’t know why I bother. Why any of us do.”

I took the cue to leave the room, doing my best to hide my grin. I cast my eyes into the dining room. There was no one in there. Sister must have gone upstairs. I hurried up to see her. She was in the bedroom as per usual. I closed the door behind myself.

“Father thinks this is all about God...The people he sends us...”

I cut her short by kissing her. She responded. I still had the erection that had been kick started by Mother’s touch (and Mother’s mouth). I shoved Sister back and she toppled on top of the mattress.

She looked at me with the same amount of lust in her eyes that I felt surging through me. I kicked my clothes off and she did the same with her own until we were both naked. She went to say something to me but I didn’t let her. I threw myself on top of her and kissed her again, my hands roaming over her perfect body.

“So fucking hot!” I told her. I spat in my hand and rubbed it against her vagina. To my surprise it was already sopping.

I thrust forward and she let out a squeal. Had it not been for her facial expression - a look of sheer lust - I’d have thought I had hurt her. At least I think her expression is one of lust. It’s hard to tell in the light offered by a gentle flame licking away at the darkness of the room. Not that that would have bothered me if the expression was one of pain. So much pain in the world - what’s a little bit more? I pulled back a little and thrust forward again with the same level of aggression. She yelped again and buried her face down in the pillow whilst, at the same time, lifting her arse in the air to allow for deeper penetration. Definitely wasn’t an expression of pain. I didn’t need telling twice and I upped the speed and hardness with which I penetrated her. We don’t make love. We never have. We fuck.

I pulled out and flipped her onto her back. Her response was a hard, heavy slap to my face. I smiled at her. She spat back.

“Fuck me!” she ordered.

I positioned myself on top of her and pushed in again. A heavy sigh from the pair of us. Feels so good. So wet and yet so incredibly tight. I breathed in her scent. No perfume. She never wore perfume anymore. No matter. I’ve grown accustomed to the smell of her scent as it mixes with my own. I kind of like it now. I breathed in hard as I continued to pound her hard and fast - the way we both liked it. I was close to the climax but could tell she needed longer. Either that or she wanted me to up the game a bit. I put my hands around her neck and squeezed hard - cutting off her air as she liked. She gasped and struggled which made the sensations I was feeling that little bit nicer. Her face was flushing now. Not sure if she is close or whether it’s because I’ve stopped all of the blood.

A knock on the door distracted us both. Before we’d a chance to hide ourselves, the door opened a crack and Mother stuck her head through. “I’ve been calling you for hours!” she moaned. “Put your sister down! Dinner’s ready.”

I pulled out with my vinegar stroke ruined; a jet of sticky white semen splashing across sister’s stomach. Sister looked just as frustrated as I was. My orgasm ruined by the appearance of mother and her orgasm denied completely right at the last minute.

Thanks Mum, thanks a lot. Great timing as usual.

“You owe me,” my sister huffed as she pulled up her French knickers, ignoring the cum trickling down her belly. I flashed her a wink as if to tell her she’d be getting it later and threw my trousers on, followed by my shirt.

I’ll repay her when I get her out of this hellhole. I feel as though our time is coming. It won’t be hard to get her to come with me. Not after hearing the conversation she had with Father. Not now I know his brainwashing techniques hadn’t won her over...

PART SEVENTEEN

Now

A Few Home-Truths

I shoved the man into the cabin no sooner had he opened the door. He fell to the floor, tripping over his own feet, a pathetic mess. He had tears streaming from his face and clearly he feared for his life. If he had been one of the people (in the second cabin) watching the monitors then he had every right to fear for it too. He knew I was a killer. He knew I tasted human flesh.

I looked around the cabin. More monitors, some computers, and a few cabinets but nothing which stood out and explained to me what was happening, despite the man’s promises.

“You said you’d tell me what was going on!” I hissed at him. I stood over him as though I were ready to clobber him. In truth there wasn’t much between us - height wise - and he was much stockier than me so I’m sure that, if it came down to it, he’d have beaten me in a fight. Especially whilst I was so hungry. Not that I wanted him to realise as such.

“Second cabinet down!” he said, pointing to the filing cabinet from where he lay, sprawled out on the floor. I followed his finger to the cabinet and walked over to it. As instructed I opened the second drawer down. A large collection of CDs. Four stacks of varying amounts bound together by elastic bands.

“What is this?”

“There’ll be one in there of you!” he said. “It will say your name on the front of the top case.”

My name?

John Burley.

I pulled all four stacks out and turned to the man.

“Get up!” I ordered him.

He did so. He took the piles from my hands and placed them on a sideboard next to one of the computers. I watched as he opened the computer’s CD drawer on the tower unit and slipped a CD from the case of the batch which contained my name. He turned one of the screens on and it flickered into life. My face was onscreen. I was sitting at a table in a room I didn’t recognise.

A female voice off screen spoke to me, asking me questions. Despite it clearly being me onscreen, I didn’t recognise any of this.

“We’re going to ask you to confirm some details before we continue, if that’s okay.”

“Sure.”

“Can you confirm your name?”

“John Burley.”

“And your date of birth?”

“September 30th, 1980.”

“Mother’s maiden name?”

“Osborne.”

I tried to remember my mother but couldn’t. Not the one pretending to be her, back in the house, but my real mother. My birth mother. My head pounded as though telling me that part of my memory was off-limit.

“Thank you. Can you confirm why you’re here?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. I’m just replying to an advert.”

“Can you confirm the advert and where you saw it?”

“I saw it online. It mentioned a series of scientific tests but not a lot else. Other than a substantial pay to those who completed it.” Onscreen I laughed. Why do I remember none of this?

I turned to the man who wasn’t watching the screen as intently as I was. He was nervously watching my reaction.

“Turn it off.”

He did as he was told.

“You signed up to this. You all did.”

I looked at his name badge again. Michael Bray. The name didn’t ring a bell.

“Signed up to what?”

“Please, I’m just paid to work here. This isn’t my idea. None of this is. They just employ me.”

“Signed up to what?” I asked him again. I went to hit him, to try and get him talking, and he fell back against the table of screens with his arms raised.

“A test!” he shouted. “It was a government test. We didn’t tell you exactly what was involved. We kept it secret from you until after you had signed the contracts...”

“I wouldn’t have signed without knowing the ins and outs of something!”

“The money! That’s all people seemed to care about, the money...”

“But what about the bomb?” I asked. “The end of the world!” Michael Bray started to laugh. I wanted to hurt him so bad that I felt the adrenalin surge through my body. “What’s so fucking funny?” I screamed at him.

“None of it was real! Don’t you see? The whole thing was set up to see how you’d cope...”

He fumbled with the CDs that were in his hand still. He dropped all but one.

BRIAN BIGELOW.

He tore the first CD from the packet and put it into the computer tower after taking out the previous CD. I just stood there, dumbstruck, as he kicked it into play.

“This is the man you thought was your father...”

* * * * *

Father (aka Brian Bigelow) was sitting on what looked to be a chair similar to the kind you’d find in a dentist’s surgery. He was rocking backwards and forwards as though trying to free himself from the restraints which bound him to the chair; one on each wrist and one on each of his ankles. A contraption was around his skull. Mean looking metal prongs at the front of it seemed to be pinning his eyes open so he couldn’t look away from a large screen which played various images in front of him.

The camera filming him seemed to be operated by a person. They first looked to my father and how he was secured into the chair and then they turned their attention towards the large screen in front of him. The camera settled for a minute, maybe two, so we could get an idea of the various things they were broadcasting directly into Father’s unblinking eyes despite his screaming and protests.

“He’d be kept in that chair for up to eight hours at a time. All the lead subjects went through the same. They would be kept in the chair and they’d be drip fed with various psychedelic drugs. Eventually - even though the films stopped playing - they’d believe what they saw was true. In this case, and the other cases in Zone B, Mr Bigelow believed a bomb went off and destroyed the world you knew.”
Michael’s voice whispered in my ear as I continued to stand in the present, watching the scenes play out on the video.

The images rotated between ones of an Atomic Bomb being detonated (and the mushroom cloud it threw into the air), people being torn apart by the radioactive blast, the photograph of Mother, Father, Sister and me, people looting and  tearing up the streets.

Father continued to scream for them to stop but still they continued to play.

* * * * *

I was mesmerised by what I was seeing play through on the screen; the disturbing images with the picture of (what I thought to be) my family spliced into it all. I’m guessing pictures of
the family
were there to try and turn Father’s way into thinking we actually were part of his life...

Father
...I need to stop calling him that. He isn’t my father. Mother isn’t my mother and Sister, dear Sister, she is nothing to do with me either. Part of me was hugely relieved, considering what we had gone through, but another part of me just felt as though my world had crumbled beneath me even more so than what I had originally thought.

Suddenly the pictures on the screen turned to images of me fucking my sister. One minute we were in the bedroom. Then we were in the dining room, over the table. Sister was replaced with Mother. Still fucking. Mother replaced with Father. Banging me hard and fast. I stumbled back against the wall and covered my hands with my eyes with a scream of despair. By the time I pulled them away again, Michael was just staring at me as though I had gone mad. The screen, still playing the CD, was still rotating images of explosions and looters. My imagination obviously decided to kick up guilt for what had come to pass.

“Turn it off!” I told him, before I saw any of my own images come back to haunt me some more. The man did as he was told. “We were all brainwashed?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Why do this? What could you possibly benefit from it?”

“It wasn’t me! I just work here!”

He was trying to refuse to take any responsibility for what was going on here but, the way I saw it, he was the only one here (seemingly alive) so it made him one hundred percent accountable. With a sudden rush of energy, I crossed the room towards him with a speed which even surprised me. Before I knew it, or he knew it, I had him by the throat and against the table. I started to apply pressure.

“Why?!”

He gasped for air and was trying to say something so I released my grip a little. Not a lot but enough for him to be able to force some words out with a little effort.

“They wanted to see what would happen if a nuke did go off,” he spluttered. “It’s just a test to see whether it would be worth setting up teams to scour the war-torn areas looking for survivors or whether it would be better just to cut their losses and consider everyone dead.”

“Who’s
they
?” I demanded.

“The Government!”

I released my grip completely and backed away from the technician, surprised by what he was saying.

“Of the people in Zone B, your family are the only ones left alive. The first couple, the ones you found in the house, they killed themselves. The man killed the woman and then turned the knife on himself. He bled out in her dead arms. They waited as long as they could, for someone to come and find them, but decided they didn’t want the pain of starving to death when the food ran out. They took what they perceived to be their only option...Another family, they were killed by the infected groups when they tried to leave...They were trying to find help. They were only a mile or so from your house when they were attacked...The two girls died instantly but the men...They made it to your house when your father killed one of them with an axe and...”

“I remembered what happened!” I hissed. I remembered them alright. The second man, the one whose legs we broke, he didn’t even try and tell us what had happened. They weren’t looters, as Father had suspected; they were just another version of us. I felt sick to the stomach. My head was reeling with all the information I was trying to absorb. All I kept coming back to, though, was that the government planned this. They made it happen. They wanted it to happen. Even when we were killing each other. They didn’t care. They didn’t try and stop it. They just left us in there, to rot. “And what did these fucking tests prove?”

The technician struggled to look me in the eye so I made him, by grabbing him around the throat once more. “That it wouldn’t be worth looking for survivors if such an event took place. It’d be more productive to spend the time, and money, on starting the population again with what we had. Your family would be too damaged,” he said, “there’d be no place in society for a family such as yours. Finding people like you, it would be more trouble than it’s worth. Other zones have similar families I heard...You aren’t the only ones to have lost your mind. Although you are one of the only ones to still be standing...”

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to tear the man’s face off. I wanted to stamp on his head until there was nothing but blood and brain underfoot but I did neither. I just stood there completely dumbstruck by what he was telling me.

“But those
things
,” I managed to stammer, “in the woods. The radiation poisoning...”

“Poisoned, yes, but not radiation. Just a potent mixture of chemicals. A biological weapon.” He didn’t wait for me to question him about it. He simply moved to the mouse and keyboard, on the computer, and selected a file - hidden within various other files - on the hard-drive and pointed me to the screen.

It was a laboratory (on the video now playing). A man, in what appeared to be a prison uniform, was stretched out on a hospital bed with doctors standing around him. A timer-counter in the corner of the screen was reset to zero and then another doctor entered the frame with a syringe in his hand. There were no words. He simply walked over to the man on the hospital bed and injected the syringe into the arm. I could see the man was screaming but there was no sound. For that I was thankful.