Turned: A Spine-Chilling Young Adult Apocalyptic Fiction (The Undead Series, Book 1) (14 page)

The sound of a heart beating interrupted my dark silence and brought me to some level of consciousness. I didn’t know if it was my heart or somebody else’s heart. My eyeballs moved around rapidly, yet the only thing I saw was darkness. The sound of the heartbeat was then accompanied by metal clanging as if I were in a kitchen. I heard footsteps, followed by wet gurgling. I managed to force my eyes open somewhat, though they felt like they weighed one hundred pounds each.

The first thing I laid my eyes on was a large stainless steel shelving unit that had all sorts of things on it that one would find in a hospital – gauze, scissors, syringes, needles, medicine containers, and bottles filled with some type of solution. Behind that was a white wall. Off to the right, I saw a computer, a heap of papers, manila folders, and sticky notes that sat on a dark executive style desk. On top of the desk was a large whiteboard with all kinds of scribble written on it that I couldn’t understand. To the right of the whiteboard was a photo of a man and a woman. I attempted to focus my eyes on the people in the picture but my vision was too blurred still. Beside that photo was an 8X10 of my face – a picture that I recognized as one Ethan had taken on his web cam.

I glanced down at my feet that popped out of a blue hospital gown and realized that I was laying on a hospital gurney. In my left arm was an IV set-up with fluids flowing. A cart sat beside me and contained some of the items that I had noticed on the steel shelving unit. There was an old, musty smell to the room and a grotesque stench that I couldn’t quite figure out.

I heard footsteps walk towards me. They stopped beside the gurney. I managed to turn my head to the left and make out sea green linen pants and the same color hospital coat. I gradually followed the seam of the coat up until I reached a tan, stubbly neck…up the neck to a stubbly chin, a cute nose and….Jasper. Jasper stood beside my gurney in doctor’s clothes. Still confused and disoriented, I stared at him with a look of puzzlement on my face.

“Good morning, sweet cheeks. I’m glad to see you’re finally awake.” Unable to force any words from my mouth, not knowing what to say if I could talk, I gaped at him.

“Aw, don’t look so glum, pumpkin!” he called out in a chipper tone with a huge smile on his face. “Everything’s fine, I promise!” My mouth was dry and my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth. I pried it off and pursed my lips together in an attempt to speak but nothing came out. I looked over toward my left arm where the IV was and then up at him for answers.

“Oh, that. Yeah,” he frowned. “We’ll talk about that when you’re all the way awake.”

I couldn’t remember much at this point. My mind seemed to only want to focus on one thing at a time. I put all my effort in sounding out words.

“Where am I?” I whispered. I felt like hell. I was sore and nauseous. Jasper smiled.

“You’re in my basement, dear,” he replied. He turned around and walked towards a counter with more medical supplies on it. “My lab…if you must know.”

“Your basement?” I questioned. I knew there was no way that I could be in California.

“Yes. The house I took you and that woman to…Em. It was my house. I just didn’t tell you.” I felt an itch on my left arm where the IV was and tried to itch it with my right hand, but couldn't. I looked down only to find out that I was strapped to the bed. I whimpered.

“What are you doing to me? Why is my photo up there? What is all this stuff?”

“Oh Retta, always the one with all of the questions, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Why am I strapped to this bed? Why do I have an IV?” I stammered. “What the hell is going on?”

It was at that moment that I suddenly had a flashback of opening the door to see Jasper standing there, and then forcing a cloth over my nose. That was the last memory I had. My mind began rewinding what had happened prior to this, and recalled being in the room with Em who was bleeding. The basement. She was in the basement. This was where Em came from, where she got her hand cut off.  Em told me Jasper wanted to hurt me. The medical equipment. He really was going to hurt me!

Those realizations flooded my mind and gave me the strength that I needed to pull my upper body up and frantically look around. But although I could move my upper body, my legs and feet were strapped to the gurney. I tossed my head and contorted my body to the left. The view behind me nearly made me pass out all over again.

On the wall behind me were cells…four small rooms with jail-like cell doors. In one of the cells, a zombie gripped the steel poles with both of his decayed hands, writhing, squirming, and moaning in an attempt to squeeze through the doors to eat me. His eye sockets were hollow and his red and black swollen eyeballs stared hungrily at me. I hadn’t seen any zombies with bloody eyeballs until this point.

The next two cells were empty. I flipped around to my right to look into the last cell but I couldn't see anything, though I heard another zombie in there. I looked up at Jasper with terror in my eyes and full awareness of the harm he might do to me. He smiled at me.

“Oh Retta, I’m not going to let them hurt you.”

“What the hell is going on Jasper?” I cried. I pulled at the restraints around my wrist. Instead of answering, Jasper walked behind the gurney to the cells. I contorted my body again so I could see what he was doing. He walked down the row of cells, stopped at the red-eyed zombie, and stared at him with a look of pleasure on his face.

“Most people look at these things as monsters,” he said to me as he walked over to a deep freezer. He opened the lid up and glanced in. With the lid open, an even more violent stench filled the basement. He bent over and reached into the freezer and pulled out a human arm. I instantly felt my stomach rise to my throat.

“Normally I like to feed them living flesh and blood,” he said with the arm in his hand. He stepped over to a large microwave, opened the door, stuck the arm in and pressed the 1-minute button. “But the most action this guy has had recently is a hand.” He snickered.

The microwave beeped, and Jasper pulled out the arm. He walked towards the rotting zombie whose foul brown tongue stuck out in an attempt to pull in the arm Jasper had for him. Jasper held the arm out in front of the zombie’s face, and he chomped his yellow teeth over the wrist and pulled it into the cell like a dog. I squirmed as I heard the zombie tear through the flesh and suck it down his throat, moaning with gross pleasure the entire time. Jasper walked over to the sink to wash his hands.

“By the way, I know Em is still upstairs,” he said amused. “She wouldn’t leave you here after all. She doesn’t know I know she’s up there, but that’s good. She’ll be enough to feed these two for a few days.” Something clicked in my head.

“That zombie ate her hand off!” I gasped. At that moment, I knew that Em was going to turn into a zombie or Jasper was going to feed her to the zombies if I didn’t save her. She let the zombie eat her hand off to get free from the cell, and most certainly contracted the virus. My whole body quivered.

“Ah, there you go detective Retta! You’re putting the pieces together, that’s my girl. Of course, I didn’t mean for her to lose her hand already. She did that herself.” Jasper tore a paper towel off the roll and wiped his hands, then turned to face me.

“What do you mean she did that to herself?” I wanted to get all of the information I could from Jasper, despite how gross I felt.

“She tried to escape. I had her hands cuffed together in her cell. Looks like she stuck it out for that one to eat off so she could get her hands free. I found pieces of it on the ground. Smart woman, she is. She had a pin on her clothes, so she picked the lock,” he said.

“Why all of this, Jasper? I thought you loved me. What are you going to do with me? Why do you want to hurt us?” The questions flew out of my mouth and I couldn’t control them.

“Like I said, I’m not going to hurt you,” he sneered at me. “Unless you make me.” I still didn’t understand. I pressed him with questions.

“Why are we here? Why are you feeding them? I don’t understand.”

“I’ll tell you all of that if you want, but first I am going to go find your friend,” he said to me.

“No Jasper, please!” she cried, please don’t hurt her!”

“If I don’t kill her, then I risk that she’ll convince you to try and run away from me. Plus, like I said, I need some living food for those two.” He motioned to the zombies.

I screamed, but Jasper didn’t care. He opened the basement door, walked out, and then shut it behind him. My screams only made the zombies behind me hungrier. I heard both of them smack up against the cell door, chomp their teeth together and moan as if they were cats in heat.

It was a half hour before Jasper returned. I sat upright the entire time, watching the zombies as they watched me.  It wasn’t my choice, but I felt that if I wasn't facing them, they’d pop up behind me and sink their teeth into me. One of them looked so oddly similar to Ethan.

Though sick to my stomach and worried about Em, I wasn’t as frightened as I was before. Jasper apparently didn’t want to hurt me and was more worried about me running away from him. I relaxed a little knowing that I wouldn’t be hurt. Instead, I could focus on gaining his trust so that we had a chance to escape.

The door to the basement opened forcefully as if there were a struggle. Once it was open, I saw why. Em was caught in Jasper's arms, kicking and screaming. She had a gash on her forehead, which I attributed to Jasper hitting her.

“Em!” I screamed as soon as I saw her face. Em looked at me and started to cry as if she was so happy to see me alive and unharmed. Jasper pulled her over to the last cell, dropped her down on the ground and locked the door behind her.

“Jasper, please if you love me, please don’t hurt her!” I screamed. Em sobbed within the jail cell, wresting one of the steel poles with her only good limb. Her eyes looked like those that should belong to someone in an insane asylum – the white of the cornea overtaking the pupil and the iris, her eyelids tucked far back into her head – while Jasper’s on the other hand looked…too normal.

“You sonofabitch!” she screamed at him. “Don’t you fucking hurt her, or I’ll cut you into little pieces and feed you to those monsters!” she yelled, referring to the zombies.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he laughed at her as he walked over to his workstation. “I’m not going to hurt her. But I am going to hurt you…well, they are,” he replied.

Em’s wrestling match with the cell bars stopped for a few seconds while she processed his words, and then she fought with them again while shrieking profanities.

“Jasper, please!” I called to him again. “Do you love me? If you love me, please don’t hurt her.”

Jasper walked over to the shelving unit, ignoring my requests, and grabbed a syringe and a bottle of some kind of solution. The zombies were writhing with desire. I looked over at both of them. Maybe it was just me, but the Ethan-looking zombie on the far right was looking at me strangely, not in the way zombies typically look at people. Jasper had turned around with the full syringe in his hand and caught me staring at the zombie.

“Recognize him?” he asked me with a slick grin on his face. I looked at Jasper, then looked back at the zombie.

“What?” I asked him confused.

“Oh c’mon Retta. You must recognize that one. It’s Ethan…doesn’t he look familiar?” The way Jasper said it made it seem like it was the most normal thing ever.

I looked back at the zombie and locked eyes with it. My eyes widened, my skin turned pale, my heart sank to the pit of my stomach. It was Ethan. Ethan was the zombie in the corner cell… in Jasper’s basement locked up like a science specimen. Once I had fully comprehended these thoughts, I had no control over the screams that came from my mouth.

“No! Who are you? What did you do to him?” I yelled as I twisted my body back and forth. I shook the gurney enough that it should have fallen over. I didn’t care. All I could think about was how much of a wacko Jasper was and how much I couldn’t believe he was the one who took Ethan away from me. Took everything away from me. “What did you fucking do to him, you monster?”

Jasper’s eyes turned cold and he began to converse with someone, even though no one else was in the room.

“Do you believe that? She thinks I’m the fucking monster? Why the FUCK would she think I’m the monster?” He paused as if he was listening to someone else. “No, I can’t kill her! I love her. Don’t tell me to kill her because I won’t do it!” I held my breath. Jasper paused again.

“Who the fuck are you talking to?” I blurted out. I remembered watching a show a few years ago, about psychopaths and their mental conditions, and Jasper totally sounded like one of them – a schizophrenic.

The memories of Ethan inundated my mind and my heart. I looked over at him and pain flooded my body. At this point, I didn’t see a zombie behind me…I saw Ethan’s handsome face smiling at me. Jasper walked over to me and put his hand on my arm. I furiously shot it away and stared at him with deathly anger.

“What did you do to him?” I stammered. “You! You took him away from me! Why don’t you just fucking answer me? You coward?” Jasper, who still held the syringe his hand, lifted it up to his eyes and tapped it to make sure there were no air bubbles. I’d seen this done in movies.

“You’re right, Retta, I did take him away from you. But only because he didn’t deserve a girl like you!”

“Tell me who you are and what you want! What do you want with me?” Jasper rubbed the scruff on his chin.

“Well, I guess you could say that your ex-lover and I…are blood. Some might call us brothers, but I don’t consider us so.”

“I knew it,” Em screamed from behind her cell door. “I knew that was you – you psychopath! Eric Allen! Eric fucking Allen. The whack scientist who raped the little girls he worked with. I knew that I recognized you from somewhere! The court said you were too incompetent to stand trial, so they put you into an insane asylum six years ago! How did you get out, Eric? Huh? Where’s your accomplice at?” Jasper let out a conniving laugh.

“Oh Doctor Emily,” he scoffed as he walked closer to her. “As a doctor and all, you should know that some of the world’s most intelligent individuals suffer from all sorts of mental conditions! My “condition” so they call it, is what makes me such a genius.” As Jasper got closer to the cell, Em backed up further into it.

“And yes, you’re right Em, I was locked up in a mental hospital – but only because those idiots were afraid of my power. That was, until I escaped, then I was able to stop taking my medication and FEEL my power run through my veins again. Now that I’m not taking my medication…now that I’m not in a drugged-up stupor, my mind…my intelligence…has been set free!” Jasper seemed to forget what he was doing in all of his egotistical glory and circled the room.

“So your Ethan’s brother,” I stated. I felt like I was in some sort of movie. "Ethan’s brother that the family refused to talk about.” Jasper’s face turned a shade of red, but he quickly regained his composure and smiled. Ethan growled, showing his ugly, foul teeth.

“I guess you could call it that,” he replied. “You see, even before he was born, Ethan was always a sad, pathetic little creature. In fact, Lissy and I tried to coerce Mom and Dad into getting rid of him after he was born. But they didn’t…they wouldn’t. Our father overhead me asking our Mom to kill the baby, and he tried to put sissy and I in a mental home. So we killed him.”

“Lissy?” I asked. I remembered that was the name Jasper called me when he forced me to have sex with him the other night. “Who is Lissy? And I thought Ethan’s Dad died of leukemia?”

“When I’m back here in my home, it’s hard for me to try and play this other character….this Jasper character. Lissy was our sister. Do you recall her? Lindsey?” My eyes were so dry that I couldn’t even blink. They felt glued in my eye sockets. I couldn’t breathe either – my chest felt so tight.

“Lindsey…from…from the sanctuary?” I mustered. “Oh my God…” It was at that moment that I had a clear understanding of what was going on. Jasper and Lindsey were Ethan’s siblings…the siblings Ethan and his mom would not discuss. That’s why Lindsey came shortly after him to the sanctuary…they came together. That’s why she saved him. They were brother and sister. His Dad hadn’t died of leukemia, they killed him!

Jasper walked over to the photo of the couple that I looked at earlier. He reached up and pulled the photo from the wall and examined it lovingly less than six inches from his eyes.

“She was the love of my life…you know,” he admitted. I felt myself getting more and more nauseous and Jasper mistook it for sadness.

“Oh now, don’t look so upset honey! When you came into my life…when Ethan showed me your picture…I told Lissy that I wasn’t in love with her anymore. I told her that this was how it’s supposed to be, and that she and I weren’t meant to be together.

“You’re a fucking sicko!” Em whined from inside her cell. “Who gets freaky with their own sister?” Jasper laughed and I looked over at Ethan, whose teeth were clenched together. He continued to stare at me, unwavering, like I was his prey.

“Lissy and I were like one person before I came across you,” Jasper continued. “So beautifully evil. We loved together, and we killed together. She grew jealous of my love for you…and she wanted to kill you. But, of course, I wouldn’t let her. She used to secretly watch us all the time at the sanctuary, plotting how she wanted to kill you. So…it worked out rather well when she was attacked by that zombie. I didn’t want her dead, but she had to be because she’d never accept me being with you.”

“How did you two even know where I was?”

“Do you remember Gus my dear?” I nodded my head.

“Yes, Gus was in charge of recruiting you to the sanctuary and keeping an eye on you so I knew where you were at all times, and so I could come to you when I was ready.” I shook from a chill that ran up my spine and I continued to push down the urge to throw up. I was so close to spewing all over the concrete floor, but knew that if I wanted to hear the whole story, I had to play Jasper’s game. Though this shit made me sick, all of it, I wanted to know what happened to Ethan, so I probed Jasper some more.

“What happened to Ethan? Were you responsible for his disappearance?” Jasper walked over to me, put his palms on the gurney and leaned into me.

“You could say that.” The words slid out of his mouth like an ugly black snake.

“What do you mean by, you could say that?”

"That’s how I created the virus that wiped out ninety percent of the population! Don’t you see? They tried to lock me up and throw away the key but I….I showed them.”

“You did what?” I asked.

“Those things over there,” Jasper replied, motioning to Ethan and the other zombie. “I made them.” He paced the room again. “They’re mine. They’re my fucking creations. That bitch over there is right. After being accused of raping those little whores and escaping from the asylum, I figured out how to end this pathetic world!”

“You, you’re responsible for this virus….for destroying the world?” I asked, horrorstruck.

“Yeah,” he replied smirking. “ME. I did it. I am responsible for creating the virus that wiped out the population. No one believed in me…EVER!” he said, growing louder. “Not my parents, not my brother, not the medical community, NOT ANYONE, but my sister. Everyone told me I’d never go anywhere, my whole life. But now….now I’m proving it to everyone. Now…the future of the human population…of the world…depends on ME, and only ME. Now, I will restore humanity, and be the world renowned scientist I always knew I was, but no one else did. Now I will have the power!” he scoffed.

“Psychopath,” Em muttered again. Jasper strode furiously over to her and pounded on her cell. “Do you want me to feed you to these fucking things now?” he screamed. “If not, you better just shut your goddamn mouth. You don’t know anything.”

I was aghast at what Jasper, my ex-lover, was telling me. But I also knew that Em and I didn’t have any chance for survival unless I played these cards right. I couldn’t let Em ruin this for us by infuriating him any more than he already was.

“Babe,” I called to him. He turned around. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt anybody. I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I lied, and tried like hell to make my eyes wet. Jasper stared at me for another minute then walked over to me and embraced my neck. He pulled my face into his chest. I shuddered with disgust, and hoped he didn’t feel it.

“If you did it, if you created this…this virus….why did you make Ethan contract it?” I asked.

“Ethan played a vital role in this whole master plan,” Jasper divulged. When I escaped from the mental hospital five years ago, I began working on the virus that would kill off the entire world so that I could be in control of this shithole. So that people would bow down to ME! I switched identities…then got into the CDC where I quickly learned everything I needed to know to create such a disease like this. Quite frankly, I didn’t even need to do that much work to create it. Little do you pathetic humans know, the CDC was well on their way to creating something that would eradicate the human race.”

“If all this is true…why did you let Ethan turn? Because you hated him?” I tried to hold back the whimper in my voice. I needed to be strong right now. “Why me?” Jasper walked over to Ethan and stood just beyond his grasp. Ethan’s calculating black eyes pierced into Jasper’s eyes.

“Well, it’s already quite clear that I wanted him dead since before he was even created. I was just going to let him die off, but I needed him for more than that. I needed him for the cure.”

“The cure?”

“Leukemia,” he replied.

“Leukemia,” I confirmed, my body started to convulse and I used all my strength to try and stop it.

“Blood cancer is the cure,” he explained. “The zombie virus can only thrive in a person’s body if that person has healthy blood. But when the cure is introduced, the blood cancer, in the body, it forces a person’s white blood cells on a rampage and prevents the zombie virus from taking over the blood cells. If the person’s blood is already tainted, neither the cure nor the virus will thrive. Alternatively, that person will just die a slow death.” I couldn’t believe what he was saying – I didn’t want to believe it, but he kept talking.