ECOPOCALYPSE CH.5 - SHIT STORM

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.5 - SHIT STORM 
By Annie Evett

You grab Madge’s hand, realising that she was always the strong one in the family. She had been the one to teach you to ride a bike, pick you up, and put a band-aid on your scraped knee.  She’d beaten up the bullies in the school yard. Hell, her best friend had been your first conquest. You’d always suspected she had been behind that and, looking in to her eyes, you are now sure that she is the one who has been behind everything good in your life.

“Madge , You go. Get the unit over to the CDC. You’re the best one for the job. I belong here. I should never have been the president of this dumb company. You should have.  You would never have gotten us into all this.”

“Shit.” she smiled.  “No I wouldn't have, but them’s the breaks, huh?”

You fiddle with the unit and make some unnecessary adjustments, unsure of what to say. Sharing emotions had never been one of the family’s strong points. 

“Well?” Madge taps the table next to the control box of the unit. “You coming or what?”

“I’ll stay. The unit is good to go, as good as I can get it right now. I’ll keep making adjustments and try and work out how to speed up the process. Something. I dunno. You better go. The President is waiting for us. For you. Go and save what's left of humanity, huh?”  You flick on the security camera system and pan around the hallway.

“Looks like any of the zombies that were here have moved on,” you snigger, attempting to stifle your own bad joke, but then break down into fits of hysterical laughter.

Madge slaps you across the face—except it's an oversized mitt thumping your fishbowl face helmet.

 “Oh, grow up. What is it about shit and farts that boys never grow out of?”

You collapse with more laughter, gasping for air in your hazmat suit.

“Later. Keep your hazmat suit on. The place is contaminated. Lord knows when or if the cleanup will start. Keep on geeking.”

You knock ham sized fists together, repeating your childhood motto.

She saunters out of the lab door. You watch her till the suit disappears up the hallway. The silence buzzes in your ears as the light in the corner of the room continues to blink. You see her helicopter make its way across the sky. 

The hazmat suit is cumbersome as you attempt to perch on the lab stool. Your oversized fingers are clumsy, and it's not long before you consider taking the whole lot off so you can start to pull one of the Environauts apart and explore every component. You have no idea what else to do. Here seems as safe a place to hang out and wait until the shit storm  blows over. 

A buzzer sounds as the corner light slows its blink. You stare at it and as moments pass; the blink eventually fades to a continual beam. The buzzer stops and a door unlatches. You stand and go over to the door, not remembering having seen it before. As you approach you realise that it had been concealed within the texture of the wall, and only as it opens that the outline reveals its position. 

You flush with anger and indignation. This was your lab, damn it. Who the hell had hidden doors leading off into the unknown in your own lab?  You turn the door handle. The space behind it is lit with floor lights and appears to be a large storage room. As you step inside, general lighting is automatically turned on to reveal rows of cages of now deceased, rotting animals. You are glad you hadn’t taken the hazmat suit off, but gag at the thought of what the smell might be like.

Dogs, cats, rats and squirrels slump inside their cages. Most are surrounded by puke and shit. Your heart squeezes at the sight of these helpless creatures, who have obviously died in a great amount of pain and suffering.  Your head spins, wondering where in the process animal testing had a place in your facility. You sadly realise you have been disconnected from the research unit for over a year, and anything could have been passed by you to sign and you’d not really taken any notice—another reason Madge should have been the CEO and not you. She would never have allowed animal testing.

A rattle in the corner shakes you from your depression. Your heart skips. Something is still alive. Perhaps you can do some sort of good today.

Crouched in one of the larger cages sits an emaciated orangutan. Its orange hair sticks out at right angles from its bony body. It looks up at you with its intelligent, pleading eyes. He gingerly puts out his hand through the bars. You hold back a tear and reach over to touch it, entranced by the gentle moment of trust. 

The ape quickly grasps your wrist and pulls you toward the cage. Its other limbs thrust out of the cage and grab hold of your suit. Your feet scrap against the metal flooring, sliding and finding no purchase as you are pulled in.

The ape grins and peels your helmet off. You try to hold your breath, but are at last forced to take a deep breath, gagging at the putrid smell of death and feces. The orangutan's lips pucker towards you as a dribble of brown trickles down its face. Your struggle renews as you realise that it is dying from the same virus affecting all the zombies. It bares its teeth. You scream, “But you’re a vegetarian! Everyone knows that.” 

The orangutan's mouth covers your scream. A mixture of vomit and shit warmed by the body gushes from the ape's mouth into yours. You feel its arms and legs tighten around you and your are slowly crushed against the bars of the cage. You feel your organs bursting as blood pours from your ears and eyes. You die screaming, clutched in the strong arms of a giant orange ape.

Oops...return to Chapter 5

ECOPOCALYPSE CH. 5 - YOU'RE A SCIENTIST!

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.5 - YOU'RE A SCIENTIST!
 By Wayne Depriest

You’ve got one chance to get this right; one chance to turn the tide; one chance to get you and Madge and the rest of humanity out of the shithole and back to normalcy. You need an antidote and you need it fast. You’re a scientist, for shit’s sake! You made the mess, even if it was some cost-conscious, bottom line-watching asstard who made the decision to use mercury. there’s no time to use any of the normal chelating agents like DMSA or DMPS. You need something that’s gonna flush the mercury out of a person’s system in minutes, an hour at most. It’s the damn mercury vapor that’s the problem. Get the unaffected to stop breathing until the units are stabilized is the perfect answer—not realistic, but perfect.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Gonetoshit, there are hordes of shit zombies sludging through the facility. For the moment you and Madge are safe. You’ve got some favors to call in; people who owe you big time and who can get some shit done in a hurry. You need to develop an antidote for those affected, one that will reverse the manure mange—or at least halt its progression through the body.

You flip back the hood of the hazmat suit, pick up the phone and punch 9 for an outside line, an idea twisting through your head. If we can get the...

You get no dial tone. You punch 9 again. Same thing.

“How the hell do I call in favors if I can’t make a call?”

“There’s no time for that anyway,” Madge  urges. “You have to do something and you have to do it fast.”

“Even if I make an antidote, how do we get it out and dispensed? I can’t even call for FedEx.”

“You’re the scientist. Just make the antidote. We’ll worry about getting it delivered later.”

You race over to the bench and start slinging test tubes and pipettes around like you know what you’re doing. But you don’t. You’re not a chemist, for God’s sake. You’re an industrial engineer. You throw some of this in a tube, add a pinch of that, some more of whatever this is and the damn thing blows up in your face. It burns like a bastard, but your eyes seem unaffected. The bright blue cloud of vapor floats across the lab and envelopes a pile of some former lab assistant. The congealed pile of crap starts to reshape itself into something resembling a human being.

“That’s it!” screams Madge. “That’s it!”

“What the hell is it?” you scream back at her.

“You made it—don’t you know?”

“Hell no.”

“You have to make some more. Lots more.”

You spend another twenty minutes trying to duplicate the formula. Finally you get a controlled batch, one that doesn’t explode. A good thing, too. You’re about out of hair. You get it into an atomizer and start working on a bigger batch, something you can push through the ventilation system here. That will give you enough time to make more and somehow get the formula out to other labs. You can have this thing whipped by tomorrow morning and be the hero again. There’s just one problem.

It’s that damn blinking light in the corner. Madge doesn’t see it. Or doesn’t know what it means. But you do. And you realize that all the determination in the world isn’t going to change what is about to happen. That little blinking light is a security breach indicator. Normally it glows with a soft steady light. When it blinks it means that someone has entered the security zone in an unauthorized manner. There’s always a guy monitoring that light. It’s his only job. When it blinks he’s trained to respond by pushing some buttons or something that will lock down the core of the lab inside a series of sheet steel walls that might yield to a nuclear weapon. Might. Anything less is like hitting a brick wall with a toasted marshmallow.

But Mr Security Breach Guy isn’t there. Well, he is, but he’s not much use as a slush pile of chunky diarrhea overflowing the office chair. And from the way the damn light is flashing, there isn’t any time to batten down the hatches, even if you knew how to batten down anything. Which you don’t. About the only thing you can do is try to get you and Madge out before the shit storm hits. The stool zombies aren’t going to care about a cure and the little atomizer isn’t enough for the mounds of muck on the way.

Of course, by this time there is no getting out. Cameras are showing hordes of shittards scraping along the corridors on the way to the lab. Every exit is blocked by shuffling schools of shit zombies, putrid poop pods plodding toward the lab. You and Madge ain’t in deep shit yet, but it won’t be long.

You search frantically for anything that will help. Of course there isn’t anything. You and your sister are on your own. For a minute you think about throwing her to the zombies. Maybe it will give you enough time to get away. You look at her and realize she’s thinking about making you the star of the Fecal Follies.

“What the hell are we going to do?” You can’t seem to control the panic.

“Just calm down. Let me think.” Madge waves a shush hand at you like your mother did when she wanted quiet. It doesn’t work for Madge either.

“What’s there to think about? We’re dead. They’ll rip these hazmat suits off us like underwear at an orgy.”

“Spray ourselves with the formula,” Madge exclaims. “Even if they get us, we won’t turn to shit. We can fake dying and hold out until they leave.”

You take a gigantic hit from the atomizer, sucking it deep into your lungs as Madge removes her helmet and reaches for the antidote. Just as she’s squeezing the mist into her mouth you feel your lungs ignite. You have time to see Madge’s eyes widen in surprise before your lungs explode and flames engulf her face.

Oops...return to Chapter 5