First Activation: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Read online

  As soon as we pushed the door open, a male voice shouted, “Who’s there? Who is it?”

  We lurched back in fright.

  Bernie slammed the door shut and locked it. “Shit, what do you think?”

  We still hadn’t discussed how we were going to deal with other people since meeting Maureen.

  I locked the front door, closed all of the blinds, and Jack pushed Maureen into a corner while we figured out what to do.

  Maureen scrambled to her feet and started shouting, “Help, I’m being kept prisoner. There’s four people here.”

  Jack and Bernie ran over and pinned her to the floor. I remembered there was a roll of masking tape in the cupboard, and used it to tape her legs together and her mouth shut. By the time I was done, she was in a foetal position on the floor and could only make muffled noises. It was good enough.

  “How are we going to handle this?” Jack said, nodding his head towards the locked steel door.

  “We only heard a single voice asking who was there,” I said. “Maureen was scared of our pistols until she thought we weren’t going to use them. I suggest we open the door again and let him know we are armed to the teeth, and will shoot immediately if he tries anything.”

  “He might even be in a cell,” Linda suggested.

  “Yeah, that’s a good point, he hasn’t tried to burst through the door,” Bernie said.

  “Okay, Linda, you watch Maureen. Jack, you take the Glock off Bernie and stand with me. Bernie, you open the door and tell him he’d better stay back.”

  Jack and Bernie exchanged weapons. Bernie walked over to the door but before he turned the key, he looked back at me. “What if he jumps out and attacks?”

  “We shoot him.”

  Everyone in the room agreed, apart from the taped up Maureen whose muffled protests were ignored.

  “Go for it, Bernie,” Jack said.

  We braced ourselves for action.

  Bernie opened up the door slightly.

  “Please, help me. I’ve been stuck in here for hours and want some water.”

  “If you try to come through the door, we’ll shoot you, do you understand?” Bernie shouted through the gap.

  “I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I’m in a cell. The police arrested me in the airport this morning for being drunk.”

  “Push the door open, Bernie,” I said.

  It swung open to reveal a prison cage at the end of the room. The cage was split into three individual sections; the cell on the left contained a single adult male. He looked about thirty years of age, had a greasy brown mullet hairstyle, and was wearing a bright blue Hawaiian shirt.

  The man behind the bars blinked. “Who are you? You’re not the police.”

  “Get to the back of your cage, now, or we’ll shoot,” I shouted.

  The man scrambled back, I went up quickly and rattled the door. It was locked.

  “Can you let me out, please? I’m sober now.”

  None of us were in the mood to believe anything we heard from anyone outside our own group.

  “Why? So you can try and kill us?” Bernie shouted.

  “What do you mean, kill you? What the fuck are you talking about?” The prisoner replied, raising his arms in the air.

  “Get the keys, Jack,” I said. “We’ll throw Maureen in the right hand cell, have a coffee in the other room, and decide what we’re going to do.”

  “Can I at least have some water?”

  The request fell on deaf ears. He may have been genuine, but we were taking no chances, yet.

  After Maureen was safely locked away, Jack shut the steel door and finally sat down in relative safety. Linda made use of the reception area coffee maker and brewed a fresh pot. It was good to have a warm drink and the chance to think.

  I stripped off my sweater and t-shirt, and then looked down at my arm, the cut was nasty and probably needed stitches.

  “Here, Harry,” Linda said, “I’ve found some bandages in the cupboard.”

  She washed my arm with a stinging antiseptic, and blood continued to flow until a large padded bandage was placed over the wound and strapped with tape.

  “Thanks, Linda,” I said.

  I inspected my arm and slipped my t-shirt back on.

  “I think we should just leave the door locked until the police get here. It’s not worth the risk of letting him out, is it?” she said.

  “I agree, what good will it do? We’ve seen the results of giving people the benefit of the doubt so far. God only knows what happened outside the terminal. We don’t want to run into more of that,” Bernie said.

  “And inside the terminal,” Jack added, “we couldn’t spot any movement, so would you bet against everyone in there being dead? The guy in the cell could be a handful if we let him out and he turned against us.”

  “Why don’t we test him?” I said.

  “Test him?” Bernie replied with a blank expression on his face.

  “We can drag Maureen right up to the edge of his cage and see if he tries to do anything through the gaps. If he’s like her, he’ll probably try to attack.”

  “You want to experiment with humans?” Linda replied, with a look of slight disgust.

  “Don’t look at it as experimenting, look at it as humane. If the man doesn’t want to kill her, then we’ll find out and save an innocent life. Maureen has already tried to kill us, so if he is like her, then we need to know.”

  “Let’s get it out of the way, now then, come on,” Jack said.

  I unlocked the steel door and we all walked through into the back room, the prisoner jumped to his feet.

  “Guys, let me out. This isn’t funny anymore. Please?”

  Jack and I dragged Maureen in front of his section of the cage.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the man asked.

  I looked between the bars and into his eyes, trying to get a sense of his intent.

  “We’ve got something for you,” I said.

  “What? Have you brought me some water? Food?”

  “Nope, but here’s an old lady’s throat for you to throttle if you like. Can you get your hands through the gaps?”

  Maureen was wriggling around and making muffled noises as we pushed her face up to the bars.

  “The poor old thing. You guys are hurting her. Let me check her pulse.”

  Check her pulse? She was wriggling and moaning.

  The man licked his lips, then thrust his hands through the cage and tried to crush each side of Maureen’s windpipe. I smashed the grip of the Sig on his fingers, and he jumped back in pain.

  Jack dragged Maureen back into the other caged section.

  “So we were right all along,” Bernie said. “Come on; let’s leave these crazy bastards to rot.”

  I hadn’t finished yet and crouched in front of the bars.

  “Why did you try to kill her?”

  “I didn’t. I was trying to check her pulse. You are the ones who have an old lady handcuffed and taped up.”

  “Stop bullshitting us. The game’s up. That little old lady tried to kill us, and then you tried to kill her. Why are you doing it?”

  Jack grabbed my arm. “You’re wasting your time, Harry. Bernie and Linda are right, we should leave them here.”

  They had been right, but I had one more card to play. “I’ve got a deal for you, if you are prepared to listen and speak honestly.”

  “A deal? What deal?” He sat up while rubbing his fingers.

  “I’ll give you Maureen if you tell us the truth about why you want to kill her. What do you say?”

  “No way, Harry,” Bernie shouted, “I cannot allow you to do this. Let’s just get the hell –”

  “Give her to me and I’ll tell you afterwards,” the man replied.

  We all stood in silence for a moment and stared at him. I think Bernie and Linda were still shocked, but I knew Jack and I were curious about what he had to say.

  “Think about the security guard at the bottom of the slide. I’m not
saying these people will all act in the same way, but if we give him Maureen first, he might try and kill himself straight after,” Jack said.

  “No deal,” I replied to the man. “You either tell us, or we leave you and Maureen to starve to death in here.”

  I thought this would put him at his breaking point.

  “I am not a killer. Let me out, please.”

  “I’m going to the other room. This is a waste of time,” Linda said, and Bernie followed her out.

  Jack put his hand on my shoulder. “It was a good try. We nearly had him. Let’s go.”

  He had been an inch from cracking and I felt suddenly angry at this man’s death wish.

  “Fuck you,” I said, and headed for the door.

  I stopped immediately after an anguished cry came from the cell.

  “Wait!”

  We both turned and walked back to the bars.

  “Do you promise to give me that old woman if I tell you everything?”

  He was now sweating and looked desperate. Bernie and Linda joined us back in the room.

  “Yes, I promise,” I said.

  “Harry, you can’t,” Linda gasped.

  “Linda, if you or Bernie don’t want to be part of it, leave the room. This is happening whether you like it or not.”

  They both stayed, standing silently behind me. I was starting to surprise myself, but the game of life had changed. I knew that even one sign of weakness could make him clam up again.

  “You’re not lying, are you? You will give her to me?”

  ”Look, that crazy old bat tried to kill us. We handcuffed her, taped her up, and I’ve been dragging her around by her hair. She means nothing to us. If you don’t believe us, then we’ll turn around and walk out now. Makes no difference to me. Tell us or that’s it,” Jack replied.

  The man dropped his head, ran his fingers through his hair, then looked straight at me. “I’ve got to kill myself.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I’ve got to kill myself as soon as possible.”

  He stopped and looked up at me in expectation.

  “Come on, there’s more to it than that. Spit it out. You’ve got twenty seconds.”

  It didn’t make sense. If the simple goal was suicide, then nothing was stopping him.

  “Oh, what have I got to lose?” He continued in a slow, cold voice. “I want to kill myself. The final unstoppable goal is to kill myself. But I cannot kill myself until I kill another person.” He rubbed his face with both hands, “…kill one, kill yourself, kill one, kill yourself… I must use whatever means necessary to do this, and I have to do it as soon as possible.”

  A stunned silence followed. I was trying to register what I had just heard.

  “You don’t have any other option?” Jack asked.

  “There is no other option. This is the only way. Now, please, give me the old woman.”

  “I believe him. I mean, it fits exactly with what we have already seen. Right?” Bernie said.

  “Can you tell us anything else? How long have you wanted to do this?” I asked.

  “No. I’ve been honest with you. My objective is simple.”

  I turned and walked past Jack, Bernie, and Linda, into the office area. The man shouted for us to come back and honour our promises, but Jack locked the door. Muffled sounds of screaming and the rattling of the cell door continued for a couple of minutes, then stopped abruptly.

  We sat down on the floor and tried to make sense of what had just happened.

  “Harry, you could have told us you had no intention of sacrificing Maureen,” Linda said.

  “The whole act with him had to look genuine or he would realise that we were bluffing. These people may be focussed on killing, but they’re not completely stupid. Both of them have tried to manipulate us in order to kill.”

  “You still should have told us. We would have been convincing. Next time, don’t scare us like that,” Bernie replied.

  “There won’t be a next time. We know that Maureen and that guy in the cell wanted to kill someone. The security guard killed the steward, then himself. There’s a pattern.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ve seen it yourself, Bernie. Since we landed, everyone we have met has tried to kill. No matter how convincing they have sounded, they can’t be trusted. So yes, I would sacrifice one of them if it meant our safety.”

  “We need to plan how to handle these situations in the future,” Jack said, backing me up. “People could be armed, strong, or sneak up on us, giving us only seconds to respond. I think we should go for a zero tolerance approach.”

  “We can’t just start shooting people on sight,” Linda said, shaking her head.

  “The people with a pulse that we have come across so far have appeared completely normal, until they managed to find an opportunity to kill. We can’t afford to let them get close enough,” Jack replied, looking sympathetically towards her.

  “There is one way,” Bernie exclaimed, “we don’t have to shoot if we see two or more people together who are alive.”

  “What do you mean, Bernie?” I asked.

  “Think about it,” he explained, “if they all need to kill someone before they can kill themselves, they are more likely to kill another person than travel with them. So far, we’ve only come across individuals who were looking for somebody to kill, or who were locked away.”

  “If we see two people alive who are thinking like the man in the cage, then the chances are they’d be trying to strangle each other. So, do we need to split up so we are not seen in a group?” Jack said.

  “No. It wouldn’t make a difference, would it? It certainly didn’t stop Maureen or that guy behind the door. But if others are out there that have worked out what is going on, then they’ll recognise that we are not trying to murder each other. We should stay together,” I replied.

  “How did all of this happen? We know what they are trying to do, but why are they doing this?” Bernie was beginning to sound distraught.

  “He said it was the only objective he ever had, that obviously isn’t true, but he believed it. So sometime in the last day, everybody here was affected. It isn’t that much of a stretch to think that the loss of communications might have something to do with it,” I replied.

  “But how could this happen?”

  It was an impossible question, and I certainly didn’t have the answer.

  “I don’t know, Bernie, we’re all working on the same information as you here,” Jack said.

  His tone was slightly sarcastic, and although unhelpful, it was understandable in our current position. A short period of awkward silence followed.

  “Ninety-nine percent of the people we have seen are already dead. Besides the guard who approached the plane, we have only come across a man who was already locked up and a woman who walked over from a nature reserve. How far do you think this has spread? Could the city be affected?” Linda said, sounding close to breaking point.

  I couldn’t help but imagine the scenes in front of the terminal when this deathly impulse took hold of its victims. There must have been stabbings, shootings, suicides, blood and screaming everywhere, everyone with the same purpose.

  A thought struck me.

  “Jack, those tweets you received right after we landed…”

  “Yeah, what about them?”

  “They were probably from people trying to draw you in after finding the original message about coming to New York.”

  “Why me though?”

  “I doubt it was you specifically, I imagine they would have tried anyone they could find after searching twitter for New York.”

  Jack was still looking at me blankly.

  “Think about it. There was somebody in a wheelchair, a guy in a hospital, and a farm owner. All were in a similar situation to the man in the cell – unable to get their hands on another human. They were in remote locations or unable to move anywhere without putting themselves at risk.”

&
nbsp; “I was being stalked on social media, Jesus.”

  “Remote locations? Let me have a look,” Bernie said, as he quickly shuffled towards Jack.

  Jack pulled out his phone and briefly checked it.

  “I’m not picking up any networks, here you go.” He passed the device to Bernie.

  As he read the tweets, Bernie’s mouth slowly opened wide.

  “What is it, dear?” Linda asked.

  “The addresses in the tweets… one of them is in Manhattan. Worse still, the farm is in upstate New York!”

  “We’ve got family and friends all over the state, Bernie. Are they all caught up in this too?”

  “Don’t think about that now. We’ll get out of here and then we will find them,” he said.

  “We’ve two friends in the Manhattan area as well,” Jack said.

  Bernie and Linda had lived in New York for years and probably had a whole network of friends and family nearby. Linda was obviously concerned, but neither she nor Bernie were paying much attention to us at the moment.

  “The captain said other airports had the same issue. Could this be happening on a wider scale?” Jack asked.

  There was no reason to hold back at this stage, but I could have done without the further worry. The thought of our own family and friends being affected was too much at the moment, we had to remain switched on to the situation. I had to hope that whatever we were witnessing, was confined to the state of New York, but my head told me otherwise. Although we didn’t know which airports the captain had tried to contact, the lack of communication made it seem like this was not a local phenomenon.

  The plane. We’d all forgotten about it. I ran over to the blinds and created a gap in them with my fingers. It was dark outside. We’d missed our agreed cut off.

  “I’m not going out in the dark, no way,” Bernie said.

  He was cuddling Linda who had her face buried in the crook of his arm.

  Jack also had a quick look through the blinds, “Remember, we told the captain that we’d let them know with a flare if we were still around? Should we fire one off towards the plane?”

  We had to let them know we were still in the local area and give them at least a little bit of hope through the night. The people on-board were bound to be hungry and scared. At first light, we could grab some supplies and head back.