Contain and Control
By
David O’Mahony
Bess rested one hand on the plexiglass as the other hovered over the incinerator switch. Her heart was rattling and her breathing ragged. When she swallowed it was hard like bitter tears. She shivered. The window ran the height of the room and had been made thick enough to keep the dead at bay, but it wasn’t thick enough to make what she had to do any easier.
She had spent more than two years working in the basement beneath a brutish grey building that stretched acres in every direction. Laboratory C6, it was called officially. But while it had no shortage of equipment the tech was only used for one thing: interrogation. Unofficially they called it the Torture Chamber.
The arrangement was simple: the guys in slate uniforms with the black body armor captured the ghoul, or the revenant, or the vampire, and Bess Coffey and her team tried to pry whatever secrets they could out of it. Usually the dead looked like ordinary folks; many of them held jobs, even had families. They were brought in from all over the country. The government, or the agency – Bess, trained as a chemist and once an advanced interrogator for a crime syndicate, had been recruited through so many intermediaries it wasn’t clear who was calling the shots – had long given up studying the causes. Countless groups had been studying the dead for centuries, after all. They had pivoted now to containment and control, so much as was possible. So the dead were dragged in, dumped in that little room with the stone furniture behind the one-way plexiglass screen, and drugged and quizzed or hammered until they gave up some information about nests or covens. What happened then was beyond Bess’s pay grade.
Every second day, grim-faced men in colorless suits came to download the latest data and reports. They seldom spoke, though recently they had seemed harried, as if desperate for answers to a question Bess hadn’t been told. “This isn’t going to work unless you tell me what you’re looking for,” she’d said to them, over and over, getting nothing more than a grunt and a glance in return. They were military men, judging by the way they carried themselves, but didn’t even have lanyards to show their identities.
Bess presumed they were happy with her work because nobody said otherwise. She was good at getting details. Different serums made different entities pliable. They had to be managed and balanced constantly though; compound-6 put ghouls into a suggestive state, but twenty minutes after it was metabolised the ghoul needed a dose of compound-4 to prevent psychosis. A blend of compounds 3 and 9 worked on revenants, but compound-5 killed them outright unless smoothed by a half-dose of compound-7. And when the drugs failed more brute tactics were required. Bess had learned how exactly to leverage suffering on each individual for maximum results. Ghouls didn’t really feel pain; they needed to be starved. Revenants were hurt by grave dirt and holy water. Vampires … vampires were trickier. The longer they went without blood and sleep, the more irrational and more dangerous they became. They didn’t fear death or pain in the usual ways, while some of the older and more powerful ones could bewitch and charm their way out of almost anything.
Almost.
Nobody who ended up in the Torture Chamber saw the sun or moonlight again. They were too dangerous. When the work was done, Bess or one of her confederates would go into the control room and flick the heavy steel switch high up on the wall, reducing the whole thing to ash.
For two years, the work had been steady but occasional. Bess hadn’t minded. The pay was quite exceptional and she had been able to spend serious, unbroken time with her husband Francisco; they had finally been able to take that honeymoon in France, three years after getting married. Neither of them had to worry about the gang wars spiralling out of control again.
But in the past six months the workload had spiked, so much so that she hadn’t felt able to leave the building in three months.
Whether it was the economic crash, a rash of new diseases, or a bevy of hidden nests that had grown out of control, Bess’s team had gone from dealing with one of the dead every few days to more than one some days. And the dead had grown angrier, more resistant to sedatives, more feral.
The vampires were the worst.
They were evolving, Bess thought, or a subspecies had risen to dominate the new population. Either way they no longer tried to charm their way out of the situation. They became savage at the slightest provocation, their features, normally pale but so ordinarily human, becoming twisted and disjointed, lips and gums retreating to expose the canines even as their eyes and skin became hyper-sensitive to ultraviolet light.
Bess’s job had become less about interrogation and more about probing for weaknesses; the new species, if that’s what it was, had proven three times more virulent and could shrug off even the most devastating stungun blasts. The only time the men in the colorless suits said a word to her was that there was interest “from above” in potential super soldiers… if they could be controlled. “We could win the war,” they said. Bess thought it an insane suggestion, but there were so many wars now she convinced herself that, in some way, she could save lives.
So far the efforts to keep them under control had failed. Bess had tried dozens of variations of serums and they had only partially worked. As soon as they failed – when they wore off and the blood lust came back even stronger than before – she torched the room and waited for the hygiene team to sweep away the ashes.
The cruelty had become routine, almost formulaic. She wondered, in those few moments when she had time to herself, if she was becoming a monster. What if it had become airborne, she thought. It would explain the surge in the population, how fast it had mutated, why she felt half-dead herself. She found herself checking her complexion in any reflective surface, pulling her lips up to check if her canines had begun to grow. She flicked them with her tongue, examining the sharp points she swore had not been there before. Her eyes were changing colour, she fancied, shifting from grey to green. And yet she swore it was all in her head. She had tortured so many vampires now she was almost immune to it, but it must be affecting her somewhere. Interrogation had become more about disposal than getting information.
But this night was different. The vampire on the other side of the screen had broken free of his restraints and killed three security staff. It had been a trap, she realised in horror as she watched; it had come in docile, as if stunned from blows to the head, only to turn on its captors the second they dropped their attention. She saw it rip the head off the young guy from Wisconsin and bathe himself in the man’s blood, a sick leering smile on his face the whole time as he watched her horror mount.
She had seen that smile hundreds of times before it had turned into the broken monster of a thing before her now.
It was Francisco.
Bess sighed, her hand hovering over the incinerator switch even as every instinct screamed for her to stop what she was doing.
“Are you going to do it?” It was her assistant, Rebekkah, a flaxen-haired Swede who was almost as grim as her when it came to the work. “Or do you want me to?”
“Just… just give me a minute.” Bess couldn’t get her heart rate under control. Perspiration pooled on her palm and at the small of her back. Being watched so intently by Rebekkah didn’t help. “Stop looking at me, okay?”
Rebekkah spread her hands and took a few steps back, looking at the floor in an exaggerated show of acquiescence. “It’s not him, you know?”
“What?”
“Francisco. It’s not him any more. You know this.”
“I know, Rebekkah. Jesus. I know all this. I’m the one who trained you in, remember?”
Rebekkah muttered something vague and picked some papers up off a nearby table, flicking through them just for something to do. Bess eyed the pulse in the younger woman’s throat, wondered if the thumping that filled her ears was her own heartbeat or that of her colleague.
Bess knew she was right. Once they’d turned, they were no longer the person they used to be. Even in the old days, when they’d been far more human than they were now, they were still different people, wearing a mask of the everyday to hide their appetites and new lusts.
But it was still Francisco. The only one outside the team who knew even a fraction of what they did down here. Bess’s blood ran cold at the sudden thought that maybe he had been sent to try and cripple her work from the inside. That couldn’t possibly be it, could it?
The observation room was mostly dark apart from the mottled green of emergency lights. Francisco had retreated to the furthest corner, his arms folded tightly across his chest like furled wings. He was silent and still, the only sign of life being that sick smile that followed her whenever she shifted in the window. There was a hunger to it. For the first time in years, she felt afraid.
“It’s a unique opportunity,” she said over her shoulder eventually. “We’ve never had a subject that we knew before.”
“So?” asked Rebekkah, and without looking Bess could tell she was rolling her eyes in that frustrating way she had.
“So maybe we can get through to him that way. Maybe I can,” she added quickly.
“You’re stalling.”
“Go to hell.”
“We’re already there. Listen, I can guess what you’re hoping for. You’re hoping four or five of those security types come charging in and somehow put Francisco down for you. Take the decision out of your hands. And I don’t blame you, really I don’t. But you know you have to do the right thing. Isn’t that what you kept telling me when I got here? ‘We’re doing the right thing,’ you’d say, and then flick the switch and walk away without looking.”
Bess nodded. “Any word from upstairs?” Their section of the facility had been shut off as soon as the alarms went off. It was standard procedure to prevent the spread of contagion.
“Nothing. I don’t think help is coming, Bess.”
“They’ll come.”
Rebekkah shook her head slowly and sighed. “The coffee machine’s empty. And the vending machine. I tried to get upstairs to find something to eat, all the doors were sealed.”
“We have a lockdown.”
“This was before the alarms went off. Something’s happened upstairs.”
Out of reflex Bess pulled her phone from a back pocket but this deep in the building her signal was intermittent at best. It wasn’t even connected to the wifi though; that was unusual. “Are you on the wifi?”
“No. We don’t even have the local network on the computers.”
“What? Why the hell didn’t you say anything?”
“I did. Twice. But you were too busy staring at Mr Used to Be Francisco.”
Bess pulled her lips back like a threatened animal getting ready to bite as she turned on Rebbekah. Behind her, in the gloom she wasn’t watching, Francisco immitated her sneer even though he could not have heard or seen her through the window. “You can be really awful, Bekk.”
Rebekkah sighed and shrugged. “I’m only doing what you taught me. Separate. Dissociate. Keep emotion out of it.”
“Yeah well it’s not your husband in there.”
“It’s not yours either. I keep telling you.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Bess shouted.
They both jumped as Francisco burst from his corner to hammer on the window, leering in at them like a hunter toying with its prey. His face was drained of all color now, his eyes a menacing emerald in the emergency lights. For a moment he bared his teeth – now fully erupted canines like daggers – and sniffed the air as if trying to catch their scent. His lips moved then, over and over, beckoning her toward him with one blackened ragged finger.
“He’s saying something,” said Rebekkah. “Turn the mic back on.”
Bess ghosted the hand that had been on the window toward the audio switch, low down on the left to avoid being mistaken for the incinerator. The microphone was never supposed to be off while a subject was in the Chamber, but she hadn’t been able to stomach hearing him gorge himself on the desiccated and desecrated corpses that lay discarded on the floor. Their blood was still damp on his face.
Bess’s hand hesitated. He was looking right at her now, lips still soundlessly rippling. Closing her eyes she flicked the switch and the audio blared into the room: “don’t want to hear it, don’t want to hear it, don’t want to hear it”.
It was a broken mockery of his voice but was still unmistakeably him.
Rebekkah began to speak but the words evaporated as Francisco began banging his head on the plexiglass. Slow, hard, heady thumps, his lips forming a blood-smeared violation of the smile he had given Bess over so many dinners, so many roses, so many nights alone together before they turned out the lights.
The plexiglass began to crack.
Rebekkah cried out. It shouldn’t crack. It wasn’t supposed to crack.
Bess just breathed, the hammering on the window becoming dull and distant, Rebekkah’s screams becoming soft echoes, heard as if through a mountain of blankets.
Francisco slammed his head into the glass one more time. A heavy shard crashed to the ground at Bess’ feet. He thrust an arm through, faster than he had ever moved in life, the blood-slicked fingers a hair’s breadth from her throat. He howled at her as she dodged back just out of reach, howled as he grasped the rest of the glass with his other hand and began to pull shards away, immune to how they slashed at his flesh.
He no longer smelled of cinnamon and oud wood. Now he just smelled of death and the early grave.
His eyes were no longer full of irreverence and light. Now they were just deadlights staring at a woman who was no longer his love, but just his next meal.
He’s no longer Francisco, she said to herself. He’s just another test subject. And how long before I do this to myself, she wondered.
With a long, slow exhale she pulled the incinerator switch, closing her eyes and looking away as the orange flames poured down from the ceiling and burnt Francisco to ash.
David O'Mahony is a horror and dark fantasy writer from Cork, Ireland, with a particular fondness for ghost stories. He has had 15 stories published across the globe, with his work appearing in the US, Canada, Australia, India, and Thailand. He has written non-fiction at irishexaminer.com, where he is assistant editor. He is looking for good homes for two short story collections and is writing his first novel.
By
David O’Mahony
Bess rested one hand on the plexiglass as the other hovered over the incinerator switch. Her heart was rattling and her breathing ragged. When she swallowed it was hard like bitter tears. She shivered. The window ran the height of the room and had been made thick enough to keep the dead at bay, but it wasn’t thick enough to make what she had to do any easier.
She had spent more than two years working in the basement beneath a brutish grey building that stretched acres in every direction. Laboratory C6, it was called officially. But while it had no shortage of equipment the tech was only used for one thing: interrogation. Unofficially they called it the Torture Chamber.
The arrangement was simple: the guys in slate uniforms with the black body armor captured the ghoul, or the revenant, or the vampire, and Bess Coffey and her team tried to pry whatever secrets they could out of it. Usually the dead looked like ordinary folks; many of them held jobs, even had families. They were brought in from all over the country. The government, or the agency – Bess, trained as a chemist and once an advanced interrogator for a crime syndicate, had been recruited through so many intermediaries it wasn’t clear who was calling the shots – had long given up studying the causes. Countless groups had been studying the dead for centuries, after all. They had pivoted now to containment and control, so much as was possible. So the dead were dragged in, dumped in that little room with the stone furniture behind the one-way plexiglass screen, and drugged and quizzed or hammered until they gave up some information about nests or covens. What happened then was beyond Bess’s pay grade.
Every second day, grim-faced men in colorless suits came to download the latest data and reports. They seldom spoke, though recently they had seemed harried, as if desperate for answers to a question Bess hadn’t been told. “This isn’t going to work unless you tell me what you’re looking for,” she’d said to them, over and over, getting nothing more than a grunt and a glance in return. They were military men, judging by the way they carried themselves, but didn’t even have lanyards to show their identities.
Bess presumed they were happy with her work because nobody said otherwise. She was good at getting details. Different serums made different entities pliable. They had to be managed and balanced constantly though; compound-6 put ghouls into a suggestive state, but twenty minutes after it was metabolised the ghoul needed a dose of compound-4 to prevent psychosis. A blend of compounds 3 and 9 worked on revenants, but compound-5 killed them outright unless smoothed by a half-dose of compound-7. And when the drugs failed more brute tactics were required. Bess had learned how exactly to leverage suffering on each individual for maximum results. Ghouls didn’t really feel pain; they needed to be starved. Revenants were hurt by grave dirt and holy water. Vampires … vampires were trickier. The longer they went without blood and sleep, the more irrational and more dangerous they became. They didn’t fear death or pain in the usual ways, while some of the older and more powerful ones could bewitch and charm their way out of almost anything.
Almost.
Nobody who ended up in the Torture Chamber saw the sun or moonlight again. They were too dangerous. When the work was done, Bess or one of her confederates would go into the control room and flick the heavy steel switch high up on the wall, reducing the whole thing to ash.
For two years, the work had been steady but occasional. Bess hadn’t minded. The pay was quite exceptional and she had been able to spend serious, unbroken time with her husband Francisco; they had finally been able to take that honeymoon in France, three years after getting married. Neither of them had to worry about the gang wars spiralling out of control again.
But in the past six months the workload had spiked, so much so that she hadn’t felt able to leave the building in three months.
Whether it was the economic crash, a rash of new diseases, or a bevy of hidden nests that had grown out of control, Bess’s team had gone from dealing with one of the dead every few days to more than one some days. And the dead had grown angrier, more resistant to sedatives, more feral.
The vampires were the worst.
They were evolving, Bess thought, or a subspecies had risen to dominate the new population. Either way they no longer tried to charm their way out of the situation. They became savage at the slightest provocation, their features, normally pale but so ordinarily human, becoming twisted and disjointed, lips and gums retreating to expose the canines even as their eyes and skin became hyper-sensitive to ultraviolet light.
Bess’s job had become less about interrogation and more about probing for weaknesses; the new species, if that’s what it was, had proven three times more virulent and could shrug off even the most devastating stungun blasts. The only time the men in the colorless suits said a word to her was that there was interest “from above” in potential super soldiers… if they could be controlled. “We could win the war,” they said. Bess thought it an insane suggestion, but there were so many wars now she convinced herself that, in some way, she could save lives.
So far the efforts to keep them under control had failed. Bess had tried dozens of variations of serums and they had only partially worked. As soon as they failed – when they wore off and the blood lust came back even stronger than before – she torched the room and waited for the hygiene team to sweep away the ashes.
The cruelty had become routine, almost formulaic. She wondered, in those few moments when she had time to herself, if she was becoming a monster. What if it had become airborne, she thought. It would explain the surge in the population, how fast it had mutated, why she felt half-dead herself. She found herself checking her complexion in any reflective surface, pulling her lips up to check if her canines had begun to grow. She flicked them with her tongue, examining the sharp points she swore had not been there before. Her eyes were changing colour, she fancied, shifting from grey to green. And yet she swore it was all in her head. She had tortured so many vampires now she was almost immune to it, but it must be affecting her somewhere. Interrogation had become more about disposal than getting information.
But this night was different. The vampire on the other side of the screen had broken free of his restraints and killed three security staff. It had been a trap, she realised in horror as she watched; it had come in docile, as if stunned from blows to the head, only to turn on its captors the second they dropped their attention. She saw it rip the head off the young guy from Wisconsin and bathe himself in the man’s blood, a sick leering smile on his face the whole time as he watched her horror mount.
She had seen that smile hundreds of times before it had turned into the broken monster of a thing before her now.
It was Francisco.
Bess sighed, her hand hovering over the incinerator switch even as every instinct screamed for her to stop what she was doing.
“Are you going to do it?” It was her assistant, Rebekkah, a flaxen-haired Swede who was almost as grim as her when it came to the work. “Or do you want me to?”
“Just… just give me a minute.” Bess couldn’t get her heart rate under control. Perspiration pooled on her palm and at the small of her back. Being watched so intently by Rebekkah didn’t help. “Stop looking at me, okay?”
Rebekkah spread her hands and took a few steps back, looking at the floor in an exaggerated show of acquiescence. “It’s not him, you know?”
“What?”
“Francisco. It’s not him any more. You know this.”
“I know, Rebekkah. Jesus. I know all this. I’m the one who trained you in, remember?”
Rebekkah muttered something vague and picked some papers up off a nearby table, flicking through them just for something to do. Bess eyed the pulse in the younger woman’s throat, wondered if the thumping that filled her ears was her own heartbeat or that of her colleague.
Bess knew she was right. Once they’d turned, they were no longer the person they used to be. Even in the old days, when they’d been far more human than they were now, they were still different people, wearing a mask of the everyday to hide their appetites and new lusts.
But it was still Francisco. The only one outside the team who knew even a fraction of what they did down here. Bess’s blood ran cold at the sudden thought that maybe he had been sent to try and cripple her work from the inside. That couldn’t possibly be it, could it?
The observation room was mostly dark apart from the mottled green of emergency lights. Francisco had retreated to the furthest corner, his arms folded tightly across his chest like furled wings. He was silent and still, the only sign of life being that sick smile that followed her whenever she shifted in the window. There was a hunger to it. For the first time in years, she felt afraid.
“It’s a unique opportunity,” she said over her shoulder eventually. “We’ve never had a subject that we knew before.”
“So?” asked Rebekkah, and without looking Bess could tell she was rolling her eyes in that frustrating way she had.
“So maybe we can get through to him that way. Maybe I can,” she added quickly.
“You’re stalling.”
“Go to hell.”
“We’re already there. Listen, I can guess what you’re hoping for. You’re hoping four or five of those security types come charging in and somehow put Francisco down for you. Take the decision out of your hands. And I don’t blame you, really I don’t. But you know you have to do the right thing. Isn’t that what you kept telling me when I got here? ‘We’re doing the right thing,’ you’d say, and then flick the switch and walk away without looking.”
Bess nodded. “Any word from upstairs?” Their section of the facility had been shut off as soon as the alarms went off. It was standard procedure to prevent the spread of contagion.
“Nothing. I don’t think help is coming, Bess.”
“They’ll come.”
Rebekkah shook her head slowly and sighed. “The coffee machine’s empty. And the vending machine. I tried to get upstairs to find something to eat, all the doors were sealed.”
“We have a lockdown.”
“This was before the alarms went off. Something’s happened upstairs.”
Out of reflex Bess pulled her phone from a back pocket but this deep in the building her signal was intermittent at best. It wasn’t even connected to the wifi though; that was unusual. “Are you on the wifi?”
“No. We don’t even have the local network on the computers.”
“What? Why the hell didn’t you say anything?”
“I did. Twice. But you were too busy staring at Mr Used to Be Francisco.”
Bess pulled her lips back like a threatened animal getting ready to bite as she turned on Rebbekah. Behind her, in the gloom she wasn’t watching, Francisco immitated her sneer even though he could not have heard or seen her through the window. “You can be really awful, Bekk.”
Rebekkah sighed and shrugged. “I’m only doing what you taught me. Separate. Dissociate. Keep emotion out of it.”
“Yeah well it’s not your husband in there.”
“It’s not yours either. I keep telling you.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Bess shouted.
They both jumped as Francisco burst from his corner to hammer on the window, leering in at them like a hunter toying with its prey. His face was drained of all color now, his eyes a menacing emerald in the emergency lights. For a moment he bared his teeth – now fully erupted canines like daggers – and sniffed the air as if trying to catch their scent. His lips moved then, over and over, beckoning her toward him with one blackened ragged finger.
“He’s saying something,” said Rebekkah. “Turn the mic back on.”
Bess ghosted the hand that had been on the window toward the audio switch, low down on the left to avoid being mistaken for the incinerator. The microphone was never supposed to be off while a subject was in the Chamber, but she hadn’t been able to stomach hearing him gorge himself on the desiccated and desecrated corpses that lay discarded on the floor. Their blood was still damp on his face.
Bess’s hand hesitated. He was looking right at her now, lips still soundlessly rippling. Closing her eyes she flicked the switch and the audio blared into the room: “don’t want to hear it, don’t want to hear it, don’t want to hear it”.
It was a broken mockery of his voice but was still unmistakeably him.
Rebekkah began to speak but the words evaporated as Francisco began banging his head on the plexiglass. Slow, hard, heady thumps, his lips forming a blood-smeared violation of the smile he had given Bess over so many dinners, so many roses, so many nights alone together before they turned out the lights.
The plexiglass began to crack.
Rebekkah cried out. It shouldn’t crack. It wasn’t supposed to crack.
Bess just breathed, the hammering on the window becoming dull and distant, Rebekkah’s screams becoming soft echoes, heard as if through a mountain of blankets.
Francisco slammed his head into the glass one more time. A heavy shard crashed to the ground at Bess’ feet. He thrust an arm through, faster than he had ever moved in life, the blood-slicked fingers a hair’s breadth from her throat. He howled at her as she dodged back just out of reach, howled as he grasped the rest of the glass with his other hand and began to pull shards away, immune to how they slashed at his flesh.
He no longer smelled of cinnamon and oud wood. Now he just smelled of death and the early grave.
His eyes were no longer full of irreverence and light. Now they were just deadlights staring at a woman who was no longer his love, but just his next meal.
He’s no longer Francisco, she said to herself. He’s just another test subject. And how long before I do this to myself, she wondered.
With a long, slow exhale she pulled the incinerator switch, closing her eyes and looking away as the orange flames poured down from the ceiling and burnt Francisco to ash.
David O'Mahony is a horror and dark fantasy writer from Cork, Ireland, with a particular fondness for ghost stories. He has had 15 stories published across the globe, with his work appearing in the US, Canada, Australia, India, and Thailand. He has written non-fiction at irishexaminer.com, where he is assistant editor. He is looking for good homes for two short story collections and is writing his first novel.
