Dead Signal

Five stories under the Chthonic Labs Alpha-1 facility, in a chilly glass-partitioned room, Guy and Deana decided to take a break.

Beyond the glass was the observation chamber, walled in cold steel. There lay fifty-four human corpses in a space no bigger than a cargo container; some were weeks old, others were months, but most had been dead for years. The chamber was dark, and nothing could be seen except fifty-three little red lights jumbled around near the floor. With some input codes and the flick of a switch, he could make all of them turn green.

    His hand went to her breast and tore it out of her bra. He squeezed it gently and glided his finger over her nipple. She gasped as he nibbled it, and her hand went to his crotch. She unzipped his jeans and reached her hand inside. His mouth went to her neck. She closed her eyes and moaned. She leaned closer to him on his lap and opened them…

    Deana didn’t notice it at first, but after a few seconds, she gave a long gasp. Guy must have thought it from pleasure, and continued his mission on her neck.

    “Guy!” she whispered, but he just gave a short grunt in response. She pulled his head off of her and looked at him; her eyes were wide-open as she was pointing to the observation room. Guy swiveled his head and the rotating chair they decided to make love on. When he saw it too, he put his hand to his mouth.

    “Hmm…” he muttered. “It’s probably been like that ever since standby. Do you notice it’s near the wall?” He pointed too. The fifty-fourth red light was higher than the others, six feet or so off the ground. Then it seemed to move, subtly, back and forth. 

    Her second gasp was even longer, and might have even turned into a shriek, but Guy was quick to notice and put his hand to her mouth. With his other hand, he put one finger vertically to his lips.

    “Just a malfunction,” he reassured her, lowering his hand. “A software bug. It’ll get fixed tonight.”

“Software bug!?” Deana practically yelled. He told her “shhh” and she went down to a loud whisper. “How is that a software bug? It’s standing, and the signal is off.” Her voice raised again, and he put his hand back to her mouth.

Guy turned his head towards the control panel, in particular to a metal switch labeled “Observation Lights.” He looked back to Deana, who had panic in her face and fear in her eyes. She gave a nod. He inhaled a little more deeply than usual, and then flicked the switch.

White, sterile light filled the observation room. As expected, dozens of naked corpses lay motionless on the steel floor. Thanatos Mark I devices were attached to all the heads, with steady red lights visible. There, in the far corner, was a standing corpse of a man, his postmortem chest scars obscenely visible. He was swaying slightly. Deana just stared, glassy-eyed.

He gently pushed her off him as he stood up, re-zippering himself. “We need to go.”

They quickly exited the observation control room into a white-walled hallway. Something was definitely wrong; dozens of people were practically running in both directions. There was a loud, incoherent murmuring.

“What the hell is going on?” Deana asked, tugging at his sleeve. “Does this have to do with…”

“Shit if I-” but he stopped himself after he spotted white-haired Dr. Bannagin a little ways down the hall, talking to one of the guards- a tall, burly fellow armed with an assault rifle. “Phil!” he called out, walking briskly towards him, with Deana following close behind.

Dr. Bannigan glanced towards Guy and dismissed the guard, who ran down the opposite direction.

“Guy, Deana. There’s...there’s been an incident. We need to evacuate.”

“Incident?” she asked.

“The signal processor, it’s- look, there’s no time, you need to leave now.”

Just then, the sound of gunfire filled his ears. There were a few people left in the hall now, but they all froze at the sound. When some indistinct yelling complimented the shots, everyone started running towards the opposite direction.

“Go. Now.” Dr. Bannagin turned and ran down the hall towards the gunshots.

“What is he doing?” Deana asked. Still slightly in shock, Guy stared at the spot he was just standing at for a moment more before turning to leave.

Rushing towards the elevator, Deana started to speculate. “If the processor glitched, then…then…the signal would deactivate, right?”

“Exactly,” Guy said. “No walking corpses.”

As they were on the fifth basement level of the facility, it was a somewhat lengthy trip to the surface. They had to turn a corner to reach the elevator, but what they saw filled them with dread. A small crowd of white-clad nurses and researchers were congesting the end of the hallway; panic was clearly starting to creep into all of them. The elevator did not seem to be coming.

“Guy! Did we lock the door?”

The lights went out. Except for the glowing green EXIT sign above the elevator doors and a few dim emergency lights, they were bathed in darkness. Some women started to scream.

“Stairs.” He was able to find her hand in the murk; he grabbed it and quickly backtracked. At the end of the long hall, where Dr. Bannagin had gone, was another green EXIT sign.

“Guy! Deana!” they heard a man cry from behind them. It was Jack, one of the server techs.

“Jack, the elevators could be dead,” Guy guessed. “We’re heading for the stairs.”

“Has anyone tried contacting Central?” Deana asked.

Jack shook his head. “Lines are completely dead. Damn mainframe, everything runs off of it.”

“Even the elevators?” Guy asked.

Jack shook his head. “Separate circuit, which is why I’m waiting.”

A loud bang came from their left. They realized they were standing right outside the observation room they had left moments before. An electronic display next to the door read “UNLOCKED” in green letters. The metal doorknob started to turn…

Guy lunged for it and held it with all the strength he could muster with one hand. He slammed his other palm on the locking panel. With a click, the display now read “LOCKED,” all in red. He stepped back as another loud bang came from behind.

The panicked yells from down the hall had risen significantly in volume.

“We’re leaving now. Come with us.”

“No way.  I’m staying by the elevator.”

“Jack, the elevators are probably gone,” Deana said, attempting to sound reassuring. 

“They’ll work. They have to.” He ran towards the screaming.

They gave each other a short glance before running towards the stricken exit. It was a pair of double swinging metal doors. Guy slowly pushed one open; he had not been in this section in quite some time. Not helping matters was the fact that there seemed to be no floodlights in this new area. An exit sign taunted them in the distance, but more pressing was the dozens of doors lining the hall; display panels next to each glowed ominously green. They were all unlocked. They entered the dark hall, hearing the windowless door click closed behind them. Guy tried his hand on one of the panels, but nothing happened.

“Morgues,” Deana said quietly. Guy could still hear the unease in her voice. She was fortunately more familiar with this area as she was a mortician’s assistant. Even though urgency saturated the air, something compelled them to walk slowly and keep quiet.

“How many bodies are kept here anyway?” Guy asked.

    “I don’t know. Hundreds. Thousands. They’re wheeled into this place all hours of the day.”

    CLANG!

    They stopped dead in their tracks as the sound reached their ears; something metallic fell onto the floor in one of the rooms.

“Where are all the guards?” Deana whispered. They had not heard any gunshots since they saw the crowd outside the elevator.

“Keep moving,” was all he said. Deana’s foot caught something large on the floor and started to tumble forward. Guy caught her arm and brought her back to her feet.

“Thanks,” she said, “but what-” In the very dim light they could make out the silhouette of a large body on the floor. Exactly what had killed him, they could not say.

“There’s one of the guards, at least.” He gingerly felt around the body. “I can’t find his gun.”

“Let’s just go.”

The hellish walk was finally over as they approached the doors at the far end. Through the narrow rectangular windows he could see a directional sign to the stairs, slightly illuminated by a floodlight around a corner. He tried the door, but it wouldn’t open.

“Damn!” Guy yelled. He pushed against it with all his weight. It wasn’t locked; something large and heavy was blocking it on the other side. SQUEEK. They froze again. One of the doors in the middle of the hall had opened. A quiet, slow shuffling sound following. Facing behind them, they saw a small red light, seemingly floating in mid-air.

“Oh god, Guy!” He bashed the door again and again. It moved slightly with each blow, mere millimeters by his account, but it did move. The thing was only six feet away.

“Guy!”

With one last lunge and a loud yell, the door opened just enough for a Deana-sized adult to fit through. He grabbed Deana’s arm and practically threw her through the opening. She yelped and tumbled to the floor on the other side, tripping over the blockade. He felt something horribly cold touch his back; his elbow instinctively flew backwards and connected with something both mushy and hard. The corpse collapsed onto the floor. Somewhat out of breath, he looked down the hall. There was a constellation of red lights in the darkness, all moving towards him.

“Run!” he yelled through the opening.

“Get in here!”

“Can’t fit. Run!”

“No!” She saw the large filing cabinet blocking the door, but it must have been filled with cement; it would barely budge.

“Sorry I couldn’t take you to that movie.” He gave a wink then slammed the door shut. She heard him scream some obscenities. Then he just screamed. Then silence. With her hands over her mouth, she stared, still as a statue, at the door. There was a squeaking sound as the door started to open again. Her trance finally broken, she followed the sign to the stairs. When she had reached them, she remembered the facility had a sixth basement floor. The sign pointing up read “Exit,” and the one pointing down read “Mainframe.”

“Shit,” she whispered to herself, then descended.

After what seemed like ten flights of stairs she came upon a large metallic gate; it reminded her of those vault doors in banks.

“Deana, what the hell are you doing?” she asked herself. Inspecting it closer, however, she discovered that it was already open, just a crack, but enough for her to fit through.

On the other side was a huge chamber; shadows clung to the walls and ceiling. In the center was a ponderous metallic cylinder, and right in front of it, at a control panel, was Dr. Bannagin. She could hear the clack of the keyboard keys as he typed.

“Phil? Dr. Bannagin.” The typing stopped.

“Deana, is that you?” He asked, still facing away.

“Yes. Phil, what are you doing down here? You said to evacuate.”

“The signal processor, it’s ready.”

“What?”

“We tried something new, to give more control. To keep the signal on longer. We couldn’t keep it on for more than a few hours.” There was a strange tone in his voice.

“Phil, Guy is dead.”

The white-haired head lowered, seemingly in despair at the news.

“I’m sorry. I knew you two were… close.”

“We need to go!”

The frantic typing resumed. “Did you know we send the bodies out? Have been for years. You may recall from orientation that there are four-hundred and fifty two Chthonic facilities in the world, and all are working on Project Thanatos. Millions were sent out. Tens of millions. All with special headgear.” The typing stopped again, and he turned around. The kindly face of Phil Bannagin she had once known was gone, replaced by a madman’s visage. His eyes were dark and wild.

“They’re everywhere, all over the world, and they’re waking up. We have conquered death itself.” He flashed a hideous grin. “The signal has unlimited range, but the time, that was the problem. How to keep it on indefinitely? The solution, it turns out, was simpler than we thought.” A few more key presses, and the walls lit up. Deana gasped. Suspended all over the walls with wires and cords were hundreds of corpses, all naked, all capped with the Thanatos device.

Dr. Bannagin began walking towards her. “We’re still not sure how it works, but we think it retains a tiny amount of electrical activity produced by the brain, long after death. Minuscule, insignificant, but still there. We simply did not have the energy to keep the signal on… until the Thanatos that is.” He sweeped the room with his arm. She started backing up slowly.

“There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing I can do. There’s no way to shut if off. Each device now produces its own signal.” A deafening explosion assaulted her senses; the mainframe had erupted in flames. The bodies draping the walls sprung to life; they moaned and clawed at their restraints. Deciding she had seen enough and abandoning a man she once called a friend, she dashed through the vault door. She clambered up the stairs, briefly seeing decaying arms trying to force open that barricaded door on the fifth basement floor. Not stopping for a second, she continued to run up and up until she reached the main hall of Alpha-1.

Barging through them, she sprinted down the hall to the main entrance. She caught glimpse of the bodies of guards and Chthonic employees littering the adjoining rooms. Finally outside, she fell to her knees and gasped for air. She coughed fitfully and looked up. Fire and smoke filled the sky, and the low sound of sirens were filling the air. High above, a squadron of jet fighters zoomed past.

“Deana!” she heard someone yell. It was Jack. He rushed towards her and lifted her to her feet.

“Jack, how did you…”

“The elevator. You should’ve waited,” he scorned. At that moment, Deana began to cry.

“Come on, there’s a shelter nearby. Some of us thought something like this could happen.” He took her arm and led her into a van with several other scared-looking colleagues. “Drive!”

“Guy is dead,” she said sobbing lightly.

“I’m sorry.”

“What happens now?” she asked, wiping her eyes. “Bannagin told me they’re everywhere. Millions of them.”

“We do have this.” He reached behind him and held a Thanatos device in his hands. No light shone on this one. “This is a prototype Mark II model. Only a few were made.”

“How the hell could that possibly help us?”

“It can override the Thanatos signal, and it never runs out of juice. We should be safe with this thing.”

Deana cried-laughed. “So that’s what you’ve been working on these past few months.”

“Yeah. Had I known what Bannagin was up to, though…”

“The Thanatos.” She grabbed her shoulders and shivered. The last year of her life had been committed to working for them. “What was the point?”

Jack shrugged. “Does it matter?

“We should go to the theater,” she said with a half smile. “There was a movie I wanted to see.”