Darren Wearmouth - Second Activation

“Jesus Christ,” I said and ran over to him. He let go of the knife and fell to his side.

I went to pull it out but realized it was too late. His eyes fluttered shut, and blood pooled around his head. He let out two wet croaks before his whole body relaxed.

Brett stared, open-mouthed. Jack gazed down with a look of disbelief. “What the fuck?”

I took a couple of steps back to avoid the growing claret pool and tried to rationalize the man’s actions. “Remember the guy at the airport needing to confirm a kill? Maybe he thought the voice killed and not him.”

“God knows,” Jack said. “He’s just another poor bastard who died by the handiwork of Genesis Alliance.”

“It’s not possible,” Brett said. “I heard there were problems, but nothing like this. The instructions are quite specific.”

“How about you tell us the problems?” I said. “Because at the moment, everything we thought we figured out has gone to shit.”

Brett moved away from the drive and stood in the shade on the front lawn. “It was more to do with people not getting activated who were near machinery, or recovering quicker than expected. There’s so many parameters to the system, but the message is quite specific.”

“Did you program the message?” I said.

“No, I didn’t. I worked on inter-device communication and statistics. My side is all commercially available coding. Do you know what they told me it was originally for?”

I slung my rifle and folded my arms. “Try me.”

He sighed and leaned against the window ledge. “Marketing. They claimed they would take money from corporations by implanting their products into people’s consciences.”

I generally didn’t believe in conspiracy theories like the moon landings being fake or Elvis still being alive, but I might have been curious about this one. Regardless, I wouldn’t have suspected the ultimate aim of the technology.

“How does it work?” Jack said.

“I’ve told you before, I don’t know. I worked on building the inter-device communications, like mobile switching centers in a cell network.”

I suspected he was being evasive and stepped toward him. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to steal the patent. Are you saying there’s been no reports of it sending people around the bend?”

He bowed his head. “I heard talk of it but saw nothing in the official reports. Would you question it with your family under threat?”

“Brett, if there’s anything you’re hiding, now’s the time to say,” Jack said.

“What do you want to know? The program I developed for monitoring the top ten processes? The statistical reports I created for gathering location updates and memory usage? The signaling protocols and their configurations? You shouldn’t overestimate my role. There’s nothing I can do to help these poor people.”

His last words were heartfelt, although he confused me with his technobabble, which wasn’t that hard to do. I reminded myself about his previous openness and the duress that he’d been under, long before the first activation even happened. Perhaps the system had quirks that he didn’t know about.

“Forget about it,” I said. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk things through once we complete our mission.”

Jack jerked his rifle to the other side of the road. “Let’s raid that house and get out of here.”

I followed him and wondered how we could tell if anyone on the ground could be trusted. Brett trudged alongside me. “I’m here to help you and survive. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s as simple as that.”

“I believe you,” I said. “You can’t blame us for asking questions.”

Jack kicked the door open, leaned against the front entrance, and spun into the light-pink hallway. He glanced back and pressed his finger against his lips. I stepped through the entrance and squatted on the sea grass carpet. A creaking sound came from behind a door, probably the living area.

I aimed over around Jack’s side. He thrust the door open with the bottom of his boot and sprang into the room. I immediately followed and swept the area.

A lady, around eighty years old, hung from a beam on the roof. A toppled stool lay beneath her. I looked at her face and immediately turned away. To her right, by an old-fashioned three-bar electric fire, a man of similar age sat in a wheelchair. A knife handle poked out of his chest, and his head rested on the back of the chair, mouth wide open as if he died while screaming.

“Everything all right in there?” Brett called from the hall.

I sighed and peered beyond the couple at a rotting buffet on a wooden coffee table. “Let’s find the bathroom and get scrubbed up.”

Upstairs, the plumbing in the bathroom still worked and supplied us with cold water. I didn’t trust it to drink, unless we found some purification tablets. Jack, Brett, and I took turns stripping off our shirts and cleaning ourselves, using a bar of fragrant soap and a pink sponge from the shower cubicle. I dabbed my stinging arm wound that I’d incurred at the tangle of cars and noticed it becoming increasingly bright red around the edges.

Jack tossed me a small bottle of antibacterial ointment and a bandage from the mirrored cupboard above the sink. “You’ll be needing these.”

I treated my arm and spotted a disposable razor on the window ledge. “You gonna have a shave?”

“What’s the point?” he said and hummed the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In” while putting his sweater back on and slinging his rifle.

I grabbed a fresh towel from a rack and dried myself. It felt like Jack and I had at last clicked back into gear and were starting to do things automatically. We didn’t debate this house clearance—we just did it. I’d feared for his mental health over the last week; it had crumbled on our way to Monroe, causing him to behave erratically. Our new focus and clear mission seemed to be having a positive effect.

In the kitchen, Brett found a sealed box of Belgian chocolates, cans of potatoes and carrots, and a tube of processed cheese. I took a small bottle of sherry from the living area.

“Back to the observation deck,” I said. “See if we can spot another boat or place to dock on the mainland.”

We arrived back at the monument just before nine on Friday morning. Almost exactly a week since boarding our plane in Manchester. I climbed the stone spiral staircase inside the structure. The smell and buzzing of flies told me that we had obstacles to cross on our way up. Sure enough, I came across a bludgeoned corpse; a bloodstained rock lay a couple of steps above.

“Do you think that bloke outside did this and jumped off the deck?” Jack said.

“It makes sense I suppose,” I said. “Although I’m bored with playing CSI .”

Brett winced after his trailing leg bumped against the body. I considered telling him that things got easier with time, but I would be lying. The bodies served as a constant reminder of the evil that had to be stopped. If anything, each one hardened my resolve.

I continued upward to the viewing platform. A stone deck gave us a spectacular three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view. I scanned across the quiet, glistening, deep-blue lake and the buildings dotted along the distant Michigan coastline. I shielded my eyes from the sun and looked south, at a small group of islands and the green fields of Ohio, stretching into the horizon.

Brett rested his elbows on the ledge and gazed into the distance. “Great view up here.”

Jack pointed over my shoulder. “We’ll aim for that peninsula about five miles away. Doesn’t look like a built-up area.”

“There’re plenty of boats in the marina. No point hanging around,” I said.