The Cockroach

[mock]

((closed, updated intermittently, Purposefully prosaic and vague, to conceal details which will probably never see the light of day IC)))

(a few months ago)

'Mr Knox. Mr Knox? Mr Knox. Edward. Edward. Good morning. Good morning, Mr Knox. Edward. Edward Tyler Knox, good morning."

The lilting, hoity-toity English-sounding voice clicked in every few seconds, and somehow Eddie's half-dead brain had relayed back to hti old crappy clock in his piece-of-sh*t apartment back in Heytown, and time and again, he would roll over in his cot, swing blindly at it, and drift back into unconsciousness.

As the blazing-dull, high-school fluorescents finally flooded the small room, hsi eyes constricted to creep-white bulbs as he turned over in hsicot in pain. "Hello," chirped the voice, "good morning. We trust you're awake? Our apologies, Mr Knox, but we can't see you thsi morning."

A dream. A dream a dream a bullshit faggoty symbolism of sh*t you don't know how to solve. A church, a home, a family, death, killing eating. A baby. A baby who looks over the cliff at a whole big empty world ahead of it, and looks back at you and says "what is this" and you say "I don't f*cking know."

A dream a dream of failure, loss. Toppling on top of your own pile of corpses, your own legacy, one more nameless name in the pile.

A dream where you fight like hell, but die anyway.

"ah, wonderful," it says, this bodyless nothing.

"our apologies, it seems we can't see you this morning," it says, as Eddie eyes a mess of torn wires in the corner of the ceiling. "it seems you can jump quite a bit higher than we anticipated. A mistake to be expected and we'll of course have that camera replaced the next time you're out of your room."

His room, maybe twelve feet by twelve. White all over. Padded, soft-cornered furniture. nothing you could take yourself out on. And yet, strangely, comfortable.

Nice chairs.

A magazine.

A plate of Japanese tea.

"Mr Knox, please feel free to replenish your strength with the tea and soba we have provided you. We are very happy to have you staying with us."

Eddie didn't' move from his cot. his clothes, clean and new. Blue hospital pants and a white t-shirt.

"From the damage you dealt to our observation system, yesterday, we gather that you have some reservations about your stay," it/she carried on. "Please be assured, we care about you. We want you here, because you are special."

A pause followed, of possibly one or two minutes. Eddie stretched out his arms and legs, which before being revived had last lived in a hail of stings and bites.

"...It's natural to be surprised, Edward. it's natural and good, and shows humility. Why am I special? What makes me special, what makes me good? Asking these questions speaks to a sense of average-ness that we here greatly appreciate."

"Your DNA scans tell a remarkable tale, Mr Knox. while you have succumbed to a lethal assault at the hands of infected residents of Malton - and our dearest condolences for you inconvenience, Mr Knox, - records procured from Necrotech imply that you have evaded this exceedingly common fate for almost all of your time in the quarantine zone. Your low, and particularly rare rate of exposure to the virus makes you an extremely valuable subject in our testing, do you not agree? A reliable control group, with extraordinary physical stamina to boot. Mr Knox, while we owe our discovery of you to pure serendipity, it is hard to deny that you will play a great part in our organization's future research.' It empasized SERACH, re-SEARCH as opposed to RE_search, which burned him up alittle.

"Your silence is disconcerting, Mr Knox," it answered the silence after a moment. "Are you calculating the likelihood of your rescue? We invite you to do so for as long as it remains a pleasant diversion, though we feel compelled to inform you that your involvement in our current research should be considered permanent."

Rooms like this were supposed to have those big, cop-show two way mirrors, but this one didn't. Only a fray of wires where a camera had apparently once been. They were, for all intensive purposes (Eddie thought this was the saying, as opposed to "for all intents AND purposes") they were talking to a man they couldn't' see. Today, anyway.

"How alarming, your records, Mr Knox. We can only speculate at your emotional state, sir. We wonder how it compares to your condition upon being revived after the assault on the Heytown barrier."

These lights were f*cking hideous. Eddie jammed his fists into his eyes and ground them into his beady eyeballs until they were lubricated enough to cope with the harsh light.

"So many scientists dead, Mr Knox. So many well-meaning champions of progress, felled senselessly."

"We wonder if you ever expected that such acts of hate would find their way to documentations?"

"We wonder if you believe that men and women of science, rational as any human can hope to be, find themselves above vengeance?"

Lights out.

[mock]

Knox, Edward T.
Acquired: November 2nd, 2007.
Location: West Grayside, south of Pole Mall.
Height. 6'5"
Weight at time of admission: 215 lbs.
Hair: Black
Eyes: Blue
State of Decay: Minimal

Personal Effects:
1 tin cigarette lighter
1 plastic sandwich bag containing 4 loose handrolled cigarettes
7 torn, folded, non sequential pages of a book entitled "Sex Cult Massacre on Route 666"
1 pair of Malton police-issue boots (viral risk yellow, incinerated)
1 pair blue jeans (viral risk yellow, incinerated)
1 patchwork leather jacket (viral risk yellow, incinerated)
1 undershirt (viral risk yellow, incinerated)
1 switchblade knife (viral risk double red, incinerated)

_____

The lights stayed off for another day, simply because he never answered back. After a few hours he had fumbled over to the chair and round coffee table which he had remembered being in the middle of the room, to get ahold of the cold food and cold tea.

"How wonderful," it says, eventually, after he's been sleeping for who knows how long (the Mk II hangover being what it is, it was never hard to catch a night's sleep even in foreign, mysterious environs). "How wonderful that a wretched, wicked boy, a rotten angry child with an ugly temper, should find himself given the opportunity to guide his fellow man, who he has so mistreated and tormented, to health and happiness."

Eddie stirred from his chair and reached over to the table. If they were going to make an ongoing game of this lights-on-lights-off sh*t, he was at least going to use this brief window to see what the magazine was. It was a Sports Illustrated. It was from before the outbreak, though, and he'd read it when he was younger.

"Death and taxes, so say common people, are the two inevitable things in life. And while you and your fellow citizens have been relieved of the latter, your obligation the former has increased immeasurably. We do not cling to naive delusions that your unusually low number of recorded deaths is the result of luck, or belonging to a safe environment. You have no doubt cut down scores of friend and foe alike in order to spend as many days among the living as possible. And while, personally, we find yoru actions deplorable, practically we find you great asset."

"The process of integration of the virus into the human system is of great interest to us, Mr Knox. Necrotechs databases have been a great boon to us, but our own studies are often halted for lack of suitable subjects. Many residents of Malton have simply been killed and revived too many times to be of use in our clinical trials."

"What we need, what we all need, is a subject with low exposure to the virus, with comparably low levels of Necrotech Mk II in their system, who we can kill. Again and again and again. In as many ways as the scientific mind can conceive. So we can observe how this virus digs in, fortifies, perseveres.

"This tenacious little infection reminds us of the common cockroach, Mr Knox. Perhaps during our time together, the two of you will find you have much in common. We would like to run some basic physical diagnostics today. During this time, the observation system in your room will be replaced and fortified. Thank you, and have a good day."

The first group who came to get Eddie out of his room didn't stand a chance. The second group had cattle prods.

[mock]

On the first day, he is brought shackled into a room with a table, where a scientist (not her) presents him with a large print checklist:
_ Murder
_ Theft
_ Rape
_ Destruction of property/Arson
_ Cannibalism (whilst living)
_ Dishonesty
_ Negligence causing death
_ Extortion
_ Carelessness with the feelings of others
_ Halting the advance of society

And was asked to check off any and all of the transgressions of which he had at any point been guilty(or, rather, to say yes or no as each was indicated, because he was certainly not allowed to hold a pen). He told them go go f*ck themselves, and then he was shot in the forehead. The test had never mattered.

One day they mount him to a wall, like Jesus, and from behind reflective glass they show slides of a Rorschach test and ask Eddie what he sees, as two zombies dismember him. He doesn't give any answers, of course, but it doesn't matter.

One day the inject him with an infection, and leave him his room until he dies. They don't bring food or water, or turn out the lights at night. It takes four days.

Some days it's her, who he hears on the intercom, and she's a plain middle-aged woman with glasses. They've never met before this. Some days it's another scientist with an equal amount of hurt and spite in their eyes. He has never met any of them before this.

One day they cut out his heart, and he wakes up the next morning with it placed back in. Things nobody could endure. One day he learns what it's like to drown.

Days don't mean anything, when you never see the sky and you never know how long you've been dead. On what he doesn't know is his 46th day, Eddie stops asking himself why me and realizes the truth: The notes and the charts and the clinical nature of it all, it's all play-acting. But their specific interest in him is no more genuine. He wasn't hand-picked, sought-after, he's not uniquely qualified, special, just-what-they-needed. He was a shambler pulled out of a line by people who needed somebody to hurt, when a red blip on a DNA scanner that said he had killed scientists made it okay.

They were learning nothing from Eddie. He was entertainment.