This was never the life I planned for myself. Truth is I never really had much of a plan. Growing up my parents always went with the stock phrase for parents with thoroughly middle-of-the-road kids, it doesn’t matter what you do, Jim, so long as you’re happy. I worked hard at school but I was no great sports star or maths whizz, I was just distinctly average. I wasn’t massively popular or an awkward social outcast, I was just Jim. Boring, normal, Jim.
When school was over, I did what everyone without a plan seems to do these days, I went to university. I hoped that three years of a nice and vague social sciences degree would give me the time to figure out where I was going with my life. Fat chance.
I floated through my degree without ever finding any direction whatsoever. For a few months in the second year I dated a girl who was a massive eco-warrior, spending most of that time being dragged to various protests and rallies, never understanding or really caring about any of the causes. I used this as a basis for writing a dissertation on the impact of corporations on the environment. I thought it was terrible. My tutor didn’t and somehow it got published.
After graduation, my life fell into another directionless slide, I found myself a comfortably monotonous dead-end job and coasted for a while longer, safe in the knowledge that I could live my life without impacting on the world in any great way, and that was just fine. Until a year ago.
One Thursday evening, returning from work, I found a letter. It was brief but informed me that I had been chosen for a ‘unique employment opportunity’ overseas and if I were to accept, I had to travel to the airport the following day where more information would be given. The letter stirred something in me. I decided that this was what I had been waiting for all this time. I had no idea what it was, but I was sure that this was going to give me the direction I’d always lacked. I packed a small suitcase and, the next day, I left my life behind.
And that’s how I ended up working for Marshcorp. Someone pretty far up the ladder read my dissertation and saw something in it that I hadn’t, they brought me on as an ‘environmental consultant’ to oversee a potentially deadly and largely disfiguring viral outbreak at one of their testing facilities in Nenana, Alaska. It may sound like a tough job but the infected people were well quarantined in a concrete warehouse and all I had to do is keep the guard rota up to date and push a button twice a day to feed those behind the steel doors.
I suppose the only real drawback to my new job was the screaming.
As part of my life as warden to the good people of Nenana, I lived at the facility where they were held. I wasn’t permitted to see any of the quarantined people, a company policy I wish I could have stuck to, but I could certainly hear them. During the day they were silent as anything, shuffling around, getting on with their lives inside the walls. At night, things really changed. They became a screaming mass of noise and fury ceaselessly hammering on the doors and begging to be freed in the most inhuman voices I have ever heard. Not exactly animal, but something altogether different an unnatural.
I barely slept during my first month at the facility and I became largely nocturnal; going to sleep at dawn when they began to calm down or wear themselves out and the screams would fade back to a faint shuffling. Waking up a few hours later still tired. I guess it was only a matter of time before I made a mistake.
A few nights ago, the inmates were unusually quiet, I decided to take advantage and went to bed early, forgoing my usual search of the perimeter when the guard changed at midnight.
I awoke at nine the next morning after the best night’s sleep I’d had in months. It took me little more than an hour to realise something was wrong.
I headed to my office and settled in for another day playing solitaire and watching the guards patrolling around the warehouse as little dots on the floor plan. But before I could really get started, I had to feed the inmates. The system was automated and I had no idea what was in it; a truck came once a month with fresh supplies and the inmates went crazy for it.
That morning there was no reaction so I radioed The guard nearest the food delivery system to see if he could find a problem. There was no response. It was then that I noticed the floor plan. The little dot representing the guard’s vital signs was missing. So were the three guards nearest him.
I decided to get to the bottom of the situation myself, thinking that the guards had probably snuck off for a crafty smoke as they sometimes would with such a quiet job. I made my way out to the service tunnel where Jacobs, the first missing guard, patrolled. The scene I found will remain with me for the rest of my life.
Jacobs’ body lay on the ground a little way from the reinforced door leading to the warehouse’s interior. The door was open the top of Jacobs’ head was missing. I turned to run back to the office and radio for the emergency crew and as I did, I heard a creak behind me. Looking over my shoulder, I saw something emerging through the door, something far from human. Its mouth was grotesquely wide and lipless and its large black eyes following me, lidless and unblinking.
I did the only thing I could. I ran.
