The Beginning of An Apocalypse

“Wake up,” A man’s voice said. “It’s time to wake up.”

Cas groaned as she rolled onto her side and hit her head against something not so comfortable feeling. It smelled like a musky new car and felt like a car as well. She tried to push herself further into the sickening smell of the car when she felt someone pulling on her arm. Someone pushed her out of wherever she was.

She felt her knees fall to something hard. She opened her eyes and saw the grey concrete road that she was on. Through her fuzzy vision, she could see most of what was around her. Somehow, it was still hard.

“Follow me,” Someone said. “And bring her along.”

It took a few minutes to realize who she was following. Gabriel. He walked in front of them as she was dragged behind him. She couldn’t exactly fight back and soon she realized it was not just the effects of whatever drug they had injected into her. She saw that she was restrained. Zip-tie restraints held her wrists together.

She wasn’t working with Gabriel anymore. She wasn’t helping. She wasn’t a partner.

She was now a prisoner.

By the time they got to the door of the blue and white building with tongs of bulletproof glass windows, Cas could stand. The man holding her could tell she could stand and be holding her accordingly.

“Hey!” She managed to say. “Gabriel!” She didn’t know how well her words were being pronounced, but she knew Gabriel could hear her and she knew he knew what she was saying. “What is going on?!”

Cas looked at the floor that she was walking on. She saw the dark stains as if something was spilled onto them. It was far apart, maybe a few feet between each. But each was different. Some were small stains and others were big and barely faded.

If Cas was stupid she’d think it would be darker shades of blood.

Cas looked up at Gabriel who didn’t turn around to face her or to tell her what was going to happen. No matter how much she shouted for him to tell her what was going on.

Within the millionth time, she had the realization. She was being dragged down to a place she would probably never come out of. She looked at the stains on the ground, she saw how they were shaped, and how in some places it looked like there was someone’s head and body blocking the blood from covering the entire ground.

This wasn’t just some stain or some weird decoration style, it is blood. There’s no way it’s not days-old blood.

“Gabriel! What happened here?!” Cas shouted. “Somebody tell me!” She shouted when once again Gabriel ignored her. Everyone ignored her. They looked at her curiously but stood back. They didn’t get involved. Some of them didn’t even look and kept going. But Cas could tell what was on their mind.

She’s dead. What’s she doing here? She’s so dead. We’re never going to see her again. Sorry, but you aren’t coming back from this.

Cas wasn’t going to let these things come true for her.

She looked up and behind her to see the man who kept his eyes on Gabriel so he knew exactly where to go. Getting him to let go of her would be the only way to get out. There weren’t many people on this floor, and the people who were didn’t go near the middle like it was plagued. She could make a quick run for it if she was free enough. Gabriel wouldn’t be able to chase after her, he’s fast walking on crutches, but he can’t run that fast. The man who held her could easily catch her, but she had experience in running for her life, she could do it.

She just had to make the man let go of her.

They walked to the door of the elevator and they were stopped. There was someone else in the elevator and they had to wait for them.

Perfect time, she thought.

The man who held her only held her by one arm. Now that she was able to stand and seemed to be fine, he wasn’t caring too much to drag her along.

She could turn around and do what she knew worked so well to get men away from her. She subtly leaned her body forward so she could see something on the wall. She turned to stand in front of the man. The man looked down at her, his messy hair making him look scarier. But no matter how he looked, he was still a man.

Cas was in front of him and she took a deep breath in. She heard the ding of the elevator and knew she had no seconds left. She raised her leg back and kicked him in the crotch. The man let go of her just like she thought. He fell with a loud groan. He held onto the ground with one hand trying to stop himself from experiencing more pain.

As soon as he was on the ground Cas swerved around him and ran. She had to make it to the door and get out of there before they found some way to stop them.

Gabriel turned around to see what was going on and he swore the amount of anger he had could let him walk without these crutches. He looked at the employees and security team that stood there and saw they were doing nothing about it.

They were too scared to go near the middle of the room. Where all the deaths took place. Pathetic, Gabriel thought.

He didn’t have time for their stupidity.

“Get her!” He shouted. “You fail and you’re all unemployed!”

Cas heard Gabriel’s threat and he knew that they all were scared enough to do whatever he said. They were scared of him and fear can make people do crazy things that they wouldn’t normally do. Cas almost made it to the door before she was forced to turn by one of the security guards who took Gabriel seriously. They ran in front of the door and made her turn.

She went to her left where there were fewer people. She would have to find another way out if she could. Gabriel was kicking the messy-haired man who failed to hold her telling him to get up. Everyone else was running after her, not as fast as they could be though. They jumped over all the dark spots, but there were so many that they couldn’t miss all of them.

Cas turned in an exhausted spin and looked frantically around the room. She had to find some way out of this room, but most of this lobby wasn’t covered indoors and way-outs. She had to come up with something quick because she didn’t seem to have much time left.

Cas didn’t want to hurt anyone, but she didn’t know if she could avoid that any longer. If she wanted to get out of there, then she couldn’t avoid it any longer.

And she didn’t avoid it.

One of the security guards came up behind her and she didn’t hesitate to turn around with her fist ready and hit the man across the face. When he got hit, he didn’t fall, but he sure backed off. Cas ran from him only to elbow a woman who ran after her in the side. She fell only because her back hit the desk.

“Cassidy, stop!” Gabriel shouted. “Stop running and make this easier for all of us!”

Cas didn’t reply to him. She had no time to think about him or what he wanted and whether it was good or bad. If it could help her gain something or lose something. But with her ankles zip-tied together, she was going to assume that she would lose more than she could gain.

Cas looked back at the door and saw that if she fought she could get free. All she had to do was get everyone guarding the door to follow her. And that would be easy, at least she hoped it would be.

She ran making her already small following follow her and when she was just a few feet from the line of people at the door, she turned and one by one they started following her. They tried to surround her and move in, but she was not shying away from hitting and breaking the circle of people.

She moved through and there was the door. The door was in front of her and letting sunlight show through the glass. She could get out.

She already started to think of what she would do once she got far away from this hell of a place. Cas would get out of these zip-ties, she would run far away from here to a place Gabriel could not track her down and bring her back here. She would find out how to get Marcus back, while she was tracking him down. She could not waste another moment when Marcus was still out there, still fighting for his life.

Cas ran to the door after being in the clear. She grabbed onto the handlebars and pushed the door open. She felt the air on her face and the blinding light hit her eyes. She didn’t push any of it away. She accepted all of it.

She accepted too much, she looked for too much she didn’t see what was coming for her. She didn’t see the aluminum-looking bar coming toward her. Until it hit her across the face and she fell. She fell but she didn’t lose consciousness. She felt the sting in the back of her head, she felt the throbbing that continued to go off in her head.

The hit almost paralyzed her and before she could fight people had her and weren’t letting her go. She looked up from where she lay to see Gabriel standing there staring down at her. His chest rose and fell so fast it was hard to believe he wouldn’t explode.

“Was it that hard?!” Gabriel shouted. “I swear, you all are the most useless people I’ve ever met!”

Gabriel comfortably put his crutches back in place before he moved away from Cas. “Get her up and hold her this time! You let her go and it won’t be her suffering for the rest of her life!” Gabriel huffed his last breath and turned around. He walked away without knowing if someone had picked her up and was bringing her along. He was furious and he needed to get this over with before he did something he’d have wished he didn’t do.

The man that had let Cas get away easily, grabbed her once again. This time he grabbed her by her waist and threw her over his shoulder. He held her tightly and followed Gabriel with the intent of never letting anything go wrong.

She hit the man in the back with her clenched fists and the guy barely reacted. She clawed and she even tried to bite him. All that did was get a fist punched against the side of her thigh. It didn’t help that her ribcage was being pressed into the man’s shoulder blade. A few of her ribs were broken and they weren’t all that healed yet.

She couldn’t stop anything especially when she saw them getting in the elevator. Her head was almost against the back wall of the elevator. She watched as Gabriel put in a code and pressed a button that seemed to take them to a floor that most people weren’t allowed to.

She turned her head to the side and tried to flip her hair to the other end. She tried to see something, but all she saw was Gabriel standing beside her.

He looked over and gave her a grin when he saw she was looking at him like she wanted to murder him, and she did.

“Didn’t you say you weren’t going to pull something like this?” Gabriel asked. “Come on.”

“I knew you’d do something, but I didn’t think you’d be so stupid,” Cas said. She wondered if the things she wanted to or could say would have any effect on whether or not she was going to make it out of there alive. She’s been with Gabriel long enough to know he was untrustworthy and unpredictable, but she didn’t know everything. She didn’t know what were smart things to do and what were stupid things.

She could poke his buttons and that would either make him make a mistake or it would land her in a grave in less than two seconds.

“Stupid?” Gabriel asked with a scoff. “No one is going to come looking for you. You’re a homeless college dropout. You were fired from your job probably and the people there are happy you are gone. Do you think your boss, Shane will come to save you? He’s going to let go of you just like everyone else has done.”

He fixed his crutches and pushed himself to look Cas in the eyes. “The only stupid thing I did was try to get Marcus and continue my work with him. But I don’t need him anymore. That’s why I tried to kill him. Which I’ll keep trying to do until he’s gone. Then it’s onto you, plan b.”

Cas tried to remember what Gabriel said word for word. She tried to piece it all together. She came up with theories, but there wasn’t much luck. She knew Gabriel was going to get Marcus and do some experiments with him. She knew that, he said he was going to do that while he was finding a cure. But he wasn’t looking for a cure now, so what was he doing?

What was he talking about?

More importantly, what was he going to do?

“What are you talking about?” Cas asked. She tried to push herself up, but all she did was hurt herself further. She rested herself back down and got her breathing back to normal. She remembered what she was trying to say and continued. “How am I plan B?”

“Come on, Cassidy,” Gabriel said. “Now you’re the dumb one doing the stupid things.” He gave her a small one-sided smile and looked back at the elevator doors before they opened to let them all out.

The elevator door opened and they were able to leave the small confined place.

“You can set her down now, Seth,” Gabriel said to the man, Seth.

Seth set Cas down and held her until she was able to stably stand. She held her stomach feeling like she was going to puke until the nausea went away. She watched as Gabriel told Seth to leave. She watched him go back into the elevator and the doors closed and he was gone.

“If you try to run or hurt me,” Gabriel said, “The men over there will shoot you without any sense of hesitation.”

Cas looked over and saw what Gabriel was talking about. Two men stood there with bulletproof chest plates and heavy-duty guns guarding the metal door. They looked directly at the two of them.

She felt like they were staring directly at her and with any little movement, no matter how big or small, they would shoot her. She stepped backward only a step. Even from fifteen feet away, she could see their hands tighten up beside the trigger.

Were they just taking the extra measure to make sure Gabriel lived or to guard whatever was behind that door?

“What is this place?” Cas asked. “What are you going to do?!”

Gabriel looked away from her and moved forward. He didn’t tell Cas to come along, she walked forward herself. “Tell me,” Cas urged. She wasn’t going to stop fighting till she knew. Gabriel could keep secrets all he wanted, but she’d find the answers somehow. She hoped he’d give in and tell her though.

“You’ll see,” Gabriel said. “This level is a level that only I and the people I assign can be. It’s the underground levels that no one can go to. It’s where I keep…” Gabriel thought about what he should say. How much he should say and how much he should show her.

“Everything that would probably shut me down but at the same time is the thing that makes my career.”

“So experiments?” Cas asked. “Things that could change the world forever. Good or bad.”

“Percically,” Gabriel said. “Maybe you aren’t so dumb after all.” He smiled thinking he was so smart and cool for what he said. All he did was make Cas roll her eyes and wonder what would happen if she punched him across the face.

They made it to the checkpoint with the guards. They put a suspicious eye on Cas and studied her like it was their job. Gabriel gave a code and a finger scan and Cas couldn’t tell what else. She realized that security was a really important thing to him. He wasn’t going to take any chances with anything getting in.

She had the feeling it was to keep something hidden than it was to keep people from getting in.

The door opened and it only brought them to another windowless gray-ish blue hall that had a few doors on the right side of the hall.

“What is this place? A jail?”

“You could call it that,” Gabriel said, unphased by what was around him. “But not for living things if you were thinking in technicalities.”

She looked into one of the passing doors, but all it had was a square that you could see through if she got up on her toes. But she didn’t see anything while she was walking past it. If she didn’t know any better she’d say that it was an empty cell.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Cas asked.

“It means that the things that are held here are not living nor are they dead,” Gabriel explained. He stopped at the fifth door and walked straight towards this one. “I’ll show you.” He put in a code and the door clicked from red to green. He opened the door and let Cas get through.

Cas stood outside the door not knowing whether she should go in or not. She heard something inside this cell, people were talking. Another person was talking but it sounded like they had something sharp stuck in their throat.

She didn’t know whether she should go in, but she knew there was no point in standing outside in this empty hallway. She was stuck in here.

She pushed open the door only a smidge more and got herself in. The room was a dark shade of white and smelled like chemicals. Before she could look around she saw the many scientists in lab coats walking back and forth. Some were holding papers, some were working with machinery. All of them were working around a glass box.

The glass box was a cell inside a cell.

Gabriel stood in front of the cell talking to someone who was in there.

The closer Cas stepped forward the more she heard the scratchy voice that belonged to whoever was in that glass cell. She walked up to stand beside Gabriel and she saw what was in the cell. She didn’t know whether to call it a person or it.

The person or the thing was what may have been a man. It may have been a man before something happened to him. Right now, this man was sick somehow. With something, he was sick.

Its black veins were very prominent Its greyer skin and falling-out hair, it didn’t have much hair any longer.

Cas took a step backward. She hit another man’s shoulder making her stop. She looked back up at the thing who stood there staring at her. She looked in horror. “What is that?!” Cas asked.

“Him?” Gabriel asked. “This is Test Subject 7032, formally known as Doug Mathens.”

“Doug?” The thing said in it’s terrifying voice. “Th-that is my… my name?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said looking back at him. “But it is of no importance to anyone anymore.” He grabbed a clipboard and looked at the progress that the idiots around him had made. None, they made none.

“What did you do to him?!” Cas shouted. “He needs a hospital.”

“He would kill them all,” Gabriel said without thinking of the heaviness of his words. It’s like he was talking about the sun and the sky. Cas didn’t understand it. “Thanks to the virus he has, he’s sick.”

“He’s…” Cas’s words got lost in her throat. She looked at the thing inside the cell and this time she looked at it. Every bit of it was familiar and she finally realized why. “Did Marcus do this to him?”

Gabriel looked at her and saw that she was serious. Her wide eyes as she looked at Seventy with a gasped open mouth. She believed that. “No,” Gabriel said. He wiped his mouth in an attempt not to laugh. Every day he was shown how stupid other people around him were.

“Did you think Marcus was the first one to have this?” Gabriel asked her.

“No one’s ever seen something like Marcus had, so of course,” Cas said. Wouldn’t anyone? In all of recorded history, there has been nothing like what happened to Marcus. What Marcus could do. He is something different entirely.

Cas looked at Gabriel and every other scientist’s face. She felt like she was the person who just walked in the middle of a joke that everyone around her knew about. She was the only one who didn’t know and that wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

“Is he not?” Cas asked trying to play off her uncomfortableness.

“No,” Gabriel said. “Neither is this one. Hint the 7023 in its name.” He waited for the gears to go around in Cas’s brain before she looked back up at him and knew what he had said.

“Then why do we not know about this? The public should know that killer disease is taking over… 7023 victims!”

“Why would the public know if I don’t want them to?” Gabriel asked. “Cas, have you not figured it out yet or are you just plain stupid?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Cas said. “Stop with the riddles and the games and tell me what’s going on. I’m tired of being in the dark!”

“God!” Seventy shouted. “He started this! A jail for experiments!” It said in it’s hard to listen to the voice.

Cas looked over at Gabriel when she deciphered what Seventy had told her. “Did you–”

Gabriel raised his arms out and smiled at her. “I have created this… human killing disease and since every time I re-create it’s different, Marcus was able to slip away. So I had to get him and with your help I almost did. But then you destroyed everything.”

“You… You did this to Marcus?! To the world?!” Cas shouted.

“It wasn’t supposed to escape, but yes, yes I did. I didn’t want to have to involve Marcus, he was such a nice kid, but he was the one that took after your parents the most so–” Cas cursed at him and plunged forward to hit him. Gabriel turned and Cas fell forward into the glass cell. She pushed herself away and recovered quickly.

Cas didn’t want to listen to any of this anymore. She didn’t want to be next to this man. She wanted to curse and to scream, but most of all she wanted to punch Gabriel until blood coated her fists and that smile was off his face.

She wanted to ruin his life as he had ruined hers.

“I can’t have Marcus anymore,” Gabriel said. “So I’ll have to settle for the next best thing.”

Cas looked and the way he was looking at her she knew what he was thinking. What he didn’t say was: “You.”

Cas stepped away from him and tried to think of possible ways to escape this. She couldn’t let this happen to herself. But she was stuck in a cell underground with no doors or windows. She didn’t have the codes or security passes. She was stuck.

And they had taken her.

They gave her another drug before she could fight and she collapsed to the ground. A few more heavy breaths and a few more things to fuzzily see before she passed out completely.

Gabriel walked over to her and looked down at her. He rolled her on her back with his foot and when he saw she was sleeping, he smile.d

“Bring out new guests to cell 568.” He smiled when he thought about the new opportunity that he was given. He could start over again and he had the feeling that it would work this time. “She’s going to be staying a while,” he said.