DiaboliQ

DiaboliQ

by Billie Sue Mosiman

Published by Billie Sue Mosiman, 2013.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

DIABOLIQ

First edition. June 10, 2013.

Copyright © 2013 Billie Sue Mosiman.

Written by Billie Sue Mosiman.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

ZOM ALIVE: 2110 | By | Billie Sue Mosiman

QUIET ROOM | By | Billie Sue Mosiman

CYBERCHIP | by | Billie Sue Mosiman

3AM WITH THE JAGUAR | by | Billie Sue Mosiman

PRISON PLANET | by | Billie Sue Mosiman

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

ZOM ALIVE: 2110

QUIET ROOM

CYBERCHIP

3AM WITH THE JAGUAR

PRISON PLANET

ZOM ALIVE: 2110

By

Billie Sue Mosiman

James, the Killer

Entry 1:

The first thing you have to know is if I were to meet you, I'd kill you. If the virus has died off miraculously and your world isn't infected, these are things you might want to know about the past.

This is my life.

Today I woke up in a ditch shivering. The pain of the cold made me so mad I jumped up and punched at the sky, swearing. Can't control when I do that—getting so mad I go crazy. Writing this shit down. No one would believe it if I didn't. Everyone's like me, all of us mad enough to bite through nails, all of us set off just by a look or any small incident. Even a cockroach can crawl across my boot and I'm in a rage where everything tunnels down to be ringed by black and all I want to do is kill something, anything.

Last night I was put in the ditch, knocked out on my ass. I'd been drinking. Yeah, so what? If you're reading this you have no right to judge. Anyway, I was downing some hooch made by some of the guys who live in a crummy camp by the railroad tracks and we all got into it. By the time we were stupid drunk we were throwing fisticuffs right and left. I took a smart smack on the chin. I guess I have a glass jaw.  I never was the best fighter with my fists. The guy put me down in the ditch for the rest of the night. I passed out so hard I might as well have been dead. I never even heard owls calling in the night or birdsong when morning dawned.

I've had this notebook and set of pens for months meaning to write stuff down. I can't figure it, you know, unless I write it out. I used to work for a newspaper, I really did. I was a pretty good journalist. You'll have to take my word for that. The old ways are coming back to me after a decade. I want to write it down before something happens to me and it never gets written. I wouldn't have waited so long but when the power grid first failed and the virus was spreading I was just trying to survive. It took every second of our attention for any of us to survive.

We've heard it's a virus that got into our brains. Makes us act like fucking animals. (If you don't like my curse words try to overlook them. Nowadays that's how I think and how I talk, I'm not cleaning it up for you.)

That part's true—how we're all a bunch of wild animals beating each other up and cutting one another's throats. I've done my share. I don't want to talk about that.

I haven't met one single person, man-woman-child, who isn't affected. Even people who haven't gotten the virus yet are affected in more ways than you can imagine. Civilization? What civilization? You know when it says in Revelations in the Bible that the world will be visited by fire? Well, it's fire all right, the fire of the mind. The Four Horsemen are named Madness, Murder, Mayhem, and March of Death.

We've been called Zoms for years. I hate that! Don't call me a zombie! I'm not dead and I'm not stupid. Well, maybe I'm brainless when I get violently angry, but unless I'm in that kind of mindset, I'm not stupid, don't think I am.

Here's what it's like: I open my eyes and wake up in a new day. Immediately I think stuff like, Why am I even alive? I ought to kill myself and get it over with. Those first thoughts start me down the slippery path to such anger that I want to kill something. I just can't control it. Some freak in some laboratory did this to us. Did this to ME. If any of us could find that son of a bitch we'd skin him alive before roasting him over open flame. I'd eat him myself and lick my chops afterward.

I’ve lost control of myself, of who I once was. I wasn't born a monster. I wasn't raised to go into murderous rages. I never even took up a BB gun and shot a bird when I was a kid, much less ever wanted to hurt living things. Now I want to take people out. It's all I think about: Kill everyone.

I'm getting hold of a rifle. I'll find one somewhere. And I'm going to use it. Because, let me tell you this, we're all mad as hatters. We're all monsters. Better if they'd just killed us all than let us kill one another like this.

I've lived ten years through this horror, done my fair share of murder, and it's getting worse. Now all I want to do is take people down, all the way down, bury them in their own shit and blood.

But this morning, with grit in my eyes, and stink in my mouth, and dirt in my hair from the ditch, all I want to do is find the bastard who put me there and take him out of his misery. I want to make him pay.

It's come down to this. That's what I'm telling you about in this notebook. All we want to do is kill. It's my mission statement, make of it what you will.

#

Baya, The Girl

April 2110

NO ONE believed we could survive for eight years. The first inhabitants of this underground cylindrical city lasted two. By then they had reverted to their baser selves and murdered one another. It took us a month to carry out their bodies. I see that happening again. Soon. We lasted a long time and we thought we could go on forever in peace, but then it all changed. So I'm going out. No one under thirty has been out of here since we came.

My name is Baya Servanich. I'm nineteen years old, female, and under assault constantly here in our city. It's time for me to leave.

In the year 2100, the plague began. If anyone ever wrote of this, they published treatises on it in scientific journals. Once the journals died, along with the electronic presses, and people stopped reading and writing, no one wrote personal accounts. Most survivors were too busy killing or surviving to write anything. I decided someone should. Just in case one day a Reader comes along.

The plague swept worldwide in a matter of months. We call the afflicted Zoms because they seem like the fictional creations, zombies. But they are no where near such a thing. They're human all right. And alive. It’s my opinion that makes them so deadly. Just like the rest of us they live out a lifetime, age, reproduce (their offspring aren't born infected), and die from natural death, accident, or disease. Usually they die killing one another. Half the world has already killed the other half and it goes on. Zoms don't have a need to eat human flesh, though eat it they will when meat runs scarce (same as we all will do—don't kid yourself.)

Why we call them Zoms and why we have hidden ourselves away underground for nearly a decade is that most of the world's population is mad. The world is an asylum. That's what's wrong with them, those outside, the Zoms. They were infected by an escaped gene-spliced virus from a scientific lab—in Maine somewhere we were told—and it drove people mad. I remember as a child learning the virus affects the brain and the person's thinking processes fall so deep down it is as if the  amygdala drives them—the lizard reptilian brain. The amygdaloid region of the brain is a complex structure involved in a wide range of normal behavioral functions and psychiatric conditions. I amend that. The normal and the abnormal. Zoms consult the abnormal portion of their amygdalas. Their limbic brain—the part of the brain that feels empathy—has lost control. The mad ones are filled with rage. The violent part of their humanity is excited the way electrons dance around the nucleus of an atom and their adrenaline is always at flash point. They are as murderous as threatened vipers. They can't think beyond the rage that swells into the frontal lobe. It doesn't matter if they were peaceful people before the infection. It doesn't matter if they're educated and knowledgeable, if they drove a fine car and lived in a fine house or if they were trapped in a ghetto. The lizard brain wins.

We know man can come to that condition on his own. We used to call them psychopaths. Some of that same behavior, without the infection, is running rampant in our city below ground.

What the Zoms become, however, is totally without remorse or conscience. Imagine your worst serial killer of the twenty-first century, multiply him by one thousand, and you will know what you meet when you confront a Zom. He doesn't care. He wants you dead. His fury goes unabated no matter how much destruction he creates.

They say we could have accidentally let out the small pox virus and it wouldn't have done the damage this Zom infection has done.

All I know is my chances on the outside are now better than they are in here.

It's dark in this city. There is a dome over our cylinder in the ground going down thirty floors, and a mirror that hydraulically shifts throughout the day's cycle to catch the sun's rays and aim the life-giving light down to us, but once past the first few floors, darkness is master. Batteries for our torches, and ways to make those batteries, are running low. So even as I write this, darkness grows all around us. Already the bottom five floors of people have moved up to join those above them—when they aren't killed first trying to do so.

Murder, we've been taught, is the highest crime. Taking a life unless it is to preserve your own (as from a Mad Zom) is against all law of man and nature. Yet, it's growing in our 1750 number of City Dwellers. There were thirty-five of us assigned to each floor for thirty floors. When a person reaches thirty years of age, he is put outside. If he or she has children, those have a choice to go with him or to stay. Otherwise we would have over-populated ourselves years ago.

I am only nineteen. Though not of age, I'm escaping, I'm going and I'm going alone. I trust no one but myself. Wouldn't you?

#

WHEN THE murders began, there were no authorities or court that could stop it. We all agree it has to do with being buried so many years down here in the darkness. It's a claustrophobic rage edged on by a lack of privacy and a future that is doomed. There is no privacy even when we use the toilets. All the levels of the thirty floors are made of steel grates so that if you look up or down, you can see others and what they're doing. Families push off to themselves against the walls trying to create some kind of unit, but still they have no privacy. Eating, sleeping, fornicating, and the passing of bodily wastes are done in the open.

When you come into this environment at a young age (I was ten) you hit a wall about what living free means. They're watching me pee, you think! They're watching my parents screw! They see us eat our food, change our clothes, bathe our bodies!

Not everyone watched. For some years people turned aside their gazes from others engaged in what should be private. But some watched relentlessly from the beginning. Finally, this voyeurism spread and led to sexual assaults and those assaults led to murder. Finally most everyone was angry at someone else or someone's family and the wars began.

My parents were killed when I was twelve. They were nearing thirty and would have soon been put outside and left me behind or taken me with them—they promised to take me and not leave me orphaned. None of us dreamed we wouldn't make it.

They died over sunlight, of all things. Another family accused my father of getting the best spot on Level 8 and hogging the light. That's stupid, isn't it? My father tried to explain the mirrors and the hydraulic system and how no one place got more light than another, except that of course the further down the cylinder you lived, the less light reached you.

The accusers, two younger men with new wives with frightened hearts who said the dark keep inching too close, came in the night and stabbed my parents to death. I slept beneath their bed on a pallet right on the grate, so the attackers let me live, seeing I was just a kid. Afterward I was not adopted or protected, not taken in by a family or looked upon with any favor. I had to make it on my own. That's what always happens to kids when they're orphaned—and there are more of us now than ever before.

I thought I could do it—survive on my own—and did for seven years. I tried to make myself invisible. That's hard to do in such an enclosed city in the earth. I wore loose clothes; I bathed underneath my shirts and pants with a washcloth dipped in a pan of cold water. I slept lightly, waking at any strange or odd sound. I did my duties taking my turn working in the top level garden and keeping my space clean. I talked to no one.

I almost made myself invisible...almost. But Danny saw me one day in late March as I climbed the stairs to the garden. Hey, baby, he said, his smile ugly because it wasn't friendly; it was leering.

I ignored him and tread on, hoping he wasn't seriously intent on doing me any harm. He let me by, but reached out first and squeezed my left breast. I hurried up the stairway.

The next day Danny had Zeke with him. Both of them eyed me, sticking out their tongues like lewd snakes to waggle them at me. Ignore them, I thought, they're just teenagers. They don't have the guts to try to take me.

The following day Danny and Zeke had a boy called Enronnie with them. This time they blocked my path up the stairway. Move, I said, sounding forceful and resilient.

Give us a kiss, Baya, just one little kiss a piece and we let you pass.

Without warning I kicked Zeke in the crotch. He stood between Danny and Enronnie. He screamed and fell over toward Danny, knocking him aside, and Enronnie leaped to aid them both. I squirmed past the trio and raced up the stairs. I knew they'd be waiting when my shift was over. This time I'd need something in my hands. Girls who fought back were really in for it, but I wasn't letting anyone take me easy.

They saw me descending that afternoon when the sun began to kiss the horizon. I kept the iron rod close to my leg hoping they wouldn't notice it.

Zeke said, Baya, I'm gonna give you the beating of your life. You fucking hurt me.

The other two boys nodded and grinned. Yeah, Baya, we're gonna hurt you, Danny said.

I drew near, taking the stairs slowly because I heard some of the other garden workers coming down behind me. I needed witnesses so I wouldn't be accused of reckless violence.

When I got within ten steps of the boys, I looked back. I saw a woman and two men just steps behind. When I turned to the boys again, I raised the rod, leaped the last few steps and struck Zeke on the top of his head. He yelped in pain. Danny reached for the rod and I rounded on him, swinging. I hit him in the jaw and he fell back. Enronnie was