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Footsteps sounded through a concrete hallway, led lights flickering above. Few sounds were heard beyond the stone, but those that were spoke of anything but friendliness. The man striding, Dr. Dostoyevsky, or, Fyodor, was on his way to meet his new patient – no, his new guinea pig. His white coat billowed behind him and his shoulder-length hair that he refused to tie up even for safety's sake framed his face. In his hands he held a clipboard and pen. In his coat pockets were a gun.
Passing through various colourless doors, he picked one at the very end of the hallway, the one that led to his laboratory. The door creaked quietly, and opened up to reveal a large room. Its ceiling was high even for the underground facility they were in, with fans above quietly whirring to circulate the muddled oxygen they had. Around the room were stationed many guards, a good portion of them hauling a person by chains into the large class caging squat in the center of the room, a cylinder of glass perfectly clear save for the metal door jammed in its side, which some guards bolted open, pushing their prisoner inside. With so many people surrounding the prisoner, Fyodor would have to wait a few to get anything more than a glance at them.
The prisoner was forced roughly onto the chair in the middle of the glass encasing, the metal fasteners being efficiently bound around their hands, legs, neck, feet even being bound to the floor — Fyodor interrupted the guards.
"That is unnecessary. Let our guest sit comfortably," Fyodor instructed the guards. "We don't want to give them a bad first impression, do we?"
Some of the guards stopped to look uneasily at him through the protection they had on their face. Still, as his subordinates they wouldn't dare oppose him. They'd heard rumours about the man and had seen more than enough of what he'd done with their own eyes. One of the guards warned the prisoner not to try anything funny, and the multiple guards that were pointing a gun at the prisoner were now even more alert with terror. Still, the prisoner was unbound, and the guards scuffled out of there, leaving and locking the door behind them in a matter of seconds, covering each other's blind spots and not leaving a single opening for the prisoner to attack. Knights of efficiency. Fyodor would never accept anything less than the very best of guards, after all.
Once the guards stopped moving and what should've remained was silence, Fyodor was brought very much awake to a fact that silence was not what he heard. Humming- the prisoner was humming. With a stretched grin on his face accompanying the merry tune. Fyodor looked at the prisoner with an expression mixed between disdain and mirth. The prisoner was dirty and dishevelled, with various injuries scattered throughout his body. He clearly hadn't let the Runners catch him without a fight. However, it was a well known fact that nobody could survive on the surface. Not anymore.
The prisoner — a man in his twenties — had dishevelled silver-white hair cut short save for a chunk that cascaded down his back. His left eye sported a bleeding slashed scar, recently received. The guards had already forced him into the prisoner, or, more accurately, experiment attire, a plain and uncomfortable white and baggy jumpsuit. It was made bright to easily identify blood, and indeed it was easy to identify the filth and blood inflicted on him by both the Runners and the guards. Still, despite the condescending looks shot his way from every which direction, he began to swing his legs around in tune to the obscure song he was humming.
Fyodor remained positioned where he was, clipboard clutched. "Pray tell, what are you humming?"
The man stopped humming to inspect Fyodor as much as he could while remaining on the chair, leaving forward to the point he almost fell off. He spoke, ignoring Fyodor's question. "I gotta say, mister, thanks for telling those big tough guys to get those chains off me. As I always say, there's no such thing as too kinky, and bondage is a piece of cake," He flashed Fyodor the 'ok' sign, "But those things were really starting to hurt!"
Fyodor stared dumbly for a moment. The man smiled.
Fyodor looked at the document about the prisoner on his clipboard. He'd already memorized the information on it, but he'd ask the man in front of him for it anyways, to test his compliance (though this didn't really matter. Fyodor would mold him into whatever he desired, in the end. As he always did.)
Fyodor looked the man in the eye as he asked "What's your name?"
"My name? Why, Nikolai Gogol!"
"Are you male or female?"
"Wha- I'm a man! Male! I don't look like a girl!" He exclaimed with a hand to his chest, looking all over himself frantically. Fyodor heard him vaguely mutter "Wait, do I?" Under his breath.
"How old are you?"
"Gee, mister, isn't it rude to ask for people's ages?" Nikolai whined.
“I’m the one asking questions.”
"Huff. Then, let's have a quiz! How old do I appear to be?"
The doctor narrowed his eyes, gesturing to the guards. They stepped closer to the imprisonment, shuffling their guns as a reminder to the prisoner that he was in no position to be playing games.
“Aw geez,” Nikolai complained, sitting with legs spread apart and both his arms supporting him in between them, trying to swing back and forth on a chair bolted to the floor, “I’m 26.”
The questions continued almost ceaselessly.
“Your date of birth?”
“Where were you born?”
“Who were your parents?”
“Where did you live previous to getting infected?”
Nikolai seemed to become more friendly with each passing question, sporting a laid-back attitude despite the fact that one could tell from his eyes he knew every single bit of what was going to happen to him, not only referring to the infection he attained recently. Fyodor slowly mixed in questions he didn’t have the answer to along with the ones he did, pretending to note down what he knew and actually noting down what he didn’t know before. None of this information was truly important, just a small background check on his guinea pig for the next month and a half. After that, no background would matter, he’d just blend into the crowd of infected.
Suddenly, a loud alarm started blaring. Nikolai jumped in his seat a little bit, but Fyodor and the rest of the guards stood still, already accustomed to its daily alert. It was a reminder to each worker in the scientific facility they were in (with exceptions to the guards) to return to their chambers. Essentially, it was a curfew. Checks on workers, especially doctors such as Fyodor, were made daily to ensure none had gone missing or were injured. Fyodor lowered his clipboard and turned around, making to leave, when he heard that cheery voice call behind him through the blaring.
“Hey, mister, what’s your name? I don’t wanna have to call you mister all the time.”
Fyodor half-turned back around, shooting an uninterested look at the prisoner. “Call me Dr.”
“Just Doctorrrrrr?”
“Indeed.”
“No, that won’t do! I can’t call my new friend doctor! That’s not right!”
Fyodor fully turned around. He strode forward fluently, stopping to stand just in front of the glass cylinder. If a reaction was what Nikolai had wanted from him, a reaction was what he was going to get. “Do not call me your friend. You are simply an experiment, nothing more than a body to investigate. Do not regard me as an equal. We are not friends and will never be,” The doctor lectured, meeting the other’s eyes with a ruthless gaze that showed not a single flicker of compassion.
Nikolai slowly stood, using his arms to push his injured body up, walking slowly to the edge of the class. All the guards rushed forward to point their guns at his head, yelling obscenities at him, but he ignored them as if no matter what they tried to do, he was safe and sound in his little circle of isolation, the only openings a door and small circles in its high ceiling for oxygen. His eyes were shaped like crescent moons as he maintained eye contact with Fyodor while stalking forward, stopping just in front of him. He raised an injured hand to the glass, leaning forward with a tilted head to tease in a low voice, “Not with that attitude.”
With a last cold look, Fyodor whipped around and left back through the door, leaving Nikolai to giggle softly as he watched his retreating back. He lowered his hand and lazily returned to his seat, raising both his arms to the guards in a display that showed he meant no harm, even as the guards overturned their previous command and strapped him down completely to the chair again.
The only testament to that moment was a stain on the glass cylinder, a handprint born of filth and blood.
***
It started five years ago. The infection that threw the world into chaos and disorder, the infection that sickened and exterminated over half of the human population. The disease that provided a mere month and a half for humans to try every possible cure on themselves before they turned into a mindless monster — a zombie, if you will. A sickness that rotted and melted away the brain of its victim within a span of 42-48 days, leaving its victim in a state of insanity from the intolerable pain, turning them into violent beasts that thought only of violence and salvation. They killed anything around them, whether animals, or, in cases of more urban areas, humans, consuming their flesh on the spot to intake their nutrients and calories, which slightly dulled the pain of having their brain destroyed slowly. After the half-month was finished, their brains were near-completely done for, though the remains were observed to continue running the rest of the body’s functions, turning the previous human into a monster unable to even think for itself, moving only to kill and feed. Infections were spread through fluids. If any infected blood came into contact with your own, you were infected. If you drank from the same water bottle as an unaware infected and got a bit of their saliva on your lips, you were infected. If an infected person even so much as coughed or sneezed on growing fruits or vegetables and you bit into it without remembering to thoroughly disinfect it first, you were infected.
It might’ve sounded easy to escape if all you had to do was hide from slow moving people and remember basic hygiene if not for the fact that when those infected spotted any moving flesh, their adrenaline spiked, and they became some of the most statistically-impressive creatures known to men, and that when they bit into other humans, their saliva transmitted into that human’s blood, and if under around 40% of their body parts were consumed, they became infected as well. That’s to disregard all the animals that could carry the disease, and the fact that it could survive for up to two weeks in average water temperatures.
It was extremely difficult to have survived through this hell on Earth for five years.
It was impossible to undo the damage caused to the brain once the process was complete, so the only solution was to kill all those infected. That, and to find a treatment to halt the destruction of the brain while the process hadn’t yet finished, so as to save the human from insanity. That had been Fyodor's job for the past two something years, and why he worked “with” those in the process of, essentially, losing their minds. This time, while he was walking through the concrete corridor, he sped up his pace, because he heard a commotion coming from his lab. He opened the door with one hand, the other poised in his coat pocket, just above his gun. The door’s usual creak was unheard of underneath the yelling from all the guards.
Inside the glass cylinder, Nikolai held a gun to the unprotected head of a guard, his head’s protective gear at the floor in front of Nikolai’s feet. The other guards were yelling threats at him with guns all pointing to his head, all too scared to do anything though, for fear of losing their colleague. A young man in his early twenties, clearly a new recruit, judging from the absolute fear and confusion in his face, not yet having learned to expect especially the unexpected when it came to prisoners. Fyodor did not stop walking, pausing only when he was beside the guards standing in front of the door to the cylinder, looking directly at Nikolai’s face.
“Nikolai,” He spoke, his measured voice stopping that of all the others’, “Put the gun down.”
“Quizzzz time! If those men were to try and shoot me, what would happen first? Would I die, or this guy here?” He asked, bouncing around the man that was placed in his chokehold.
“What do you want in return for his life? I’m assuming you know we cannot just grant you freedom.”
“Oh!” Nikolai perked up. “Did I forget to saywhatiwanted…” His voice shrunk to a murmur — he was talking to himself. “I had forgotten! That’s so embarrassing!”
He cleared his throat.
“Why, dear sir, what I wanted all along was your name!”
Various exclamations were heard from guards all around Fyodor.
“Yes, that’s right,” Nikolai clarified, “I simply want your name. As I said yesterday, we can’t be friends if I don't even know what to call you!"
Fyodor melded his gaze into neutrality. “My name is Fyodor Dostoyevsky."
“Fyodor Dostoyevsky…” Nikolai spoke as if he was testing out the feeling of that name on his tongue. “Alright! Nice to meet you, Dos-kun!”
“Free my guard,” The doctor responded emotionlessly.
“Your wish is my command!”
With that, he threw the guard and the gun back outside the cylinder, both landing on the ground. Before the rest of the guards could shoot Nikolai, Fyodor placed himself in between them. After all, there was no use in losing a valuable patient so quickly after he had attained him. He held up a hand to the men behind him.
“It won’t be necessary to shoot Nikolai. Retreat.”
“But, Dr. Dostoyev-“ A guard protested.
Fyodor interrupted him sharply, turning to face him with a slight glare.
“Need I repeat myself?”
“O-of course not.”
The guards backed away, all being instructed to leave after locking up, only Fyodor and Nikolai left in the lab. Both wore smiles on their faces as they measured up one another, one wearing a grin of confident glee, the other wearing a smile of mirth found amongst rolling hills of tediousness.
From that day on, no guards were allowed to enter the room without further instruction.
***
There were no more commotions after that day. Nikolai was a character eccentric as one could find both underground and above, but never once did he try to attack Fyodor as he transported Nikolai from place to place with nothing but chains and a handgun in his pocket. Never once did he attack the frail, pale man that gave him his daily meals hand-to-hand, never like he did with the last guard, or when defending himself futilely against the Runners. Never once did the smile slip from his face, even when he ate his grey, bland food under the studying gaze of the doctor, even through the tedious blood extractions he went through daily, even when he was being transported by chains to a surgical table to have his head cut open and his brain’s destruction observed firsthand.
Still, no actions went unpunished, and Nikolai’s stunt from the other day was not forgotten. He was picked by the other doctors to be the subject of their new experiment. A disguised torture.
Fyodor observed calmly, emotionlessly, through the ear-numbing screeches reverberating through the glass screen between him and his guinea pig, noting down his observations on his clipboard along with the others. It was as if the person on the other side of the glass hadn’t been the subject of his fervent investigations for the past three weeks. Nikolai was sitting bolted to a chair, with a saw splitting him through the middle, his torso being sliced through slowly like a particularly difficult-to-cut cake. An experiment regarding the regeneration of a person who was halfway through the brain’s destructive process. First had been small cuts on his arms, then peeling away layers of skin from his shoulders and back, then amputation of his limbs. As predicted by many of the doctors, because of their presence surrounding the subject, his adrenaline spiked, and the remaining half of his brain still healed his injuries (something which it could not do once fully destroyed) at a semi-rapid pace. As long as they did not fully amputate his limbs, his body would reattach them within various fractions of an hour. He had, though, lost two fingers, both his pinkie fingers. There were various patches on his back where completely torn away skin was still throbbing and slowly, agonizingly slowly (though still faster than the average human) healing. Scars were left on his arms from the cuts left. His right eyeball had been experimented on, slowly cutting away nerves to see how quickly they would reattach themselves to the eyeball, but through an “accidental” jerk of the guard that was inflicting the injuries on the subject for the doctors’ safety, his eyeball was completely severed from his eye socket, leaving him with a single eye. None of the doctors cared much. His vision would be almost completely destroyed by the end of the cycle anyways, as all nerves on the eyeball connected to the brain to transmit sight, and by the end of the cycle almost nothing got through anymore.
And now Nikolai was getting his half cut through slowly, his body re-connecting the spots the saw left behind. At one point, when the saw was halfway through him, it was, to simplify, like a sword stuck through his middle, two solid sides of flesh encompassing it. Fyodor observed until the very end, when the saw finally left his body, though Nikolai’s tears continued with his screeching. Just like that, the doctors started leaving. The experiment was over. They’d gotten the information they wanted.
Fyodor stayed behind for a moment more, only to instruct the guards that were taking Nikolai back this time to leave him in the encasement without chains. Then like the others, he left too, to record his findings in a more permanent place.
A quarter of an hour later, he sought Nikolai. He closed the door to his dull lab behind him, ears picking up on the familiar sound of sobbing. Nikolai was sitting hunched in his chair, white clothes completely smudged in blood where they had been replaced on him (he had been wearing only pants when back in the experimentation room). His shoulders trembled and heaved. Fyodor stood by the glass, looking down on the man – no, he couldn’t even be called a man anymore – thing who was usually so carefree.
It only took a moment for him to realize that what he heard was not crying, but silent laughter.
“What are you laughing at?” He asked, intrigued.
Nikolai quieted down a little, sitting up to look at Fyodor, tear marks on his face overrun by still-flowing tears. Dry blood was splashed all along his chin.
“Isn’t it funny, Dos-kun,” He started, in a mildly trembling voice, telling of the pain he was still going through, “That humans have made me look more like a zombie than zombies have?”
He wasn’t lying. With a missing eye sporting hanging nerves, bloody hands, and all sorts of stains on his clothes, he looked more like an infected than he ever had.
“Nikolai,” Fyodor asked, a question that he had wanted to ask ever since the experiment started floating to his mind, “How have you always remained sane during the duration of your infection?”
The pain he’d just gone through alone was probably less than the pain of having his brain melted away. Combined, he should have gone positively mad. Yet, here he was, still making witty remarks to Fyodor. In his place, any other subject would’ve started pounding at the glass walls, trying to break through to sink their teeth into Fyodor’s flesh.
Nikolai just shrugged, looking off into space for a moment before returning with a sober look on his face. “Hey, wanna know something funny?”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“I got infected on purpose.”
Fyodor’s head perked up in interest.
“Do you like birds? I do. I guess you don’t see many if you live underground. I let one infect me. Wanna know why?”
Fyodor remained quiet, attention focused solely on the speaker in front of him.
“Did you know? A bird that grows up in a cage never realizes it’s trapped. Only I did.” He pointed to his head. “Right here. We’re all trapped in here, a cage in our skull. That’s why I got infected. I thought, if I could destroy my brain – destroy that which keeps me from freedom – and yet continue to live, would I not be free?”
“…”
Fyodor watched as the prisoner who had been walking slowly towards him while speaking collapsed to his knees, body shaking from the pain of walking, having finally given up on moving its legs. His shoulders were deflated, a sad smile on his face. He didn’t expect anybody to understand, it was evident. Still;
“I see,” Fyodor spoke, looking down at the prisoner with an understanding grin. “Rather than embracing the humanity God has given you, you choose to fight him instead, using the infection granted by the Devil.”
The golden eye he was staring into widened, Nikolai’s face resembling that of a child, for a moment, with the slight wonder shown. For him, Fyodor mused, it was likely time had stopped moving.
Of course Nikolai had never gone insane from the pain, he understood, because he had never been sane at all. A one-in-a-hundred-million specimen. And he'd been lucky enough to meet one on his own.
This time, when a hand was pressed to the glass, he pressed his own hand above Nikolai’s to match.
Up above the silently whirring fans of Fyodor’s lab, a rat squeaked and scurried in a vent.
***
One last time, a man strode through a concrete hallway faster than he ever had before. He was just short of breaking out into a speed run. Alas, his body was never made for athletics. The door at the end of the hallway grew closer to his vision even as the led lights above him flickered and flashed red rhythmically, accompanying pools of sound drowning his ears. Upon opening the door, the one he was seeking met his eyes, sitting squat in his chair, staring up at the alarms ringing over and over, a tired alertness to his posture – he’d been asleep until he was woken by the noise. An alarm a thousand times more urgent than the curfews, and quite past the time for curfews, too. The evacuation alarm. Fyodor rushed up to the glass and stared through it at the man past it. Fyodor refused to call him anything but a man anymore. The other spoke first, an uncaring curiosity in his voice. “Dos, what’s all this noise for? I was having a pretty nice dream before it woke me up.”
“What was your dream about?” Fyodor asked, pushing aside his intentions for a moment.
The other grinned mischievously. “I asked first.”
Sounds of screaming started to overcome that of the alarms’.
“This is the evacuation alert. An accident has occurred, and so its workers must leave for another facility, or seek shelter in an underground city.”
“Then why are you still here, dear Dos? Have you come to say a last goodbye?” Nikolai spoke slowly, deliberately, as if he couldn’t hear the crashing and commotion coming from the rooms beside him. “Or are your fun experiments also evacuated?” The chunk of hair he'd made a habit of braiding swooped down over his hunched shoulders.
“The test subjects in our facilities are not regarded as human, thus, they do not receive the full rights humans do. They are left behind, and are killed if they try to escape,” Fyodor stated matter-of-factly.
“Then? Dos-kun knows I love quizzes, but even I can’t figure out why you’re here. Oh, oh!” He exclaimed, a lightbulb going off in his head. “I know! You’re here to kill me!”
Fyodor heard a rough thump against the side of the walls to his left. Enough stalling.
He began unlocking the cylinder door, inserting codes and undoing various bolts. He pulled on the heavy door with the little strength his body provided. Once the door was fully open, he stared Nikolai in the eye, both facing one another in quiet contemplation. Fyodor pulled out his gun and pointed it directly at Nikolai, who wore a stretched grin on his face even with the current reality choking his throat, encompassing his rotting brain with all thoughts that the one friend he had had gone out of his way to kill him, a muzzle pointed straight at his forehead.
He had just opened his mouth when that gun was lowered, thrown to the ground, twisting in a skid to stop by his feet. The doctor stood, now defenceless, staring at the other for a reaction to the thought he had just proposed.
Nikolai cast the gun a glance, looking back at Fyodor. “Was that a wise choice, Dos-kun? In case you’ve forgotten, I’m an infected a week away from having my cycle completed. If you let me out now,” He paused briefly, “Will I really be able to control myself?”
Fyodor stared the other in the eye, his own bang-covered eyes a mask of calculation.
“Make your choice, Nikolai. Will you come with me or not?”
Fyodor acted as if he didn’t know every moment that would proceed to occur, as if he hadn’t planned this out weeks before. Still, when Nikolai just short of flew at him, biting his lips and drawing the metallic taste of blood from a violent crescent kiss, crushing his spine into a heap of bones from a tightly-clenched hug, Fyodor learned that there was a strange pleasure in seeing your plans come to fruition. The least he could do was return the kiss the monster in front of him gave, a monster himself.
Still, as both were about to leave for the corridors, Fyodor injected both he and Nikolai with a clear substance from a vial he had carried in his pocket.
Upon having a predictable question asked of him from Nikolai, about what it was he had just been injected with, Fyodor replied, “An antidote to the infection. You may continue your rebellion at a later time, but now, I need you sober.”
Nikolai looked on, confused. “When did Dos-kun make an antidote? He never tested anything on me!”
“I never needed to. I’ve had an antidote since the infection began, of course.”
He took Nikolai’s hand and began weaving his way through the maze of corridors, perfectly avoiding each source of agony and screaming, leaving all sounds of chaos behind them as he walked and walked. He explained everything to Nikolai as they escaped the underground facility.
He was never a doctor searching for a cure to the infection plaguing their world. In fact, he had always had an antidote to it because he was the one who created and set loose the viral disease in the first place.
To set humans free from sin, he explained, he reduced them to creatures that openly killed one another, so that with an open declaration of their sin, other humans would be shortly prompted to kill the other. An eradication of the human race, so that the pitiful creatures would no longer have to bear the weight of merely existing. Once humans adapted to live underground to avoid the honest sinners, Fyodor adapted alongside them, posing as one of the most crucial workers in their research facilities, though instead of researching for a cure, he only researched on how to speed up the brain’s rotting, waiting for a perfect chance to strike and once again release the disease into the mass of workers, using tiny little rats to do so. When the moment was right, coincidentally, a mere week before Nikolai would completely lose any ability for coherent thought (something he should've lost long ago already), Fyodor struck forth. Forget a month and a half of internal annihilation, it took a mere hour for his new strain of disease to turn its victims. And the chaos among the underground began, mass killings springing on.
Through doing the Devil’s dirty work, Fyodor was blessing others with the salvation of God.
A hatch in the ground was opened, and two men stumbled forth, one breathing fresh air for the first time in nearly two months, the other for the first time in over two years. Above, Nikolai saw the world with a new truth. It was as if his one remaining eye had been pried open with a crowbar, realizations filling his brain. To his left, where the carcass of an animal was laid, was not a tragedy, but an opportunity, for another animal nibbled at the remainder of its meat. To his right, where splatters of blood stained the green below it, not quite washed away by rain yet, was not a sad accident, but nourishment for the tree that grew under it. In front of him, where a once-human body had died a second death from hunger, he came to a conclusion; the Earth had always been better off without humans, and the best they could provide to Mother Earth was their corpses, if only for soil to intake their nutrients.
Fyodor had stood up, spending only a brief moment looking around at the world he had sculpted so meticulously, before lowering a hand at the still-crouched man in front of him. A second invitation, a copy of that he had handed out a mere fraction of an hour ago, stakes raised higher. Nikolai looked up and observed the pale hand outstretched to him, no contemplation needed for his answer.
He took the hand, and accepted the invitation with a smile and a kiss, just as he had before.
Just as he always would.