Golgotha: Prequel to S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND series (S. W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND companion title Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  “Thank you”

  Golgotha

  (prequel to S.W. Tanpepper’s GAMELAND series)

  About GAMELAND

  Free sneak peek to GAMELAND

  Copyright page

  Other titles by this author

  Acknowledgements and Author Bio

  ***Special FREE offer***

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Golgotha

  a short story

  by S.W. Tanpepper

  Golgotha

  by S.W. Tanpepper

  Copyright © 2012 by Saul Tanpepper

  All rights reserved.

  1st Published December 15, 2011 by Brinestone Press, San Martin, CA 95046

  Cover design Brinestone Press Copyright © 2012

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://www.brinestonepress.com

  Tanpepper, Saul (2011-03-26). Golgotha

  Brinestone Press Kindle Edition

  Golgotha is a selected title from Shorting the Undead & Other Horrors: A Menagerie of Macabre Mini-fiction

  (Dec 2011)

  For more information about this and other titles by this author:

  http://www.tanpepperwrites.com

  Dear Reader,

  A heartfelt thanks for purchasing Golgotha. The story is both a standalone horror tale as well as the inspiration for the world of GAMELAND, a new action-thriller series which picks up fifteen years later. Both Golgotha and the series can be enjoyed without reading the other. I hope you will enjoy reading Golgotha and are intrigued enough to consider trying out the series. To encourage you, I’ll be thrilled to send you the first episode of GAMELAND for free. Just follow this link. All I ask is for your feedback on Golgotha. Your input is invaluable. Reviews are how other readers decide whether or not to purchase a book; they also assist authors in identifying weak or strong areas in their writing.

  But first, sit back and enjoy this tale of science and politics gone horribly wrong.

  My best to you,

  Saul

  San Francisco, California

  [BACK TO CONTENTS]

  Golgotha

  He was a religious man, so the first time Special Advisor to the President of the United States Richard Daniels heard the recording, a single word rose up in his mind. The second time, he became violently ill and also afraid. The third and final time, those emotions were still there, but by then he’d managed to control them. He was a religious man, and he wished he wasn’t, for how could any god, much less the God of his religion, forgive what he had done?

  “My name is Gene Halliwell. Eugene Douglas Halliwell. I am a professor of immunology at Royce State College and…”

  [rustling sounds]

  “Okay, I wasn’t sure this was recording, but it is. Royce State College…immunology… Okay. Okay. I should’ve made better notes.

  “I am making this recording on the twenty-third of December. It’s a Saturday. The current time is…six-seventeen in the evening. I am in my laboratory. I am alone.”

  […]

  “The children are… They’re at their mother’s house for the holiday. They won’t miss my absence. Neither they nor my ex-wife Sophia, my students and colleagues here at the college, know a thing of what I am about to attempt; they are all innocent, and I do not wish them to be implicated in this in any way. I am not naïve enough to think they will escape scrutiny; I know that when this all comes down, there will interrogations and they will be treated harshly. There will be the inevitable arrests, charges, slander—maybe even torture—and for all that I have the deepest regrets. But there is no other option left to me. Only I am guilty for what happens here. If you hear this, you must believe me: they are all innocent.

  “I just wanted to make that clear.

  “While it’s one thing to claim all the responsibility, it’s quite another to claim all the credit. For that, I can say there were others without whose efforts I would not have made it this far. That is how science progresses. But they, too, are innocent. At least in their intent. I wish I could tell them thanks for their contributions, but, alas, I cannot for fear of the retribution that would find them. May they remain satisfied in their anonymity and their freedom.

  “The doors are locked. I have programmed for them to remain locked the duration of this holiday break to prevent any intrusion. Any interruption—were it to occur prior to the second injection taking effect—would be catastrophic. I have left instructions for the janitorial and security staff not to enter; they think the laboratory will be undergoing a chemical fumigation. Let them continue to think that. They must not attempt to enter.

  “Now, I hope I have considered all the possible steps to ensure this experiment proceeds to completion.”

  […]

  “Mail. Delivered today. The last of it.”

  [laughs; sound of paper shredding]

  “Alumni association dues…credit card application. Where I am going, I won’t need credit. And the only association I will be alum to will be the school of the dead.”

  [sighs]

  “By the time I am discovered—hopefully not before January second, ten days hence—this recording and all that is about to transpire will have become public knowledge. I have programmed my computer to transfer everything onto the internet at midnight of the thirty-first of December. Let them enjoy the holidays. It will be their last days of innocence. When the world wakes in the New Year, it will be a horrific one they will see. Then everyone will know what I know already, and there will finally be an end to the madness. Too long I have persevered alone in this endeavor, unable to continue using the standard mechanisms. Now, it is only through this final desperate attempt that I will be able to succeed. The results will belong to the world.

  “Desperate? Yes, some will say I was crazy, others that I suffered immense strain and depression following the divorce. I am neither crazy nor depressed. And the strain… Well, it has nothing to do with Sophia. In fact, I am glad that she and the children are safely away from me now. No, I am not crazy or depressed. I am… For the first time, I can see clearly, rationally.

  “My visions terrify me.

  “I am not paranoid either.

  “Inevitably, the question will be asked: Why? Why am I doing this? To which I would answer, What else can a dead man do? I have angered the wrong people, and they’re not the kind of people who tolerate being angered. There will be no turning of the proverbial cheek. They are coming for me. Maybe not today or tomorrow. Maybe not next week or next month. But soon enough. They have been watching me, and when th
ey decide I am too big a threat to them, they will come. Then I will disappear, just like Geena Bloch disappeared. And Marion Lemas. And Stephen Archdeacon. And possibly others I don’t know about, striving in secrecy. In fact, I am certain there must be others. It is unlikely that I am alone in knowing the truth.

  “I cannot be the only sane one.

  “To put it bluntly: I am doing this because I am already a dead man. Either way, these will be my last words, so I will go out on my own terms, not theirs. You see, if this works—and I have performed enough tests of sufficient scientific rigor to convince me that it will work—then I will die, and I will welcome such death because of its promise to provide life for all.

  “Of course, there is always the possibility that—

  “No. I cannot contemplate any other possibility. It is too small to be meaningful. There will be only one outcome. There must be only that one outcome. But nothing is absolute, which is why I have implemented the appropriate safeguards. In the event something does go wrong—instrument failure, electrical failure, act of God—I have put into place the necessary mechanisms. The device above me, for example, will ensure I do not leave here in any other state but dead.

  “On the slim chance, however, that I should fail—that my work here fails—then the world will have to find its salvation without me.”

  […]

  “I don’t like to think about it. I won’t think about it. This will work. That is the only acceptable outcome. I have prepared too carefully, too completely, to allow failure.

  “Ah, the equipment is finally warmed up and ready. I’m not, but would I ever be? Probably not. Still, the world cannot wait to be saved.”

  […]

  “A little background, as I…prepare…the…restraints.”

  [The recording captures several seconds of rustling sounds, followed by a series of unidentifiable clicks. Richard Daniels, chief scientific advisor to the President will later testify that these noises are most likely to be the arm and leg cuffs being buckled into place, all but the one arm that Professor Halliwell will need free to operate the injection device.]

  “Okay. Background. I suppose that’s necessary. Everyone needs context. But where to start? What to include? There’s so much. Time forces me to be pithy, to abandon self-indulgent thoughts and nostalgia. Once the process begins, I must focus. I’m not even sure how quickly the treatment will impair my ability to speak or even to conceive of coherent speech. I should have written this down. What a fool I am to have spent all my time preparing myself and the experiment but fail to prepare the world, for which I am sacrificing myself.

  “Wretched hubris.”

  [laughter]

  “The Nobel. That’s as good a place to begin as any.

  “Four years ago, I shared the prize for medicine with two other scientists: Geena Bloch, a neuropathologist at the University of Heidelberg—now missing, presumed dead—and geneticist Richard Daniels, who was at that time a dean at Harvard College. We all know where he ended up. The work, some may recall, had to do with delineating the exact molecular pathway for accelerated cellular senescence and apoptosis—cell aging and death, in other words—that follow from tissue insult, and proving that the process could be not only be arrested indefinitely, but also partially reversed. What is remarkable is that preliminary experiments with cells isolated from tissues that had already begun to putrefy could be revived! Not all, but enough to simulate basal tissue functions in some cases. We had hoped we could completely reverse the process of tissue death. We believed we could, anyway.

  “We should have never tried.”

  [Several seconds of indistinct noises, including a curious crackling sound which Daniels will explain is when Professor Halliwell removed the frozen vial of virus from liquid nitrogen storage and set it into the injection device to thaw prior to mixing and infection.]

  “Twenty minutes to thaw. Then…

  “Anyway, what was significant about that prize-winning work was that the results we obtained and the models we developed opened up whole new universes of possibility for disease prevention and control, not to mention the repair and reversal of systemic damage to whole tissues and organs as a result of various kinds of somatic insult, including irradiation, poisoning, disease and physical trauma. Bloch proved she could reconnect a completely severed spinal cord and even went so far as to show how a semblance of brain activity could be restored after considerable mechanical or organic shock. I say a semblance, because even though neural activity in the test subjects—monkeys and rats, primarily, though the results were also confirmed in a variety of other organisms such as dog, rabbit and guinea pig—the neural activity spiked and remained measurably higher than the untreated control subjects. What was remarkable was the return of basal motor function: enervation of musculature was quite good despite loss of pliancy due to early stages of atrophy! In other words, animal subjects that had recently died or been dead for up to several hours, could be partially revived.

  “Other metrics, however, remained largely unimproved, which was quite disappointing. For example, higher, non-primal, brain activity—self-awareness and cognitive response being two—did not show any activity at all. The subjects, as it were, functioned more or less instinctively, or reflexively, rather than consciously. They were reanimated, but not fully alive.

  “As you can imagine, there was considerable outcry over these results from the religious right, which prevented her from exploring these subjects more deeply.

  “My own contribution focused on blocking the body’s innate systems for self-destruction by targeting antagonists to key components in the apoptotic pathway. Apoptosis, the pathway for cell death. What I looked for was a way to block our own innate molecular capacity for inactivating and removing diseased cells. I had hoped that we might block initial tissue destruction and provide the body sufficient time to regenerate whole cells rather than discard them. That was the thought, and we proved it in a series of spectacular experiments, although, in retrospect, they really only established our ideas in a rudimentary way.

  “Like Doctor Bloch, we quickly observed effects that were quite…disturbing. Once the molecular pathway for cell death was inhibited, we could not reinitiate it; in other words, tissues remained frozen, if you will, in a permanent semi-decayed state, neither decomposing further, nor fully recovering into a productive and reproductive configuration. Even externally applied pathogens had no effect on these tissues. They couldn’t be infected or enzymatically destroyed! The tissue could, naturally, be further damaged through mechanical means, as well as acids and such, but other destructive agents, such as radiation and poisons, had no effect whatsoever. Furthermore, it appeared the suspended tissue lost nearly all of their nutritional requirements.

  “We have yet to understand this last observation. One colleague even joked that we’d somehow created a perpetual motion machine by accident. But, of course, that’s a physical impossibility.

  “We were, of course, very perplexed by these findings. Nevertheless, we also found them very disturbing. Can you imagine such a thing? Say you had an amputated arm reattached. With the body’s usual mechanisms for repair and replacement blocked, it would never heal itself after injury. Perhaps, given time, the body might find a way to kick start those pathways on its own; alternatively, what if the effect spread to the rest of the body? We didn’t know the answer to these questions, and we weren’t about to try and figure them out, either.

  We shut down the project, retracted our results from our publications. We hoped it would discourage others from attempting to replicate our work. It did not stop Richard Daniels.

  “Daniels not only tried, but he also stole methods and techniques from us that we did not publish. What he has done since then is to turn our body of work into what can only be described as an abomination against science and human advancement.”

  [Unidentified noises. Daniels, ignoring Halliwell’s accusations, will explain: “Professor Halliwell is preparing the excipient�
�the solution that will be mixed with the virus to stabilize it for injection.”]

  “I will not dwell on his theft any further. What would be the use? It is all done and cannot be undone. Besides, the public is against me, me and others like Bloch and Lamas who are now gone. The public knows only what it is told. They are shortsighted. To them, Daniels is a hero. He has— I shouldn’t say he when it is really they: him and the war machine at the Pentagon—they have taken our collective battle fatigue and twisted it to their purpose. A dozen years sending our families to fight. Multiple wars. Another half dozen years besides in scattered conflicts around the globe. Thousands of our own dead. Soldiers killed in places most of us have never seen and can only imagine from pictures and nightmares. We could never truly imagine the horror they experience. So, yes, we were tired. But what we should have done was to put a stop to the fighting altogether. Not to find a better way to fight and kill and avoid being killed.

  “Our own shortsightedness is what blinded us to become what we have become, blinded us to what we are and what we are willing to do, what we are willing to sacrifice. All to secure the illusion of freedom and the perception of security. Yes, Daniels was a hero for developing a means to reducing casualties, fewer killed in action, but at what expense?

  “We have sacrificed all to gain what we already had.

  “And I was participant.”

  […]

  “We have become gods. After all these years of pretending, of striving for godliness, now we can finally say we are gods. But I fear the day is coming when the wrath of the true gods will be visited upon us for being so arrogant. Soon. I am sure of it.