Treasure of the Dead

Chapter 39

A wave of bitter self-loathing coursed through Fabi as she unburdened herself to her captor. She hated herself for what she was doing. She’d been trained to resist interrogation, but now she was broken. Damn! She’d believed herself tougher than this. Apparently, she wasn’t.

“And so Maddock, Bones and Willis went diving off Alto Velo Island to look for the wreck, and I haven’t heard from them since.” Fabi looked up from the cot at Avila, tears streaming down her face, sobbing and gasping for breath. “That’s everything.”

It had been an emotional recounting of events. The facts, stories and memories poured out of her. Once she began telling the truth, she held nothing back, as if a floodgates had opened and she could do nothing to close them. Avila looked down on her with a wide smile.

“Shhh, there now, Fabi. You’ve done well! Calm down, now. Take it easy…” Fabi closed her eyes for a moment, to block out the reality of this weird place, to try to calm down a bit… but when she opened them again Avila was wearing a respirator mask and placing an inhaler like the kind used by those with asthma into her mouth. With her wrists cuffed to the cot rails, she couldn’t fend him off, and he squeezed two puffs of whatever the inhaler contained into her mouth before she could move her head away from it.

“There you are. That should calm you down.” Avila retreated from the cot and handed his lab technician the inhaler and his mask, both of which the tech handled with gloved hands and the abundance of caution reserved for material that represented a biohazard.

Perhaps it was the contents of the inhaler, perhaps not, but Fabi did, in fact, feel calmer. Self-loathing burned through the fear, and left only anger. She looked Avila in the eyes and somehow knew that he would not let her go. She had to find a way. Perhaps if she could get him to lower his guard.

“I don’t understand how you even made this zombie formula, or whatever it is.”

Avila grinned. “The ancestor I mentioned, Cristobal, had an encounter with zombii. From an early age I was fascinated with the story, and researching the phenomenon became one of mypassions.” He settled into a chair, a faraway look in his eyes.

He’s letting his guard down, Fabi thought. If I could only get loose. “What did you find?” she asked, trying to keep him distracted.

“I knew the scientist in you would come out eventually. I discovered that most of the reports were garbage: religious frenzy, mental illness, mind-altering drugs, brain damage, even a few cases of someone being buried alive. But in some rare cases I discovered people whose brain functioning had actually changed. The centers that control inhibitions and original thought were “turned off” for lack of a better term. I knew that this phenomenon existed in nature, with certain ants, for example, so I investigated it from a biological perspective. Those who knew the true secrets were reluctant to divulge them, but I… persuaded them. I discovered certain plants that, when used in combination, elicited this effect.”

“What’s to stop others from simply duplicating your work?”

“Fair question. We constantly work to collect all the plant material on the island and then used herbicide to eradicate anything we might miss. It is my intention to control the entire supply of the needed material.”

Fabi was running out of questions and was no closer to freeing herself. “So, you grow it here?”

“Grow, synthesize, experiment. In fact, you’re helping with one of our experiments right now.”

Fabi’s heart raced. The aerosol! “What do you mean? What did you give me?”

Avila’s grin did little to assuage Fabi’s concern, his words even less so. “We're experimenting with transferring the productivity therapy via aerosol, and it so happens that you're the first test case.”