Most Wanted

Cheborg Russia, 2142…

Dimitri shuffled along as the line of kids moved slowly through the hallway, his little sister’s hand in his. He looked around at all the armed guards pacing back and forth, keeping everyone in line and quiet. The army had come for them in the middle of the night, dragging families from their beds and forcing them into the back of military transport trucks. As the soldiers forced Dimitri into the back of the covered truck, he could see his family was not the only one. The soldiers were rounding up everyone in his neighbourhood, beating anyone that dared to resist.

No one knew what was going on; the soldiers would tell them nothing. They had taken the people out into the countryside to a large prison camp, at which point they separated the children from the parents and had lined them up and marched them two by two into a medical building. The closer they got to the laboratory room, Dimitri could see they were strapping the kids ahead of them down to narrow steel tables. They were giving everyone two injections. The suspicious part was that all the medical personnel and soldiers inside the room were dressed in white head-to-toe hazmat suits. Dimitri got the feeling whatever they were doing to the people in line was not conducive to their good health.

When Dimitri and his sister Masha reached the front of the line, they were ripped from each other’s arms and were forced onto the table and strapped down. Dimitri struggled but was no match for the four men that wrestled him down. He watched with wide eyes as the lab tech next to him took a needle and injected something under the skin of his palm.

“What was that?” Dimitri demanded.

“Just a little something to keep track of you,” the tech said, picking up a scanner and running it over his palm as he watched information pop up on his computer screen. Satisfied with what he saw on the screen, he then picked up a large needle of red fluid. He then pierced the tender flesh of his forearm and pressed the plunger filling Dimitri’s veins with whatever was in the needle.

The injection hurt. “What was that?” Dimitri growled.

“Just a booster shot,” the man told him. “Next,” he called as he unstrapped the leather straps that had been holding Dimitri down. Dimitri shoved the guard off him and lunged at the tray of red fluid-filled needles. He grabbed one and then jammed it into the arm of the man that had injected him and hit the plunger. Seconds passed, and Dimitri was tackled and restrained. Dimitri watched as the soldiers turned on the tech, who threw up his arms and proceeded to beg for his life only to be gunned down on the spot by every soldier in the room.

The soldier’s reaction had confirmed in Dimitri’s mind that whatever all the prisoners had been injected with was dangerous. Whatever it was, it was not a booster shot. Dimitri and Masha were moved along at gunpoint and marched into a large empty room filled with other prisoners of all ages. Dimitri spotted his parents, and he and Masha rushed over, hugging their mother so glad to be reunited. They were locked in the large empty room with hundreds of other prisoners. They stayed close to their parents and sat down with their backs to the walls. They sat there for hours and while the prisoners theorized why they had been brought here. No one had any idea as to what was going on.

Dimitri did very little talking. He spent much of his time looking up at the high catwalk above the room where soldiers in hazmat suits paced back and forth with their guns at the ready. In the corners were soldiers with Gatling guns pointed into the crowd below. Dimitri considered the soldiers to be overly armed, and he wondered why.

***

As the days passed, more and more of the prisoners had begun to fall ill. They were trapped in the room, the soldiers never giving them food and only occasionally thrown bottles of water into the crowd from the catwalk. What had started out as a common cold had quickly become something more? More than 95% of the prisoners had gotten sick. There was a violent cough that often brought up blood coupled with excessive vomiting. The sick became week and sweaty. They were pale, and their face and body had developed lesions, bloody puss-filled blusters. Their bodies were wracked in pain. A week after exposer, the sick began to bleed from their eyes and nose, eventually resulting in death.

Dimitri knelt next to his mother, who was one of the sick. His father was trying to get her to drink some water, but as he tried to help her drink, her body went limp, and the life faded from her bloodshot eyes. Dimitri went quiet and hung his head in sadness. His mother, like so many others, was dead. Victim to whatever was killing everyone around them.

There were very few of them that survived. Just a handful of hundreds that, for some unknown reason, had not gotten sick. Eight days after they arrived, those rare few that had not gotten ill were all that was left, trapped in a room filled with the bodies of the dead.

Dimitri had noticed that everyday scientists and military brass would come in on the catwalks and observer the carnage below, taking notes and leaving. Today was no different. One of the scientists pointed into the room at those still alive and ordered the soldiers to round up the living.

Half an hour later, armed men in hazmat suits came in and started barking orders for the living to get up and line up in an orderly fashion. They were marched out of the killing room and locked in individual cages. Dimitri sat in his cage no bigger than that of a large dog kennel with cages stacked side by side and on top of others. The scientist from the catwalk strolled back and forth, looking into each cage at the survivors with a curious look on his face.

He stopped and looked in at Dimitri. Dimitri locked eyes with the man. He was in his mid-thirties. His dark hair was cut short, and his jaw donned a short, neatly trimmed beard. His dark eyes were curious yet cruel and unfeeling. He was a man of average height and built much like Dimitri’s father.

“Prepare the morgue,” the man said, still inspecting Dimitri. “Let’ cut them open and see why they did not die,” he ordered as he backed away from the cage and then pointed to the four cages stacked on the top row above Dimitri. “Let’s start with these four,” he said as he left the room. The soldiers then opened the cages and dragged four survivors out of the room.

All day long, the soldiers would drag away survivors and, hours later, return without them and take four more. Dimitri had no idea how long he had been in the cage when the soldiers came for him. They opened the door and grabbed Dimitri and three others, forcing them to march at gunpoint through the halls.

When they reached the morgue, the scientist was rinsing blood off the autopsy tables and disposing of bodies in the furnace. Realizing they were about to die, the others struggled as the soldiers picked them up and tied them down on the steel slabs. The dark-haired man in charge stood over Dimitri with an electric bone saw in his hands. He had on white scrubs dirty with blood, complete with masks and gloves. “Let’s crack that skull open and see what makes you so special.”

Dimitri struggled against his restraints. Lucky for him, the guard had not strapped his right arm down securely, and Dimitri managed to free his arm as the scientist leaned over him, bringing the bone saw dangerously close to Dimitri’s forehead. His hand reached out to the stainless-steel tray of surgical tools next to the slab he was tied down on, and he snatched up a scalpel closest to him and drove it into the scientist’s right eye. The man screamed and backed up, dropping the tool in his hand to grip the handle of the tool in his eye.

In the chaos, Dimitri removed the rest of his restraints and jumped off the slab. He pushed a steel cart of supplies into the belly of a soldier coming at him. While the man grunted and doubled over the cart, Dimitri grabbed his machine gun and turned it on the guards. The scientists scattered while Dimitri turned the gun on every soldier in the room. Once they were all down, he unstrapped the other three he had come in with, and they had all took up guns from the soldiers Dimitri had killed.

They ran through the halls gunning down the un-expecting soldiers on their way back to the holding cells. When they reached the cages, Dimitri started opening all the cages, and then he and the rest of the survivors armed themselves and fought their way out of the death camp. His father was setting fires as they moved through the camp. They had managed to kill most of the guards and scientists, but as they came out of the front gate, Dimitri looked up to see helicopters taking to the air with escaping staff.

Dimitri was furious those responsible for so many deaths had managed to escape. His father stood next to him. His hand on Dimitri’s shoulder as he and his two children watched the helicopters disappear over the horizon. “Do not worry, Dimitri,” His father Christov said, “We will find those involved if we have to track them to the ends of the earth. This massacre will not go unanswered.”

The survivors of the illness that had killed so many of them had gone into hiding. Two weeks after they escaped the death camp, the same sickness that had killed, so many of them swept across the world at a startling rate, systematically killing those in the middle class and poor neighbourhoods. Conveniently the wealthy one percent seemed oddly immune to the epidemic. Within four weeks, the death toll was unprecedented. Almost overnight, the world’s population had been reduced by 70%. Those with money survived, with a handful of the poor lucky enough not to get sick.

In the aftermath of the plague, the survivors called the Red Death. A new global regime changed the world. The wealthy became the citizens of the new world, while the surviving poor were enslaved and oppressed.

Dimitri, like many other survivors, knew this was not some tragic illness that ravaged the world and then died out. They knew better. The sickness that had killed so many had been a bioweapon designed and released into the population to kill off the lower class and reduce the world population. This was no accident; it was mass genocide. Those who knew the truth band together and took up arms to fight the new world government that had killed so many… and so the Red Hand Melisa was born.