Budweiser: It's Sheer Perfection!

/K/-Day
T + 22 hours
A secure basement laboratory at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute, 2 stories underground

(Now playing: Day Of The Dead [Main Title] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi7kBeXCB38 )

“Audio-Journal, entry one. This is the voice of Doctor Wilbur Paisley, to whomever this may concern. I was an only child, I loved studying all the little and large intricacies of the body, animal or vegetable, and after a series of fortunate events that culminated in some shoulder-rubbing with retired men of high political standing, I was hired and assigned to a secret government operation, only days after acquiring my college degree. The purpose of the operation was actually quite benign, and an actual worthwhile use of taxpayer money. Our group’s mission was to study samples of biological weapons that rival nations constructed. I don’t know who exactly gets us the samples. We received them by unmarked mail-drops, on what is usually a bi-monthly basis. We examine the contagions, then we tested them on rabid animals and people of unsound mind, who cannot be integrated into a sane society. From this, we developed vaccines and sometimes antidotes, to be sold to the highest bidding medical supply corporation, with a decent stock left over specifically for our federal employers and their families, not to mention ourselves and our families.”

“This employment arrangement worked out well for several years, until 2 weeks and 4 days ago. Our maildrop came to us, not in the usual form of test tubes or bottles in a carefully packaged box. This time, several people clothed from head to toe in black, goggles and ski masks covering their faces, and speaking in, frankly terrible, fake Cockney accents, brought us a coffin out of a hearse. Officially, it was the corpse of an identity-classified soldier who had been exposed to leftover depleted uranium in the deserts of Iraq. In actuality, please prepare yourself, it was a still-living man with several horrific and severely painful tumors across his body. They were quite forthcoming with details, for once. This man was not of our world, yet looked just as human as us. He ‘popped’ out of a portal, in a black ops training area somewhere near Dallas, with several witnesses confirming his surprise appearance. They also confirmed my suspicion that our project is a top-secret CDC/CIA/FDA collaboration. Our objectives were threefold. The primary one was to see if we could isolate any ‘clean’ uninfected samples from him, to see what genetic differences this man had, compared to humans of Sol 3, commonly known as Earth. The secondary objective was to see if we could pump him with enough painkillers to dull the pain, while keeping him lucid enough to answer whatever questions we had for him. Thirdly, we were to attempt to study his condition, starting with non-invasive tests, all the way to post-mortem dissection, if it was necessary.”

“After 3 days of theorizing different formulas, combinations, and cocktails of tranquilizers and stimulants, we took the leap. And much like Indiana Jones’ leap over that chasm mirage, it turned out to be quite simple. We gave him 1 shot of standard gorilla tranquilizer, and put some ammonia smelling salts in front of his nose to wake him up. After explaining where he was, we then asked him who he was and how he got the condition. His name was Lorcenz, and a witch ‘cursed’ him for rejecting her advances. Straight out of Beauty and the Beast, but this Beast wasn’t some goat-man. All poor Lorcenz got was being trapped in a endless state of boil, tumor, and headache pain. But he got his revenge, he told us that after a few months of being trapped in her basement, he finally snapped, went up the stairs, and gouged her eyes in with his thumbs, right in front of her familiar, and her new lover . That was 7 years ago. He lamented that her death came so quick, and that she had the last laugh on him. His appearance here was actually a suicide attempt, after paying a wizard school with all the money he had left, to send him somewhere that would grant him an instant death. Guess they pulled a sick prank on him by sending him to Earth. He was so grateful to us, for dulling his pain for at least a few hours. But the witch had somehow expected him to find pain relievers. When his pain returned, it adapted. Over the next several days, it took injections of an ever-increasingly faster and stronger variety to keep him lucid. But we’re fast-thinking ourselves, our primary and secondary tests were finished within 14 hours, we didn’t learn much, other than the pain factors involved. We were going to need full samples”

“Next came the real meat of the project. After consulting our assigned liaison, who warned us that our mutual superiors were expecting more portals to appear within the year, we received the green light to commence Phase 3, after he spent almost one day grilling Lorcenz over every detail regarding the lands he came from. Maybe the folks at Cheyenne Mountain are planning an extra-planar Operation Overlord. I honestly didn’t pay much attention, I defer these sorts of things to the public servants at the Pentagon.”

“We surgically removed several of his tumors and lesions, some grew back, some did not, but we confirmed that each removal caused increasingly extreme shocks of pain to Lorcenz’s ravaged nervous system, which wasn’t dulled in the slightest, poor bastard. But he kept going as long as he could, after we explained to him how vaccines work, and that we could learn something from him that could spare others of similar conditions in the future. I am proud to say that we didn’t have to lie about that at all. We proceeded with Phase 4, animal testing, on monkeys, canines, and felines, surgically implanting the tumors onto them. Nothing happened to the cats and dogs, no effect whatsoever, along with all but 3 types of simians. It spread and enveloped 8 out of 44 Rhesus monkeys, 2 out of 19 Western lowland gorillas, and 32 out of 117 homo sapiens, also known as humans. Before you ask, our benefactors were able to supply a great amount of.….test subjects from Iraq, Afghanistan, the killing fields of Angola, and those already sentenced to death at Guantanamo Bay for acts of terrorism against our nation. I will shed no tears for these so-called people.”

(Now playing: The Marshalling Yard [2nd Half] from Resident Evil 2 1998 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPglVVYl5Lc )

“Now to make another long story short, we chose a random placeholder name for the virus. We chose ‘Budweiser,’ because it seemed funny and that’s what we were drinking at our lunch breaks. Even Lorcenz chuckled a bit after we explained that it was just the name of a famous brand of alcohol. To put it simply, it takes a rare combination of a specific Rh factor, and O-positive or B-type blood to be infected. People with O-negative or any of the A-type, are basically immune, their antibodies successfully rejected the virus within 8 minutes, the longest rejection took 7 minutes and 4 seconds, to be precise. We still do not yet know what the exact odds of infection for O-positive,B-type, and AB-type is, but we confirmed that it took the longest to infect AB-types, and even then, their condition was far more mild, yet still terrible.”

Budweiser is a marvel, a contagion of the likes never before seen on this planet. This ‘curse’ is far, far more than some voodoo-induced hyper-cancer. It is the most tactically useful viral weapon ever seen yet, a self-evolving virus. It turns all but the original carrier into violent, tumor-riddled carnivorous beasts, although they still drink liquids, and will turn to other food sustenance, in the absence of meat. They grow in size and shape at random, but they all share a quality of adapting to their environment. However, AB-type infectees are still capable of coherent speaking and semi-coherent thought, albeit the only things they talk and think about are topics of killing and eating. There are no asymptomatic carriers, you’re either clearly infected, you're clearly rejecting it, or you’re completely immune from the start. It’s only method of spreading is via artificial means, such as: spraying a deliberate and unnatural amount of infected blood onto the target, in a way that covers the whole body and enters the bloodstream; dumping it into a water supply, however this is not recommended, as it dilutes in freshwater quickly, our best estimates put it at only lasting up to 2 hours for one gallon of pure Budwieser dumped into, say, a reservoir; and lastly, via a direct injection into the bloodstream, although our testing showed that it would take at least 3 full injections to overcome the average immune system. To acknowledge the obvious parallels, this does NOT turn people into zombies. The infected are not the reanimated dead, they are very, VERY much alive, and most are pretty stupid. Don’t worry too much about gas masks and hazmat suits, it’ll take a LOT of this virus to get in your bloodstream to infect you, even if you're of the targeted blood types. This isn’t an end-of-the-world plague. It’s a area-denial short-range bioweapon that you’d use to, say, quickly turn an apartment complex into a quarantine zone, or a single target into a rampaging monster, by sneaking into his room at night and pumping his guts full of it.

The only serious warnings are as follows. One, there is no cure. No vaccine. It’s irreversible. If you’ve gone ten minutes, and your body hasn’t rejected Budweiser, you’re already gone. We put Lorcenz down 20 minutes ago. Painless lethal injection. There was nothing more we could learn from him without a full autopsy. He went peacefully, after we pumped him with 7 elephant tranquilizers. He thanked us for putting him out of his misery, and as it turned out, being sent here DID bring him the sweet release of death that he sought for so long. He called us his friends. I’ll really miss that primitive screwhead. Warning two, among the AB+ infected, 2 of them maintained their sanity, even after full infection. The odds are 1-to-15. They are just as intelligent as you and me, but their atavistic nature, their reptile brain, has overcome them completely. They may be able to blend in for a time, then eat someone when it’s just them and the victim. We have video evidence that shows they prefer raw fresh kills over cooked meat. They’re mutant cannibals, simply put, whereas O-positive and B-type infected are monstrous hulks of ferocious , man-eating squishy flesh. I doubt they would be difficult to take down with high-caliber firearms. Now I’m disappointed that I passed up on that $400 Desert Eagle at that police auction last month. Would have made our testing more accurate, all our liaison and his troopers had on them were 9 millimeter pistols and submachine guns. They left early this morning via helicopter, and thanks to this blackout, all we’ve got is our emergency generator. All I have left to do is to wait for the Wi-Fi to come back online, then I can send the research out to my employers, and I can get out of here!”

(A chainsaw’s revving is heard in the background, followed by 7 loud gunshots, then several seconds of silence. After that, the sound of loud footsteps get closer and closer. The stairway door busts open.)

(Now playing: SWAT Team Attack from Terminator 2: Judgment Day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvbHBdcon5Y )

(WP) “So! You’ve finally come! I take it you fine ladies came from across the highway?”

(AW) “Doctor Paisley, I’m Agent Williams, and this is Agent Lane, yeah, we’re NSA.”

(WP) “Well that was obvious! I take it you glowniggers don’t exactly approve of our little ‘project’ here?”

(AW) “Righty-O, you sick fuck! We’ve had your lines tapped for a month now! You’ll be coming with Agent Lane, she’ll take you to the police station right by here on Culebra. You and everyone working here, are officially under arrest for crimes against humanity! I gotta thank you guys, you’re really about to take a lot of public relations heat off of us, gonna make Abu Ghraib look like a frat hazing session gone sexual! Now where’s your front desk jockey? I’d bet he’d know how to get what we need to put you away for 20 fuckin lifetimes!”

(WP) “Walker? He took the day off. Heard he was gonna go out west and play cowboy, or some other inane faggoty stuff. He doesn’t know anything about Project Budweiser, you really think we’d let a peon like him know about this? Closest he ever gets is putting the carefully enclosed virus samples into the right P.O. box! And what the fuck is up with those guns? Why are you wearing night-vision goggles? Who was revving up that chainsaw? Don’t tell me Burton’s playing with the construction equipment, again?”

(AW) “Your pal Burton ran off after we took some shots at him, you can blame Lane here for missing!”

(AL) “Get bent, Williams, our security took all the good shit from Wal-Mart, left me with this wack-ass hunting rifle. Who the fuck uses a long-range bolt-action for shooting people INSIDE a building?

(AW) “Doesn’t matter, we’re right up close and personal now, we’re strapped, and you’ve been caught lackin’, Doctor! Put your shit onto that USB drive, and MAYBE we won’t just blow your head off RIGHT NOW, and say we thought you tried to pull a gun on us! You wanna find out what a 30-odd-6, or a 28 gauge, does to a head at 6 feet?”

(WP) “Well, folks, you got me, but you’re not gonna win. You and your bosses are gonna wind up mysteriously committing suicide by ‘falling’ off a boat in the middle of the Caribbean! I’m connected! I got the full force of 3 agencies behind my back, and you’ve only got one! You’ll get your USB all right, and I hope you choke on it! In two months, you’ll be lucky to be alive, cleaning toilets in North Dakota, while I’ll be sipping martinis in a New York penthouse, courtesy of a witness protection program!”

(He plugs the USB and uploads the full folder, designation: BOOZE CRUISE. As he finishes the upload and puts it in his pocket, Agent Lane abruptly fires into the back of his head, splattering the room with his brains.)

(AW) “DAMMIT LANE, NOW WE’RE GONNA HAVE TO USE A TRUCK STOP SHOWER TO WASH THIS OFF!”

(AL) “Sorry, Williams, aw geez, this is nasty. Thought it’d be smart to just get rid of him once we got the USB!?”

(AW) “SHOULDA DONE IT OUTSIDE, WHEN WE CAN GET, LIKE, 15 FEET FROM HIM BEFORE POPPING HIS SKULL LIKE A PINATA!?”

(As they bicker, the head-split corpse formerly known as Wilbur Paisley slumps over. As one hand hits the stop button on the recorder, the other hand smashes down onto a blue button, labeled “NO ONE EVER EXPECTS THE BLUE ONE.” Infected blood suddenly spews from the fire system sprinklers, and as Williams and Lane realize what’s about to happen, they begin to try and cover their faces. After about 30 seconds of trying to find the door button, Lane falls over, her eyes turning a sickly yellow, along with her skin. Williams, covering her mouth with her shirt, reaches into the corpse’s pocket to retrieve the USB stick, then shoots the door-glass with her Mossberg SA-28, stumbling over its broken pieces as she tries to get out. She runs up 2 flights of stairs to the front door, tripping over 2 dead lab assistants she just shot only minutes before. The doors are shut, and covered by steel reinforced walls that dropped from the ceiling, and as she shoots at the steel, she grazes her left leg with a ricochet. As she crumples to the floor to writhe in pain, a prerecorded voice blares over the intercom.)

“HEY-HEY PEOPLE! THIS IS THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY! SINCE SOMEONE TRIGGERED THE 2ND SUB-BASEMENT’S BLUE BUTTON, YOU’RE PROBABLY PURGING THIS PLACE. WELL, THE JOKE’S ON YOU, THAT BUTTON TRIGGERED THE COMBINATION LOCKDOWN AND TOTAL AEROSOL SPRAY SYSTEMS. IF YOU AREN’T INFECTED, YOU’RE GONNA WISH YOU WERE IN A FEW MINUTES, ASSHOLE!”

(And with the message ending, Agent Williams heard the sound of large rolling doors open, the moans and screams of what she instantly recognized to be the infected, now roaming around the facility grounds.)

(AW) “Y-you absolute monsters. You let them out. You let these abominations out to kill and feed on whatever poor sucker gets in their sights. You’re listening in, aren’t you, you CDC bastards! Probably got eyes on this place by glow-in-the-dark satellite, courtesy of the CIA! Watching to see what your little pets can do in a ‘live-fire scenario,’ out in the ‘wild.’ You already know how stretched thin we all are, it’ll take days, maybe weeks, to kill them all. And only God knows how many people they’ll get before someone can do something about it!.”


“PAISLEY! YOU SON OF A BITCH! I’LL GET OUTTA THIS PLACE AND THROW THE BOOK AT ALL YOUR FRIENDS, EVEN IF IT’S THE LAST THING I EVER DOOOOOOO!”


(Now playing: The Resident Evil Outbreak Staff Roll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UmUOkUMgkU )