Suicide Pill

"Well, well, well, I never expected to see Mr. Zhang again. What an honor, truly illuminating my humble abode."
A slightly odd voice drifted from the cell door. Wang Chen laboriously twisted his head around, only to be greeted by what looked like a mountain of flesh.
Yes, this man had to turn sideways just to enter the ship’s cabin, which spoke volumes about his size. As for his looks, they defied description—one could only say he resembled the Michelin Man, his features nearly swallowed by the fat on his face, though he was far less endearing than the mascot.
He lumbered over to the cage where Zhang Fu was held, plopped down right on the floor, and looked at Zhang Fu with a goofy grin.
“So it’s you, Lin Qi. What a coincidence to run into an old friend here.”
“Yes, Mr. Zhang, I never thought you’d fall into my hands. I should thank you, really—if you hadn’t caught me ten years ago, I wouldn't have had the chance to switch to a desk job and survive till now. Too bad I just can’t keep this weight under control.”
“Looking at you, what, two hundred kilos?”
“Of course not, not even four hundred pounds! Anyway, let’s not talk about that. I just wet my pants, Mr. Zhang, would you like to change? Please understand our methods—we simply don’t have the time to check if you’re carrying any tracking devices.”
“I understand, I understand. A bit of electricity is nothing. Don’t bother with the pants, they’re quite cool right now.”
From their tone, the two of them might have been chatting like old friends catching up after years apart. Yet, looking at that mountain of flesh’s earnest expression, everyone else in the room felt a chill deep in their bones.
In the space of a few sentences, he’d jabbed a rusty steel spike through Zhang Fu’s leg seven or eight times, each time precisely avoiding major blood vessels, only stabbing the muscle.
This man was even more terrifying than Zhang Fu, whose face had grown pale but showed only a slight twitch at the corner of his eye. This was a true monster.
Wang Chen watched as the spike, its red tip flecked with dark brown rust, slid in and out of Zhang Fu’s leg. He struggled not to lose control of his bladder again. Finally, he understood what it meant to win without fighting.
“Ah, the joy of reunion made me lose track of time.” Lin Qi gripped the cage and struggled to his feet, then gave orders in English to the CIA agents behind him: “Would you two please take Mr. Zhang to get patched up? Oh, and be careful. You may not recognize the name Zhang Fu, but I’m sure you remember Mr. Stevens, who died in Benghazi a few years ago. He was the culprit—or to be precise, the instigator and murderer. Your mortar fire is as precise as ever, isn’t it? Just like always, as we say in Chinese.”
Zhang Fu let the two CIA agents drag him out of the cage, as if the bleeding legs weren’t his own. Hearing Lin Qi’s attempt at Chinese, he replied in English, “There’s an old saying in China…”
“‘A gentleman’s revenge is never too late, even after thirteen years.’ I know, I know. Then I’ll say you shot down our F-117 over Yugoslavia, and studied the wreckage, so we had to use bunker-busting bombs. Then you’ll rebut, and I’ll counter again—what’s the point? On the surface we’re all smiles, but underneath, it’s a game of calculation. Isn’t that just how our countries interact? We do the dirty work for our nations—no need to argue further.”
Zhang Fu, listening to the banter of his old adversary, simply fell silent, accepting it all.
Wang Chen, listening to their conversation, felt nothing. As a young man who’d barely made it through college, he had no concept of Benghazi, mortar fire, F-117s, or bunker-buster bombs. But Ma Tian felt entirely differently. Just thinking of the connections between these events made his skin crawl. No matter how much psychological preparation he’d made, he wasn’t like the old special agents, who had long since set life and death aside, nor like Wang Chen, who’d survived the desperate struggle in Harbin and had already brushed close to death several times, even nearly dying in a lab accident despite knowing he wouldn’t live past ten years. Now, Ma Tian truly understood what it meant to have death hovering right above one’s head…
What the two observers didn’t know was that their cages had been placed right next to Zhang Fu’s on purpose by the CIA, and their reactions had been recorded for Lin Qi to review at any time.
Lin Qi, this minor CIA boss, was shrewd indeed. Among the prisoners, he wanted to find a breakthrough and obtain intelligence on the zombie pathogen from the Chinese special agents. The old hands were out—they were too hardened, too experienced, impossible to break, and ruthless in rooting out traitors, as proven by the execution of the young agent earlier.
Fang Qiang, who looked old but was a newcomer, was also ruled out, as he’d never entered the tanker and was likely just logistics support. That left two young agents who could be used as leverage. The only question was which one to torture first to frighten the other—seeing a peer tortured would surely rattle them more than seeing their superior suffer.
Back in the surveillance room, Lin Qi squeezed his massive body into a chair, panting, and began replaying the footage of the two young agents’ faces during Zhang Fu’s interrogation. After a quick comparison, he pointed at Wang Chen and said to the black female interrogation specialist beside him, “Start with this one who tries to imitate Zhang Fu. Go hard—no shades of gray, make it as intense as you like, got it? And make sure the more emotional one watches. Chinese people care about face—let’s smash their pride first!”
To Lin Qi, Wang Chen’s blank expression looked like indifference or feigned composure, so he reasoned that Wang Chen had a stronger will than Ma Tian and decided to torture him in front of Ma Tian. He had no idea that Wang Chen’s apathy was simply because he wasn’t even a military enthusiast; all those buzzwords meant nothing to him, and after all he’d been through—blood, flesh, zombies, villains—he was simply numb.
“No problem. However you want it done, I’ll do it,” the black woman, who was over forty, replied with a flirtatious wink, her meaning unmistakable.
Lin Qi’s breathing quickened, and his carrot-thick fingers unzipped his trousers. The black woman, quite used to this, knelt down before him, opening her thick lips to please him…

“Chief, we’re currently cooperating with the Navy. The captain has explicitly forbidden any interrogations on board. He said, ‘As long as the destroyer is in these waters, it’s U.S. territory—so do not break U.S. law on U.S. soil.’”
“Damn those Navy blockheads! Outbreaks in forty-one states! Twenty-seven in crisis! And they still care about military law and human rights?!” Lin Qi’s weight hampered his “performance,” so the woman got up to rinse her mouth. Lin Qi zipped up, turned to his deputy, and asked, “Any luck cracking the hard drive? Navigational system? Do we know the processing plant’s location?”
“Deputy Chief Susanna finished the decryption. As predicted, it’s a freshwater island, off the shipping lanes, about seventy nautical miles from the destroyer.”
After a moment’s thought, Lin Qi ordered, “Inform the captain. We’ll land on the island, clear out the cartel, and interrogate the prisoners there. Make sure the ship doesn’t stray too far—stealth or not, we don’t want the Chinese guessing the island’s location. Suggest a patrol radius of no more than thirty nautical miles. The Chinese won’t just abandon their comrades, and we may need fire support. Deputy chief and the techs stay on the ship.”
Though Lin Qi was a high-level CIA official, he dared not openly defy the captain, who, as a Navy commander with promising prospects, might soon be promoted. It wasn’t worth making an enemy of a rising military star for the sake of a few extra hours of interrogation.
Besides, the homeland was in chaos. The whole country was on edge; New Mexico had declared independence and was building a wall to keep out the infected. Texas had gone further, blaming the virus on Native Americans and threatening to reinstate the Indian Removal Act. Racial tensions were at a boiling point—black, Chinese, and Mexican communities had banded together, refusing entry to any government force, teetering on the edge of cult-like isolation. Years of social division were being laid bare by a microscopic pathogen. Lin Qi wouldn’t be surprised if the entire society collapsed overnight. If the outbreak truly became uncontrollable, with his size, he’d have to find some Navy officer’s protection and a defensible, well-provisioned coastal hideout—or risk becoming zombie food himself.
With Lin Qi gone and Zhang Fu dragged away, the cell fell quiet again. Wang Chen stared blankly at the bloody trails left by Zhang Fu’s legs.
He’d always felt as if he were in a dream. This sense of unreality was an early sign of PTSD, though Wang Chen didn’t know that. He only felt that as an ordinary man, he’d gone from escaping zombie-infested Harbin, to being a test subject in a secret base, to flying and sailing, ending up fighting the undead on a tanker, and now in CIA hands—all in just a few days. It was crazier than any Hollywood blockbuster, a story not even the worst web novelist could invent. Was his life being scripted by some Bollywood writer? Would the next moment see people dancing around his cage, telling him it was all an illusion?
Thinking of illusions, Wang Chen couldn’t help but recall a woman driven mad by insomnia, her lips offered in gentle comfort, and her unconscious form lying in a hospital bed.
The thought sent a sharp pang through his heart.
Han Li, are you alright?
His gaze grew distant as his mind wandered. Ma Tian, on the other hand, was determined not to die here, not even on the most advanced U.S. stealth destroyer.
Unlike Wang Chen, Ma Tian had grown up in a military family. Tough and unyielding, he was a fighter through and through—if he could take on zombies atop an armored vehicle, how could he accept being toyed with here? He looked around for any means of escape, but they’d been stripped to their underwear and pants; even their boots were taken. There was nothing to use.
His constant fidgeting soon attracted the CIA’s attention. Their response was simple—a tranquilizer shot, force open his mouth, pull out his tongue to prevent choking, and that was that.
Seeing Ma Tian dealt with, Wang Chen, still in a daze, slowly regained his senses. Unlike Ma Tian, he had no will to fight—but he did have the courage to die. One way or another, he wouldn’t give these bastards what they wanted.
After some thought, Wang Chen realized he had an edge: unlike the others, he and Liu Shuhuan wore only basic protective gear. When they were captured and stripped, the others’ military pants had only sweat stains, but Wang Chen, having waded through the drug lab, had picked up some mud on his pant legs. Noticing the mud, Wang Chen curled up, using his sweat to moisten it, kneading it in his palm into a small pill. He had no idea what was in it, but whatever it was—whether poison or something else—it would surely do harm if swallowed.
Having prepared for suicide, Wang Chen actually felt calmer. He found a comfortable position in the cage and dozed, while Ma Tian remained unconscious for the four-hour journey until the destroyer anchored near the unnamed island, waking only after another injection.
Those four hours were not uneventful—Old Dog and Ramen, both bitten, succumbed to the infection and died. Their corpses, not yet zombified, were shot and tossed overboard. Now only Zhang Fu, Zhou Feng, Ma Tian, Wang Chen, and Fang Qiang remained.
What was meant to be a simple mission had turned into a bloodbath.
The deaths of the veteran agents left the survivors even more somber, and Wang Chen more convinced than ever that his suicide plan was the right choice. At least Liu Shuhuan had died on the tanker—had he survived to see fellow agents gunned down and discarded, the poor, unlucky troublemaker would have gone mad all over again.
The destroyer’s destination was an island so obscure it had no official name on any chart. Some countries had assigned it a number, but most hadn’t, as it lay far from the main shipping lanes—just another of the Pacific’s twenty-odd thousand insignificant islets, the nearest inhabited land over three hundred miles away. There was nothing special about it: no resources, no minerals, nothing of value, which made it a perfect hideout for a drug cartel’s processing plant.
CIA strike teams landed first, clearing the island and finding it abandoned in haste. Vital equipment like computers and centrifuges had been left behind, and though the cartel had tried to burn the buildings with gasoline, the reinforced concrete structures built to pharmaceutical standards mostly survived, only blackened on the outside.
Lin Qi then ordered his men to bring the five cages ashore, placing them in a secluded house facing the sea. He sent the evidence ahead to the destroyer, waiting for it to sail out of U.S. jurisdiction before bringing in an iron frame and buckets of seawater—ready for interrogation.

Of course, Lin Qi would not soil his own hands. He positioned his vast bulk in a corner, ready to pounce the moment a prisoner’s will broke.
The interrogator was the same black woman in her forties, clad in a beige tank top and garish Hawaiian shorts. Her body was stout, her face fleshy, and her chest, unrestrained by a bra, heaved with each step, the nipples standing out like grapes, her thick tongue flicking at her lips, as if she wore her desires on her forehead.
She wasted no words—she signaled her men to pull Wang Chen from the cage. He resisted, so she punched him hard, doubling him over and making him retch bile—after four hours without food or water, there was nothing else to vomit.
As they lifted him again, Wang Chen wiped his mouth, swallowing the small gray pill. Perhaps sensing death, he found courage, stood as straight as he could, and grinned at the black woman: “I’m not afraid of you, bitch! I’ve killed more zombies than I can count—let’s see if you can eat me!”
The woman didn’t understand his words and looked to Lin Qi for translation. Once she’d heard, she grinned, swaggered over, and with her meaty hand, seized Wang Chen’s head, dragging her crimson tongue from his chin up to his temple.
The touch of her tongue made Wang Chen nauseous. He tried to curse, but suddenly a sharp pain lanced his cheek.
She’d clawed his face with her nails, and worse yet, she licked the blood from the wound, then began to suck at it.
Did she think this would scare him? Dream on! Maybe it was the pill kicking in, but the pain in his face faded rapidly. Ignoring her, Wang Chen hurled every insult he knew, using the full breadth of Chinese profanity, which outstripped anything English could offer. He cursed for a solid twenty seconds, but when Lin Qi translated, all he could tell her was that Wang Chen wanted to have intimate relations with her entire family, including her dog.
Not satisfied with this, the woman reached into the interrogation kit and tossed a silicone rod shaped like a man’s fist at his feet—obviously meant for a particular humiliation.
As Wang Chen realized his fate and began to struggle, the pill finally took effect. His head swam as if stuffed with hot, foul-smelling sludge; blood and rot filled his nose and mouth. Everything doubled, his body heavy but his mind clear—unable to move, unable to speak.
His body was no longer his own.
Seeing Wang Chen roll his eyes and convulse, the two CIA agents who’d been about to tie him up instinctively reached for their guns, fearing he was turning into a zombie. Wang Chen collapsed, wracked by uncontrollable spasms.
“Fuck!” Lin Qi saw him seizing and foaming at the mouth—no way was he faking it. It had to be some kind of medical crisis. There was no ambulance or doctor on this godforsaken island, so better to put him out of his misery. Losing his intended “example” would make breaking the other agents harder, but there was nothing to be done.
Resigned, Lin Qi waved to his men. “You two, put a bullet in him. Dump the body in the sea.”
As his agents pressed Wang Chen down, one started to draw his weapon, but Lin Qi snapped, “Who’s got earplugs? Idiots! Take him outside!”
Ignoring Ma Tian’s stream of curses from the cage, Lin Qi turned to the black woman who knelt silently before the interrogation kit, puzzled. “What’s the matter? That’s not like you.”
She didn’t look up—just let out a faint, chilling moan.
There was nothing lustful in that sound—only a blood-curdling menace.
“Fuck!” Lin Qi reacted instantly, reaching for his gun, but his immense bulk slowed him down. The woman had already turned, bloodshot eyes and teeth bared, lunging straight at him.
She’d turned.
Bang! One of Lin Qi’s men reacted quickly, abandoning Wang Chen to fire a shot into the woman’s massive chest, splattering black blood and knocking her back. But she rolled over, sat up, and launched herself again—straight for the biggest, nearest meal.
This time, her angle was cunning, and Lin Qi’s bulk blocked his men’s line of fire.
Now Lin Qi had his gun out—a huge Colt Python gleaming silver. He aimed at the thick lips that had once given him pleasure, and, without hesitation, pulled the trigger.