Captured by the Chimera Zombie-Master

by Veronica Sommers

  "It's good water, isn't it?" she says sweetly, as if we're the best of friends. "Not hard or sulfurous at all. We've got a nice well, you know. Pipes it right in. Lovely. Hard to come by, fresh water, out here. It's why we put our little secret bunker in this very spot." She giggles, patting the flyaways from her brown hair. "You look pale, dear. Are you all right?"

  "Like you care," I pant, wiping my dripping mouth.

  "Oh dear—you're angry with me. Is this about the boy?" She puts a hand to her waist and cocks her hips. "You know, I was only trying to do him a favor, give him a little relief. You should have seen the poor baby. So hard. Must have been painful. 'Blue balls' is real, you know. It's called epididymal hypertension."

  "Atlan is just fine in that department, thanks."

  "Oh, I know. I heard about your naughty trick with the assigned rooms. Reuel tells me everything." She steps closer to me, slipping her other hand into her pocket. "He also mentioned that you spilled the beans about my little tryst with Atlan."

  "You mean when you almost raped him? Yeah, I told Reuel about that." I stare her down, defiant. I just watched a swarm of zombies run toward me like teenage boys to an all-you-can-eat buffet, and I barely escaped with my life thanks to a dragonfly demon with a scorpion tail. I'm not about to be cowed by a skinny pervert in a lab coat.

  Her eyes snap. "Never use the 'r' word to me again," she hisses. "It's not nice, and it's not true. I told you what really happened—"

  "Rewording and revising it to yourself won't change what you did," I tell her. "Now let me pass. I need to rest."

  "Need to rest, do you?" The hand in her lab coat pocket twitches. There's something else in that pocket—something long and thin—a syringe maybe? "I could help you with that. We have some very effective concoctions of my own design, adapted from Reuel's fluids—"

  "No." I edge around her.

  "Whatever you say, dear. But no more tattling to Reuel, okay?" Her eyes take on a vicious sparkle. "The way he looked at me this morning—like I was a worm under his feet—and he's no better, I promise you. No better. No. No." She wraps both arms around herself, shaking her head. "I can't lose him. You mustn't say wicked things about me, not to him, or there will be consequences. Very serious consequences, do you hear?"

  "I hear you." I move slowly toward the door. "I have nothing else negative to tell him about you. As long as you leave me and Atlan alone, I have no reason to speak of you—or to you—ever again."

  I'm not sure she hears me, immersed as she is in hugging herself and mumbling; but at this point, I don't care if what I said got through—I just want to get away from her.

  Back in my room, I use another Sanguadyne injection. There are only a few more left. Hopefully the military of the Safe Zone won't take too long to decide on their course of action, or I may need to ration my blood for Atlan. Once I'm completely out of Sanguadyne, he might even have to supplement what I can give him with blood from Bob or one of the techs.

  Sighing, I stretch out on the bed, mentally calculating how I could ration my blood and still keep Atlan healthy and functional. Too bad I can't remember how fast the human body can restore its blood supply without a stimulant like Sanguadyne. Surely one of the scientists here knows that information.

  Though I didn't intend to sleep, the next thing I know I'm staring groggily at Atlan, who's sitting on the edge of my bed brushing my hair back from my face.

  None of the words he is saying make sense to my sleep-addled brain.

  "What is it?" I murmur, rubbing my eyes. "Blood-sucking time?"

  "A little later," he says, half-smiling. "They're going to mind-wipe the zombies. Reuel sent me to get you, in case you want to watch."

  "Oh." Zombies. Mind-wipe. Reuel. "Okay, sure. Give me—give me a minute."

  I sit up, slowly, my head still thick with sleep.

  "Wow, you were really out, huh?"

  "Yeah." My eyes travel his torso, taking in the extra bandages wrapping his middle. When he stands up, the motion is agonizingly stiff and slow, as if even the tiniest movement hurts.

  "Did Darius break your ribs or something?"

  "I'm pretty sure he did. Cracked my sternum too, I'm pretty sure."

  "Damn it. We warned Reuel that this couldn't keep happening."

  "It won't now." A shadow falls across his face, and I remember how desperately he struggled to haul Darius to safety. "He's gone. Honestly I think Reuel is relieved. Darius was only docile in his immediate presence. Otherwise, he was pretty damn bloodthirsty. He had some screwed-up ideas about the way the world should look in the future. It's probably a good thing he never got to see any of them through."

  We walk the corridors together—me, still groggy from sleep, my legs leaden and weary; and Atlan, moving carefully and breathing shallow, wrapping his ribs with his right arm.

  Atlan leads me to a room I haven't entered before. Turns out it's a narrow concrete box of an observation room, with a broad window of thick glass looking into a chamber lined with copper wires and metal coils, transmitters and odd-looking boxy devices I have no name for.

  Reuel stands by the glass, his forearm braced against it. Near him, bending over an array of controls and monitors, is Dr. Corbin.

  Even through the thick window, I can hear the hungry roars and shrieks of the zombies. They're strangely riled up for being stuck in an enclosed space with no human flesh to smell.

  Reuel glances at me as we enter. "Ah, you're here. Good. All right, Dr. Corbin, please proceed."

  I step up to the glass, peering into the room beyond where the zombies writhe impotently in their bonds, their jaws gnashing. In the center of them, barely out of reach of their teeth, lies another bound and gagged figure—Bob, the blood-hire. His eyes bulge with terror, and the gag digs into the flesh of his cheeks as he strains to scream.

  "Wait, why is he in there? What are you—" But before I can finish the question, Dr. Corbin clicks her mouse, a savage grin on her face—and a streak of light races around the coils inside the mind-wipe chamber. A shiver pulses through the air, and the zombies flail, spasming. Bob jerks and flips over, with his back to the window.

  The light fades, the air stills, and the zombies fall limp and quiet. So does Bob.

  "Reuel," says Atlan, very quietly. "Why did you put Bob in there?"

  "My idea, darling," says Dr. Corbin. "You see, we haven't tested the effects of the mind-wipe on humans, so I thought, before we go big with this thing, we should run a little experiment. Bob is so lovely and squishy, but far too chatty, so if the machine wiped his brain it would be a blessing, yes, wouldn't it? Imagine if we could wipe the brains of the most useless humans. They would be such calm, snuggly slaves—no pesky free will to worry about. Just nice juicy blood-bags for you to use whenever you like."

  "You monster," I hiss at her. "If you were so eager to test it, why didn't you go in there yourself?"

  "Because I might lose my lovely mind, dearest. I'm very intelligent, you know. Brilliant, some say—isn't that right, Reuel darling?"

  "Wiping her mind would be an incalculable loss," he agrees. "Just as wiping yours would be a loss, Finley."

  He reaches out to caress my face, but I jerk away from him. "Don't touch me. You're as bad as she is."

  Anger sparks in his eyes, and the faintest whisper of guilt. "We don't know yet if he has been wiped. Atlan, why don't you go check?"

  Atlan moves to comply, but I catch his arm. "What, so you can wipe his brain too? I don't think so. Let Dr. Corbin go in and check."

  Annoyance crosses Reuel's face. "I wouldn't wipe Atlan's brain. He's leverage, remember? It's in my best interest that I keep him healthy and intact. Well—reasonably intact." His mouth tweaks in that awful smirk. "But go ahead, Dr. Corbin, and check on our human test subject."

  I wait, breathless and anxious, as Dr. Corbin exits the observation area and enters the mind-wipe chamber. For a second I'm tempted to dart over to her keyboard and run the program again, hoping it will wipe her brain—but
then she takes the gag off Bob and helps him up, and he looks normal. He was never the smartest guy in the room, but he's obviously still there. Still talking, and moving of his own free will.

  Besides me, Atlan is shaking his head. 'That wasn't cool, man. Not at all. You didn't tell me you were gonna do that."

  "Am I supposed to update you on all my decisions now?" Reuel's eyebrows lift. "Forgive me. I had no idea I was responsible to you, vampire."

  "It's not that, it's—" Atlan breaks off with a pained grunt. "You know what? Screw this. I've done my part for the day. I'm going to lie down."

  He limps out of the room. I move to follow him, but I'm intercepted by Dr. Corbin, escorting Bob into the observation room. He's babbling in shrill tones. "How could you do that to me? I'm not the secret illegal experiment type, okay? I can make myself useful some other way. And what was that white light? Hell, I don't care about the light—I could have been bitten. I could have turned. I could have died."

  "But you didn't, dear. You're quite all right. And as a reward, you get a nice room to yourself tonight. No more stinky cell." Dr. Corbin pats Bob's thinning hair.

  Reuel steps forward, catching both of Dr. Corbin's hands. It's a sudden move, startling in its earnestness. "We did it," he says, looking into Dr. Corbin's eyes. "The machine is perfect. Effective for zombies, harmless to humans. This calls for a celebration, don't you think?"

  "Oh my." Dr. Corbin's eyelashes actually flutter. "Celebration—yes. Yes, I think you're right. We deserve it."

  "I could have died," Bob repeats again, his face sagging with disbelief.

  Dr. Corbin rolls her eyes. "You'll be just fine, love. We'll do a few brain scans later, just to be sure—but for now, why don't you run along to the kitchen and help yourself to anything you like?"

  "The kitchen?" Bob blinks. "I don't remember where it is."

  "I'll show him." I seize Bob's arm and usher him out of the room. As I hurry him along the corridor, I whisper, "How are you really? Do you feel weird at all?"

  "No—I mean yes! I'm freaking out. I'm terrified. Shaking. I may have shit myself just a little—I won't deny it. What was that room? Why'd they put me in there with all the zombies?"

  Briefly I explain, and Bob's eyes widen until they're bulging almost as wide as they were earlier. When I've finished, he lets out a long, almost reverential string of swears. "I survived a damn mind-wipe," he breathes.

  "You did. And now, you should eat something." We enter the kitchen, and I guide him to one of the metal chairs. The kitchen was clean this morning when we ate breakfast—no sign of the carcass Atlan and Darius feasted on—but there's a faintly rancid odor in the room, and the air feels stale and stifling. The last thing I want is to stay here with Bob while he eats, so I retreat to the door. "I need to go back," I tell Bob. "To see if they need my help with the wiped zombies. You'll be fine, right?"

  "I'll—be—fine." Bob stares at the bare table in front of him, tapping it with his fingers.

  "Get something to eat, okay?" I urge him.

  "Something to eat. Right." He rises and heads for the cupboards.

  Relieved, I hurry back to the observation room.

  It's empty.

  Weird.

  The zombies are still lying on the floor, trussed and helpless—and silent, now that their drive to feed has been eliminated. In fact, the whole place is unsettlingly quiet.

  I wander back into the empty hallway, moving along it. If I remember correctly, Reuel's bedroom is somewhere along an adjoining corridor. Maybe he's there now. Maybe I can convince him not to use poor Bob for any more experiments. Annoying though the guy might be, he doesn't deserve to be used as bait or a test dummy.

  The next turn looks familiar, so I take it, counting doors as I walk. I'm pretty sure the next room is Reuel's—and his door is ajar again. Probably something wrong with the hinges—if they have some tools around here, I can fix it so it will swing shut properly. I move forward, my fingers outstretched to push the door farther open.

  It takes my brain a minute to process what I'm seeing—Reuel on the couch, clasping Clarice's naked body to his chest, his long black claws denting the flesh of her back. They're moving together, and panting—

  I dart back from the doorway, pressing myself to the wall outside the room and shutting my eyes, as if that could purge what I just witnessed from my mind. A blend of disgust, horror, and embarrassment churns in my gut, sending bile up to sear my throat. I gag silently.

  What Clarice Corbin does with her body is her business, but I'd be damned before I'd let that yellow-eyed scorpion knock me up.

  26

  Finley

  The next two weeks are a softened blur, not so much of days, but of cycles—sleep, uncomfortable meals in the bunker kitchen, and work. My work consists of submitting to brain scans, yielding blood samples, and practicing over and over with the zombies in various situations. We discover that I can't keep control over more than eight to ten zombies at once, and my control fails if I'm more than fifty feet away, or separated from them by a solid concrete wall. As soon as I come to their side of the wall or within that fifty-foot radius, my control snaps back into place.

  For a while it's just mimicry. They do what I do, whether I want them to or not. But slowly, slowly, I begin to pick up on the mental threads connecting me to each one of them, and I find that I can send impulses along those threads. I can make specific zombies perform simple tasks, like picking something up and moving it. But I can't do it with more than a couple at a time, and the others just continue mimicking while I'm working on guided tasks with one of them.

  A few of the other humans in the bunker manage to connect with one or two zombies too, but the connect isn't as strong or long-lasting, and they can't direct the zombies to do specific tasks. Bob, Atlan, and Dr. Corbin can't manage a connection at all. After those attempts, Reuel decides to focus on understanding and perfecting my abilities.

  He seems frustrated with my progress, though. After all, his idea was to control the zombies en masse, turn them into a workforce to rebuild the human civilization they demolished. At this rate, that's not going to happen. If we can manage to mind-wipe large groups of zombies at once, but we can't take effective control of them, the military won't see the value in keeping them around as labor. They'll just come in and mow the zombies down—scoop them into trucks and dump their bodies in the ocean, most likely—because what else do you do with the dead bodies of most of the Earth's population? Shoot them into space?

  The thought of all the cleanup, of all those once-people being shoved into mass graves—it sickens me. But what's the alternative? I certainly can't think of one. The main problem we have to solve is the survival of humanity, and that means eradication of the zombie threat.

  Reuel, John, Atlan, and another tech have been working on detailed schematics for a large-scale mind-wipe machine. They've planned a sort of cordon made of shipping containers and wire fencing, which will be fitted with signal modules to broadcast the mind-wipe frequency. The rest of the techs have already started cobbling together a few additional modules besides the ones already in the mind-wipe chamber; but after two years of experimentation, the bunker is nearly out of raw materials and supplies. They're going to need a lot more materials and many more skilled hands if they're going to build any sort of working mind-wipe tech in the open Hordelands.

  "Ideally, it would be best to do it closer to the Safe Zone," says Atlan one night. We're alone in the kitchen, and he's healing my shoulder with his tongue after a quick feeding. "I told Reuel that, and he agrees. We just need a big military team to come out here and help us transport all the plans and equipment nearer to the wall."

  "No word from Deathcastle yet?"

  Atlan sighs. "If Reuel has heard from anyone in the Safe Zone, he hasn't told me. He'd be more likely to tell you, wouldn't he?"

  "I don't know. He's been distant lately. It's kind of a relief."

  I'm not sure if the two things are connected, but I'
ve also been on my period for the past week. I know Atlan could smell it, and I'm guessing Reuel could, too. Embarrassing, sure—but at least it kept the horny chimera at bay. I was happy to discover that the bunker still has a supply of tampons and pads on hand, which made my life a lot easier. At one point after the Gorging, I had to make do with rags like a freaking pioneer woman, until my group could raid a convenience store for supplies.

  Atlan wasn't interested in my period at all. I'd always wondered about that with vampires—like, would that kind of blood be appealing? But Atlan isn't like mythical vampires—he consumes blood to replace the cells that his body can't regenerate. That kind of tissue wouldn't even work for him.

  "Distant is good," he says in response to my comment about Reuel. With a satisfied smirk, he leans in to kiss me. "Means I don't have to worry about kicking his ass. Yet."

  I run my fingers along Atlan's cheek and jaw, my mind reverting back to his earlier words—the plans for rendering the zombies inert and harmless. "Back to the subject of the cordon—I understand what you're saying, about the benefits of moving the operation closer to the Safe Zone—but Atlan, have you thought about the consequences of that? Imagine Reuel in the Safe Zone. People will freak out, just seeing him. And who knows what he'll do with that extra freedom to work, what new plots he'll develop."

  "What freedom? I'm hoping they'll lock him up. He can mastermind everything from a nice dark cell. Same with Corbin. They both need to be locked away where they can't hurt anyone else." Atlan lowers his voice. "I've been talking to John. If we bring along all the schematics and data, it won't be hard to pull in some of the military's scientists and get them up to speed. Then, with John's expertise, they could oversee construction and run it themselves, without a problem. We wouldn't need Reuel and Corbin at all."

  A shuffling sound in the hallway startles me, and I lay a warning hand on Atlan's arm. But no one enters the kitchen.

  Maybe I imagined it. I hope none of the little hunters have made their way out of the menagerie.

  "Well, I'm gonna grab a shower," says Atlan. "We're playing cards with John and Eli in about half an hour, remember. You in?"