Zombie Threat: The Undead Arise
The Danger to Mankind’s Survival
Published by Colten Steele - [email protected]
Copyright 2014 Colten Steele
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Table of Contents
Chapter I – In the Jungle
Chapter II – The Worms
Chapter III – Slavin Says
Chapter IV – Bring a Lizard
Chapter V – These Are Not Worms
Chapter VI – Dinner is Served
Chapter VII – A New Tree
Chapter VIII – Eggnog Payback
Chapter IX – Some Thing Died
Chapter X – Pupae
Chapter XI – Planning a Trip
Chapter XII – The Crash
Chapter XIII – The Bite
Chapter XIV – David’s Story
Epilogue
Author Notes
~ Chapter I ~
Drenon looked up from the book titled Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man as the familiar sound of chainsaws stopped. It was replaced by the squeal of a monstrous cotton tree, nearly two hundred feet tall, starting its descent. The dim shadows retreated as the falling tree left a tremendous hole in the jungle canopy letting in the early morning sun. The tree's eight foot thick trunk destroyed everything in its path during its thunderous fall. This destruction finally ended in an explosion which shook the ground as if Armageddon had arrived. The artificial earthquake would have tipped a half empty soda can had Drenon not reached over to steady it.
He peered through thick glasses down at the paperwork he had been working on. He knew he was somewhere in the Toledo province of Belize, fairly close to the Guatemala border, but there was no official name for their location. The fallen tree was simply described as number 922 and in the location field was a set of GPS coordinates. In an ideal situation, the team would have had access to heavy equipment, but the location was so remote cutting the access roads would have been a monumental task.
Getting up from his black plastic folding chair, Drenon lumbered his heavy frame over to the raw stump which was already swarming with short amber colored men. All of the men spoke English, but talked to each other in Brazilian Creole, a language Drenon did not understand. Only the foreman, Miguel, would talk to him, but all of the men looked so similar Drenon could not pick him out of the crowd. He knew the men would soon be digging the enormous stump, roots and all, from the ground until it could be pried out for examination.
Even though he was the tallest man in the group by at least a foot, he walked completely ignored over to investigate the top of the newly fallen giant. Upon reaching the stump, he saw where sap should have been flowing from a raw wound in living wood, instead a black hole three feet in diameter reached out of sight into the ground. The pit was ringed with dark brown frail sponge-like rot. The cotton trees had been dying rapidly across the province with no explanation and Drenon was here in this remote location trying to find out why.
"The men refuse to cut down any more trees," spat Miguel’s voice from behind him with a heavy Spanish accent.
Devon turned. "Miguel, explain to the men if we do not cut down these trees the others around them will die as well," he replied. "Ancestral superstition aside, the jungle will be decimated without removing them."
"I understand. That is why I am here after the others have left, and I will still be here after these men leave, but it will be difficult to find another crew. These men are full of dread at what they are doing. They believe the spirits of their ancestors still occupy these sacred places."
"I need to figure out what is causing this, and to find the key I am going to need more trees."
"This may be the one," Miguel replied.
"Yes, it might, but you can see it is probably another dead end. There is nothing obvious here."
Drenon was a world-renowned botanist with decades of experience at solving just this type of mystery, but after months of investigation he still had no leads. He knew the toppled tree had been slowly deteriorating for years. From the extensive research he conducted and the results from the samples sent back to his university sponsored laboratory in Texas, he knew the tree's sap, its lifeblood, had turned highly acidic.
Surprisingly, he concluded the trees continued to live normally for many years after first infected. The culprit causing the devastation seemed to sustain the tree, keeping it physically alive even as it was being devoured from the inside out. This pattern always left the trees hollow from the tallest branches all the way down into the roots. The first outward signs of a problem were when the foliage did not regrow in April after the long dry season. Drenon’s assumption was this happened when the devourer was no longer able to sustain the tree with all the damage it had caused, and moved on somehow to another tree. He had never seen a sign of the culprit on any dead tree they had cut down. Once the tree died on the outside, the acidic sap from the enormous tree leaked into the surrounding soil killing any living plant for hundreds of feet in every direction.
He had tried to convince the Belize Botanical Committee to cut down, or even to just drill exploratory samples, into seemingly live trees, but the hardheaded Belize government would not allow the sacred trees to be touched while they still appeared to be living. This just delayed the discovery and diagnosis of whatever was causing the destruction, allowing it to spread further. He wondered if there were any trees left without the unidentified problem in the entire country. There was no way to tell the infected trees from the healthy until it was too late to save them.
Drenon walked back to the table, grabbed his collection pack, pulled on a pair of heavy rubber gloves and took out a sharp spade-like tool before heading back. He collected fresh samples from the blackened inside of the stump and the thin fragile bark. He was heading down the long trunk towards the naked branches when his cell phone vibrated. This was unusual. The service in this part of the country was nearly nonexistent, and without the funding for a satellite phone he was stuck without a way to communicate most of the time.
Pulling off the gloves, he uncovered the phone from its protective case and noticed a text had come through. The time of the text showed it had been sent nearly five hours previous. It had just now managed to arrive.
The text was from Jaws and said, "Call ASAP. New info."
~ Chapter II ~
Getting back to Texas was a major ordeal. He remained two days collecting all of the samples from site 922 and securely packing them for shipping. It took another two days just to navigate the sparse jungle paths to reach the village serving as his base of operations. There he and Miguel packed everything into an oversized rusty pontoon boat they had acquired months ago and started the long uncomfortable boat ride back to civilization.
They were out of the jungle and arrived in Punta Gorda on day five. Navigating the rest of the journey had been relatively easy. A prop plane with eight seats got him to Phillip S. W. Goldson International, where his contacts in Belize City were waiting with the tickets he had requested. A quick pass through customs and a relatively comfortable two and a half hour flight had Drenon back in the state of Texas on a Saturday. His SUV was waiting in long term parking and he was back at home in a matter of hours.
He decided to go to church Sunday morning and slept most of the rest of the day. On Monday morning, seven days after felling cotton tree number 922, Drenon was back
at his lab.
Jaws was a tall skinny man in his sixties with a full head of wavy gray hair and a scholarly look about him. His nickname came from his upper teeth, which were always showing. He could never quite get his wisp of a top lip to cover them, even when he was consciously aware of their protrusion. When he laughed he looked like a great white reaching out to bite down on its prey. After years of abhorring the name, at some point in his thirties he accepted and adapted it.
The two often spent time together outside of work and were good friends. Their practical jokes on each other were legendary with the faculty and had even inspired a blog on the university web site.
"Do you know what they are," Jaws asked as he passed the pictures to Drenon?
Drenon stared hard at the picture on top. "They look like beef worms, but no beef worms I know of are that large. You said some of these worms were over two inches long?"
"Yeah, the smallest were less than a quarter inch though. Take a look at this picture here. Notice most of the worms are black or dark brown, but a few are white."
The picture showed a local boy standing next to a pile of black worms. He was just a few inches taller than the pile. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them. In the background half of a tremendous cotton tree lay on top of a long building constructed of cement blocks with a metal roof. The building was nearly cut in half.
"We have a large sample of the white worms in the other room," Jaws explained. "We have determined the blacked worms were actually burned that color. The cotton tree they came from was hit by lightning on the west coast of Honduras during a brief, but violent storm. The tree was split nearly all the way to the base, and this pile of worms poured out."
"Did you say Honduras? That's hundreds of miles from the nearest tree we know of that is infected," said Drenon quietly.
"Yes,” Jaws frowned. “The tree was the focal gathering place in the center of a small village. The people there are poor and there was no video footage, just a few photos. By the time officials from a nearby town arrived two days after the strike, the villagers had poured fuel on and destroyed the massive pile. Many of the blackened worms, though badly burned, were still moving and starting to spread out. The villagers did not know how else to dispose of them."
"Apparently, nobody knew the worms were in the tree," Jaws continued. "It appeared perfectly normal. The worms we have in the other room were collected from what remained of the stump of the tree, but the tree was declared cursed and has been burned to the ground. We have nothing else to go on."
Drenon continued to scan through the pictures. "Well, at least we have our first real lead. Let's go take a look at the worms."
Jaws led the way through a series of doors. The first area was pressurized to keep foreign air and dust from getting in. The second area was designed to keep air and dust from getting out. Before entering the lab both men secured bulky face masks behind their ears and pulled on bright yellow gloves with sleeves up past their elbows. Down the hall was another room where things considered more dangerous were kept. Had they been going into that room an anti-contamination shower and full body suit would have been required.
"The worms arrived in a canning jar with holes punched in the lid," Jaws said in a voice muffled by the face mask. "We have moved them into a more comfortable home."
Drenon followed Jaws across the room to a clear aquarium with no lid. It was one of the smaller aquariums they frequently used, but it was more than enough room for the dozens of white worms moving around like grubs. They crawled along the fake branches and leaves that had been provided for them. Drenon stared intently. "What are they eating?”
"They aren't eating anything at the moment. I don't have approval to bring live branches and foliage into this room."
With eyes raised to the ceiling a calculating look appeared briefly on Drenon's face before he replied. "So... two days in the village. A few days in the custody of some officials in Honduras while they figured out what to do with them. A few more days sending live unknown animals across foreign borders. Nothing to eat in what? Two weeks?"
"The lightning actually struck the tree twenty days ago."
"Yet here they are wiggling merrily in the bottom of their new glass home. Any idea how long a worm can live without any food?"
"No clue," Jaws replied. "We haven't exactly identified them yet."
“If they are related to beef worms we need to be careful with them. The beef worm is the larvae of the bot fly and is generally about one tenth the size of these worms. Bot flies bite mammals, usually livestock, but also people, and place their eggs in the wound. About a week later, the beef worm is large enough to raise a bump under the skin. They literally are sustained by the flesh of the person carrying them.”
Drenon turned to Jaws with a serious look on his face. "My first suggestions would be to put a cover on this aquarium. If these are a variation of the beef worm, they will eventually morph into some kind of flying insect you certainly do not want to be bitten by."
~ Chapter III ~
Drenon couldn't make heads or tails of what he was seeing. He was well versed in the study of trees and plant life, but worm guts were not his specialty. It was odd how difficult it was to kill the worms so he could dissect them. He tried putting them in formaldehyde, but they just swam around until they were removed. Finally, he just decided to dissect them alive, and they still continued to writhe while clamped down. Only cutting off the head seemed to stop them completely.
He had taken some of them out into a less secure lab and attempted to feed them. They refused to eat any of the leaves, vegetables or wood he provided. He had requested a living branch from a cotton tree from his contacts in the Belize government, but the nearest one was many hundreds of miles from the Texas laboratory. His contacts estimated it would be days before it arrived. He had researched and found some worms could live for many weeks without food or water so he stopped worrying about their feeding for the moment.
The toxicity results came back in the afternoon and were also confusing. The worms were not poisonous, but their body fluids contained high dosages of the same acid found left over in the dead cotton trees. A handwritten message at the bottom of the memo said, "When can you send one of these to Dr. Slavin in the biology lab? Congratulations, you get to name a new species." Drenon made a few copies and filed them in the ever thickening folder.
Drenon was used to studying plants exclusively and had reached the end of his ability to gain new information from the worms. He had looked up the information available online, but there was simply no information on the web to explain what he was seeing. He took a small glass jar, picked up two unlucky worms from his collection, grabbed a copy of the toxicity report, and headed out to the biology lab.
Drenon looked around the lab as he walked in. The layout and feel of the room were much like the lab he worked in. Wooden cabinets with glass fronts surrounded the room above black ceramic countertops. A thin drawer was pulled out containing hundreds of insects pinned to three narrow sheets of wood. Microscopes of different sizes dominated working spaces and large pieces of unidentified machinery were shoved into every corner.
Drenon had never met Dr. Slavin before. He was a relatively new professor at the university. He was not particularly well known, but was well respected by his peers. Slavin turned out to be an unusually tall man with a harsh Russian accent. His large hand reached all the way around Drenon's when they shook. The punishing grip reminded him of Popeye squeezing the spinach out of a tin can.
"What do you need," Slavin asked.
"I have a worm here I am told is a new species. I was asked to bring a few down to you for analysis.”
"A few? You have more than one? Usually I just get one, and it almost always turns out to be a species already identified. If you have more than one there is no way it is new. Hold on."
Slavin turned away and walked over to the wall
to pick up a ringing phone.
Drenon walked around casually looking at all of the equipment to see if he could find anything he could use for his own studies. Recognizing a microscope he had been thinking about purchasing himself, he peered into a small Nikon to check its clarity.
A large hand settled on his shoulder pulling him upright. "That is a very expensive piece of equipment I am assuming you do not want to pay for."
"Sorry. Where can I leave these worms?"
"Jennifer over there," Slavin pointed, "will give you some paperwork to fill out. Leave them with her. I will get back to you."
"When do you think you will know something?" Drenon asked. "These worms are destroying an ecosystem."
"I am working on some important things; I will call you when I get to you. It might take a while." Slavin turned and walked away muttering, "Important things."
Drenon was irritated by the abruptness and at being dismissed. He had not noticed Jennifer when he walked in. She sat at a small desk covered with papers in the back corner of the room. Jennifer was short and chunky. She was staring at a computer screen with a scowl on her face when he walked up. She continued to ignore him even after he arrived and sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the well-worn desk.
"Hi there, Dr. Slavin asked me to fill out some paperwork in reference to a potential new species I have here with me."
Jennifer reached to her left, opened a drawer and pulled out a clipboard without taking her eyes from the screen. "Fill this out," she said handing the paperwork to Drenon.
Luckily he had a pen in his pocket. There was not one included with the paperwork, and he was a little too irritated to ask politely. “What is it with this place?” he asked himself. He sat down and started filling out what he could. Fortunately the paperwork was limited to two pages and Drenon was done within ten minutes. He pulled the toxicity report out of his pocket and unfolded it, then handed the three pages to Jennifer.
"What's your number?" she asked.
"It is on the form next to the words Phone Number," Drenon replied irritably.
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