All three men were still unconscious, so Smith was able to do his work in relative silence. The only sound was the decapitated head’s incessant chewing, its hunger now driving it to mangle its own tongue. Even without a body, Stephanie(Z) still felt the burning need. It was in a room with flesh that it would never get to taste, its heightened senses sending it into a maddening frenzy, liquid pouring out of its mouth. The salivary glands were still producing their virally laden brew, and Smith wondered how long it would be until the husk of a head simply dried up.
Clearly, that would not be happening any time soon, the saliva pooling on the metal table. Smith acquired himself a sterile syringe and began to suck up the juice where it poured from the zombie’s maw. The liquid was thick and viscous, almost oil-like in texture. It had a pale creaminess to it that did not represent any perceived health benefits. Just a speck of this was enough to infect someone with the virus.
With his sample selected, Smith stepped over to his chosen patient.
He wanted to recreate the conditions as best he could, so instead of injecting the concoction, Smith would apply it directly to an open wound. He didn’t even need to create one, Shah already having suffered several injuries on both arms and hands. There was a particularly impressive cut on his right forearm that would adequately do the job. Stripping off the sterile dressing he had previously placed, Smith was satisfied that the wound was still weeping. Shah for his part remained unaware of what was happening to him, dead to the world as he was. At some point that injury would need stitching up, but better to see if the subject actually survived everything that was being done to him. There still wasn’t enough data to prove that XV1 was successful in all cases, so there was little point battling with a needle and thread if the soldier was destined to die.
“This is a control test of the XV1 antiserum,” Smith said to the cameras and the microphone he had set up. “As has been noticed with the second test subject, further exposure of the virus, post serum delivery, may have unwanted side effects. This test is to determine if the side effects are an aberration or an unfortunate result of the antiserum itself.”
“And who are you going to send these results to?” The Voice asked. It had recently descended into a perpetually mocking tone which Smith found decidedly irritating.
“I thought I told you to keep quiet?” The words were out before Smith realised his mistake. The microphone was listening to everything, and he really didn’t want evidence of his madness to cloud the research he was doing. It wouldn’t be good for people watching his research to think he was talking to himself.
“You aren’t the boss of me,” The Voice insisted. Smith did what he could to quieten the volume of the annoying guest in his mind.
“I am applying the virus harvested from the saliva of one of the zombies that attacked the barracks here,” Smith said again for his electronic audience. Donning a pair of gloves, Smith picked up the syringe and drizzled the fluid into the gash in Shah’s flesh. To ensure the highest chance of getting it into the bloodstream, Smith massaged the liquid into the laceration with his thumb. Shah murmured something as he did so, but other than that there was barely any reaction.
“Your experiment is flawed because you fail to understand what is happening here,” The Voice insisted, resurfacing from the box Smith had hoped he had shoved it down into. As much as he knew he shouldn’t be conversing with his own mind like this, Smith suddenly felt compelled to defend the scientific process he was using. He resisted the urge to respond, however. Smith didn’t see why he had to explain himself to himself. “However, this approach is necessary as a lesson in your own stupidity. Will you be doing the same with the other two?”
“That would defeat the object of the experiment. The other two are my controls.”
“What nonsense you speak. I’ll come back when there is more chance of you talking sense.” That was hardly a threat, thought Smith. With that, The Voice disappeared from Smith’s mind.
With the zombie saliva delivered, Smith reapplied the sterile gauze dressing. He wasn’t too worried about the risk of secondary infection, even though human bites and human saliva were nasty with the bacterial load that could be delivered. One of the things that they had managed to discover about Lazarus was that it didn’t just attack human cells. It suppressed the natural floral bacteria present throughout the human body, which explained why the resurrected bodies were so slow to decompose. The zombie’s saliva itself was basically as sterile as urine except for the Lazarus it carried. And if the worst happened, Smith had plenty of antibiotics on hand if need be.
Curiosity suddenly grabbed him, his damaged fingers beginning to ache as if to remind Smith about something he had forgotten. Smith stripped the glove off his hands and examined where the zombie had chewed his fingers off, the two missing digits marked by the professionally applied, if not somewhat soiled surgical dressing. Those dressings clearly needed to be replaced, and he stripped them off, anxious to see what was underneath.
The ache intensified into a brief flash of fire that rippled through his arm, Smith finding it almost intoxicating. That was something new to him, and before removing them completely, Smith squeezed the once sterile gauze back onto the stumps that had once been fingers. The pain fired off again, Smith breathing hard as the agony almost overwhelmed him. Smith had been able to endure pain in the past, but he had never enjoyed it before. That was exactly the right word to use for what he was now experiencing.
“I wondered how long it would be for you to discover that,” The Voice almost laughed, back again. Clearly, its threat to stay away had been a lie. The dressing fell to the floor, and Smith looked at what should have been ragged remnants of his ring and middle finger. Being a medical doctor, he knew what the wounds should look like, and this was all wrong. Although there was blood still caked over the damaged ends, there was evidence of healing far in excess of what should be possible. He had no hope that the fingers would grow back, but it was obvious that he didn’t need to worry about infection. The flesh there was already knitting together.
Was this another side effect of his experiment? Clearly it was, and he had three injured men in his possession to experiment further on in that regard. Smith didn’t think he would be unshackling them any time soon, but it was another reason not to stitch up the gashes many of them were sporting. Perhaps whatever he was doing to them would do the work of repair for him.
“They aren’t going to like that confinement,” The Voice warned. “You should release them as soon as they come round.”
“I’m running this experiment,” Smith advised. “I say when it’s over.” This time he did not voice the words with his mouth.
“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Colonel Smith?” For a moment, Smith was confused as to who was speaking to him. The sound seemed to come from all around him and a small tendril of fear formed in his brain. Am I hearing more voices now?
“Colonel Smith, can you hear me?” Smith looked around, and his fear evaporated when he saw the face on his laptop monitor. An excited woman was looking back to him from the USAMRIID feed. The backdrop was different from the empty office he remembered. Wherever the woman was, it was well lit, the whiteness of the walls screaming sterility.
“I can hear you,” Smith said. The woman was not one of the people he had originally been relaying his research to. “Who are you, please?”
“My name is Professor Schmidt. I have been put in charge of combatting Lazarus here at Fort Detrick. We have been monitoring your broadcasts.”
“She looks nice,” The Voice said. “You just need to stick her in leather and give her a whip.” Schmidt’s gaunt face and tied back hair did give her the air of what The Voice was alluding to. She was almost a walking stereotype.
“Are you up to date with my present experiment?” Smith was animated now, the chance to share what he knew bubbling inside him. Strangely though, any pride he should have felt seemed to be absent.
“Why don’t you give me the bullet points,” Schmidt advised.
“I see. Yes, very well. I have administered the last of the antiserum XV1 to these three infected volunteers in the hope of ascertaining its safety.”
“Volunteers? It’s not like you gave them a choice really now is it.” Smith found it difficult to think with the laughter that suddenly erupted in his head.
“Do you have any reason to think XV1 isn’t safe? We have already begun harvesting our own immune patients.” Smith was surprised by the use of the word harvesting, but what better word was there? He stared at the screen for a moment, pondering just how much he should tell Schmidt. Was there any reason for him NOT to tell her everything he had so far discovered.
“Yes I do,” Smith said with regret. “The first test subject showed no side effects, but he was not infected with Lazarus as I’m sure you know.” Nick had failed to tell Smith about his belief that Azrael was naturally immune. “You have the data on when I injected myself, I assume?”
“Yes,” came the response. “We have the video and the blood test results Dr Patel did after the antiserum had been administered. It shows that XV1 successfully eradicated the virus from your system.” It occurred to Smith at that moment that he had never actually confirmed that himself. With the death of Patel and the outbreak of the undead in the North Manchester General Hospital, he had never had the chance to actually ascertain that the virus was gone from his body.
“Behold the great scientist,” The Voice scoffed yet again.
“When I came to, the hospital I was in was under attack from the undead, and I got bitten by a zombie. I’m still around, so it implies XV1 protects against post injection exposure as well.”
“What are you not telling me, Colonel?” Schmidt’s voice was demanding, the face searching for the deception that Smith was so tempted to employ.
“I wouldn’t tell her if I were you.”
“Shut up,” Smith said angrily.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry Professor, I wasn’t talking to you. It’s part of why I’m doing these further experiments.”
“So you were talking to yourself?” There was no alarm in Schmidt’s voice, just brutal scientific curiosity.
“Yes. It is my belief that either the XV1 alone or in combination with further exposure to Lazarus resulted in me suffering a psychotic break.” There, he said it. Would the future praise him for his brutal honesty, or reject him for his self-confessed madness?
“I see,” Schmidt said sadly. “This is not good news.” Schmidt had already been made aware of how desperate the new US President was for some sort of cure. It was unlikely the President would accept a healing concoction that turned people mad…unless it was limited in use to her political opponents. The other problem for Schmidt was that, so far, she had been unable to recreate Smith’s experiment.
“There’s more,” Smith added. “For some reason, I have a limited control over the undead.”
“Maybe you should have told her that bit before you revealed you were a stark raving lunatic.” Smith found himself agreeing with that. Maybe he should have even videoed some of his interactions with the zombies he had been able to command. Something to add to the list of future tasks.
“Do you have proof of this?” Schmidt enquired. Smith shook his head, only to realise he might actually have a way to show her.
“Give me a second,” Smith said. The severed head of Stephanie(Z) was still resting on the table, and he brought it over so Schmidt could see. She didn’t recoil from the horrific sight, instead moving closer to her own screen. The zombie’s head lay there, chewing.
“Open your mouth wide,” Smith said, the zombie head following his command. He repeated several other commands which the decaying head followed.
“Fascinating. That would make a great parlour trick,” Schmidt said.
“I have just exposed one of the subjects to further viral load. I think we will know in a few hours what the situation is.”
“I need to update our files with this data, so please keep this line open,” Schmidt ordered. “I will have someone monitoring your experiments. Good work, Doctor.” With that, the face of Schmidt disappeared from view.
“I think she likes you,” The Voice teased. Smith didn’t tell it to shut up. He had told his secret to the world, and the world, so far, hadn’t rejected him. He should have felt happy, and yet that emotion too seemed to be strangely lacking. Standing there looking at the computer screen, Smith realised he kind of felt dead inside.
23.08.19
Frederick, USA
Anthony Powell or Big T as his friends called him, was no longer asleep but he hid that knowledge from whoever might have been watching. Trust was a concept he would be abandoning for the foreseeable future. With his immense size, the needle they had stuck in his neck had still worked, it’s just that its effects were shortened by his impressive metabolism.
In this place, he was known as AP35BM.
Those who knew Anthony generally liked him for he was amiable, humorous and slow to anger. While not religious, he was generous, giving more than perhaps he should to charity, well aware that he earnt more than most and lived a good and prosperous life. His huge size could have been easily used to intimidate people, but he had an infectious smile and a way of making people feel at ease that quickly made people warm to him. Even though he was an African American, he hadn’t experienced much in the way of racism in his life. Growing up in a well to do middle-class family helped with that, the schools he was sent to being progressive and left-leaning. The only lessons in the true evils of racism he experienced were given to him by his grandfather who went out of his way to tell a much younger Anthony about how things used to be, and in some places still were. You had to learn from the lessons history gave you.
At that age, there were still states where a black man was considered inferior to Caucasians, but Anthony had not lived in such a state. At the age of thirty-five, he thought he had life pretty good.
Whilst his parents had both been lawyers fighting for the civil rights most people now enjoyed, Anthony had not followed the example of those who raised him. At the age of fourteen, he had woken up one morning and told his parents that he wanted to be a dentist. He had no idea why he had chosen that profession, but it stuck with him, and he had worked hard to get the grades he needed to make his parents proud. Unlike most teenagers, Anthony never really went through a rebellious stage, instead any anger and pent up testosterone was used up in the gym which was something else he had taken to at a relatively young time in life. Strangely for someone of his physical potential, he never enjoyed playing sports, football, in particular, being of little interest to him. And all the while his parents had never pushed him, preferring to support the road he chose, believing that true happiness could only be achieved by finding your own way in life as well as making your own mistakes.
Well, Anthony wasn’t happy now. The bastard behind his eyes was easing gradually, but inside, his normal placid nature was competing with outraged indignation at what had been done to him. It was clear to Big T that his forced incarceration was nothing to do with race, the other prisoners here all white of skin. Still, it was an assault upon his person, those liberties his parents had helped strengthen ripped to shreds right in front of his face. The constitution had been desecrated.
One of the other things that had helped him throughout his life was his innate sense of justice about what was right. He knew when to let things slide, and he knew when someone needed to take a stand. You could do that and still maintain that calm and measured exterior. That calmness hadn’t worked when the soldiers had taken him though, the injection delivered before he’d had any chance to react, his size useless when faced with their training and their numbers.
Despite his immunity, Lazarus had given him a hard time, exacerbating the asthma that he had suffered for as long as he could remember. People were often shocked when a person as huge as Big T displayed such frail
ty, and he had been fortunate that it had been under control for most of his adult life. The medication he took and his ability to handle stress had meant it had been two years since he had experienced any kind of attack. That all changed when he visited the coffee house next to his office, picking up the virus from a barista who was only just starting to show the earliest of symptoms. Simply touching the same cup had been enough, the virus greedy to get into another host body. That one coffee shop had been the primary centre for the viral spread throughout the city of Boston.
Late on the night of the twenty-first, the asthma attack had taken him totally by surprise. He had been feeling under the weather all that day, and with the nationwide Presidential Alert that had forced him to close up his office and head home, there was a worry that his grogginess and general mild flu-like symptoms might be down to the biological attack his country was under. His wife had fussed over him, making him take it easy with subtle jibes about his man flu. She too used that to mask her own fears, of course, the symptoms from her own infection still to manifest.
When the asthma attack hit, the inhaler medication did nothing to alleviate it. Anthony’s wife did the only thing that made sense, driving him to the nearest emergency room despite the curfew that had been placed across the city of Boston. With so few cars on the roads, it was inevitable that her dash of mercy had come to the attention of a patrol car that stopped her. Fortunately for Anthony and his wife, the patrol officer could see that their reasons for breaking curfew were legitimate, and he gave them an escort to ensure their safe arrival at the hospital.
Once again, Anthony Powell had experienced the opposite of the narrative that all white cops were racist.
Of the cities in the United States, Boston was only in the very early stages of the Lazarus infection, no undead having risen up there at that time. Many who ran the city even thought it might well be possible that they had escaped the virus. Anthony was thus able to be seen in the Emergency Department, his asthma so severe he had needed to be admitted. With no kids to look after, his wife stayed with him, choosing to sleep in a chair next to Anthony’s hospital bed. She fell asleep with tears in her eyes and his hand in hers, so full of worry for the man who had swept her off her feet nearly ten years before.
The Lazarus Strain Chronicles (Book 3): The Fall Page 17
