by Adams, Lucia
“Brian? I have your medicine.” I crept down the corridor.
“That fucking smell is gross. It’s like somebody died in here,” Gary said. I swung around and glared at him. Oh shit! More urgently this time, I said, “Brian!” That poor kid had been through so much. I felt so incapable. The sight of his mother floating through the air would not leave my head. I could feel Gary on my shoulder as I inched towards the room.
I peered around the door, and the stench nearly knocked me over. I saw him straight away. The poor little fella had his back to me as he looked out of the window. My heart went to him. I knew what was out there, what was lying broken on the rain-soaked, cobble-locked street.
“Brian, come away from the window,” I said, as gently as I could.
The little boy turned slowly. I had an image of a group of kids knocking on my door collecting sweets for the Halloween party—cute little things all dressed up in their handmade costumes. Trick or treat!
“Oh fuck, this is not good,” Gary whimpered from behind me. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.
Brian snarled a junior version of the zombie theme tune, a sort of low moan from the back of the throat. His little face had the sunken cheeks and dark eyes of the infected, and blood dripped from his bottom lip, down his chin. That’s when I caught sight of the body behind him. It looked like Lisa from the next floor. How many times had I drooled over her and the cute little skirts she wore? It always felt as if she were teasing me… she had this way of smiling. Not anymore.
This explained why Mrs. Watson was lying with her skull decorating the footpath below the window. Imagine seeing your only child turned into a flesh craving zombie. Jesus, he’d probably tried to eat her.
I gripped the axe tightly. This whole thing was so fucked up. It was hard not to imagine that God or some greater source had just gotten fed up with us and decided to flush us out of existence. Surely they could have picked a kinder way. I was going to say more humane, but inflicting the maximum amount of suffering has always been the human way.
“Don’t make me do this,” I said. I searched his milk-white, empty eyes for any trace of the child who had once been there; the poor sick child who had problems breathing. I had his pills in my pocket. My vision was getting blurred from tears forming in my eyes.
“Oh shit, shit, shit,” Gary said rapidly behind me. “Here he comes!”
I swear to God, I was going to bury that axe in Gary’s head any minute.
How could I have been so bloody stupid? The open door, the smell, and I, like a moron, go charging in. I suppose watching your friends being eaten alive will do that to you.
Brian started to run towards me. It was probably the fastest his ill body had ever run in his whole life.It’s not him, it’s not him, I repeated in my head. His face was a mask of twisted hate and hunger, a grotesque parody of a little boy. Why could I not get past the Halloween costume? This was no holiday, there would be no party at the end of it all, just survival.
Closing my eyes, I swung the axe. His neck was at just the right height for my weapon to complete a perfect arc. The momentum of his legs kept his body going until it crashed into the wall behind me. His head flew through the air, spinning like a comet traversing the night sky, with hair and blood for a disintegrating tail. Gary retched and then puked behind me. I couldn’t move as I contemplated what I had just done. Images of Mrs. Watson and her ill son, Brian, walking down the corridor, smiling a greeting to me as they passed, flooded my memory banks. He had never been able to play football with the other kids, or rip around a playground, whooping with laughter. His life expectancy was probably not that great anyway. I wiped the tears from my cheeks and the snot from my nose before turning my back on Mrs. Watson and her son.
“You left the fuckin’ door open,” I spat at Gary, pushing him out of my way.
Life is shit.
CHAPTER 9
Omaha, Nebraska, USA
Sharon
His name was Tate, and he was a Spectacled Sun Bear who had a fondness for muskmelons. However, right now, he was doing his level best to take a bite out of anything that got within, well, biting range.
In the early 70’s, the zoo had set up an enclosure for a colony of prairie dogs. Unfortunately, no one thought to line the bottom of the exhibit with cement, and the little buggers dug their way out.
They quickly spread along the hillside on the north end of the zoo. As they seemed content to stay there, the directors decided to let them have free rein, along with the peacocks that prowled around showing off their vivid plumage and loudly shouting ‘pee-oor!’.
Three days ago, a groundskeeper found a dead rat near one of the prairie dog mounds. I examined the rat, and it tested positive for the Hauksson virus. By that time the following day, we had lost 50% of the prairie dog population. Two days later when I showed up for work, I was told there were only a dozen of them left alive out of a population of nearly a thousand.
I had gone to the board of directors and asked them to close the zoo before we had an animal-to-human event. They balked. I hinted at possible lawsuits from the families of the infected. The zoo was closed an hour later.
Beneath the zoo was a vast labyrinth of tunnels and cages. We put every animal we could in those cages and monitored them all for signs of infection. Tate started presenting symptoms right after lunchtime that same day. A few hours later, he was in full-on rage mode.
We were in the process of moving him as far away from the other animals as we could. One of the interns, Mindy, had the lead pole with a lasso on the end around his neck, while two animal handlers prepared the containment cage. It was small, about three feet wide and three feet high, and cramped. It had wheels so that we could move it easily and was only open on one end. As I said, not real pleasant, but I didn’t think Tate was concerned with comfort.
We finally managed to wrangle him in and close the door. The ground must have been wet. Mindy slipped and fell against the cage, and Tate bit her. Hard.
She screamed and fell back, holding her arm while blood trickled through her fingers. I stopped and exhaled, trying not to let panic show on my face. Thanks to my press release about a virulent strain of rabies, no one here knew about the effects the Hauksson virus had on humans.
Another intern rushed towards Mindy, intent upon helping her. “Don’t touch her!” I shouted. I hoped that the edge of panic I heard in my voice was not as evident to everyone else as it was to me.
“Mindy,” I said, kneeling down next to her. I had the first aid kit with me and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “I’m not sure what type of effects this virus will have on you, but we need to put you in quarantine.” I felt horrible, I had just looked her in the eye and lied, while Tate screamed and roared in his cage.
Pressing gauze to her arm, I examined the wound, and swabbed it for samples that I put in secure cases. “I am going to put you in the birthing room. You’ll be more comfortable there.” The zoo had the privilege of housing several severely endangered species. It was our goal to breed them whenever possible. A small, cement, windowless room that was kept warm and quiet was where we put the expectant mothers when they were due to give birth.
The room only had one door, but was riddled with cameras at various heights along the wall so that we could keep watch. The outer room was filled with medical equipment, including a surgical suite, just in case. I knew Mindy was going to die, but I was determined to learn as much as I could with the opportunity I now had.
I led her to the room and encouraged her to go inside. Locking the door behind me, I went to the control panel and spoke into the microphone. “Mindy, can you hear me?” I asked. She nodded. I had left the first aid kit with her. She was seated on the floor amidst a bed of hay, bandaging her arm. She was calm because I was calm. The guards looked at me and nodded. We had an understanding. When things went bad, they would deal with it. The two animal handlers left, completely unaware of the seriousness of Mindy’s bite.
“Mindy, I am going to sl
ide a tray of electrodes through the door. I want you to apply them and then talk to me about what you are feeling. Let me know if you start to experience pain or anything.” She nodded and swiped a hand across her mouth—she was drooling.
Tate screamed in his cage and thrashed about. I put the cameras on ‘record’ and went to tend to the sun bear. He was going to die; I knew that. There was no point in making him suffer. I walked over to the cabinet where we kept the medicines and prepared an anesthetic syringe. The dose was four times the regular amount and would prove fatal. Instead of dying in pain, he would just go to sleep and never wake up.
I had a dart gun that I put the syringe in. After loading it, I fired it into the cage, striking Tate in the large vein in his neck. He groaned and clawed at the dart, but couldn’t get it out. He calmed almost immediately, a few minutes later, he blinked his sad golden eyes at me, and died.
I swallowed and fought back the tears that welled and blurred my vision. But all thoughts of Tate left when I heard a crash from the birthing room. Mindy had thrown the metal first aid kit at the door and was pounding on the walls with such force that she left bloody handprints behind.
As I had requested, she talked her way through the symptoms, but not for very long. She had lost all ability to speak at eleven minutes, thirty seconds. Now, fifteen minutes after the bite, she was drooling profusely, and was extremely violent.
The electrodes sent signals to the machines that were monitoring her heart, blood pressure, and brain activity. Her brain stem was lit up like the 4th of July, and the monitors showed activity that was not generally found in a human brain. Her blood pressure was steadily climbing into dangerous levels, while her heart rate pounded away at over 180 beats per minute.
I made sure that the main computer was tracking the information that was coming from the monitors and that the cameras were still recording. Thankfully, they were digital, so running out of film was not an issue. There were nine cameras built into the walls. I could not watch them all at the moment, but I would be able to review the footage later.
Mindy raged on, banging her head against the wall and slamming the medical case around. Twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds into the event, Mindy’s heart exploded, and she died.
“Time of death, 16:43,” I said into the recorder. “Cause of death, heart failure induced by Hauksson virus.” I sighed and sat down. “Now we wait,” I said to no one. The guards assigned to me never spoke. I had grown used to that. There were three rotations of them. This was the second group. One looked much like the other, and I had long since given up trying to get to know them.
While Mindy lay dead, I let the monitors and camera keep recording and documenting. In the meantime, I walked over to Tate and took samples of his spinal fluid. I even drilled a hole in his skull and took brain samples.
It had been a month since my visit from the CDC and the various Powers That Be. From that point on, I had been trying to figure out a virus that could resurrect the dead. I knew what it was doing and how it was doing it; I just couldn’t figure out how it was possible for it to do what it did. A single-celled organism simply should not have that kind of ability.
I needed to know what allowed the virus to animate a dead brain. Was there a chemical that it released? In that time of hyper brain activity, was the virus synthesizing a new type of chemical that it would use for resurrection?
The scans only looked for what you told them to. If there was an unknown chemical that was released, I could not get the scans to test for it if they did not have a sample of what to look for—which meant that I would have to search for some unknown molecule that was likely hidden behind or within a normally occurring one. I needed a chromatograph. With that machine I could separate my samples into their chemical components and identify each one.
I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. I had been working non-stop since I found out about all of this, and I was exhausted. I must have fallen asleep, as a bleep on the monitors woke me. According to the clock on the wall it had been more than three hours since Mindy died. The underground catacombs echoed with the sounds of slumbering animals along with the occasional grumble from the nocturnal ones. My two guards stood by the door, faces impassive, but eyes alert.
I leaned forward and peered at the monitors. She hadn’t moved yet, but the EKG was registering activity. As I watched, a finger twitched, a foot wiggled, and seconds later, Mindy sat up. No heartbeat, no respiration, and only minimal brain activity, but she was up and moving.
I swallowed and tried to tamp down the panic that I was feeling. Up until this point, part of me didn’t really believe it. Now that I had seen it with my own eyes, there was no denying it.
I let the machines monitor for a few moments longer. She wasn’t really doing anything but wandering around the room. I suspected that she was just reacting to lack of stimuli. I broadcast a few animal sounds, and she turned towards them. She lifted her face and sniffed the air. The lack of expression was eerie, but it told me what I wanted to know—she was hunting.
I didn’t have an animal that I was willing to sacrifice, but I was pretty sure what she would do if I did. The virus wanted to spread; she would bite anything that moved. I didn’t need to see that to know it.
I sighed and nodded to one of the guards. He slid open a small window in the door. She reacted instantly, running towards the door with amazing speed and growling low in her throat. The Bengal tiger down the corridor heard her and snarled threateningly. They were reacting to her.
She crammed her arms through the slot, scraping off skin and exposing muscle and tendons to get to the guard. He stepped back, bent to see through the opening, and fired.
She fell to the ground in a heap with a single hole in the middle of her forehead. A few moments later, I unlocked the door, and we entered. As I had done with Tate, I took samples of her spinal fluid and brain stem.
One of the guards made a call. A short while later a team arrived. They zipped Mindy up inside a black body bag, disinfected the birthing room and containment cage with bleach, and left. Mindy’s family would be told that she was taken to a military quarantine facility where she would receive the absolute best care. Unfortunately, due to the infectious nature of the disease, there could be no visitors.
Three weeks later, 90% of the zoo’s animal population was dead, and the Military was about to call for a nation-wide retreat.
CHAPTER 10
Sarnia, Ontario, Canada
Gerry
I coasted up to the dock in Corunna just as the engine stalled out. The sudden absence of noise sent a shiver up my spine, causing me to wonder who (or what) had heard my approach. The boat’s fuel tank was empty, so I was pretty much committed. There were forty-five gallon drums of fuel behind the harbourmaster’s office. Every kid in Corunna who’d ever siphoned gas knew about it. I hopped off as the boat bumped along the wharf and tied it down. For better or worse, I was home. For gas. For food. For Carmen.
Carmen wasn’t a ‘who’—she was my motorcycle, and I wasn’t leaving town without her. Sunrise was an hour before, but the combined haze from the belching smokestacks of the Valley and unchecked burning houses had choked the sky, lending it the hues of a bruise. The streets were deserted, at least as far as I could tell, and the clock tower across from the now burning Provincial Police Station offered the only heartbeat my small hamlet could muster.
I’d planned on walking, taking a route through backyards and side streets to reach my house, but I found a discarded bicycle on a nearby front yard and pedaled for home. The shotgun had to be left behind, but I tucked a pair of .45s into my belt and teetered off down the street. I spied movement here and there, or thought I did, but after the attack by the woman back at the jail, I didn’t stop to investigate.
Funny how loud the wind is when the bustle of civilization isn’t there to drown it out. Every so often a whisper, a cry for help, a moan, a prayer, would reach me, but what could I do? I mean, other than feel like shit f
or being afraid? I was lucky to be alive as it was. No use tempting Fate.
I dumped the bike half a block from home and hoofed it the rest of the way. I felt like I was being watched, and travelling down the center of the street on a children’s bike left me feeling vulnerable. While cutting through a neighbor’s back yard, I came face to face with an infected woman caught in a clothesline. She’d somehow gotten the wire wrapped around her neck, and it dug in, cutting into her flesh as she flailed and jerked. She ceased struggling upon sensing my presence. I say ‘sense’ because sight would have been impossible. One eye-socket was a bloody cave, and the other eyeball hung from its stalk and bounced against her ruined cheek. My bowels turned to ice as her head tilted and she sniffed the air.
I gasped and raised my gun, and she pounced. She pounced and bounced back. I shakily lowered my gun as she lunged for me again and again. I stood mesmerized by the sheer tenacity of those infected with the virus. I pitied her, I feared and loathed what she’d become, but I was held rapt. I shook my head and turned away. With no voice box to moan out any sort of alarm, she was no threat to me. And soon, unless the line broke, she’d decapitate herself with the clothesline. I didn’t relish seeing that happen, so I left her behind.
Many houses on my block looked to have either been looted or had windows smashed, and mine was no exception. My front door stood wide open, and the bay window had been smashed from the inside, but whoever had done it had long since vanished.
I pulled a .45 and wasted no time entering the house. The feeling that eyes were following me grew with each minute spent in the open. The kitchen pantry had been ransacked; most of what remained had been trampled during what seemed to be a bloody struggle. Blood streaked the walls and floors leading to the rear of my bungalow. Fuck pillows, fuck the clothes. If one of those things was back there, I wasn’t going to fight them for my teddy bear. No blood marred the landing leading to the basement, but there was only one way up and down. No way was I going down there.
