by Jack Wallen
“Bethany, I want you to promise me something.” She had been busy playing nurse by wiping my forehead and neck clean of grime and sweat. Her touch was simultaneously calming and electrifying.
“Anything.”
“If I tilt full-zombie, and the doctor can’t help me, I want you to kill me.” My request smacked her dead center in the face. Her eyes blinked back a rivulet of tears.
“How can you…I can’t…why are you…how can you?” She seemed caught in some shock-zone, infinite loop, unable to fully register my request.
“I need you to promise me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my time on this planet slurping brain stew. I can’t trust the doctor, and Susan is too young. You’re the only hope I have of dying with a bit of dignity. You’ve seen those things out there. They aren’t human. I don’t―”
And then she kissed me. It was a deep, hot, passionate kiss that had an undertone of familiarity. It was a kiss shared by two lovers whose fire had just been reignited. A husband and wife, married for decades, seeing one another in the same way they did when they first made love. I wanted that kiss to go on for eternity.
But then it was interrupted by an alarm. It wasn’t a loud, fire-engine type alarm, but more of a delicate chiming sound. Somehow, that delicate chiming was still, very obviously, an alarm.
“What is it?” Bethany pulled away, her face still in my hands.
“I don’t know, but it just interrupted the single most perfect moment of my life.”
Bethany gave me a sweet glance before returning her attention to nerd central. It took her mere seconds to spot a light blinking in accordance with the chime. Next to the light was a switch. Below the switch was a label. On the label was printed, in bold letters:
SATCOM 1
Bethany turned her attention to the keyboard and worked some magic at the keys.
“There’s an incoming, encrypted message. It looks like it’s for our Dr. Godwin. It’s an official government communication. If I crack it and read it, I’m breaking about seven thousand different laws, all of which are punishable by burning at the stake.” Bethany stopped and turned to me. “Of course, you know I have to crack this file. I won’t be able to sleep until I do.”
“And if you crack it, I will have to read it, which means they’ll have to burn my ass as well.”
There was some poetry to our exchange – at least on the metaphoric level.
“I bet I can crack this bitch in under thirty minutes.” Bethany was outright glowing.
“No way…it’s government cipher.”
She turned to me with a wicked grin. “If I don’t crack it in under thirty, the panties are yours to keep.”
“What about their contents?” I wicked-grinned back.
“Those, too.”
And with that, Bethany turned to the keyboard and began furiously typing. Naturally, I wanted to distract her, but I was afraid a single distraction might send her into fits of rage that would land me in bed alone for the rest of my nights. So, I thought twice about being a pest.
A bell rang outside in the hall. I had nearly forgotten there was anything outside of Room 77. Up until now, nothing existed but me and Bethany.
How hideously and hopelessly romantic. I wanted to vomit, but I wasn’t sure if that was my inner-moaner or my inner-cynic creeping out.
“Jacob, please report back to sick bay.” It was Dr. Godwin’s voice over a PA system.
“I feel like I’m caught in the middle of a Star Trek episode, and I’m being called by Dr. McCoy.” I smiled at Bethany.
“Tease.” She giggled at my nerd nod.
Feeling smooth and cool, I exited the room.
Outside of Room 77 the air was heavier and the lighting darker. The farther I walked, the heavier the air became. My lungs felt as if they weren’t working, like they were filling with water or foam. And then, as if I stepped out into a vacuum, every molecule of air disappeared from my lungs. I couldn’t inhale; I couldn’t exhale. I should have been in a panic, but instead the only emotion to hit me was rage. My hands wanted to rip apart anything they could touch.
And with bitter timing, Susan came into view. My hands reached out and grasped her shoulders. She screamed something unintelligible. The girl started writhing under the hold of my hands until she managed to tear away, her top nearly ripping off in the process. As I watched her disappear down the hall, my vision started to tunnel, and then everything went black.
Chapter 17: The cell, the panties, and the dead wife
I was trapped in a small room, Spartan in decoration and utilitarian in nature. The only items of note in the room were my notebook and digital recorder. My head was pounding, and my mouth felt like I’d been sucking on cotton rags. I had no memory of what had brought me to this room. No matter how much I strained, I couldn’t recall anything after reaching for Susan in the hallway.
I had the recorder, but I was afraid to listen. I didn’t want to know what had happened, what would have caused me to actually lose fragments of my memory. The fear of drawing ever closer to full-on zombie was overwhelming.
Fuck.
Right now was one of those moments when I fully understood why desperate people deep-throated shotguns to splatter-paint their living room walls with their gray matter. If I had a gun at this moment, I thought I could pull the trigger. The idea of ending my life to avoid what I thought was imminent sounded perfectly logical.
Seriously, given the choice of dying with some dignity or trundling around like an extra in Dawn of the Dead, I knew exactly the choice I would make. I hadn’t seen even the slightest joy in the eyes of the moaners. I’d seen their suffering face to face. I smelled the rot in their breath, heard the constant death-rattle seeping out between their lips. It was horror. Grand Guignol in the flesh, and I wanted no part of it.
It seemed, however, that I had no choice. Dr. Godwin posed the same questions I had been asking myself: What were we to do, should I turn into one of the undead? Was it worth risking the lives of the others? But why this? Why did I agree to this insane experiment? The greater good? I wanted so badly to shout to the rafters, “Fuck the greater good! I’m out!” I knew I couldn’t really do that. But I could at least get some answers.
“Hey! I want to talk!” Pounding on the door with all the might I could muster in my dying limbs rattled my bones more than it made any real noise. “Doctor Godwin? Susan? Bethany?” My shoulder slamming against the door did about as much good as my slamming fists. I kicked the door. I smashed a chair against it, which did nothing more than bend a leg of the chair and send shockwaves up my arms.
So, it boiled down to this: I was being held captive against my will as I spiraled downward into the black abyss of moaner-hood. It was really dawning on me how fucked the situation was. As if it weren’t bad enough, now I was trapped in a cell with little more than a government-issue, prison-like bed, prevented from doing anything about my situation by a simple door, a door I couldn’t possibly open. I always liked to think that when one door closed, another opened. But right now, I saw only one damn door. Fuck me.
“Jacob?” The voice was obviously the doctor’s, and it wasn’t coming from the other side of the door. It was electronic, disconnected.
“Hello?” I called out.
“I hear you, Jacob.”
“What’s going on, Godwin? Why am I locked in this room?” I tried to ignore the fact that I most likely knew why I was incarcerated. I was hoping a little feigned innocence would win me some sympathy.
“I think you know why you are in your current situation.” The doctor’s voice had an undertone of anger.
I had to continue the lie. Maybe there was a chance the father had no idea his little daughter was infected. That is, of course, if she even was infected. I had no way of knowing for sure if I had bitten her when I attacked her in the hall.
“Jacob, I believe your condition has progressed more rapidly than expected. Because of this, I had to lock you in that room. This way I can observe
you more carefully.”
No matter how right the man was, I wanted to kill him at the moment.
“Jacob, I am going to have to rely on you for blood samples. I can’t risk infection at this stage.” The voice broke my daydream of crushing Godwin’s skull and sifting through his oversized brain-pan. Instead, I listened. I was instructed to take a syringe full of blood every hour and place it in the small sliding hatch-box attached to the door. After I did this, the doctor would safely snatch his sample from the box on the other side of the wall.
The problem with this plan was that I had never drained blood. My own, or anyone else’s. I had never stuck a needle in a vein. To me, the act had always seemed like a sort of morbid masturbation.
I really had no choice but to comply. Maybe I would get an early parole for good behavior if I just learned how to draw my own damn blood. It was starting to really hit me that the only way I was getting out of this nightmare was if either a cure was found, or I died. I hadn’t lost my mind yet, but the writing on the wall was crystal clear. Even a zombie-in-training could read it.
“Dr. Godwin?” A plan was forming in my mind.
“Yes, Jacob?”
“I would like to speak to Bethany.”
The doctor agreed to bring Bethany to the control room so we could chat. But how would I communicate with her with the doctor most likely standing by her side? How could I ask if she had accomplished the decryption?
The answer, much to my delight, was in Bethany’s panties.
It didn’t take long for the doctor to get Bethany to the disembodied mic on the other side of the rainbow.
“Jacob? Are you okay?” Her voice was a bit edgy, not the relaxed, youthful tone I had last heard from her. I wasn’t exactly sure how to read it. Had Godwin made threats? Or was she concerned about my wellbeing? My guess was that Godwin had done nothing, in order to keep up appearances.
“I’m fine. Just your average locked-up zombie-wannabe still hoping to get into your panties.” I was pretty sure the latter part of the statement would throw Godwin for a loop.
“Sorry, dear, the panties are still mine. You can have what’s inside, though.” There was a smile trapped somewhere in her voice, probably happy that I had figured out some strange way to encode a message. I was thinking on her level, geek to geek.
Bethany’s message was clear. She had decrypted the message and done so in less than thirty minutes. Now for the real test: how was she going to pass the contents along to me without Godwin knowing?
“I’ll take you up on that one.” I hoped she knew I was being honest.
“It’s all yours.”
She knew.
Great. Now I was locked away in solitary confinement, slowly transforming into a zombie, and I was horny.
“Jacob.” It was Godwin. “Bethany asked me to pass on a book to you from her. She said the book had a good message that might help you get through this ordeal. Quite a sweet girl, our Bethany. I wish I could assure you that you would be seeing her again. I can’t, however. Your state is too unpredictable.”
“Jacob,” Bethany’s voice sang over the speakers. “He’s telling me I have to go now. Read the book. Take notes because I’ll want to discuss it at our next book club meeting. I’ll talk to you soon.”
I had to admit, the girl was good. Not only did she manage to decrypt a government-encoded message, it seemed she might have hidden that message in a book to be passed to me by the man holding me captive. Brilliant! It wasn’t really that difficult actually. Hell, I’m surprised Godwin didn’t figure it out. But he didn’t, and he had no idea we had intercepted his message.
Oh, this was getting interesting. I hoped I would be able to stick around for the conclusion.
~
I need to stop for a moment, just pull myself out of the entire situation and try to explain what’s going on inside of me. I’m not really sure how to put this into words. Really, how does one go about describing the transformation from human to zombie? I don’t want this to happen to me. It’s like Thor’s Hammer was crafted of irony and swung down from the sky to smack me across the face. Why do I say that? Well, outside of the whole ‘turning into a zombie’ thing, there is the ‘falling in love’ thing.
If this infection had happened a week earlier, to be perfectly honest, I just wouldn’t have cared. I would have looked the fucker that bit me square in the eye and said, “Please, take me out of my lonely misery and do what you will.” When I was hiding underneath that truck, witnessing that zombie suck the brains out of that woman, I mentioned the only other woman I had ever had feelings for. I didn’t really get much of an opportunity to explain that. I guess I have all the time in the world now, at least until I no longer have control over my higher functions, so I might as well explain myself.
I was married once. She was incredible, everything I had ever longed for in a woman. We had so much in common. We read the same authors, enjoyed the same food, loved the outdoors, had no desire for children, and shared the same passion for artistic films; the list goes on and on. From the moment we met, we knew we were bound at the hip, the heart, and the soul. Outside of work, I spent every waking moment with that woman. And every moment was joyous.
If it sounds like a fairy tale, it was. Only this fairy tale was real, and I was living it.
We moved in together shortly after we made love for the first time. It was the natural next step. One day we awoke in my bed, looked at each other, and realized it was time. So she sold her house, packed her things, and moved in with me. It was glorious. Even our taste in decor was so similar it was as if we intended this merging at the moment we purchased our first duvet.
Our fairy-tale life continued. We were both professionals―she was a lawyer―so our work schedules were grueling. But at the end of every day we knew we were coming home to peace and salvation in the arms of one another.
On the night of October 13th―I remember it so well; it was a Friday, oddly enough―I was on an assignment, covering an election scandal. I had spent weeks trying to score an interview with an assistant to a candidate accused of laundering money. When I finally landed the interview, the assistant would only meet me late at night. I didn’t hesitate. That night, she gave me enough information to post a story that was the equivalent of a journalist’s wet dream. We spent hours discussing the past and future of a political candidate who could have been a miracle to a failing country.
The call came at exactly 10:35 p.m. A neighbor heard the screams and called the police. When they arrived, it was only to chase down the man that had raped and murdered my wife. They didn’t catch him until after he had thrown the body in the river. The tide was high. The water took her body away. The next time I saw her was weeks later. Her skin―her eyes….
After seeing her body, I swore off relationships. Never again would I allow my heart to open up only to get crushed and feel an almost infinite pain, a pain that dwarfs the pain I feel when I visit zombie-land.
But then along comes Bethany, and now, when my heart is finally able to open up and accept the vulnerability and emotions that come with falling in love, I’m dying. I don’t want this. I want to fight the urge to continue falling for this amazing woman. I don’t want to have to deal with an aching heart while I deal with an almost overwhelming desire to crack open her skull and dine on her brain matter. That is not the kind of all-consuming love I want. And she certainly deserves more than to love a zombie.
This is insane. I know I should pull away, but I can’t. If I give up, I know Bethany and Susan will lose all hope of surviving…
Jesus! I’m starting to sound like a made-for-TV movie. Fuck! I don’t have the strength or the soundtrack for this. What I do have is a responsibility to make sure Bethany and Susan make it out of this shit-hole to safety. I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but I will keep them safe.
As for Doctor Godwin…that is another matter altogether. I have to keep him alive just long enough to make sure he finds a cure. After that, wh
o knows, maybe I will allow myself just one cranial snack.
~
Chapter 18: Godwinism
Dr. Godwin brought me the book, nothing more than a trashy love story. I assumed Bethany had found the book somewhere here in the station. At least I hoped she hadn’t been carrying around such a book. I assumed her to be much more intelligent than that. Anyway, none of that really mattered. What really mattered was what was inside.
A quick scan through the pages revealed that Bethany had taken the time to find the words from the encrypted message and underline them. But she chose very carefully to make it look as if she was just trying to point out important passages in the otherwise worthless text.
I started from the front, but it didn’t make sense. The isolated strings were fine, but when placed together, it was nonsense. It didn’t take me long to realize that Bethany had started from the back of the book. Smart, smart girl.
The hidden message read:
We have successfully imprinted another subject. It seems we can control the most violent behavior. It is time to take subject to stage two of the process. Once your male has gone through sufficient isolation, the metamorphosis should be complete. When the change is one hundred percent, it will be time to begin the training phase.
I had to read the message two or three times before I could even begin to believe it. And when I did finally believe it, my entire body began shaking with rage. This was all so much Cold War, axis-of-evil shit. I remembered living in a time when fiction was fiction, and it never crossed into the realm of reality. Now it seemed someone had managed to get caught in a time-warp, landing themselves back in Hitler’s day, thinking the Germans were once again the supreme evil to be destroyed. But in this story, the thinking was skewed, and the thinker in command had decided only one weapon could take down the Reich―Zombies.
