Necrovirus: A Zombie Apocalypse

by James King

  And all the while, behind them, the massed ranks of Alchester’s dead advanced: lurching, staggering, groping, and the bright unholy fire leapt amongst them.

  Twenty Three

  The command to launch Protocol Zero went through at ten minutes passed ten on that morning of Monday the 16th of July. Lewis had been right, and the procedure had been set in motion a good twenty minutes prior to the original start time. Scouts had observed the escalating situation in Alchester – had seen the explosion, and how the resulting fire had seemed to energise the infected rather than destroy them. And so the wheel had been set in motion, a terrible swift wheel of fortune whose pointer would only ever settle at violence and death.

  The order made its way through the chain of command from the highest on down. Its progress was swift – terrifyingly so – and no less than ten minutes after the procedure had been confirmed, the electronic and mechanical processes that would ultimately result in mass devastation had been initiated.

  The missiles were housed in a secret compound in the South of England. There were fifty missiles in all stored in readiness at this particular location, but only one would be needed this day. Its yield was 1.5 kilotons, which would be easily enough explosive power for what this version of Protocol Zero needed. The nuclear fallout would be considerable, but that was an acceptable risk. All outcomes had been considered, all risk thoroughly assessed, all pros and cons weighed carefully in the balance. The use of nuclear weaponry - particularly on home soil – would at one time have been unthinkable, but the threat that the Necrovirus posed had been made clear at the highest level. It had been decided that there was only one solution to this problem: nuclear immolation. Terrible, terrifying: but the only and ultimate course of action.

  And so the procedure was initiated. Passwords were entered and programmes were engaged. Coordinates were plotted. The countdown began. And then, at last, the lid of the missile silo slid open, and the missile’s propulsion systems were engaged. It rose gradually at first, but with increasing speed, a huge finger of death pointing skyward as it was lifted from its subterranean lair. And then it was free of its silo, rocketing toward the sky, leaving the sharp white line of its contrails behind it. It reached a height of thirty thousand feet, and then its internal guidance systems kicked in. The missile turned, tilted; pointed its nose toward the ultimate ground zero. And then, with vicious speed, it seethed toward Alchester, closing the gap mile by mile, second by second, cutting the air before it.

  It would take less than five minutes to arrive. Then it would detonate in a programmed airburst of three thousand feet. Then there would be light: the purest, strongest, most blinding light known to nature. And by that light, they hoped, the darkness would be banished.

  Anyone within a five mile radius of Alchester now had seconds left to live.

  Twenty Four

  Doctor Christian Morrell sat in his darkened laboratory and gazed downward at the table before him. There were two items on the table. One was a hypodermic syringe that was full of a liquid that was so purely black that it might have been ink. The other object was a Smith and Wesson revolver. The revolver gleamed, metallic and deadly, beneath the laboratory’s dim lights: a machine that was constructed only for death and destruction - a frightening artefact to be sure. But, of the two items, it was the hypodermic that most frightened Morrell. Or - to be more precise – it was the substance that the hypodermic contained that frightened him. The Necrovirus...

  He had kept some of the virus back after Gudrie had ordered the project to be terminated. Morrell wasn’t sure why he had done this. Perhaps he had harboured some desire to continue his experiments in secret. Or perhaps he had seen it as a defence against some future crisis, a bargaining chip of sorts. Morrell had little doubt that Felix would keep his own reserves of the virus – a supposition which had proved to be entirely accurate. Morrell had also been certain that Felix would attempt to do something crazy with his supply – again correct – although Morrell had failed to predict just how crazy. Now, he shook his head. He should have known that it would come to this, and taken steps against it. But then, were there any steps that could be taken against an insanity that was as strong as Felix’s?

  Morrell reached down and delicately picked the syringe from the surface of the table. He held it to the light, examining it. There was nothing to be seen really: just a hypodermic syringe that was filled with a pure black liquid that might have been ink, just a sleek, medical arrangement that dealt only death – and worse than death. Morrell was seized with the sudden desire to stab the needle into his arm and then depress the plunger. He wondered what it would be like to have that darkness in his veins, to feel death coming on like some great and freezing shadow that engulfed not merely his body but his mind as well, his heart, his soul... and then to awaken from that shadow, to waken from death’s fatal sleep. What must that be like? What knowledge would be birthed within the reanimated mind, what visions, what dreams and what nightmares, growing there in the brain’s dead meat like exotic mould? For one insane moment, Morrell even began to roll his sleeve up, scraping the white fabric of his lab coat across his gooseflesh-raddled skin. But then he stopped, shook his head, uttered the darkest of laughs, and allowed the tube of his sleeve to settle back across his arm. Crazy... to even think of it, much less action it: crazy... He need never wonder where his son had got his insanity from.

  Morrell placed the syringe back down onto the table top. It uttered a light, dry tap as he replaced it, a sound that was oddly skeletal. Then he looked across at the revolver. Ah, now here was a more likely proposition. A gun, a bullet: swift, clean, and devastating. It would have to be through the head of course: firstly because this would make death more or less instantaneous, but secondly because there would then – as far as Morrell understood – be no danger of reanimation. With the head a splattered porridge of blood, bone, and brain, there would be nothing for the virus to work with, should it ever find its way into his stilled blood stream.

  He picked the gun up. He thumbed back the hammers, and they made a dry creaking noise, the sound that a noose might make as a dead man swings at its end. The fire arm was entirely legal – Morrell had all the paperwork. Morrell had always been a stickler for such things – the paperwork correct, the i’s dotted and t’s crossed. It struck him now though how entirely ridiculous that was, given everything that had transpired between the four walls of this laboratory, deeds that contravened not only the rule of law, but also outraged the laws of humanity and of nature. Ah well, no matter. Those deeds had been done, and their bitter consequences were close at hand, and getting closer by the minute. Perhaps the time had come to put this sleek, well oiled, and entirely legal firearm to the use that he had only ever vaguely guessed at.

  Morrell raised the gun to his face. He looked along its barrel, at its cylinder, admiring its lines, admiring the way it gleamed beneath the laboratory’s dull lights. He put the muzzle to his lips, and for a second tasted its metal, its oil, its cold death. His finger snaked around the trigger, feeling its thin contours. Such a little trigger: such a tiny leaver that could move the world; that could snuff it out into an eternal darkness.

  A sudden knock at the laboratory door. Morrell snatched the gun away from his mouth, quickly, self-consciously, as though he had been caught in some guilty act. Perhaps, in a sense, he had.

  The knock came again: rapid, strident, sharp. There was only one person who knocked like that.

  “Come in!” Morrell called, and was suddenly shocked at how weak and feeble his voice sounded. How frightened his voice sounded, like an old man’s – an old man who was close to death.

  The door opened and Felix stepped through it. His son: thin, pale, smartly suited, vampire like in the shadows. And grinning too. Felix, it seemed, was enjoying life these days. No thoughts of bullet eating for him, it seemed, no longing for death’s eternal shadow. Maybe that was because, in a sense, Felix had died long ago. Not a death of the body, but a death of the emotion
, of humanity, of compassion, and of conscience. Felix Morrell the psychopath, Felix Morrell the dead man – and dead men don’t need to die.

  Immediately, Felix’s gaze fell upon the gun, still grasped in Morrell’s hand, and a mock expression of compassion fell across his thin face.

  “Oh father...” he said, “...surely it has not come to this.”

  And then a titter, high and hateful, and Morrell thought kill him. Kill him now, while you have the gun while it’s loaded, while the hammers are cocked and the whole damn piece is primed. Fire a bullet straight through his black and poisoned heart – the heart that you helped to start beating – and then kill yourself. Why not? It’s the perfect time, the perfect scenario, the perfect solution to all problems. Two bullets, two squeezes of the trigger: that will be all that it takes...

  He almost did it too. But, in the end, the hand holding the gun remained where it was on the table top, unmoving, as though it had been paralysed by some rare poison. Maybe a poison that had travelled through the air from Felix to him, a dark poison spreading like black and catastrophic smoke on the wind.

  “Protocol zero is now in progress,” Felix said, “the command has gone through, the countdown has begun, and soon the military will have their little firework display. Exciting, no?”

  Morrell said nothing, just stared at the ghoulish figure of his son, standing there in the shadows, talking about the slaughter of thousands as though it was nothing but an entertainment.

  “Nothing to say, father?”

  Morrell did, in fact, have plenty to say. He could have asked Felix how he knew about Protocol Zero. He could have asked him why he seemed to jubilant that the results of his little act of sample-swapping mischief were about to be transformed into ashes, into less than ashes. He could have asked him what he knew about this whole situation that made his grin so wide and joyful and carnivorous. And he could have asked him why, simply. Why had he done what he had done? Why had he found it necessary to do what he had done? And, more to the point, what had happened to him in Antarctica.

  But asking such questions was pointless. They would only result in more lies, more taunts, more cruel mind games and gross distortions of reality, uttered on the antiseptic laboratory air. So in the end Morrell merely shook his head and looked back down at the table, at the gun and at the syringe. And he felt a shiver work its cold way through him.

  More laughter from Felix: high, delighted, mocking.

  “I’m going to my room now, but I’ll see you later. Perhaps I’ll see you back here in the laboratory. Perhaps I’ll see you back at the cafeteria. Or maybe I’ll see you in Hell.”

  And then Felix withdrew, still laughing, and Morrell was left alone again. Alone beneath the dim fluorescents, alone amongst the test tubes and chemicals: alone gazing down at a table upon which lay two items. One death, the other worse than death...

  Twenty Five

  Felix hurried down the corridor that would lead him to Room Eighteen. He stopped at the closet, hastily donned the coat, and then continued up to and through the door of Room Eighteen. Once inside, the coldness again gripped him, his breath smoked, and his skin crawled into tight gooseflesh. The gooseflesh wasn’t just about the cold though. Oh no. Of course not. It was fear, it was wonder, it was a kind of sick electricity that might infuse the dark air the minute before the breaking of a world ending storm. The thing knew and its knowledge burned in the atmosphere with sick and vicious longing.

  Felix hurried over to the corner. There it crouched, its legs gathered about it, its eyes burning silver, its fangs dripping black venom the nature of which Felix knew only too well. This thing was ripe with poison, with strange and infernal life, and now, at last, its time had come.

  “It has begun,” Felix said, his voice small, afraid, the voice of a small child lost in a dark wood. His breath puffed white before him

  I know... said the voice from the corner, the time is close at hand. Now we will reap what we have sown.

  “But I don’t understand...” Felix said, suddenly fascinated despite the fear that this thing generated within him, “they’re going to send a weapon. A bomb. It will destroy everything. The place where the virus was spread... the reanimated. All will go up in flames. Doesn’t that put all that we have worked for in jeopardy?”

  No. The fire – it is essential to our plans. The heat...

  “It’s more than fire,” Felix returned, “it’s a nuclear missile, and it doesn’t just burn, it incinerates, vaporises, utterly destroys. A wonderful weapon yes, but for our plans - .”

  Felix was interrupted by a sudden laugh. The thing in the corner was laughing, a high, crystalline, sound, the sound of a thousand champagne flutes struck with a thousand tiny bones.

  Nuclear weapon... the thing said, and it relished the words ...you do not understand you say. Why should you? None of you hu-mans understand. That is why you are so eager to destroy. But we understand. We know the rhythms of the cosmos. We – my kind – are birthed in stars. Rare elements forged in white heat. Forged in the heart of the old stars – not young like your sun. The old, old stars that burn beyond the black void. Burning. Emitting. Our elements. Our spores. Transmitting us in solar bursts. We travel through the universe. We seek soft planets where we thrive. Soft, blue planets like your own...

  “So...” Felix returned, narrowing his eyes in concentration, “...you actually want the explosion? The bomb? The weapon?”

  Heat... the thing said again, essential. When your aircraft crashed – fire, heat... we spread in the black cloud... when the weapon comes, many, many more times as hot... and the black cloud huge, reaching high into your atmosphere, spreading wide across your blue planet...

  Felix said nothing but, suddenly, a grin spread across his face. Had there been anyone there to see it, they would have thought it mad and clown-like in the darkness.

  We propagate... we grow... heat, fire, the white nuclear light, and we, the creatures of the stars... it is what we need. Your planet is ours already... your military men have been dreaming strange deep dreams, Felix, just as you did when I called you to me. I have gazed deep into the soft and vulnerable meat of their minds, and have planted sharp, strange desires within them, like strange and fecund seeds. It was not difficult – your species is so full of violence and killing hate. And now, at my behest they send their weapon – their nuclear weapon – and the fire and the heat will come. The beautiful white light of the stars...

  And here the thing’s eyes grew brighter yet, as though they too were tiny jewels of starlight, captured, corrupted, used by this monstrous thing to see. And, suddenly, Felix was laughing. He was quite unable to stop himself. The lunatic grin evolved into a lunatic laugh, and he threw his head back and howled laughter at the darkened ceiling. It was so perfect, the creature’s plan. What greater riposte to the world could there be than to take that which is meant to destroy you, and then use it to thrive?

  And so once again, Felix fell to his knees, as though his strength had been drained by his humour, his energy focussed into his howling killer-clown gusts of laughter, and yet again he made his obeisance.

  And the thing merely crouched in its corner, eyes glowing, fangs dripping, legs gathered delicately about it.

  Twenty Six

  “Shit, they’re still there!”

  Matt skidded to a halt in the lane, and looked back at the others. Becky, Bryan, and Lewis had been following him close behind, and now they too skidded to a halt, almost piling into each other. Matt looked at their faces, from one to the other, and they were all pale, tense, and expectant. He was suddenly aware that, in the last five minutes or so he had suddenly, somehow, become their leader. The Guy With The Car, the guy who could lead them to the very thing they needed to get out of this nightmare – and it seemed as though they were looking to him for answers. And it was a situation that he didn’t like one little bit.

  “The zombies you mean?” asked Becky, panting, bewildered.

  “Yes, I mean the fucking
zombies look!”

  Becky looked. They all looked. The car was still parked some quarter of a mile down the lane, its door still open and its indicator still ticking. He supposed that it was a minor miracle that the car was still there at all, that some other desperate evacuee hadn’t used it to get the hell out. He supposed that there were two logical explanations for why that hadn’t happened – reason number one being the zombies who were massed around it, acting as a pretty convincing deterrent, and reason number two being that the keys weren’t in the car.

  And, come to think of that, where were the keys?

  Matt’s hand flew to his pocket, and he had a very bad thirty seconds or so when he thought that his pockets were empty, and that the keys were gone, fallen out of his pocket, lying on some pavement or field somewhere in Alchester, never to be retrieved. But then, at last, he checked the breast pocket of his shirt, and there they were. It was the place where he always kept them – where they were least likely to fall out unless he did a hand stand – and he must have stowed them there, by instinct, after he’d abandoned the car. He drew them out of his pocket and held them up in front of his eyes in a big shiny jangly bunch, as though to make sure that they really were there, and not some hallucination that had been artfully devised by his overwrought senses.

  “Glad to see you’ve got those, mate,” said Lewis, nodding toward the keys.

  Matt said nothing, merely nodding and then hastily stowed the keys back in his breast pocket as though he were afraid that they might suddenly grow wings and fly away.

  “How many of them are there do you think?” asked Becky. She had raised her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes against the glare of the sun, and squinting down the road.