Dead Stop

by Mark Clapham

  Gregson looked remorsefully at the body he’d been dissecting, then back at me.

  ‘Very well,’ he sighed, getting out of his chair and backing away towards the door.

  ‘Be careful out there,’ I said. Even though the guy creeped me out, he didn’t seem to be worried enough about what was outside. He may have seen that I wasn’t a real threat, but that didn’t mean he was safe.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ said Gregson, holding the door open before leaving. ‘Once you’ve walked amongst the dead, they regard you as one of their own, even after you’re cured. I’ll be perfectly safe.’

  Then he was gone.

  ‘Right, let’s find this medical centre and get me my shots, then get this stabiliser,’ I said, lowering my aching gun arm at last, and picking up Gregson’s map.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Melissa. ‘He might be okay, but it’s too dangerous for you to be running back and forth across the site. You’ll get mauled before you can save me.’

  ‘Then what do we do?’ I asked, heart sinking a little.

  ‘We can’t go get the stabiliser and bring it back,’ she said. ‘It’s too risky and we’ll run out of time. There’s only one option.’

  Oh, shit, I thought. Here it comes.

  ‘You need to find my body, and take it to the stabiliser,’ said Melissa.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘YOU WANT ME to babysit zombie-you through a subterranean complex full of other zombies?’ I said, as Melissa talked me through digging out the junk I needed from a large green first aid box. There was shit in there I had never seen in any first aid kit before: syringes and evilly curved scalpels.

  ‘Yes,’ Melissa said, her game face on. ‘Do that, inject me with the stabiliser, you’ll get everything I promised.’

  ‘Everything?’ I asked, wincing as I gave myself the first of three injections to the arm. ‘Even with you alive?’

  ‘There’ll be plenty to go around. There’s far more than you know.’

  I took a moment, shaking my numb arm. A pleasant warm feeling was spreading through my body, the pain getting ever more distant.

  ‘Yes, I got that bit,’ I said. ‘Though I’ve worked out plenty for myself.’

  ‘Then you realise the value of what we have here. We can both be alive and rich, if that’s still what you want.’

  ‘You must be a really good accountant,’ I said, dabbing at the wounds on my leg with an antiseptic wipe. Then I started to fix a dressing over the top. The antibiotics and tetanus booster and god knows what else I’d shot myself up with should have dealt with most of the infections I could pick up, but it didn’t do any harm to keep the wounds clean too.

  ‘Don’t get cute,’ she replied. ‘As you no doubt guessed, the accountancy was a cover. Though I knew enough to do the job I could have made a real go of it, if the secret stealing business ever dried up.’

  ‘Is that likely?’

  ‘Nope.’ She smirked. ‘There’ll always be knowledge people don’t want to get out. They make exorbitant attempts to keep a lid on their dirty secrets, and people like me will always get to the truth.’

  ‘Is that what you are, a truthseeker?’ I asked, hopping off the desk I’d been sitting on as I took my medicine. I wobbled slightly, but then felt steady on my feet, and better than I did most of the time, to be honest. ‘Information just wants to be free, and all that?’

  ‘I just do a job. But what I’ve found doing that job is that the sort of information people want to keep secret is usually safer spread around. Look at this cluster fuck.’ She stepped back, disappearing partially into a desk, gesturing widely. ‘If the company had their way, then none of this would be known about, and the first the rest of the world would know would be when an even bigger outbreak occurred, one that took down the company and got out into the general population. Then, what; millions die because this stabiliser was locked in a vault and everyone who knew about it was dead?’

  She stepped forward, close to me. With the last of her normal persona dropped, she had a sleekness to her movements, and a predatory glint in her gaze. I was finally seeing the Melissa who would parkour her way across the lab complex to steal secrets, the Melissa who had the determination to resist the mental deterioration that affected all the other ghosts I’ve ever met.

  I had to admit, I liked this Melissa more than the old one. But I needed to keep at least a level head. It was bad enough trying to keep a straight head having shot myself up with morphine, never mind letting my romantic imagination lead me astray.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But how do I know I can trust you? A professional thief and liar doesn’t make for a reliable ally.’

  She smiled.

  ‘I guess you don’t. But look at it this way.’ She raised her hand, looking up at me with a smile, so close that if she had breath, I’d be able to feel it on my skin. She raised one finger. ‘One, you know I need you alive until you inject me with the stabiliser, so you can trust me to look after you for my own self-interest.’ She raised a second finger. ‘Two, you know my line of work now. Can you imagine how useful you would be to me with your abilities? You’re well worth the long-term investment, believe me.’

  ‘You don’t strike me as someone who likes to share,’ I said. ‘Even with a talented partner.’

  ‘For the right partner, you’d be surprised.’

  She swept her ghostly fingers under my chin, and I could swear I felt a cold touch on my skin. Then she turned, and started for the door.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a few ideas about how we might safely capture me.’

  ‘HOLY SHIT,’ I said, looking around the store room.

  It wasn’t even the store room with the zombie Melissa locked in it. This was a store room for the people who handled the ‘test subjects’, and it made me frightened as to what could have happened to cause this current outbreak. Looking around me, it wasn’t like these people weren’t well prepared.

  There was enough equipment for subduing and restraining in that room to put down a revolution or hold a really dangerous fetish party: tasers, shock batons, handcuffs, those loop-on-a-stick things used to catch sheep by the head, straitjackets, hoods, body armour, helmets, even riot shields.

  Fat lot of use it did them, in the end.

  My clothes had dried out in the air-conditioned atmosphere of the basement, so in spite of various nasty stains I decided to not waste time changing. I also wanted to travel relatively light and move quickly, which ruled out the heavier body armour.

  I reckoned it would be my arms that would be most vulnerable, so I pulled on a light zip-up jacket with black padded sleeves, and a pair of thick-ish gloves—I needed to balance the need for protection with the need to not get stuck fumbling and unable to grip anything properly. I found a box of clip-on belt holsters, which allowed me to put my pistol away, although there were no firearms or actual ammo stored there.

  I decided against a helmet, which would restrict my field of vision, but there was a light blue lady’s scarf discarded on a bench, so I wrapped that around my neck and tucked it into my jacket, hoping that would be enough to protect my neck from scraping zombie fingernails.

  Which left the equipment I would actually need: a black hood that looked like an over-sized money bag, as popularised by the CIA in their fashionable renditioning programmes; a handful of plastic zip-tie handcuffs, plenty of spares in case I fumbled the first go; a fire blanket from next to the nearest fire extinguisher; and a screwdriver.

  ‘If you put that thing through my skull in a panic,’ said Melissa as I tucked the screwdriver into my belt, ‘I’m going to lead you to the worst infested sub-level and leave you there.’

  ‘It’s your plan,’ I said. ‘We can try something else.’ I looked longingly at the shock batons, which had the advantage of quite a long reach.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head firmly. ‘You won’t be able to even touch me until I’ve nearly recovered; if you zap me, it’ll just slow us down. This will work.’
<
br />   I wished the duplicity Melissa had demonstrated extended to sounding more convincing.

  A LITTLE FURTHER into the sub-basement, another cupboard.

  I was on the outside, now, kneeling by the door. We were in a server room, banks of computers lined up, harsh strip lights illuminating every speck of blood on the walls and floor. The clean-up crew who had come to stabilise Gregson hadn’t lived up to their name; there were bullet-riddled zombie corpses everywhere.

  They hadn’t got as far as the store cupboard, though.

  Melissa emerged through the door, passing straight through me. I barely noticed the slight cold of her touch. I had the other version of her to worry about.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked. I could have said ‘you’, but I needed to put clarity over sensitivity in my pronouns. This was no time for niceties if I wanted to get through this with my face unchewed.

  ‘In the corner, facing the door,’ said Melissa, with the same shaken demeanour she had the last time she checked on her zombie body. ‘Chewing on a pack of antistatic wipes.’

  I grimaced, as if that was the worst thing a zombie could try and eat.

  ‘Good, good,’ I said, taking the screwdriver and placing the tip in a slot just below the door handle. ‘I need you to go back in and tell me the moment she notices the door open.’

  ‘Okay, fuck,’ said Melissa, hugging herself, and disappeared again. I would have thought that knowing we were working towards bringing her back to life rather than just killing her zombie body would have made the encounter easier, but apparently not.

  Maybe she was concerned it wouldn’t work because her spirit had left her body. The thought had crossed my mind, but we were so far beyond the realm of the knowable, the only thing for it was to try and see what happened.

  I gently twisted the screwdriver, turning the slot around. It wasn’t a proper security lock, just a crude bolt, and the groove on the outside was an easy way of letting a maintenance worker in if someone locked themselves inside, without the whole fuss of taking the door off its hinges.

  There was a click within the door. I stayed still for a few seconds, listening intently for sounds of movement behind the door, or for Melissa—the ghost version—to shout out a warning.

  All quiet.

  Standing up as quietly as I could, I lifted the fire blanket in my right hand, carefully holding the two top corners between different fingers. Then I turned the door handle as quietly as I could with my left hand, and opened the cupboard.

  It was light inside, the dangling bulb overhead one of the few things not smashed to pieces. The floor was a mess of equipment used to clean and maintain high-end servers, but that wasn’t what caught my eye, obviously.

  Although I was expecting it, the sight of two equally dead but very different Melissas caught me off-guard for a second. One, translucent and alert, standing to one side, staring obsessively at the other, a queasy looking creature slumped on the floor, limbs twisted in odd and uncomfortable-looking directions, with ripped and stained clothes.

  That creature looked up at me, but it was not Melissa who looked out of that familiar face. It was something animalistic, with slack pupils in bloodshot eyes, and skin that looked both pallid and bruised, tinted with jaundice.

  It jerked forward and up, bringing its knees together, dragging its legs across the floor as it tried to stand. I took one corner of the fire blanket in my left hand, and prepared to throw it over zombie Melissa before she could move further.

  I then realised that the cupboard was too narrow to do what I needed to do—I’d be too tightly wedged in to get her on her front and use the cuffs. Loath as I was to let her stand, I needed her out into the server room.

  I shook out the fire blanket like a cartoon matador, waving it in zombie Melissa’s direction.

  ‘What the fuck are you—’ ghost Melissa began, but I shushed her, watching her corporeal counterpart shuffle forward, half standing. I backed away a little, a step at a time, eyes fixed on the zombie version of Melissa, hoping that I didn’t slip on any of those bloodstains behind me.

  That would be bloody typical. Get all this way and fall on my arse, suffering a fatal blow to the back of the skull.

  As I stepped back into the server room, the zombie Melissa charged, and the ghost version screamed in terror and disappeared through the wall.

  I ignored her, and as her zombie version crashed into me I threw the fire blanket over her head and brought my arms down to her shoulder level, trying to grip her upper arms through the insulated fabric and stop her clawing at me.

  We staggered backwards, wrestling like that, and I bumped into one of the servers. Under the blanket came a chomping growl, and Melissa’s head flailed back and forth beneath the fabric, searching for a way out.

  Rather than try and push her back—she was incredibly strong, even with her unshod feet slipping and scraping against the smooth tiled floor beneath us—I instead got an elbow on to her head and forced it downwards and under my arm, quickly whipping her under me and spinning around behind her.

  I was glad Melissa’s ghost form wasn’t there to see me slam her body head first into the server, hopefully hard enough to stun her a little bit.

  It seemed to work, as the wrestling creature went briefly limp. I scrabbled to grab her wrists beneath the fire blanket, dragging them behind her back and holding her jacket sleeves together in one hand as I scrabbled with my right hand for a wrist tie.

  As I struggled to cuff her, zombie Melissa began to flail again, the sleeves tearing and stretching in my gloved grip.

  I mentally apologised as I kicked her hard in the back of one knee, bringing her down slightly and giving me a second to get the plastic tag on and pull it tight.

  The broken, bloody nails of Melissa’s hands were clawing at me, and I let go, letting the zombie roll to the floor, blanket slowly slipping off its head. Hands shaking, I removed the black hood from my trouser pocket and quickly stretched it out. There was a loose drawstring around the open part—the neck, I suppose—like a washbag, and I pulled that loose.

  Melissa the zombie, hands cuffed behind her back, had shaken off the fire blanket and was scraping around the floor on her knees, face down, trying to push herself up, almost chewing at the floor.

  I pulled the bag wide and, ready to pull my wrist away the moment she went for it, pulled the bag over her head as fast as I could.

  The bagged head lunged for where my arm was but I pulled it away, jumping back. The zombie flailed sightlessly, and I quietly leaned in and pulled the drawstring tight.

  I staggered back, leaving the zombie to sightlessly kick around on the floor, hands cuffed and unable to freely move. A wet dribble patch was already beginning to form on the front of the thin black hood as zombie Melissa tried to chew her way out.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said ghost Melissa, who had come up alongside me without me noticing. She was staring at her other self ferally thrashing back and forth.

  ‘Yep,’ I said, wheezing and out of breath.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IMAGINE TWELVE WILD, hooded dogs on leads. Imagine trying to walk those dogs. Imagine trying to walk those dogs while they’re hungry, and drunk. Imagine trying not to get bitten or scratched by those dogs while keeping them moving in a straight line.

  You are now imagining something about half as impossible as marching a handcuffed, hooded zombie through an underground lab facility.

  The first part was relatively—note relatively—simple, as Ghost Melissa—I’m going to have to refer to her that way while two Melissas are in the same place—led me to a narrow maintenance corridor that connected the underground sections of the admin block with the other sub-levels.

  It was tricky, but guiding a flailing, blind zombie down a narrow corridor wasn’t impossible, my undead captive ricocheting off the walls and moving in the general direction I wanted, provided I nudged her in the back now and then. I held on to the back of Zombie Melissa’s jacket, or the tag that tied her wrists tog
ether, allowing me to guide her while also pulling her back if she was about to fall over or crash face first into the wall.

  I found myself thinking of the zombie as ‘her’. Partially that was because I knew Melissa, while I hadn’t known any of the other zombies I’d encountered. It also helped that with the head bagged it was harder to tell Zombie Melissa was undead, and wasn’t just a normal woman I had tied up and was manhandling down a corridor.

  So she seemed more like a person, but I felt unbelievably horrible, creepy and guilty about the whole business, which seemed slightly unfair as Zombie Melissa would happily eat me if given the freedom to do so.

  Soon we emerged into an underground car park, and that was where the real problems began. Not only was it a more open space, but the floor was slightly skiddy with oil and other liquids I didn’t want to think about.

  Yes, there were other zombies there, as well as the remains of people who had been torn apart without getting the chance to rise again. Thankfully, they were quite far away, and Ghost Melissa alerted me to their presence in advance. I tried to keep Zombie Melissa quiet as we began to cross the space.

  I was surprised by how big it was. A cavernous, high-ceilinged concrete space lit by a small number of electric lights, the car park contained a large selection of civilian cars, a row of anonymous black vans, and a couple of high-end sporty vehicles that I presumed belonged to the most senior staff. There was a lot of empty space, and I could see zombies staggering around between the cars.

  There was an exit ramp at the far end, in which half a dozen cars had collided, blocking the exit. A queue of cars were abandoned behind the crashed cars, and human remains were scattered around the floor on that side of the car park.

  The crashed cars still had lights on, and it was easy to see how the chaotic attempt at escaping the facility had gone badly, badly wrong. In the light from the cars, a large group of zombies bustled around each other at that end of the car park, though there were a few nearer to us too.