LovewithaChanceofZombies

by Delphine Dryden

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you need any of the roots?”

  “Sure.”

  He seemed pensive, staring out past the fence for a few seconds then closing his eyes and turning his face up to the sun. A faint, bittersweet smile crossed his lips. Lena glanced away, feeling as if she was intruding on something unbearably private.

  She thought Lucas was wrong about himself. He really was a hero, a better person than most, inherently admirable. In the face of certain death, he was giving up a few of his remaining days trying to solve one last puzzle for the people he would leave behind. He was even trying to do his part—better late than never—to contribute to the future existence of the human race.

  Lena didn’t know how he found the strength, because it nearly destroyed her every time she tried to face the inevitable loss. She didn’t know that she was worthy of him, of the responsibility of carrying his legacy, but since she’d been the one on hand, she would do her best to live up to the role. Just as Lucas had spent a lifetime doing.

  She was down on the ground, digging in the soft soil and hacking off a handful of woody root tendrils, when Watson came back down the row. Lena stood and passed the bunch of roots to Lucas, wiping her hands on her pants as Watson approached.

  “The wind was to the northwest,” he reported. “Toward the woods from here. You think the scent of the hemp is what’s drawing them, Doc?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Nye said, looking in bemusement at his two handfuls of plant stuff. “But at least I’ve got plenty of sample material gathered to take back to the lab.”

  * * * * *

  As Lucas processed the hemp into its component parts, Lena watched him and thought too much. After a few hours she recognized the feeling. She was just plain bored. She hadn’t expected that.

  “You want to help?” he asked, when she sighed once a bit too loudly.

  “If you need a hand.” She was mostly just spoiled, she realized, from the previous lazy, surreal days of fantastic sex. Of being his primary focus. Now he was intent on the hemp like a hawk on a mouse. Lucas had slept only five or so hours in the past twenty-four, but seemed brimming with energy. Lena had to admit that even rumpled and unshaven, with circles under his eyes, he looked more alive than she had seen him in days.

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  Bait. He wanted her to lie out some hemp as bait for zombies that night and report on their reaction.

  “The wind is in the right direction, if it hasn’t changed from what Watson said earlier. The woods near the front gate are downwind now, and sunset is in about an hour. I want you to set these out at least ten yards from each other, but all the same distance from the tree line.” He handed her four sealed plastic bags filled with various plant bits. “Seeds, leaves, stalk, roots. We see which batch the zombies go for. Simple.”

  “Simple?” She took the bags but didn’t move, even though Watson arrived in the lab then, obviously prepared to take over guard duties. Lucas must have discussed this with him at the farm. “Zombie…bait. Those two words should never go together. We never want to lure the zombies in, Lucas. We want to get the zombies the hell away.”

  “But they’re already getting lured in, and I have a hunch about why. It could be something helpful.” He was practically bouncing with anticipation, and Lena wondered what he wasn’t saying about his hunch. “Just please do this, Lena. One night, two at the most. If my suspicion is correct—”

  “What suspicion?” Watson wanted to know. “I trust your hunches, Doc, but why the secrecy?”

  “It could be big,” Nye admitted. “Not just another piece of the puzzle…the entire missing half of the puzzle. But I won’t know for sure until I see which pile of stuff they go after. And I don’t want to accidentally influence the results by giving you any more information than that.”

  In the end, Lena went, setting out the four batches of vegetation as Lucas had described. The other guards clearly thought she was crazy, and since she couldn’t tell them why she was doing it other than “secret mission for Watson”, she couldn’t really disabuse them of the notion.

  At least she didn’t have long to wait. Before the sun was even below the horizon, screeches and moans issued from the woods. Lena gripped her rifle stock, hefting it for comfort.

  “Locked and loaded, boss?” Jonesie materialized at her shoulder, his own weapon at the ready.

  “You know it. Just keep your eyes peeled and don’t shoot until I say so, got it?”

  “Got it. Good to see you back in action.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  She felt bad about missing so much real work, staying safely in the lab playing with Nye while Jonesie and the rest of her team still risked their lives at the fences or in the woods every night. If Nye had come to life with a new science project to work on, Lena felt herself coming to life here, in the gathering dark, ravening monsters about to attack.

  They attacked right then. Three zombies dashed from the tree line in the shuffling, hunched-over skitter most of them used. Lena held a fist up, reminding the guards not to shoot on sight as they typically would. All three zombies made straight for the pile of seeds, the one almost directly in front of Lena. She watched, horrified and fascinated, as they scrabbled in the dirt for the tiny morsels. The smallest of the three, getting the least of the bounty, turned and loped a few steps toward the pile of leaves, but after a few seconds he made an agonized, frustrated wail and shambled back to the seeds.

  The lure was gone in minutes, and none of the zombies had so much as spared a glance at the humans standing twenty yards away. After a few minutes of fruitless rooting in the dust for any missed pods, the zombies started wandering off, two toward the trees and the little one at last heading for the humans with nothing like the usual zeal.

  Lena dropped her hand sharply, taking out the little guy herself while Jonesie and another guard picked off the larger two.

  The silence that followed as the reverberations from their shots died was almost reverent. It was finally broken when the second guard whispered, “Holy shit.”

  “Zombie catnip,” Jonesie offered. “They didn’t even give a shit. We were standing right here, and they didn’t give a rat’s ass about us. What the hell was that?”

  “An experiment,” Lena muttered. “I think it was a successful one too.”

  Chapter Seven

  Lucas whooped when he heard the news, jumping and punching one fist in the air. His eyes were sparkling, manic, practically crazed with energy.

  “Do you realize what this means?” he asked as he raced for the stash of unused seeds still sitting on the lab table by his microscope.

  Lena tugged her rifle strap from her shoulder and put it down, happy to have gotten to use it again. “That we’re going to get the zombies stoned?”

  “Heh. Not quite. I don’t know that there’s enough hemp in the world for that. No, the hemp seeds aren’t going to be for them. They’re going to be for…me.”

  “Lucas, no. You can’t. You know what I’ll have to do if you start showing symptoms. Your syringes, you already planned—”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. You don’t know the whole plan.”

  “They were still zombies, just pacified. The seeds aren’t a cure, are they? I thought it was brain damage, and some part of that damage is what makes the zombies crave myelin, that’s what the news always said.”

  “Wrong!” Lucas cried, still high on discovery. “So close, but wrong. As I suspected, and I think the hemp has proved it. Look, we know the zombies seem to smell out brain tissue, right? They’ll eat other things, but the brain is the real prize, and once they get some they finally stop eating and attacking and go to ground. If they don’t get the brains, they’ll keep eating until they’re regurgitating. As far as we know, they’ll eat themselves to death if there’s still food.

  “My theory is a little different from the conventional wisdom. I always suspected the problem isn’t a craving for mye
lin specifically. It’s a crossed signal that tells the zombie it’s hungry, and the only thing that eases it is a concentrated dose of a certain type of fatty acid. A brain will do it, but so will certain plants. Hemp seeds are chock full of fatty acids.”

  “Okay,” Lena said slowly, trying to work out the implications, and to figure out where this new information fit into her overall picture of how the zombie virus worked. “There’s more to it than that, though. There’s other damage. They can’t really think about anything else but eating. And if they could, that wouldn’t be so great either, like we talked about. That’s nightmare stuff, zombies that can think.”

  “That’s where the other half of the puzzle comes in.”

  “Why do I have a feeling I’m not going to like this?”

  He sat on the stool and pulled her toward him until she stood between his legs. He was still smiling, practically giddy, and Lena wished she could catch that giddiness to replace the anxiety growing like an icy flower in the pit of her stomach.

  “Here’s the other half. Remember I mentioned rabies vaccines, and how those turned out to be a bad model to deal with this virus?”

  “Smart zombies, yeah. I’ll never forget. Thanks.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Here’s the thing though. There is actually a cure—a treatment—for rabies. Risky, very rarely attempted, with a low survival rate. But low is still better than none, and a few of the survivors have even walked away from it almost unscathed. Even the most badly affected still have all their cognitive abilities. All their higher brain function, not just the lizard-brain survival stuff. They’ve shown some other lingering symptoms of central nervous system damage, some that seem permanent and some that resolve over time. Slurred speech, gait problems, poor coordination.”

  “Like smart zombies?” She wasn’t seeing this as a better option.

  “No,” he contradicted, “like people who have been in an accident or had a stroke, and maybe sustained some damage that affected their speech and coordination. Or possibly no damage, like I said. Full recovery.”

  “How?”

  “Medically induced coma. When the rabies victim starts to show symptoms, they’re put under and kept under while the worst part of the virus runs its course. The brain activity is minimized while the patient is comatose, so there are no seizures, none of the cascading, harmful neurological effects that would usually take place. The virus just burns out, basically. And if the person is lucky, they wake up in five or six or seven days, brain intact.”

  “So why haven’t they tried that for the zombie plague?”

  “They did,” Lucas admitted. “The first two attempts weren’t successful, the patients didn’t make it. The third was…a partial success.”

  His lips tightened, and he clasped his hands tighter on her hips. Lena breathed out heavily and forced herself to ask, “Partial?”

  “We caught him late. He’d been feverish for at least twenty-four hours, hiding the symptoms. Finally the headache and photophobia gave him away. He was cringing at the lights. But he went under, and three days later he woke up. We kept it shorter than the rabies treatment because the active, inflammatory stage of AX-1 only lasts about twenty-four hours. There was some damage, in his case. He could talk some after a few days though. He knew his name and he recognized us. He seemed like a minor stroke victim, and his progress was good by those standards. Within a few days, he was walking with a walker, speaking more clearly.”

  “But?” she prompted gently when Nye paused. Lena had noted the shift from “they” to “we”, knew he was talking about somebody he’d worked with, but had no way to know how deeply the case had affected him.

  “He was hungry,” he said flatly. “He shouldn’t have been eating solid foods so soon after being anesthetized that long, but after a few days it became clear the liquid nutrition wouldn’t cut it. He ate, although his stomach was still rejecting a lot of foods after the anesthetic, but even when he kept it down it didn’t help. The hunger was constant and unbearable.”

  He looked up at the ceiling for a moment, seeming to collect his emotions as well as his thoughts, before continuing a little faster, as if he was eager to get the rest of it out at once. “He lasted a week. If we’d had longer, more time and resources to try different diets, or if we’d had the chance to try some different psychoactive meds, we might have stumbled on something. But he couldn’t take it. He said he could… He could smell our brains in our heads, and he feared it was only a matter of time before the hunger drove him past the point of control.”

  “He killed himself?”

  Nye nodded. “He used the same combination of drugs I have in those syringes in my room.”

  Lena ran her hands up Lucas’ arms, squeezing gently. “Who was he?”

  “My mentor, David Pollack.”

  “Pollack? As in Pollack’s Disease?”

  Lucas nodded, his expression stiff.

  The most famous researcher of the zombie virus, dying during his own best attempt to cure it. And now his protégé was determined to be the next guinea pig.

  * * * * *

  “I can’t be hearing this correctly,” Watson said, standing up in agitation and pacing between the stool he’d been using and the door of the lab. “You think if you sleep through the worst of this, you’re gonna wake up and it’ll all be okay? You’re asking me to risk the safety of this entire colony on a hunch you had about weed?”

  “Not sleep. A coma,” Lucas explained patiently. “The brain activity is different, blood flow to the brain is also reduced, and the virus won’t be able to cause the chain reactions that are responsible for most of the damage. Once that period is past, the brain can heal and the body’s immune system can handle the virus. The only other problem was the hunger. If the hemp seeds correct for that, the subject should be free from that symptom as well. A regimen of careful diet, regular doses of hemp seed or oil and—”

  “Would you still be infectious?”

  “I don’t know,” Nye admitted, running his hands over his face. “We can test for it though. Assuming I survive and my reasoning is intact.”

  “And assuming the hemp works like you say it will.”

  Lena jumped in. “The zombies at the gate didn’t even care about us after they’d had the seeds, sir. It’s also possible that Pollack’s hunger wouldn’t have been so dire if he’d been treated sooner, right, Lucas?”

  “It’s possible, yes.” Nye shrugged. “None of this will help much with the existing problem, I realize, Admiral. It’s not a practical solution for any large-scale applications, and the odds are I won’t survive at all. Even if everything works perfectly, I know I might have to be isolated from the rest of the compound for everybody’s safety. But at least I’d be alive and could still keep working on a cure.”

  Not caring what Watson thought, Lena reached over and took Nye’s hand, holding it on her lap as they sat side by side like worried parents in the principal’s office.

  Watson stopped pacing and stared back at Nye, shaking his head.

  “It’s not just a question of what’s right for you, Doc. Or even what you can do for us. There are other dangers I don’t think you’ve considered,” Watson said with a frown.

  “What do you mean, sir?” Lena ventured.

  “I mean it would muddy the waters. Create doubt. Lena, what are those things out there in the woods, the things you hunt?”

  “Zombies,” she said promptly.

  “And what are we?”

  “Humans.”

  Watson turned and lifted his eyebrows, obviously waiting for her to catch his meaning. When she didn’t, he sighed and returned to his seat.

  “Lena, if those are zombies, and we’re humans—what’s he?” He pointed at Nye, who looked from Watson to Lena and back again with alarm. “What’s he going to be in a few weeks when he starts to turn? If he goes through this like he says, and he can walk and talk like us humans, then what will he be?”

  After a moment of confusion, Len
a met Lucas’ eyes and knew the answer and the danger. “Human.”

  “Do you know why you can do what you do in your job, Stanton, going out and shooting those things? It ought to drive you crazy but it doesn’t, and there’s only one reason for that.”

  “I get it now, sir,” she assured him. She thought about young Gilford briefly; maybe she wasn’t as different from him as she liked to believe. “They’re not human to me anymore, so it’s okay to kill them. I’d never see Lucas that way though, you’re right about that. I would hesitate.”

  “No,” Lucas started, but she squeezed his hand.

  “I would hesitate. I’d take you out after that if I was still alive, but that’s not the point. The hesitation isn’t acceptable. The point is, we all need to see the zombies as zombies. Not humans. If they were people to us…that would be the real nightmare fodder, because we’d still have to go on killing them. Right now we’re all positive they have no memories, no souls, there’s nothing left of the people they were in there. But a zombie that wasn’t just an empty husk…that would create confusion. Doubt, just like the admiral said. People wouldn’t be sure, like they are now.”

  “I haven’t said no yet,” Watson reminded them. “It isn’t only up to me, I’ll need to talk to some folks. Cochrane here and Jackson over at the farm, at least. How many days into this is it now, Stanton?”

  “Fourteen, sir.” Two weeks, but it sounded like half a lifetime in the compressed timeline of Lucas’ remaining days.

  Watson sighed then pressed his hands flat to his thighs, coming to a decision. “For the next week, I want you to focus on what this hemp can do for the infected. Baiting them into the open may turn out to be useful if the seeds make them docile enough to pick off easily. We need to experiment with different amounts, think about efficient delivery methods. Maybe some kind of dilution, a spray, something like that. Just to draw them into an area where they’re easy targets.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “Carry on then.” Watson rose and strode to the door again, but turned with his hand on the knob. “Nye, can you teach her what she’d need to know to help you? IVs, monitoring equipment?”