The Lazarus Strain Chronicles (Book 2): The Rise

by Deville, Sean

  The only way to end its ceaseless torment was to destroy the part of the brain that now caused the dead body to defy the laws of nature. So far it had escaped that fate.

  There were bodies strewn about the street, not the result of a zombie attack however. These people had been alive, their torsos so less resistant to bullets than the sons and daughters of hell who now stepped over them. Occasionally a zombie would bend down and begin to feast, fulfilling the demands of the hunger. Most followed Sid(Z), some mechanism temporarily making it leader of this particular pack. They needed to move, to spread, to enrich their ranks with fresh carcasses. The bulk of the mob marched thus on, their feet the only sound to escape their massing ranks. Across the city, more such groupings occurred, each accumulation separated into clumps. The zombies had somehow learnt that there was a very real risk from the humans who flew in the sky.

  If it could still read and see, Sid(Z) would have seen the sign that said A40, would have observed the bridge they travelled under. The piecemeal conversion of humanity to their army was a success, but the virus now drove them on to where the people really were. Better to attack larger numbers now so as to really swell the ranks, which meant chasing the human flight. They could all smell where their meals were, the scents blown by smoke filled winds from miles around. Perhaps there was a semblance of memory left in its brain. Perhaps it was just some uncontrollable intuition, but either way, Sid(Z) led them to the hotel where the Sid before death had spent time in the embrace of a woman she had loved. Such passion was dead to it now, a mere shadow of the yearning that drove it ever forwards.

  With nearly five hundred rooms, most of the residents had done what the military had told them to do. Stay where you were and wait for help. Cut off from their normal communities and with the transport network either shut down or clogged, the only other option was to set out on foot which most were ill equipped to do. The fact that any military that might have come had long since fled this part of the city did not escape most of the people left in the hotel. The absence of the police and the army on the surrounding streets told them everything that they needed to know. This resulted in many people cowering in their rooms, watching the ever dwindling selection of TV channels to try and get some understanding and some hope for what they now faced.

  There was little in the way of either.

  Stopping in the centre of the road outside the hotel, Sid(Z) turned and set its sightless eyes upon the building’s main doors. With the whole front of the hotel comprised of glass windows, it was perhaps uniquely vulnerable, and without warning, the horde swarmed at the building, leaving Sid(Z) standing, buffeted by the many who rushed past it. As a unit, dozens impacted the windows and the doors that had wisely been locked. Inside, frightened faces looked on in disbelief as the undead hurled themselves at the strong, yet exposed glass. The attackers spread themselves along the hotel’s front, pounding with their fists, even mashing their skulls in the hope of forcing entry. It was clear that the windows might be able to hold, but perhaps not indefinitely. All it took was one crack, one breach.

  Despite their efforts, the accumulated zombies couldn’t get in. Even over the noise, a sense of relief replaced the initial shock of those hapless souls in the hotel lobby. Not all stayed to watch the spectacle, nearly half of those present when the zombies arrived fled to the upper floors. They can’t get in, was the overriding assumption. But what if they do?

  Stepping off the road, Sid(Z) almost stumbled over the curb. The zombies were a dozen deep now, and Sid(Z) couldn’t get anywhere close to the doors. Instead it made its way around the pack, passing down the side of the hotel where more windows presented. And more doors, only a few of its kind following behind. Then it stopped, listening to the skies, its brethren doing likewise. The whole horde seemed to pause in their assault, their cacophony cut off in mid strike. True death was coming.

  There was that noise they had encountered so many times before, and the zombies began to scatter. The hotel could wait, now they needed refuge and as many of them ran across the road, the bullets from the heavens began to chew them up.

  Man and his relentless flying machines. The problem with Gatling cannons though…they aren’t particularly accurate, and as the bullets ripped up the asphalt the helicopter aimed its tiny missiles at the largest concentration of undead. It was therefore inevitable that some of those bullets would penetrate and shatter several of the hotel windows.

  With nearly a hundred still pressed against the glass, they poured in through the freshly created portals, the humans who had stayed to bear witness suddenly realising their stupidity. Sid(Z) ignored it all, its sense of smell taking it further towards the back of the hotel, the helicopter noise irrelevant. A side fire door opened and half a dozen hotel guests (who had been trapped in the building from the start) tried to flee. Only some of them made it, Sid(Z) there waiting for them, its speed equal to theirs. You don’t have to run faster than a zombie. You just have to run faster than the slowest human being chased.

  The remnants of the baby now discarded, Sid(Z) grabbed and held the frightened woman in its arms, the weakness in the meal’s muscles making it an easy target, Sid(Z) bit down into her face, one of its incisors snapping off at the gum line. The tooth fragment got buried in the screaming face, becoming a permanent fixture there. Sid(Z) let the weeping and destroyed woman fall to the floor and stepped through the still open door. Inside, it could hear the tantalising screams of those who were already dead in waiting.

  The helicopter had done little to thin their ranks, only a couple of dozen zombies now useless to the viral cause. But there were other weapons the humans could drop from the heavens, and the zombies spread throughout the surrounding buildings and the hotel. There were also ways for the undead to fight back.

  Sid(Z) was not there to hear the small flock of birds attack the helicopter, their viral infused flesh striking the most vulnerable parts of the flying monstrosity. With the tail rotor now destroyed, the flying marvel came crashing out of the sky, exploding amongst some houses several streets away. The different types of zombies weren’t coordinating, they just seemed to have a link that helped spread the virus and protect the army that was being built. The birds were a momentary advantage. It wouldn’t be long before their wings decayed to the extent that flight was impossible.

  The zombies renewed their attack. Each door in the place they now invaded represented a potential banquet, the zombies attacking each in turn with a relentless methodical approach. As usual, Sid(Z) led the way, the first to find the staircase which led to the upper levels, the first to feed on the hapless human who was caught in one of the corridors. It could hear hundreds of hearts beating, its auditory capabilities getting stronger with every passing hour. Every one of the hotel guests would meet an unenviable doom.

  On the first floor, Sid(Z) stopped outside a room. The smell there was stronger than she had ever encountered, several other zombies gathering behind her. Some filtered past to other rooms, but this door seemed to be the focal point of many. With no conscious minds they went purely on primal instinct, and that instinct told them that the human in this room needed to be destroyed.

  The Hounslow mutation had developed a worrying aspect. The immune were so rare as to hardly be worthy of mention. Normally, when the undead encountered them they were treated as just another source of food. Not so with the Hounslow variant. Sid(Z) felt pulled to the room’s occupant. Here was someone the virus couldn’t defeat and something in Sid(Z)’s dead mind seemed to know the threat this resilient human represented. It attacked the door with an aggression it had never before displayed, the other zombies following Sid(Z)’s lead, the wood actually splintering as fists broke through. One of Sid(Z)’s hands was rendered useless by the barrage, the door lasting mere minutes as it was reduced to mere fragments.

  The woman inside was dispatched with unstoppable ferocity, only for the freshly created corpse to become a banquet of carnage. The flesh of the immune, it seemed, was the sweetest ta
ste there was, and the zombies fought each other to get just the smallest piece of such a delicacy, dozens of them forcing their way into the room. By the time Sid(Z) stood up from the carcass, nearly thirty zombies were trying to get at what was left. No trace of this true enemy could be left.

  It was as if Lazarus had recognised the threat the immune posed and had started to evolve to deal with it.

  22.08.19

  Preston, UK

  “That’s an interesting hypothesis,” Dr Patel said into his military issue phone. Natasha had called him and patched Nick’s radio into the call. “I’m not sure how such a thing could happen though.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, you would have said the same thing about zombies a few weeks ago.”

  “Very true,” Patel admitted. “Still you are talking about some kind of telepathic link. You are also suggesting that this Azrael has been given a vaccine against the virus. These are, some would say, preposterous presumptions that are difficult to defend.”

  “There is something you need to understand,” Nick said patiently. “This isn’t me putting this forward, but an acquaintance of mine. We call her Moros.”

  “Moros?” Confusion now in Patel’s voice.

  “I ask Moros questions, and the answers given are usually correct.”

  “I’m not sure who this Moros is...”

  “Not who, what. Moros is a multi-billion-pound quantum super computer that has more computing power than either of us could even fathom. It states that there is an 83% probability that the immune are telepathically linked somehow. With the information provided, it has also given a 58% chance that Azrael has been inoculated. Might such an individual be of use to you?”

  “We will run some more tests on his blood,” Patel responded. Nick assumed that was all the answer he needed.

  “OK, keep me in the loop. If he is as useful as he claims to be, we will be shipping him to Porton Down with Jessica. Manchester is already showing dangerous signs of being unstable. There are too many military personnel either infected or deserting. You need to be ready to leave as well.” Plans were already being made to relocate any and all research from Patel’s laboratory to the Preston Barracks. Order was still there, but it only seemed to be a matter of time before things finally fell apart.

  Despite being a military man himself, or perhaps because of that, Nick couldn’t blame any soldier for deserting their post when their country needed them. Especially this country. There was an impossible task being asked of the young men and women of the UK’s armed forces. It wasn’t as if the country and its political masters had looked after them, something Nick was well aware of. The military had been underpaid, underfunded and often left in squalid conditions. And then when their service was deemed complete, they were often abandoned on the scrap heap, many with a host of psychological conditions that the criminals in Parliament cared little about.

  However, even in such a broken system, there were forces at work trying to restore some sort of balance. MI13 had been one of those forces, working tirelessly against the country’s enemies, both foreign and domestic. Ever since Thatcher had been ousted by a coup within her own party, those domestic enemies had seemed to multiply like mice. That was the period when the rot had truly started. MI13 had held much of the damage at bay, but it had been losing the war. The realm that it was there to defend had started to feed upon itself.

  Even when the military went to war, they were shat on. Nick had been there, in the second Iraq war. He was special forces then, so was exempt from many of the problems much of the military faced, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t witness to the insanity of it. And even with the barely edible food and the shortage of ammunition, the British had still been considered by many the best soldiers in theatre. He would freely admit that he was biased in his assessment and was more than happy when the USAF came hurtling out of the skies to give much needed air support when it was called on. And it had been called on often. It also didn’t matter how good the British soldiers were, the Americans would always be the dominant military power.

  That was all in the past. Whatever it was that had made the British squaddie so formidable, part of that seemed to be lacking in the modern day British forces. The UK military had been decimated to the extent they were not up to the task being asked of them. Was it a generational thing? Nick didn’t know the answer, but he understood why so many of them were running for the hills.

  Was he being disloyal? Just because Nick worked for the most secret government funded organisation in the country, didn’t mean he couldn’t state the truth about how that country was being run. Osmond had said it best. Over the last twenty years, MI13 had spent a considerable amount of its time cleaning up after bureaucrats and members of the political classes who seemed intent on destroying the nation. There had been a similar situation in the nineteen sixties, but that was a direct result of communist infiltration at the height of the Cold War. It had almost been successful, communist sleeper agents infiltrating all the main political parties as well as the civil service. Osmond had spent his early years with MI13 removing as many of the undesirables as could be uncovered. This was before technological marvels such as Moros. Back then it was all hard graft and field work. The British public never learnt just how close they came to being a Russian vassal state where the orders would have come directly from Moscow. It was almost ironic that it was the remnants of the old Soviet system running amok that had caused the present crisis.

  To this day, it still confused him whenever he saw left wing protestors carrying the Hammer and Sickle flag, seemingly oblivious to the horrors that had been perpetrated under that symbol. Millions dead in the gulags. Tens of millions dead by forced starvation. Assassination, wholesale slaughter. The communists made Hitler and his fascist cronies seem almost like amateurs at times.

  There would be little in the way of concern for a person’s political ideology in the world that was coming. All that would matter was your ability to survive and your usefulness to any group that managed to come together. Hopefully, that meant the politicians would die out, but Nick wasn’t too hopeful. They always seemed to find a way of sticking around.

  As for the theory on telepathy, Nick had no idea what it all meant. That was for minds much smarter than his to figure out. They wouldn’t even know for sure until they got more immune subjects to examine. Would that even happen though? Admittedly, the more that became infected, the greater the chances of another immune individual cropping up. But conversely, more infected also meant more zombies and a greater threat that the whole infrastructure would collapse around them. Without the hospitals, the laboratories and the scientists, there would be no vaccine. Even with the best equipment, a vaccine would take months to create and produce.

  Humanity didn’t have months. At this rate, it probably didn’t even have days.

  22.08.19

  Isle of Man, British Crown Dependency

  Trevor Hughes had lived on the Isle of Man for twenty years. He liked the relatively sedate life the island represented, as well as the extremely favourable tax rate. His job at Douglas Harbour kept him busy, but for over a day the ferries hadn’t been running. Stood on the edge of the docks, he watched the two Royal Navy frigates patrol on the horizon. There had been many ships visible over the last few days, a great exodus from the two countries that sandwiched the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. None of them had been permitted to land on the island’s shores, the Royal Navy helping with that embargo.

  It was no rumour that the Isle of Man was under naval quarantine, signs being placed in ever street to report any sighted boats trying to land. Only this time the quarantine was to keep something out rather than to contain it within. The worry was that people fleeing the British or Irish mainland’s might bring the infection with them, and as the island was apparently disease free at present, it was hoped that it would stay that way. The hotels were full of those who had fled before the quarantine, so who could say what had been brought over. There was the chance t
hat islands such as the Isle of Man could become bastions of humanity, allowing mankind the prospect of rebuilding, to start again should the countries of the world fall.

  Unfortunately, the island wasn’t free of Lazarus. One of the planes to arrive on the nineteenth had carried a single infected individual. That had let the virus spread throughout Douglas so that there were now nearly a thousand viral carriers on the island. Trevor wasn’t one of them, but even now his beloved daughter was being infected in her primary school. She would bring Lazarus back to the family home and spread it to himself, his wife and his other three children. By the time Lazarus became apparent on the island, there would be too many already carrying the disease for it to be stopped. It was already too late.

  For much of humanity the need to flee was thwarted by the invisible and highly contagious nature of their microscopic enemy. There was no way for people to know where it was safe to hide.

  Even without the virus, there would have been problems. The island was far from self-sufficient and it couldn’t survive without the modern capitalist system that brought in goods every day of every week. With a population of nearly eighty-five thousand, as well as thousands of tourists, it would take a lot of work to feed itself. Theoretically it could be done, but only with a massive dose of science and a huge infrastructure building project to rival the agricultural marvel of the Netherlands. Nobody had bothered with that though. Nobody had previously considered the island any kind of possible haven except from the terrible terror of taxation.

  It was a problem many such islands would face over the coming weeks and months. Some would survive unscathed by the virus, only for their populations to slowly start to starve, air travel and international shipping lanes shutting down the deliveries of goods essential for human life to continue. The things that would be done in the name of survival would be reminiscent of the worst of humanity’s many atrocities. Ranging from forced euthanasia to cannibalism, the will of man would gratefully accept barbarity over extinction when given the choice. Such was the new world that would start to form, civilisation replaced by a new merciless order.