by B. M. Hodges
“You’re supposed to call before coming here!” Lucinda put her arms around Tomas’ neck, pressed her breasts up against his chest and gave him a sloppy but passionate kiss. “My boss would have my head if he knew you were here. Lucky for you, the vet and his assistant are in surgery removing a cyst from a Doberman’s spine. They’ll be in there for at least another two hours. If they see you back here, they’re sure to call the authorities.”
Dr. Greer had recruited Lucinda when she was reconnecting with her colleagues in Australia after she had used Tomas to steal vitally important IHS research from Vitura’s San Diego compound four years ago. Greer was a pro at setting up locales for those times when on-the-fly research was required. Each time there was a zombie fever outbreak, a phone call was made to Lucinda who took the next flight into the hot zone, creatively finding a business or housing estate where the two crates of laboratory equipment following close behind wouldn’t garner suspicion. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Lucinda was rumored to have connections with the ancient Chinese gang known as the Triads.
The problem for Tomas, however, was that Lucinda had a mad crush on him and always assaulted him with sloppy open mouthed kisses whenever they crossed paths. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate the effort she put in - and she was attractive. But post-op transsexuals weren’t his type.
Tomas pulled away and smiled at him, “Same old Lucinda. Dear, I need a shower and use of the lab, then I’ll be out of your hair. Your ‘employees’ will never know I was here.”
“I can’t help you with the shower, but the lab is ready to go. The equipment has been sterilized and the computers are on a secure line with the Vancouver lab. If you’d have let me know you were coming, I could have closed shop and assisted. But as things are, I’ll need to stay up front until closing time.”
Lucinda led Tomas down a narrow hallway.
On the left side there was a large room housing twelve cats, four dogs, a cockatoo and a goat – all in cages. On the right there were four doors, the first one marked with the Malay term for examination ‘Peperiksaan’, the second recovery ‘Pulih’, the third surgery ‘Surgeri’, and the last, the important one, supplies ‘Bekalan’.
Tomas glanced through the little window in the door marked ‘Surgeri’ and saw two men in full surgical gowns hunched over a large black dog.
Lucinda unlocked the number padlock on the ‘Bekalan’ door and motioned for Tomas to step inside the tiny broom closet filled with medical and janitorial supplies. When he was inside, she locked the door and Tomas flicked the light switch down two times. There was a click behind him. He turned and stepped into the hidden laboratory that was formerly the vet’s office. The room was cramped, but Lucinda had done a bang-up job on equipping the tiny lab. Along the length of one wall was a stainless-steel table crowded with, among other things, test tubes, beakers, graduated cylinders, hot plates, goggles, tongs, Erlenmeyer flasks, Petri dishes, magnifying glasses, and dissecting needles. There were analytical balances, hybridization ovens, centrifuges, thermal cyclers, pipettes and a stereo zoom microscope on the next wall. A large stainless-steel sink, a locker full of aprons and protective bio-suits, and a computer hooked up with an encrypted VPN line directly to Qual Pharmaceuticals were packed along the wall to Tomas’ left. And there was a large examination table in the center with an array of surgical equipment including bone chisel, bone cutter, a mallet, clamps, dissecting forceps, probe, Crile retractor, Tracheal hook, rip spreader, scalpels, Metzenbaum scissors, tissue expander, scale and - finally - an electric surgical saw.
Tomas set the duffel bag on to the table and went straight to the computer. First, he tried to contact Dr. Greer at the lab, but she wasn’t available; so he left a short message that he was going to send her some samples of a new strain of the IHS virus. Then he googled a map of Singapore and studied it for a few moments. He needed to find a rendezvous point where he could meet up with Abigail and her friend. He had never been to Singapore, but thought he found a convenient spot to the north of the island that was secluded and easy to find. He preferred meeting them as close to the border as possible since he had to swim or take a boat across the strait as Singapore had closed its borders earlier in the week.
He checked the website for CARS reality television show and saw that the reality show finale was being held at a casino resort in Marina Bay, Singapore. So he wrote a quick email to the hotel concierge of the resort, in care of Abigail and Jamie, that said:
Made it to Johor in one piece. We must get you to our lab in Canada a.s.a.p. It’s imperative you meet me at the Punggol Jetty @ midnight tonight. Bring your passports.
-Tomas
He thought about those few hours he had spent with the reality show teams and remembered something that kept bothering him … that scratch on that Norris guy’s arm. He had noticed the wound after they had smashed into the shopping center display window and couldn’t help but wonder whether some of the gore from the zombies who had exploded across the front of the car had seeped into that cut.
He finished the note with:
P.S. Get Norris checked out. He may be infected.
It was unlikely that they would get the message. But if they did, he wouldn’t have to search for them in that densely populated city-state.
When he finished with the computer, he went to the sink, took off his shirt and did his best to scrub down. He put on a bio-suit, taking great care to ensure that it was sealed tight. Then he donned a surgical mask with an eye shield and removed the head from the sealed orange biohazard bag. Immediately, he regretted not breathing through his mouth as the rotten cheese stench from the decomposing tissue infected with the virus made him wretch.
He clamped the head to the table with leather straps, switched on the electrical surgical saw and made quick work of sawing around the upper part of the skull. Then he took the bone chisel and mallet and tick, ticked a few deft taps on the cut line. The skull cap rose on its own off the top of the severed head from the release of pressure as the swollen brain expanded. It reminded him of watching bread rise in the oven. He removed the piece of skull and marveled at what he saw. The brain matter had lines of green sprouting through the pink as though an invasive plant had taken root inside this woman’s head. It was a curious sight, and Tomas took photos and recorded some video before proceeding.
After removing the brain and weighing it, he set to work cutting horizontal slices from the brain itself and sandwiching them between slides. He wasn’t much of an expert in molecular biology, but knew enough to handle a microscope. When he put one of the slides under the microscope, he inhaled sharply. The green shoots were still teeming with live virus, as though the actual death of the woman six hours earlier had never occurred.
Tomas took the head and the remains of the brain and sealed them back into the biohazard bag. Fearing an outbreak of this mutant virus in the middle of Johor, he thoroughly cleaned and disinfected the instruments and table. When he was finished, he set the slides into the data analyzer next to the computer, sent the information to the Vancouver lab and waited for Dr. Greer.
Tomas spent the next few hours deep in thought, analyzing the tissue and trying to isolate which parts of the brain the virus was controlling and which parts may still be latently human.
Finally, Dr. Greer appeared on the screen, her signature raven black hair streaked with white pulled back into a tight bun. There was a look of concern on her smooth matronly face. “Tomas, please tell me you’re taking every precaution handling these samples.” Qual Pharmaceuticals had been keeping tabs on Vitura’s field experiments during Malaysia’s outbreak. They knew their rival was close to manufacturing a cure and that Vitura was attempting to create a more efficient virus. But this mutant strain of zombie fever was an extreme that even Dr. Greer hadn’t anticipated.
“I’ve been doing my best to avoid contamination. But the field doesn’t exactly measure up to the cleanliness of the lab.” He held up the head. “I’m trying to be as safe as possibl
e under these conditions. Believe me, if you saw these new crazed monsters, you’d agree that getting infected by the original strain would be a much more humane fate. At least, after that fever, your higher reason is decimated. I’m not so sure with these creatures. They may still retain some intelligence. It may even be possible they are aware that they are somehow different.” He raised the head again. “I saw this one dragging a corpse like it was saving it for a future meal.”
Dr. Greer nodded, “Tomas, this definitely isn’t the same virus we’ve been fighting. Genetically, it’s not even close to the contagion that killed your father. The virus in the brain tissue you have there is nothing like we have seen. Damn them! Vitura obviously hasn’t vetted their bioengineers. They seem to be redesigning strains without proper controls. It doesn’t have the half-life cycle of the original IHS that made it possible to contain before spreading through an entire population. This virus,” she held up the pile of research that she, the labs AI computer and their grad student forensic examiners had produced over the last hour, “is unstable. It is going to continue to mutate and the virus will become more and more virulent.”
Tomas let her words sink in.
If they were correct, then this new mutant strain could be the global killer they had hypothesized after the first zombie outbreak in China four years earlier.
“Oscar is working up various scenarios for a potential global pandemic. But you need to know the danger you are in, being so close to ground zero. Our preliminary results show that the incubation rate will continue to decrease as the virus mutates. Infection rates will be impossible to contain.”
Oscar leaned in over Dr. Greer and said, “Tomas, it was a straightforward process to contain the previous outbreaks--just quarantine those stricken with the fever and round up those infected wandering around. But this new contagion won’t be so easy to control. A population stricken with this mutated virus will be devastated in days. There’s even a distinct possibility that this virus could become airborne. And if that happens, then it’s all over.”
“Doc,” Tomas interrupted waving his hands in front of the screen to get Dr. Greer’s attention. When Oscar had spoken up, she had lost herself in the data. She focused again on Tomas. “The samples I sent were the bad news,” he said, “but that’s not the only news I have. I also have some good news. I helped two Singaporean girls escape Vitura’s field hospital in Mersing. They had been given the latest Vitura vaccine that supposedly inoculates against IHS and IHS-2. Right now they’re safe in Singapore. I wanted to send you these samples before I go after them. I’ll have them on a plane tonight and tomorrow we can begin synthesizing our cure. If it’s not too late, we’ll finally stop Vitura and rid the world of zombie fever!” He grinned into the monitor and, quoting from his favorite fantasy trilogy, said, “Even in the darkest moment … there is light.”
Chapter Four
Gleneagles Hospital
Orchard Road, Singapore
After threading her way through the crowds of staff and befuddled patients milling around in the ground-floor corridors, Abigail found a less hectic exit in the rear of the hospital. She pushed her way through the revolving doors into an alleyway.
The one-way street was devoid of traffic and people. She began to jog in the opposite direction of the mayhem up the hill towards the expressway a couple blocks ahead. Behind her, sirens and orders shouted through bullhorns and an occasional gunshot punctuated the stillness of the back road.
Abigail leaned forward and sped up her pace.
She spotted a police sedan blocking the road at the intersection branching to the expressway at the crest of the hill. The officer had set up a barricade of traffic cones along in front of his car. The sedan was facing towards the junction and she could see the officer sitting in the driver’s seat through the rear window. The driver’s door was wide open and the blue lights were flashing on the roof.
“Hey, there! Help!” Abigail yelled as she approached the back of the car. She wasn’t yelling because she needed help - she just didn’t want the police officer to mistake her for a threat.
But the police officer didn’t move or acknowledge her approach.
She stopped by the trunk and hollered even louder. “Hey!”
And still no movement.
Yet, the policeman continued to sit immobile in the car.
Abigail timidly knocked on the trunk and said, “Excuse me.”
She eased around to the side of the car and looked inside at the officer. He was a young man, not much older than she. He was holding a bloody towel wrapped around his arm and was sweating profusely. His eyes were shut, but they were rolling around behind his eyelids.
Abigail gave him a light tap on the shoulder and he groaned. She knew there was nothing that could be done for this young man. He had been bitten and soon he would awaken with the all-consuming hunger of the fever.
The rioters had entered the narrow street at the base of the hill and steadily marched towards her. One of the hooligans launched a beer bottle high into the air and it crashed on the roof of the police car.
Abigail grabbed the officer by his shirt collar and heaved him out of the sedan onto the ground. She slid into the driver’s seat, buckled in and put on the policeman’s cap that was sitting on the passenger seat.
The rioters were now directly behind her. One of them jumped onto the trunk and began pounding the roof with a metal pipe. She turned the ignition and slammed on the gas, flipping the rioter off the car into the approaching crowd.
With blue lights flashing, Abigail roared across the intersection and up the ramp of the expressway. She whipped around a barricade of police and, mistaking her for one of them, the officers manning the barricade waved her by.
The CTE expressway was crowded with people trying to escape the city district. Abigail pulled onto the narrow shoulder. She took the police car to a dangerous, reckless speed, flashing past the slow-moving traffic as the drivers of the other vehicles on the road stiffened at the sight of police lights.
The police radio was squawking about squadrons of army personnel being deployed in the central business district, riots breaking out around MRT subway stations across the island, and shopping centers being evacuated because of vicious feral human violence, only to be broken intermittently by the order to ‘stand by for further instructions.’
They don’t have a clue what they were up against, Abigail thought, they’re treating this like a resurgence of anti-government protests from fifty years ago.
At least they hadn’t put a total lockdown on Singapore’s borders.
She still had a chance to get her family to safety.
To say that Singapore is crowded is an understatement. With towering apartment complexes pressing uncomfortably together on every piece of available land, a five-minute drive meant passing over ten-thousand people every square mile. So while the drive to her home district of Bishan was short, the perception, the feeling of human distance in Singapore is lengthened.
She took advantage of the authority of her stolen car, running stoplights and aggressively forcing other motorists aside.
Five minutes later and she was in front of her apartment block. She drove the sedan over the sidewalk, across the grassy knoll in front of her building and onto the void deck underneath the building. After taking the stairs to the eighth floor, she burst through the door of her flat.
Abigail’s mother jerked out of her rocking chair in surprise. She had no idea what was happening outside the confines of their tiny flat. The wall-sized screen was blaring at full volume about a salacious affair by so-and-so celebrity. Abigail pressed her hand on the screen and the wall went blank.
“Mom!” Abigail said, giving gave her a big hug. At least she’s safe. “Where are the girls? We have to leave Singapore now! I’ll explain in the car.”
“But my show’s on. Give me another ten minutes, could you dear?”
Abigail opened her sisters’ bedroom door and saw them playing teddy at
tea on the floor. She helped them up and said to her mother, “Grab the satchel with the passports. We’re taking a little trip.”
Down at the car, Abigail shushed their questions about the police car with a fierce look and once they were all secured inside, said, “Wait here. Lock the doors. I won’t be long.”
