Resurrection: A Zombie Novel

by Michael J. Totten

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m not a doctor and this isn’t a hospital. Take two of those pills. Hughes, give her some pills, will you?”

  Hughes unscrewed the cap on a little orange bottle and gave Annie two pills. She swallowed one without water.

  “We should wait a half-hour or so,” Kyle said. “Let that pill start to kick in.”

  He picked up one of the syringes.

  “How much of my blood do you think we’ll need?” Annie said.

  “Enough to fill this whole thing,” Kyle said and tapped the needle tip with his finger.

  * * *

  Parker drifted in a delirious state made of one part sleep and another part pain. The agony in his lower back remained constant even while he slept. It was part of his body now as if it had always been there and always would be. He even began to make some sort of peace with it. He’d stop resisting if only the pain would stop getting worse.

  The door opened downstairs and he snapped to alertness. He reflexively tried to sit up, but of course he could not, not with his wrists yoked to his ankles as if he were chained to the floor.

  “Jesus Christ,” he heard Kyle say. “I will never get used to that smell.”

  Parker no longer even noticed the smell of the corpse downstairs on the couch. That was the least of his concerns now. Only two things mattered to him anymore. He couldn’t move, and his lower back felt like someone had reached in with a pair of pliers and yanked things out.

  He heard several sets of feet on the wooden steps. The whole crew was on its way up there. To let him go? Shoot him? Read him the riot act?

  The door opened. Kyle appeared with a syringe in his hand with Annie beside him and Hughes and Frank behind. Hughes had the Mossberg, but he pointed it at the floor.

  “We have a job for you,” Kyle said.

  “I’m sorry for what I did,” Parker said.

  Kyle’s face remained flat. “You mean you’re sorry you didn’t succeed.”

  “No,” Parker said, suddenly desperate all over again to have his ties loosened and to feel even the slightest bit of relief in his back. “I snapped. I wasn’t thinking. It could have happened to any of us with all this shit that’s going on.”

  “But it didn’t. You’re the only murderer here. But it doesn’t matter anymore because we have a job for you.”

  Parker looked again at the syringe in Kyle’s hand. It was filled with dark liquid.

  “We debated whether or not to tell you what’s going on,” Kyle said. “I didn’t want to say anything because I don’t think you deserve it, but the others convinced me.”

  “Can you please loosen these ropes? Then we can talk. My back is killing me. I can’t stay hunched over like this anymore.”

  “Unfortunately for you,” Kyle said, “your job requires you to remain precisely in that position.”

  Parker groaned. He had a bad feeling about where this was heading.

  “What’s in the syringe?” He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.

  “Blood,” Kyle said.

  A wave of panic hit him and his entire body seized up. Were the sadistic bastards going to infect him?

  He pulled against the ropes with everything he had left. “Get me out of here! Let me go and I’ll never bother any of you ever again!”

  “Relax,” Kyle said. “This is Annie’s blood.”

  Parker settled down, but he could still feel his heart pounding in his chest and the blood rushing in his ears. He was hyperventilating, and it was hard for him to breathe in this position.

  “Annie is immune to the virus,” Kyle said.

  She was immune? Really? “How do you know?”

  “Because I got bit,” Annie said. “Look.” She turned around and lifted her shirt up. Parker saw an obvious human bite mark below her shoulder.

  “Jesus,” Parker said. “You got bit and it didn’t affect you? Are you sure you were bitten by one of those things?”

  “Oh, it affected me,” she said. “I became one of them.”

  Parker didn’t move, but he felt like he fell onto the floor.

  “I spent days as one of them before my system defeated the virus. It’s hard to be sure. My memory of that time is vague.”

  “Jesus, Annie,” Parker said. “Did you—kill people?”

  “I did,” she said and swallowed. “I attacked and killed some of Lane’s crew shortly before he took over the grocery store. He saw the whole thing. That’s why he recognized me. But he couldn’t place me because it never occurred to him that I was infected when he saw my face. He didn’t think anyone could turn back.”

  “My God,” Parker said. So that’s why she looked like such hell when Hughes first brought her home. That’s why she was covered in so much blood. She’d bathed in the blood of her victims. “Annie, I’m sorry.”

  He shuddered as he tried to imagine her running around as one of those things and hunting people, biting people, eating people. Then he paused. “What does this have to do with me? And why is your blood in that syringe?”

  “We’re passing Annie’s immunity onto you,” Kyle said. “At least we’re going to try.”

  Parker was truly confused now. He thought they were going to punish him. But this wasn’t punishment. This was a gift. They weren’t going to kill him then. There’s no way they’d draw blood from Annie’s arm and inoculate him only to kill him or exile him later. He breathed easier.

  “So you’re going to stick that in my arm?” Parker said.

  “I’m going to stick this in your arm,” Kyle said. “It’s best you don’t move when I do it. I’m not a doctor. It hurt something fierce when I stuck this in Annie. I’ll try to make it relatively painless even though you don’t deserve it, but it is going to hurt.”

  “We’re pretty sure,” Annie said, “that the antibodies in my system are in my blood and that they can be added to yours. So you’ll be immune just like I am. In theory.”

  “Have all of you gotten the injection?” Parker said.

  Kyle’s face remained flat. Annie looked like she was going to say something, but she hesitated. Hughes shook his head.

  Then Annie spoke up. “You’re the first.”

  He was the first? That made no sense. He was the bad guy. So why was he first?

  “Why?”

  “Because we don’t know if it works yet,” Kyle said.

  Nobody said anything else. Nobody even looked at him. They just stood there and waited for him to figure it out for himself.

  “You motherfuckers,” he said. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “It’s the only way to be sure,” Kyle said and plunged the syringe into Parker’s arm.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Parker wept silently. He no longer cared about the pain in his back, nor about the pain in his arm where Kyle had jammed in the needle. He was one of the last human beings on the face of the earth, yet he had no more value to anyone else than a lab rat.

  How long, he wondered, before they brought the next needle in? The one that would infect him. And what would they do with him once the results from their little Nazi experiment came in? If he turned and stayed turned, they’d shoot him. That was clear. But what if he turned back into Parker, like Annie had turned back into Annie? Were they still going to shoot him?

  Probably. Since shooting him was the plan in the first place.

  Maybe after he turns, he’ll have enough strength to rip through the ropes and break out of the bedroom. The virus didn’t give those things extra strength, but it did seem to make them less sensitive or concerned about pain, like psychotics hopped up on angel dust. Maybe he could bust his way free and eat Kyle.

  He actually laughed at the thought, a horrible grim laugh even though there was nothing funny about it. He didn’t want to eat Kyle. He didn’t want to eat anybody. Yet he laughed at the thought. Perhaps this was the beginning of acceptance.

  Acceptance. Yes. He’d have to accept this. It’s not like they gave him a choice. They were going t
o stick him with an infected needle, and he’d either turn back like Annie did or he wouldn’t. And then they were going to kill him.

  He wondered what it would be like after he turns. Would he be aware of what’s happening? Would he remember the person he was before, when he still knew his name and where he had come from? Annie said her memories of that time were vague, which suggested she was still sentient on some level. She wasn’t sleepwalking. Otherwise she wouldn’t remember it.

  He hoped he would at least remember his name. Please let him at least remember his name.

  The front door downstairs opened and he tensed up. This was it. They were on their way up. He only wished they could wait a little bit longer and give him more time to make peace with the terrible transformation awaiting him.

  Then he wondered: Where on earth did they get the fluid for the second injection?

  A horrendous racket downstairs. Lots of banging and scraping.

  He heard Hughes say, “Grab his hands, Frank!” and Frank said, “I’m trying!”

  Grab whose hands? Kyle’s?

  Then he heard Kyle’s voice. “Steady. Get it onto the stairs.”

  Get what onto the stairs?

  Something heavy banged into the wall.

  And then something growled.

  No.

  It couldn’t be.

  They wouldn’t.

  He heard a new voice he didn’t recognize. It struggled and strained as if it were gagged. Parker’s entire body flushed with red heat.

  The commotion reached the top of the stairs, and soon they were outside the bedroom.

  “Okay,” Kyle said. “Hughes and I have a hold of it. Frank, open the door.”

  Parker heard grunting and snarling. He wanted it to be some sort of animal, but no. He knew what it was.

  One of those things.

  * * *

  Madness and mayhem out in the hallway. Annie stepped back as Kyle, Frank, and Hughes wrestled with the thing they had captured in Eastsound. This one really did look like a thing. Annie felt no kinship or bond with it whatsoever. Not even pity.

  It was a male. Maybe thirty years old. It was covered in gore and it stank of a charnel house. Its eyes were like intelligent animal eyes, seeing and focusing but lacking compassion and decency. Its face was red and swollen and puffy. Hughes had stunned it with pepper spray designed to repel grizzly bears, which made it furious and explosive.

  Hughes and Frank had placed some kind of fishing net over its upper arms and tied its wrists together behind its back. They covered its mouth with duct tape. It could still kick and head-butt and throw its weight around. It thrashed about so violently, she feared it might get its arms free, rip the tape off its mouth, and start biting.

  Annie held the Glock. Her job was to guard that thing while the others tried to control it.

  This was not at all what she had in mind. When she said they should inoculate Parker and then infect him, she meant they should inject Parker with the virus, not let one of those things actually bite him. But Kyle insisted—no, he demanded—that they do it this way. His sadistic determination frightened her almost as much as this thing did.

  Hughes grabbed its bound wrists with one hand and the hair on the back of its head with the other. Kyle and Hughes each managed to hold one of its shoulders. They had it positioned in front of the door like they were going to use it as a battering ram.

  It managed to scream even with its mouth taped shut. It sounded human and not at the same time. Parker hollered on the other side of the door, but the thing in the hall made so much noise with its muffled yelling and thrashing that Parker’s screams were hardly even noticeable in the background.

  “Annie,” Hughes said. He gripped the thing’s head and held its writhing arms still as best as he could. “I need you to open the door, step out of the way, and then aim that Glock at this creature’s head. We’re going to get it down on the floor in front of Parker and then rip the tape off. Let it bite Parker one time and one time only. Then shoot it. Do not hit any of us and do not hit Parker. You got it?”

  She nodded, trembling.

  Parker screamed from the other side of the door. Surely he knew by now what was happening.

  She reached for the doorknob and the thing lunged at her. It rammed the top of its head into her shoulder and groaned into the tape. She flinched and stepped back.

  “Sorry, Annie,” Kyle said.

  “Jesus, this thing,” Frank said.

  Hughes gripped its hair and pulled back its head. “Okay. You’re clear.”

  She reached for the doorknob again, twisted it, flung open the door, and stepped back.

  Parker, tied to the chair, strained and thrashed as violently and hysterically as that thing. “You motherfuckers! You’re going to burn for this!”

  “Get it down on the floor,” Hughes said and kicked the back of the thing’s knees with his boots. It went down just a few feet from Parker.

  Parker’s face was red from the straining. Spittle flew from his mouth. “You’re the most wicked people alive. I never did anything half as bad as what you’re doing right now. Kyle, after I turn, I’m going to rip through these cords and chew off your face.”

  Annie tried to aim at the thing’s head, but she couldn’t keep her hands steady and the gun bobbed all over the place.

  “Frank,” Hughes said. “Lift Parker’s pants leg. Expose his ankle.”

  God, Annie thought. Lifting his pants leg so that creature has something to bite. She wanted to look away but couldn’t. She’d need to shoot that thing if it got loose.

  Hughes turned its head sideways, slammed it into the floor, and leaned all his body weight into its back. “Rip off the tape, Frank. Do it carefully.”

  Parker wept. He seemed too tired and resigned to yell anymore.

  Frank tried to yank the tape off the thing’s mouth, but he flinched and pulled back, afraid of losing his fingers—and worse. Unlike Parker, he had not been inoculated. None of the others had yet been inoculated. No one even knew if the inoculation would work.

  “Try again, Frank,” Hughes said. “This thing’s head isn’t moving.”

  Frank reached toward its face with a shaking hand, grabbed a corner of the tape, pulled, and jumped back. He scrambled six feet backward to get clear of its teeth.

  The tape was still over its mouth.

  “Damnit, Frank,” Hughes said and ripped the tape off himself in a flourish. He did it so quickly, the squirming thing had no time to react. But now its head was free and its teeth were bared, the virus cocked and loaded, the worst biological weapon the world had ever seen.

  Parker jerked as if he was being electrocuted in his chair.

  Annie should have known what would happen next, but somehow she didn’t. She knew the bite was coming. She anticipated Parker’s screams. She knew she’d have to blow the thing’s brains out before it bit somebody else.

  But she didn’t foresee what happened first.

  It belted out a scream unlike anything she had ever heard in her life, even from the others she had encountered. Those things didn’t take kindly to being detained and controlled by their food. If malevolent violence had a sound, this was it.

  She felt shocked and appalled all over again that she had once been the same kind of thing that made such a noise.

  It lunged like a big cat and bit Parker’s ankle.

  Annie turned away as Parker screamed in horror and agony. She knew that sound because she had made it herself when she had been bitten. It came back to her in a rush, the knowledge that she was finished, that the dark waters were rising, that she would transform into a thing so mindless she’d be a brain-dead woman walking, yet walking all the same and biting and spreading the disease that burned down the world.

  But then she recovered. She came back from the other side as if she had been resurrected.

  The same thing might happen to Parker.

  Please, she thought. Let him recover. Let him live. She needed him to rise whole fro
m that chair.

  She snapped back to alertness when Hughes took the pistol from her trembling fingers and blew the thing’s brains onto the floor.

  “Kyle,” Hughes said. “Frank. Get rid of that body. Throw it on the lawn outside next to the others. And try not to get too much blood on your hands.”

  * * *

  Annie was angry. Kyle could see that. She wouldn’t talk to him. Would not even look at him.

  He sat on the front steps of the guesthouse while she slammed kitchen cabinets and banged things on the counter. He wanted to go in there, but he wouldn’t be able to say the right thing, not after the violence upstairs in the main house, and especially not since they all knew more violence was coming whether or not Parker recovered.

  They hadn’t yet discussed who would shoot him when this was all over, but Kyle would make sure he got the honor. He would insist. It was his right.

  * * *

  Parker was beyond pain now. The part of his brain that received and interpreted it had switched off. The rest of his conscious mind would shut down soon enough. Only a distorted version of the lizard brain would remain.

  It was all over for him even if he recovered, but a tiny flickering part of him hoped he’d recover anyway. For Annie’s sake and for the few healthy humans left in the world. If her immunity could be passed on to enough people, she might prevent this scourge from becoming an extinction event, but he’d never know. He’d be dead either way. So he also hoped, for entirely selfish reasons, that when he slipped out of consciousness, it would be lights out forever.

  Please, he thought. Just let me go. Let me go to sleep and never wake up.

  * * *

  Hughes wasn’t easily disturbed, but what happened in that room was the worst thing he’d seen since the death of his family. And this time he was to blame.

  What was wrong with him?

  He should have insisted they do it differently, that Parker be injected rather than bitten.

  It was possible that the virus could only be transferred through saliva and biting. Kyle was right about that much. They didn’t actually know that the blood carried the virus. None of them had witnessed a person getting infected from contact only with blood. But they’d figure it out. If Parker didn’t turn after being injected, then they could have brought that awful thing into the room.