by Parker, Des
Two strangely dressed scientists looked back at them. One was tall with glasses and wearing mohair gloves over his hands, his standard issue white coat covering a mohair cardigan that clashed with his old grey trousers and black shoes. The second scientist was shorter and balding, a goofy grin on his wide face, a mohair cardigan, much like Simon’s covering a white shirt with two pens and a notebook in the pocket above an olive green pair of pants and an old pair of white joggers.
The two groups regarded each other and the two scientists found it hard to take their eyes off Caroline. The first scientist elbowed the shorter one, who then elbowed him back, and the first one fell two steps forward and grabbed Simon’s hand to steady himself as Simon reached out to shake his hand.
Mr Percival trotted over Simon’s foot, stopped briefly to study the scientists who watched him, open-mouthed, before walking deliberately between them and taking up residence on the top of a nearby desk, where he ate the remnants of someone’s lunch and promptly went to sleep, his beak tucked over his back and buried in his feathers.
“Your duck seems to like us,” the second scientist said as an afterthought.
“Well, at least he hasn’t tried to kill you, so, you’re probably not a threat,” Dick replied.
“Um – I’m Doctor Scott Michaels,” the first scientist said as he pumped Simon’s hand.
“Simon,” came the reply, “you don’t seem to be worried about us?” Simon added slowly, a hint of uncertainty in his tone. “For all you know, we could be zombies and we’re going to eat out your brains.”
“Um - I don’t think so,” Scott replied, “we’ve been watching you since the moment you arrived and I recognise your voice from the radio.”
The smaller, balding scientist jumped forward like a small puppy eager to play. “And I’m Associate Professor Yonas Filigreen, but you can call me Yonny. I’m Chief designer of this project. We’ve been watching you very closely and we’re very excited you’re here.”
“Yes – very excited,” Scott added, “very excited indeed.”
“Oh yes. Very, very excited.” Yonny added as he pumped Simon’s hand for much longer than was proper, or normal, or even slightly creepy.
“All right, all right. I think he gets the point,” Scott said as he prised Yonny’s hand away. “My apologies, we haven’t seen another human being for a couple of days. The only contact we’ve had has been from zombies, and that just turned out messy.”
Simon looked around the room. There were several workstations, flat planning tables, computer displays, and enough desk space for several more people, yet there were only two people in front of him. “Where is everyone else?” he asked.
“That’s the messy bit,” Yonny replied. “They all turned into zombies and attacked us. Most of them ran off outside, and the rest, well, let’s just say we had a huge job cleaning the walls.”
“I haven’t even bothered,” Simon replied. “I just leave them where they fall and it’s not always in the same place. It’s a little creepy but you get used to it after a while.” He pondered for a moment then remembered his manners, “Oh – sorry, this is Dick and Caroline.”
Yonny jumped in the way and grabbed Caroline’s hand with enthusiasm, “And I’m Yonny and you’re a girl and sorry about earlier, it’s just that Scott tends to jump in with both feet and say things he shouldn’t and gets all tongue-tied around women, whereas I don’t and I never leave the mike open like he does and -”
“Yeah, thanks Yonny,” Scott said, pushing him aside, “I’m Doctor Scott Michaels and um, I never know, um, what to say around women and – I’m Doctor Scott.”
“Dick Meister,” Dick said as he moved forward and shook Scott’s hand.
“The porn star?” Yonny added with an enthusiastic lilt.
“Porn star?” Scott whispered. “You lucky sod.”
Caroline tensed and moved forward, a look on her face that could kill at seven paces. Simon saw this and stepped in front of her, “More to the point,” Simon interrupted, “what is this place?”
Scott remembered himself and turned his attention to matters more in his remit, “Oh, yes. This is a secret underground lab.”
“We figured that out for ourselves,” Caroline interrupted, her voice cool.
Dick half jumped forward, his eyes taking in the whole room, “But seriously – how cool is that! I’ve never been in a secret base. Do you have, like, super-weapons and lots of cool shit that can fuck with the bad guys?”
“Um – no,” Scott replied sheepishly. We were doing weather research and neutrino emission experiments.”
“Neutrinos?” Simon asked, his knowledge of the subject about as comprehensive as his knowledge of women.
“Small cosmic particles that can pass through any matter,” Yonny chimed in, a boyish enthusiasm in his voice, “we’ve even built a quantum accelerator to run our own field tests.”
“Right,” Simon replied with absolutely no understanding of the relevance of any of this, “that doesn’t exactly help us with the zombie problem.”
“Or the werewolves,” Dick added.
“Or the vampires,” Caroline added with ice in her tone.
“There are werewolves and vampires too. How cool is that?” Yonny added, almost falling over his own enthusiasm.
“We’ll have to design a stratagem for them as well,” Scott said, turning away from Simon and looking at Yonny.
“What about a field resonator? We could hyper-accelerate the atomic decay and -” Yonny said, his voice trailing away as he completely ignored the visitors.
Scott got out a notebook and started scribbling in it as he and Yonny turned their backs on Simon. “No, we’d need a Class Five reactor for that; but we could scratch-build a light wave guide and capture box.”
“Yes – like in that movie.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, you are good Scott.”
“Thanks, Yonny.”
Simon cleared his throat. “Excuse me.”
“What, yes, oh Sorry,” Doctor Scott replied with a half turn.
“What do we do now?” Simon asked, his tone betraying a slight annoyance.
“Oh – there is food in the galley, first corridor on the left, a library down the second corridor, and bedrooms plus facilities to the right. There’s only the two of us here now, so there’s plenty of extra space and we cleaned up most of the mess. Make yourselves at home – we have work to do.”
With that, Scott turned his attention back to Yonny and they walked over to a planning table across the room, deep in discussion.
“Oh – right,” Simon half heartedly replied, not wanting to think about the mess Scott had referred to, but already knowing the answer.
“Well I’m hungry,” Dick said as he trotted off towards the kitchen.
“And I’m freshening up,” Caroline snapped as she stalked off towards the facilities, leaving Simon standing alone, looking lost.
“And what am I supposed to do?” he whispered to himself as he gazed about the room, lost.
Over at the planning table, Scott and Yonny, looked up at Simon, looked at each other. “He’d be just right,” Scott whispered.
“Yes – just the one we’ve been waiting for,” Yonny replied.
Scott looked at his notes then back at Yonny, “I’ll do the perimeter defences and bring the girls in, you prep the box. We might still be able to save the world.”
“Do you think we should tell him?”
“No need to spoil his day. We won’t be ready to go until tomorrow, so let’s keep him in the dark until then. It’s not every day a man gets to save the world.”
“What if it goes wrong?”
“Then we’ll need a good mop,” Scott replied sadly.
They went back to their notes, as Simon nervously looked around the lab and stared uncomfortably at the ceiling, completely oblivious to his new status as a scientific experiment.
Chapter 28
Hettie
Hettie had for
gotten her own name, until now. The thing that once was Hettie had been emptied out of all that made her Hettie, until she met Albert.
The thing that had once been Hettie was living, but in a state of undeath. The state of undeath wasn’t exactly death, but felt like it, looked like it, and smelled like it. All of those who died this unnatural death had lost all their humanity and had killed, or been killed, in this new paradigm.
But, Hettie couldn’t bring herself to kill. The thing she had become still had a shred of humanity, so she didn’t take part in any of the killings, and when Albert bit her, a part of her that had vanished, began to seep back into the empty shell where it once lived.
There was a connection between Albert and her; neither of them could understand it, but some small part of them sensed it. They were different and this is why they stayed close to each other, even as they were swept up in the tide of the not quite human army that was seething through the valleys on its way to a particular valley where a meal awaited.
The mass moved as one, an army following a leader whose resolute sense of purpose led them onwards. He had purpose, they did not, so his purpose became their purpose and that purpose was Simon.
They travelled on foot or in vehicles, some falling by the wayside in the odd mishap, because a crap driver is still a crap driver even if they are a zombie. But on the whole, the mass kept up with the man in the robes.
He rode in an open-top jeep, driven badly by one of his minions, but so far he had not been killed twice, and for a zombie that had to be a good thing.
The zombie army had acquired more weapons along the way, and more zombies, and six werewolves who ran stupidly along side the lead vehicle, occasionally stopping to sniff trees and each other’s backsides. The pack was resolute in their decision to follow Nick, but they failed to entirely ponder one area - how was it, that they could transform, at will, into their wolfen forms, completely disregarding hundreds of years of werewolf lore – because something like this could easily come back to bite them, metaphorically speaking, sooner than they expected.
Nick knew the werewolves would be useful in some way, he just hadn’t figured out how yet. In the back of several of the vehicles were crude coffin-shaped boxes in which the vampires travelled during daylight hours. Nick didn’t want to share his strategy with them; the more allies he had to throw at Simon’s compatriots, the better the chance of clearing a way for him to get to Simon.
Nick didn’t care what happened to the vampires or the werewolves or his horde, so long as he could get to Simon and he would gladly sacrifice them all if that’s what it took.
Chapter 29
Understanding
“They’re not technically dead.” Being a scientist, Scott had an explanation for what was going on.
“Well they certainly make a good show of it – I mean bits of them keep falling off and you’ve got to admit they look the part.” Simon replied, not believing what he was hearing.
It was morning after the first restful sleep the travellers had enjoyed since the apocalypse began.
Simon actually woke up thinking the whole thing was a dream and then, knowing his horror movie clichés, half-expected a zombie or some other dead thing to leap at his groggy head and splat itself on a nearby wall, completely wasting the advantage of surprise.
He was the one surprised when this didn’t happen and was equally surprised to join Dick, Caroline, and the two scientists around a pretty-much normal breakfast table, in a pretty-much normal secret underground laboratory, in the middle of what had become a pretty-much normal zombie apocalypse, with an extra serve of werewolves and vampires for good measure.
Everyone was eating porridge – an unexpectedly normal thing to do while the entire population of the world wanted to suck out your brains.
The previous night Scott and Yonny went off and did some weird, sciencey stuff that Simon didn’t understand, and built some kind of contraption in the lab.
Later, Scott went off towards the main door, carrying a whole bunch of unusual spotlights, with wires and cables sprouting from the backs of them.
All the time this was happening, they would cast furtive glances at Simon. He was hanging around and couldn’t sleep. He tried reading some old science magazines that he did not understand but these sent him packing to his bedroom, which had belonged to a younger scientist who turned into a zombie and whose undead bits and pieces had to be washed off a wall after he had a close encounter with Scott’s cardigan.
Now it was morning, Simon pressed the scientists for an explanation, “Why has the world fucked itself?”
And they weren’t exactly helping; they were now telling him that the undead weren’t technically dead after all.
Simon’s whole grasp of what was happening flew out his head, ran down a corridor, hid in a shadow, and started sucking its metaphoric thumb.
“So, explain to me again how someone who looks like death warmed up, isn’t actually death warmed up; but is actually some kind of lukewarm knock-off, doing a bloody good job pretending to be death warmed up, complete with the drooling and craving for my flesh?”
Scott pursed his lips before answering, “Well – this still doesn’t mean they’re dead.”
Simon fixed Scott in his gaze, “Some of them had worms crawling out of their faces.”
Yonny piped up, “My great Uncle had worms, but that didn’t mean he was a zombie.”
Caroline leaned forward, trying to make sense of this. She put down her spoon and Dick snuck a bite of her porridge. “Alright – so if they’re not dead, what are they?”
Scott turned to her and tried to sound knowledgeable, but not too clever, but just enough clever so she would be impressed, and maybe one day go out with him. “We think they may have evolved.”
“What do mean – evolved?” Simon interrupted. “I wouldn’t exactly call trying to suck out my brains with a straw, while an arm falls off, as some kind of evolutionary leap.”
Scott nodded slowly and pushed his tongue against his teeth. He raised a finger to make a point, but dropped it again, a little less confident. He pressed his hands together at the fingertips because he thought this looked wise and a little zen-like, and spoke slowly.
“Yes – well, no. That is we – believe an energy wave from space caused a cross-species mutation on a colossal scale.”
Caroline jumped in, “So they’re mutants?”
Scott glanced at her, but Yonny beat him to the punch and launched headlong into a full-throttle scientific explanation at one hundred miles-an-hour.
“Well – not exactly. The wave field caused a cellular determinant to activate dormant psycho-reactive interleaves in the subjects neo-cortex, causing the hypothalamus to reprioritise the …”
He could see Caroline’s eyes glaze and he felt a little nervous about continuing, but tried ploughing on regardless - until it was clear none of the visitors were following. This lack of understanding finally made him stop. “I’ll make us some tea,” he blurted before hurriedly leaving the table.
Caroline and Simon turned their gaze on Scott as Mr Percival jumped up on the table and helped himself to Simon’s porridge, his beak diving in, throwing bits everywhere.
Dick just sat there a little bewildered, licking bits of Simon’s flying porridge off his face as he chewed his breakfast mechanically. All of this was well beyond his usual life experience where his biggest problem was getting himself up, and what lube to use once he did.
“So they’re mutants?” Caroline repeated blandly.
Scott adjusted his cuffs and cleared his throat, “Technically, mutation is the basis for gradual evolutionary change so, yes; they are mutants. It’s just that the evolutionary change occurred a bit faster than normal.”
“Oh that’s reassuring.” Simon responded, a dark edge to his voice. “So why zombies, werewolves, and vampires? I mean those things are creatures of myths – well, they were until two days ago.”
“Scott brightened up. He could see he was final
ly getting through. “See, that’s the clever bit. We think each individual’s hyper-evolutionary vector was determined by the subject’s favoured subconscious fear archetype.”
“Their subconscious what?” Caroline asked.
“We think the energy wave caused people to hyper-evolve into whatever powerful id-determined creature of terror they resonated with the most. So, those who thought zombies were the most powerful things to fear became zombies; those who feared vampires or werewolves, subconsciously chose those forms, and their own hyperactive cellular energy did the rest.”
“What about those who didn’t have a favourite monster and all the other non-human species?” Simon asked.
Scott considered this for a moment. “Evolution simply chose the easiest path and mindless zombies are pretty low on the pecking order.”
Simon thought about Nick, “But not all the zombies are mindless – I mean I know at least one who can speak and set an army on us.”
“Well – evolution isn’t perfect, I read about a two-headed dog once.”
“That doesn’t help us,” Simon replied.
“So how did the mohair save us from the change?” Caroline asked.
Scott considered this for a moment. “We think mohair’s cellular signature may have masked some of the energy wave, and set up a counter-effect which disrupted the primary tissue mutation – hence, it repels everything that changed – and because the change was hyper-kinetically charged, the resultant counter-force is also hyper-kinetic in nature, and may even have enhanced your existing, albeit latent, abilities.”
“What do you mean?” Simon asked, now worried he might have a latent zombie cell hiding somewhere in his body.
“The evolutionary impetus seems to have come from your brain, so, something in your mind may have evolved – you may feel more courageous, more focused, or smarter. I certainly feel a bit taller today.”
“Could your dick have grown bigger?” Dick suddenly asked, his mind finally catching up to the conversation.
