Brother Mine, Zombie.

by Trevorah, Peter

  This was, of course, a lie – or, at best, a major exaggeration – but the audience, as one, turned to look at me. I think they had assumed that I could not speak either.

  “Silence!” ordered the Captain. (Since I was daring to upstage him in his finest hour.)

  But I was in front of a public audience. I was not to be silenced so easily as all that.

  “Oh, come on, Captain. These fine young GI’s deserve to hear it from the horse’s mouth. They need to know everything they can about creatures like my brother, David. Their lives will undoubtedly depend upon it once they leave here.”

  “I demand you remain silent, prisoner!” spat the Captain.

  I turned and pointed at the creature beside me in the cage – who made a pathetic groan (again, right on cue!) I felt the ‘mood of the meeting’ might be turning. I played for sympathy.

  “Very well, Captain,” I said. “You’re in charge. I don’t want to have that ten thousand volt cattle prod rammed up my arse again. That was absolutely excruciating!” (This was another lie – he hadn’t yet used it on me.)

  I pointed to the three cattle prods that had been left leaning carelessly against the back of the stage wall – and feel silent. However, the discontent among the audience members was palpable as well as audible. The Captain was not so stupid as ignore the fact that he was rapidly losing the troops’ attention and, along with that, his own credibility. He flashed that creepy smile again. (Yuk.)

  “Now, now, Mr Zombie’s brother,” said the Captain (he’d forgotten my name). “There’s no question of using those cattle prods on you. You know that, don’t you? Those are only there as a precaution in case your brother gets out of hand.”

  “Let him speak!” shouted one of the bolder GI’s at the back of the hall. “We want to know what he has to say.”

  (And thus I had him!)

  The Captain’s deep sigh was not heard above the general hubbub that had now broken out.

  “Very well,” he shouted above the din. “I will allow him to take your questions but do remember that he is not on our side, he was caught protecting a zombie.”

  “Caught protecting my only brother!” I corrected, now gaining in confidence.

  A young GI stepped forward to the microphone, introduced himself (“Private First Class Brendan Swooper from Idaho”) and asked:

  “How come you’re not a zombie yourself when your twin brother is?”

  The answer to this was obvious to me (I’d not been bitten and David had) but I decided to muddy the waters a little because I guessed that no-one in that hall was in a position to correct me.

  “That’s a very good question, Private Swooper,” I answered. “I’ve lived amongst the zombies since day one, since the first outbreak at Melbourne. On that day, there were hundreds of zombies all at once – and there were none the day before. None at all. And, as far as I know, none of those first zombies got bitten by anyone or anything. Don’t you think that’s curious, Private?”

  Private First Class Brendan Swooper nodded thoughtfully – and a lot of the other GI’s in the audience nodded along with him. I continued:

  “My brother became a zombie within the first few days …”

  (I omitted to mention that he’d actually been bitten.)

  “… but not me. I’ve seen a lot of guys and girls, all fellow university students, bitten by those first zombies, the ones who appeared without warning on day one, the ones who were never bitten. None of the girls became zombies. None of them. Not one. Now, Private Swooper, that’s also mighty strange, don’t you think?”

  Private First Class Swooper nodded even more thoughtfully – and even more GI’s nodded along with him again.

  (At this point, the Captain started to feel uneasy about the fact that I had the undivided, and extremely interested, attention of the GI’s – and he stood abruptly, starting to try and silence me once again. The GI’s hissed at him – and he reluctantly resumed his seat.)

  “The third thing, Private First Class Swooper from Idaho, that is mighty strange is that not all the guys who got bitten and became zombies stayed that way!”

  “That’s not true!” yelled the Captain – who was promptly hissed down, once again.

  I shrugged, fell silent and sat down my cage. I knew what would happen. I had won the GI’s over. They knew that I was talking from first-hand experience. They wanted desperately to know what I knew – and for very good reason.

  Very soon, despite the fact that the Captain tried to shut the meeting down, I was recalled to speak. Now, the Captain would be most reluctant to interrupt – at least until I had said more than he could tolerate. I continued:

  “Some of the guys who get bitten just get better within a few days …”

  (I omitted to mention that these guys were probably all gay and that they never actually turned into zombies at all. Well, I mean, details, details!)

  “…and, as for the others, unless they have a meal of fresh human flesh to maintain them, they just run down like clocks. After a few days, they grind to a halt and fall over – as I say, that is unless you let them feed.”

  (This was, of course, a big, fat lie – but I had my reasons.)

  There was a muttering in the audience, and another GI came forward to the microphone:

  “Private First Class Aaron Gately. Mr Zombie-brother, are you saying that, not all of the infected guys stay zombies and, even if they do, they just fade away if you don’t feed them?”

  “Exactly,” I replied.

  “And you didn’t even get infected at all - despite livin’ with them for over two weeks?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I slept with them side by side and watched them kill and feed for over two weeks. So far, I’m not a zombie like my brother. I guess I must be immune.”

  (Another big, fat lie.)

  “Well, sir, I’m confused,” said Private First Class Gately. “Do you mean we could be killin’ guys that might get better and just stop bein’ zombies?”

  “Yep! And, more than that, you GI’s will be putting your lives at risk fighting a bunch of creatures that would probably just fall over anyway.”

  The hubbub in the room increased very markedly at this observation.

  I glanced over at the Captain – he was urgently summoning the guards to come and have me and David taken away. I needed to make my formal ‘speech to the troops’ now or not at all.

  “When I saw a US F4 Phantom bomber drop napalm on thousands of my fellow students at my university, burning them all to death in a most painful and horrific way, I knew that they were killing kids that would soon recover – hundreds of them. It was like Dresden. It was like the firebombing of Tokyo. Gentlemen, that’s a major war crime. That’s not a battle. That’s not war. That’s why they hanged guys at Nuremberg!...”

  Time was indeed short. I could see the guards hurrying to the stage. I had to raise my voice to be heard above the other voices that were now being raised. I started screaming:

  “…I can’t tell you why your government sent you. That’s political. But I can tell you that you’ve been sent to war on the basis of a lie! Does that sound familiar? Well, does it? Have any of you still got brothers in Vietnam?...”

  Those were the last words I managed to get out before I, too, was hit with a cattle prod – and screamed very heartily.

  The hall was in uproar. There was complete pandemonium – just as I’d hoped.

  The Captain approached my cage as I lay spasming on the floor and hit me with another powerful jolt of electricity from one of the other cattle prods. (Perfect for my plans – but painful all the same.)

  “Leave him alone, you bastard!” shouted one of the GI’s. “You’re killin’ him!”

  And he and several of his buddies rushed on stage to protect me. Cosmic!

  For an instant, I thought that they might actually free me – though that had not been my immediate plan – but the guards drew their side-arms and aimed them squarely at the stage invaders. Sensibl
y, they retreated.

  The Captain dropped his prod, came close and looked me squarely in the eye. There was deep hatred in his look. I had willfully robbed him of his moment of glory.

  Good.

  Now to see what the GI’s would do with the (quite plausible) disinformation that I had provided them.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE EXPERIMENTS BEGIN

  I was, of course, perfectly prepared for the Captain and his assistant to take skin and blood samples. These, of course, were completely useless because the key to the mystery of male zombification lay in the study of epigenetic changes in DNA wrought by the infection.

  At the time, the study of DNA generally was exceedingly rudimentary (there would be no PCR for decades) and the study of epigenetics had not even been thought of. (Unless, of course, you misguidedly included Lamarckianism within that scientific discipline.)

  (Poor David’s DNA had, of course, been well and truly methylated.)

  Anyway, what I didn’t expect was the series of experiments that the Captain had had in mind for both me and David – and I don’t think his original plans had been altered one jot by my, shall we say, ‘misbehaviour’ at his lecture. (At all subsequent lectures where my attendance became necessary, I was bound and gagged. Very mean.)

  Once the Captain’s experiments on us began, I took to referring to him as “Dr Mengele” – in remembrance of that awful medical monster, the ‘Angel of Death’, Josef Mengele, who performed some of his most hideous experiments on twins in the Nazi concentration of Auschwitz during WWII.

  o0o

  The Captain sent for me first. He sent his assistant doctor to collect me. She was the tall, striking woman who had escorted us to the lecture fiasco. Henceforth I shall call her Ingrid though this was not her real name.

  “The Captain is not very happy with you,” she said sternly. “So don’t give me any trouble this time round.”

  ‘Trouble’? She hadn’t seen anything yet – if I was to have my way.

  The three goons with the cattle prods came forward but I waved them away as if I were actually in charge.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “There’s enough sparkle in my eyes already.”

  I took David’s hand and, once again, lead him from the cell to ensure he did not try to make a meal of Ingrid – though she may well have been tasty. We travelled along several narrow, linoleum-paved passageways. The cattle prods were poised and ready to strike to our front and to our, as required.

  We passed some sort of common room that was being used by the GI’s. They had some electric Blues playing loudly. As we got closer, I saw through a window that some of them were actually dancing to the music. More than that, I recognized that that music was something from Muddy Waters’ ‘Electric Mud’ album – which I had recently bought second-hand for the late, lamented “John Clements” shop in the city.

  Blues, even electric blues, is not supposed to cheer one – but this was the first music I heard in a while and so it did cheer me a little.

  I also saw, as we passed the common room, that almost all of the GI’s in it were black guys – and I wondered who, if anyone, was re-introducing segregation among the US troops. But maybe it was not deliberate – maybe it was just the music that attracted the black guys there.

  Later, I realized that the white guys were more partial to the early work of The Eagles – which had not then made it to our shores – and The Guess Who – who, as far as I can remember, never really did ‘make it’ here at all. (Though their stuff was still appreciated by some of the locals.)

  Anyway, we eventually arrived at a couple of swinging doors which led into a very spartan-looking laboratory. Not much equipment to be seen there – and, what was there, looked pretty old and battered. I supposed that the Australian Army didn’t put very much of its funds into medical research. (And that’s a very good thing, in my humble opinion.)

  David and I were ‘encouraged’ by the goons to be seated in chairs that each looked suspiciously like the electric chair – made with massively heavy timber and fitted with thick, heavy leather straps to restrain arms, legs, torso and head.

  I didn’t resist. David did – and was struck simultaneously with jolts from the three cattle prods for his trouble. He eventually came round to the idea of sitting down and allowing himself to be strapped in.

  Once this had occurred – and both David and I were securely strapped into our chairs - the Captain strode into the room.

  (Very brave, it seemed, was our Captain - no appearance until ‘the threat’ had been thoroughly eliminated.)

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said, with a broad smile. (Yuk - again.)

  “We have a few little, shall we say, ‘games’ to play this morning,” he continued. Then he turned to Ingrid and ordered: “Doctor, shave their heads and apply the electrodes, if you would be so kind.”

  ‘Electrodes’? That didn’t sound very promising.

  Our hair was lopped off in large lumps and then our heads were roughly shaven. I didn’t really care much about this but David grumbled and moaned enormously. (I wondered idly if all zombies were such whingers.) I hadn’t previously noticed that he – or any other zombie, for that matter – took any particular pride in his locks. Indeed all the zombies that I’d met seemed make it a badge of honour to clot their hair up with as much dried blood and congealed gore as they could.

  It was just the indignity of the thing, I suppose.

  Soon, my newly-bald head was covered with shiny, stick-on electrode pads – carefully placed on me by the tasty (?) Ingrid. The electrodes were then attached to an ancient-looking EEG (electroencephalogram) machine in order to measure my brain waves.

  Ingrid and The Captain then started to take readings from the cathode ray tube.

  Lots of lovely wiggly lines being traced across the screen. What did it mean? Dunno. I suppose it meant my brain was working. Beyond that? Ask someone else.

  They did this for a while and made a whole bunch of fairly boring and unintelligible (to me, at least) remarks.

  Then it was David’s turn. Same deal: carefully placed, stick-on electrodes all over his bald cranium, hook up to EEG, read-out on screen.

  Result? A screen full of flat-line tracings. Not even a faint wobble in any line. Not the slightest tremble.

  “This man is dead,” observed Ingrid. (What a genius!)

  “Hmmm,” responded the Captain. (Another genius.)

  And yet, of course, David could move about by himself, grunt a bit, eat people and so on. These were all clear signs of life, of a sort. So, how come the flat-line? Where was the brain activity that seemed to be going on?

  Don’t know. Not my problem.

  Then things got a bit more interesting – though ‘interesting’ is not exactly the word I would have chosen at the time.

  The Captain asked for one of the cattle-prods. One of the goons duly handed it over. The Captain checked to see that it was on – by applying it to David’s ear. It was indeed on – as David’s reaction amply confirmed.

  Then: Zap. Zap. Zap.

  He applied it all over David’s grey-skinned body: face, hands, feet, genitals. He was very thorough, very thorough indeed.

  David roared loudly from start to finish and strained at the leather - doing his utmost to snap his bonds and get at his tormentors. One of the bolts holding a strap even worked loose from the wooden frame of the chair – but not enough to matter.

  The Captain was smiling that slimy smile of his. (Yuk – thrice.) He was obviously enjoying himself – particularly when he applied the electric charge to what otherwise would have been David’s most sensitive areas. It was at that moment that the parallels with the evil work of Dr Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, first came to my mind.

  While the torture of David was proceeding in a thoroughly well-planned and systematic fashion, Dr Ingrid was keeping her attention firmly fixed on the CRT screen and making appropriate notes of what she observed. It seemed she was less interested in the f
iner points of the Sadistic Arts class that was being conducted by her superior than in the ‘scientific’ data it was producing.

  “Still flat-lining, Doctor,” she reported, in a matter-of-fact way.

  “Remarkable. Truly remarkable,” commented Mengele.

  “But the readout of the other subject, the non-zombie twin, has gone completely wild, doctor,” Ingrid added. “Quite unexpected, in my view.”

  The Captain and I looked at my own screen at the same time. She was right. The squiggles of my own readout were flying off the scale. Maybe, somehow, it was I who was feeling David’s pain. Then again, perhaps I was just registering my upset at what I was seeing – and being completely helpless to stop.