Waking The Zed

by Katz, ML

  Then he recalled again that the Twice Dead had been revived because the dead were supposed to know everything. They were used as oracles before being sent back to the underworld. He did not dare open the outside door to listen, but it did not look as if the amblers in the street had anything to say. As Hercules had observed them, they seemed brainless and without purpose. This might be something else, but also more unlike anything else in his experience than to his grandmother’s stories of the Twice Dead.

  Hercules did not own a gun. He had long ago resolved to protect himself with a good alarm system, heavy locks, and the resolution to give any thieves whatever money he had on hand. So far the alarm system and locks had thwarted the few burglary attempts he had suffered.

  All he had on hand was an old hunting bow that had been handed down from his grandfather. It was a beautiful hand carved artifact from the old country and he had it hung on the wall with a quiver of twenty arrows. Back when Hercules was a child his grandfather had taken the boy out to the country so he could practice shooting at targets.

  Hercules remembered asking during one hunting trip, “Are we ever going to actually hunt anything?”

  “You want to hunt something?” his grandfather asked. “Ah, maybe I am a spoiled old man. But I prefer to take pictures of the beautiful wild animals. I’ll get my meat from the store if it’s all the same to you.”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” young Hercules had replied, agreeing seriously. “I guess if I had to kill my own food, I’d stick to hummus.” Then both he and his grandfather had laughed.

  But Hercules had learned the hunting bow could shoot sturdy bolts with surprising power; especially know when strung with modern fibers. He had learned to shoot well enough to send bolts right through wooden targets. He knew this type of bow could penetrate armor or skulls. It was especially effective because each arrow was tipped with a razor sharp steel head as fine as Hercules’ best chefs knives. Hercules grandfather had told him that a skilled archer could shoot arrows as fast an armed gunman. Of course, that was in the days before automatic weapons were so prevalent on the streets.

  Hercules nodded at the thought and pulled his bulk back up the stairs to fetch the bow and quiver. He had forgotten that a sturdy hunting knife and a short ax were sheathed on the same strap that held the quiver. Those seemed like useful tools for a man in the woods, or in the midst of an urban apocalypse.

  After a quick glance through the closet, he also found the old book which his grandmother had claimed was the source of most of her knowledge of the old wisdom. It was wrapped in its own finely tooled leather bag. He climbed back down to the dining room, glanced out the window to find the scene unchanged, and then remembered the coffee.

  He set the bow, quiver, and dusty old book bag on a booth so he could read by the light of the window. Just a year ago he had the windows treated so they let light in, but looked shaded from the street. His father had been against it, saying that seeing the busy café would attract more business from the outside. But the salesman had told him it was energy efficient and would save on utility bills in the future. Hercules wanted to invest in money-saving and ecologically responsible ideas so he had the windows treated. Just now that investment had saved him from being seen by the Twice Dead on the streets and seemed like a fortuitous decision.

  Hercules had left the sturdy door untreated, but covered it with a decorative shade. He decided against uncovering the door to see if he could get a better view.

  Then he returned to the kitchen to pour himself a double serving of strong Greek coffee. His grandmother had always joked that this stuff had the power to wake the dead, so perhaps it would fortify him.

  He opened the small cooler over the counter and found a few slices of pita bread, yesterday’s leftover hummus, and some butter. It would have to do for his breakfast. He took a moment to warm the bread on the gas burner. Then he settled himself in the customer booth, something he rarely did. He picked at the food, and sipped his coffee while trying to learn more about the Twice Dead.

  He struggled with the old language, wishing he had his grandmother here to refresh his memory of a character here or a word there. It was hard to concentrate on such a difficult task while those things were lurching about outside and poor Marina was missing. But somehow it seemed important.

  Zed Dawn

  Pam honestly felt surprised when she woke up in an ordinary bed. She did not appear to have any abnormal cravings for human flesh. She was not in the rain ditch, a frozen tank, or even back in the military hospital ward either. The bed felt soft and luxurious, and not like a hard cot or slab. She guessed the whole drive off the military base could not have been an awful nightmare. She opened her eyes slightly. This light only intensified the awful headache with seemed to start at her hairline and extend all the way down to her toes. Pam heard somebody groan, and it took a moment before she realized that the sound came from her own mouth. Her throat felt dry and her voice seemed to come out as a pained croak.

  Somebody had cleaned her off. Instead of wearing her stained and smelly work clothes from the day before she seemed to have been dressed in a large undershirt and a modest robe. Captain Crawford’s gruff voice sounded distant but clear. “Ms. Stone, are you awake?”

  “Oh,” Pam said, peering around at the small and neat bedroom she had somehow ended up in. “Are you here to murder me?”

  “No, I’m not here to murder you,” Captain Crawford said. “You obviously misunderstood a conversation you should not have heard. Though it appears from the holy havoc those things have caused it would have been smart to shoot first and ask questions later. I just wanted the area secured, and I didn’t act fast enough.”

  “What happened last night?” she asked. Her voice seemed to emerge from her throat like a croak when she spoke. “I’m still a little fuzzy.” She rubbed her head and winced when she found the spot where she had struck the big rock.

  “You stole Corporal Gordon’s vehicle, and he gave chase. That ended up being a lucky thing for you as he extricated you from what would have been a terminal situation and hauled you back here. Your hero is actually in my own kitchen making coffee, eggs, and toast right now for breakfast. This place lost electricity, but we still seem to still have gas to power the stove.”

  “Did I get bitten?” she asked because with the mass of scrapes and bruises all over her body she had no way to sort out one thing from the other. Now that Captain Crawford had mentioned food, she did smell coffee. She thought that a hot cup of coffee and about a half dozen pain killers would be just the thing for her right now. Pam swallowed and her throat felt dry.

  “You do not appear to be bitten or have the immediately terminal form of the infection,” Crawford said. “In other words, you don’t have symptoms. The truth is, I found out later than I tested positive for the virus just like you did, but also don’t appear symptomatic. I’m sure I wasn’t bitten, so it must also be airborne. Testing positive for the virus does not appear to produce symptoms, at least it hasn’t yet. Right now, you’re just lucky that you didn’t get a concussion when you fell. You were covered with gore when Gordon extricated you, but that alone doesn’t seem to be enough to trigger the symptoms either. At least, it wasn’t enough to trigger symptoms in you yet. So there’s some good news.”

  Despite her awful headache, Pam tried to consider the little evidence she had to understand the infection better. She closed her eyes again. Concentrating seemed to increase the pulsing pain in her head. She groaned. “We still need Dr. Klein’s research.” Then she squinted to pry her eyes open again and peered at her companion.

  He stood by a window, watching the street. From her vantage point on the bed, it appeared that they were on the upper floor of some sort of an apartment building. A similar building stood across the street. “You said you had people that were better qualified than me to help you. That’s what I heard. Where are they?”

  “I’m still in agreement there,” Captain Crawford said. “That wasn�
��t an insult or anything. But you’re only a graduate student, and you only functioned as a paid intern. Surely there are experienced experts the US Army could command to help out. Maybe some of the other doctors on Dr. Klein’s original virus blocker team would be able to help if we can find them.”

  “There were senior scientists working at Future Faith,” Pam said. “There weren’t too many because Dr. Klein’s personality and her type of business did not seem like a magnet for really qualified researchers. But I’m sure there were a few. I mostly just had contact with her though.”

  Captain Crawford paused and sighed. Pam wondered why it would be a problem for the long arm of the US Army to find a few famous scientists and haul them in.

  “We had time to do some checking. There were three other scientists at Future Faith,” he said. “One was a medical doctor who lost his license in a distasteful scandal after a bout of drug abuse and alcoholism. The other two had doctorates, but they were not MDs. From what we could find out before the Internet went dead, neither were particularly renowned as scientists or publishers. At this point, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that they both lost tenure at the local university for one reason or another before Dr. Klein gave them a job.”

  “Where are they?”

  “The two professors are amount the confirmed dead and the disgraced medical doctor is reported as missing,” Captain Crawford said with a shrug. Pam blew out a sigh and nodded.

  But then Captain Crawford continued, “On the other hand, I’m a pretty good judge of personal. You did manage to evade the creatures in situations that would have taken most people down. You even managed to escape a military compound. All along, you gave us sensible advice though we weren’t prepared to listen. When the situation became untenable, you did the sensible thing. You ran away. You remained loyal to poor Paul even when he became a liability. That may have been an error in judgment, but you had no way to know it at the time. Those are the qualities of somebody I’d want on my team. Dr. Klein didn’t seem to be too picky about her permanent staff but she was picky about her interns. “

  “Dr. Klein liked to surround herself with smart people just so long as they weren’t smarter than she believed herself to be. The permanent scientists all had issues, and she figured the interns wouldn’t be around too long.” Pam paused because speaking seemed to make her chest ache. Then she said, “But I guess that’s not important right now.”

  “There’re just a few problems we need to solve.”

  “Is there a way to contact these other scientists? You know, can you get to the really famous and credible ones?”

  Captain Crawford actually smiled then. The expression did not seem to fit his normally severe face. Even though his lips turned up, the expression also seemed to lack any real humor. He just seemed pleased and pained at the same time with Pam’s question.

  “That’s another problem. The phones don’t seem to be working at the moment. Even if I had the number for a guy like Dr. Levi or Dr. Winn, I couldn’t get through to them. It looks like you are the scientist we have to work with. I think you have the potential to rise to the occasion though.”

  Pam was in no mood to be flattered at the moment. She was still trying to untangle the situation in her head, and the pounding headache did not help to clear her thinking. “Where are we?” Pam asked. “Why are we here?”

  “This is my own off-base apartment. As for the other question, if you can stand up, it would be easier to show you than tell you,” Captain Crawford said. He moved over to the bed to extend a large rough hand to help Pam get up. When she sat up a wave of dizziness threatened to overtake her. She moved slowly, favoring the sharp pain in her head and duller aches in a hundred other places. Crawford got her to her feet and led her to the window. “Brace yourself for this,” he said.

  At first Pam looked straight across to see residential apartments which loomed over the streets. For some reason Captain Crawford and Corporal Gordon had holed up in an old residential neighborhood. “Why aren’t we at the base?”

  “Gordon couldn’t make it back to the base. That was a lucky thing because the base was so overrun I had to leave myself. Mistakes were made and a dozen checkpoints were overrun. We managed to coordinate a midnight rendezvous back here at my own apartment. Even then, I had to clear out the hallways while Gordon carried you. It was no easy night.”

  “What do you mean when you say you had to clean the hallways?” Pam asked, still squinting at the buildings on the other side of the street. It looked like early morning. She could not see any activity in the buildings though most shades were drawn closed.

  “Look at the street,” Captain Crawford said. He still propped her up with one large hand around her shoulder.

  Pam looked down and then immediately took a frightened and stumbling step back from the window. She might have fallen if Crawford had not held her up. They were only one floor up from the street. A dozen feet below the crowds of Zeds ambled about aimlessly. Some walked slowly like they had a destination in mind but no sense of urgency. Others mostly stood still. A couple seemed to lurch about in pointless circles. Two of them dragged themselves across the street because they seemed to have lost the use of their legs. Many of them had visible injuries or limbs that hung at awkward angles. Most had some sort of clothing, though one man only wore briefs and a few women had skimpy nighties.

  None of them paid any attention to each other.

  A few cars had stopped on the street but no vehicles appeared to move. The creatures had not thought to look up, but they might if she opened the window to make herself more visible. They could be attracted by noise and movement. For all Pam knew they might even be able to smell her. The delicious odor of good coffee emanated from the apartment’s kitchen. She wondered if she would smell like breakfast to the creatures.

  Directly across the street, down at street level, there was a small café called The Mediterranean. A couple of chairs and tables had been set out on the wide sidewalk, but a few of the chairs had been tipped over. A prone woman feebly dragged herself across the sidewalk in front of the café’s window. Gore matted the back of the woman’s head.

  The store’s sign was dark, and so were the windows, but Pam thought she saw the shadow of a rotund man peering out from behind the reinforced and barred windows. Even from her vantage point, the shaded figure’s actions appeared deliberate, and not like the motions of the dead things that shuffled and ambled and crawled around below. The creatures looked more like a group of some type of handicapped insects, moving aimlessly from place to place. Though Pam detected the shadow of the man across the street, the shadow did not seem to attract the attention of any of the dead things.

  She believed the turned things could see, but she figured they could not really discern shadows very well. In other words, they could not seem to perceive a shadow and then automatically figure out it must be caused by a live person’s movement behind a shaded window. The death and the virus might not wipe out their eyesight, but it must destroy a million connections between the brain and the eyes that allowed people to correctly infer things from small pieces of information. Even then, Pam was trying to figure out how understanding that could help them survive.

  “It looks like there’s a guy stuck in that deli down there,” she said. “I saw his shadow behind the treated windows, but the creatures don’t seem to notice.”

  “There are probably quite a few people trapped in all over the place,” the captain replied. He glanced down at the café window and shrugged. “We really don’t have the resources to sweep the buildings right now. The three of us have to keep ourselves safe while we make our way to Future Faith. Hopefully the base was able to call in reinforcements to try and contain the larger problem.”

  Although she found it the stuff of nightmares, Pam forced herself to continue to survey the scene on the street below. The figure in the window had disappeared, and she wondered if he had noticed her. If so, she supposed that trying to signal her was som
ething he had wisely decided would be a bad idea. Any attempt to get her attention would surely draw the Zed’s attention. The barred windows looked strong, but she had no idea how long anything like that would hold up against the weight of hundreds of those things.

  She figured she could estimate a rough count of a couple of dozen of the things wandering around on the street and sidewalks. But some disappeared past her line of vision while others moved into her line of sight. She guessed there was no way to count the things. The supply of Zed appeared limitless. What if the whole city was like this by now? How had it happened so fast?

  “How can we get back to Future Faith?” Pam asked. “How can we ever get out of here?”

  “That’s something we have to figure out,” Captain Crawford said. “We have a vehicle parked in the garage here, but it might be challenging just to get to it.”

  “I never want to see that place again.” She rubbed her temples. Pam had considered quitting her job and leaving the creepy place yesterday, before any of those creatures had risen. Now she had no idea where she would find the courage to force herself back inside even if they could overcome other obstacles.

  “I understand how you feel, but you know this could be important. You’re the one who convinced me it was important to get back to Dr. Klein’s office. You saw the scene on the street below. Don’t you think it’s your duty to try and help?” Captain Crawford sighed then. “Besides, you’re infected too. So am I. I expect a lot of others are too. It could just be a matter of time before the virus takes over. Don’t you want to save yourself?”

  Pam threw up her hands in a gesture of frustration. “It might be too late. On the other hand, maybe it’s only too late after we start seeing symptoms or after the subject expires. We have no idea.”