The Romero Strain

by Alan, TS

  “I like that. Who is it?” I asked, as I stepped toward the doctor.

  “Voltaire. Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why the lab?” David asked.

  “Ah, because I had a dream, well, a psychotic fantasy, anyway. And in my dream I found a golden ticket.” I produced the doctor’s swipe card from my pocket.

  “He’s unstable!” the doctor said, interrupting.

  “So is most currency.” I retorted as I walked toward him. “But you don’t see people—” I knelt down next to him, but was interrupted by his urgent need to escape.

  “Get away from me!” Dick yelled, kicking at me and trying frantically to crawl away.

  “Is there something you need to tell us about the lab, Doc?” I moved toward him again.

  “I said keep away!”

  “What the hell’s your problem? What’s wrong at the lab?”

  “It is not the lab, it is you!”

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  “You are not fine. You are one of them!” The doctor was completely terrified of me. “Look at your eyes,” he continued. “You are a transmute!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Your eyes!”

  “I heard you the first time.” I stepped back to David. “What’s wrong with my eyes?”

  He pointed the flashlight toward my face.

  “Jesus, that burns,” I complained, placing a hand in front of my face to block the light.

  David moved the light from my face and pointed it toward my neck. The others gathered around.

  “Don’t go any further, Doc. Max might get hungry,” I warned France, as he was still moving up the tunnel to distance himself.

  “Jesus, dude,” David said, with astonishment in his voice. “Your eyes… your eyes.”

  “My eyes what?”

  “Are weird. Your pupils are, like… elliptical and glowy.”

  “Like a Strix occidentalis,” the doctor said.

  “A what?” I turned my head, nearly rotating it one hundred and thirty degrees.

  “Holy shit,” Julie exclaimed.

  David dropped the flashlight and everyone backed away.

  “What the—?” I said.

  “What the fuck was that?” David asked, still in shock.

  “Yeah. What he said…” I said. I approached the doctor and placed my foot on his leg.

  He repeated himself, “A Strix occidentalis. A spotted owl.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “You have signs of the mutation,” he said, answering my question with hesitation.

  “Mutation? What!? Marisol, please. Stop staring at me.” I turned my head again, even farther.

  Marisol let out a scream.

  “J.D., you’re seriously freaking us out.” David warned.

  “I told you to shoot him,” Joe resumed.

  “Shut up,” David and I retorted simultaneously. He did.

  “I’m sorry. Marisol. Do you have a mirror?”

  She shook her head affirmatively.

  “May I borrow it?”

  She gave me the same headshake, and removed her backpack.

  It was freaky. My pupils were elliptical and the irises had changed from brown to black, with a green-yellow luminescent glow when light passed over them.

  “Shit. That is freaky. Okay, France. Let’s skip the Spanish Inquisition and go straight to the confession. What have you done to me?”

  I eyeballed him. For the first time he was genuinely scared of me. I could see the fear in his eyes as he cowered.

  “The virus has a chromosome aberration, a large-scale mutation phenomenon, that I named the transmute anomaly. In the clinical studies, I discovered that this neomorphic mutation might affect one out of every seven hundred and thirty two people on a massive physiological level.”

  “Are you saying your virus alters DNA to the point of cellular metamorphosis?”

  “Must I explain? DNA has what we term as hot-spots, where mutations occur up to a hundred times more frequently than the normal mutation rate. I was able to isolate the specific base pair deletion and I discovered it was CCR5-32.”

  “Hold it. That’s the delta-32 gene.”

  “Precisely. Those who had a single copy of the mutated receptor gene had a genetic disposition to a random and spontaneous transformation.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

  “The virus causes a morphological mutation.”

  “You said that. Now clarify.” I didn’t want to believe him.

  “I told you—”

  “An owl. Yes. I heard that. You mean I’m going to grow feathers and fly?”

  “Do not be absurd.”

  “Don’t be evasive. What do owls have to do with this?”

  “Recombinant owl DNA was used in creating the current viral agent, specifically a North American spotted owl.”

  “Are mutant owls going to be flying around, competing with the living dead on who gets to eat us first?”

  “Now you are being obtuse.”

  “Am I? I’m the one who’s got owl eyes and my head spins around like Regan MacNeil!”

  “Your symptoms were a response to your immune system eradicating the infection you received from the bite, not your immune system succumbing to the virus. Similar, but not as acute. Therefore, the antiretroviral I urged against appears to have triggered the mutation response. As for the change, the anomaly is random and only affects those who have a genetic makeup that contains a single copy of mutated gene.”

  “That doesn’t sound too random to me. There are eight and a half million people in this city. That’s like… like…”

  “Eleven thousand, six hundred and twelve.”

  We all looked at Marisol in amazement.

  “I’m not stupid,” she said.

  I turned back to France. “Right. What she said.”

  “If you listened, you would have heard me the first time when I said that the phenomenon might affect one out of every seven hundred and thirty two people, not will.”

  I sat down, still feeling weak and haggard. I put my hands over my face. My eyes stung and my ears were ringing. Marisol sat next to me, putting her hand on my shoulder as an act of compassion and sympathy. Her earlier repulsion of me had vanished.

  “So, Doc, we got transmutes and the living dead. How long are those things going to be roaming around killing everyone? Or don’t you have an answer to that?”

  “The virus should maintain itself in the host for up to sixteen weeks.”

  “Not twenty-eight weeks?” I sarcastically replied, referencing the hit British horror film.

  “I am not amused.”

  “Either am I. And after that?”

  “Total cellular degeneration. The virus should burn out the body.”

  “Should? Doesn’t the consuming of the uninfected keep them going?”

  “You have viewed too many horror films, young man.”

  I looked at him with great disdain. I never wanted to hurt someone so badly. I felt a need to pommel him repeatedly in the face. He took away more than just one of my favorite directors.

  “Why are those things eating everyone if doesn’t help them?” Julie inquired.

  “They have a need to feed, but the consuming of human flesh does not extend the lifecycle.” The doctor paused. “But it is not the reanimated you should be concerned about. It is the others.”

  “The others. You mean the transmutes,” I said.

  “Yes, the transmutes. They do not have a mortality rate.”

  “What?” David and I said in joint astonishment.

  “And they can reason.”

  “What?” David and I said together, again.

  “They are not the infected reanimated. They are the infected altered. Therefore they are not a mutation of the living dead.”

  “Explain,” I ordered.

  “When entering the third stage, the change begins. There is a change in
the eyes. They become larger. The eye’s brow ridges recede, becoming flush with the Zygomatic bones to form a facial disc and the eyelids shrink in size. The Zygomatic process on the temporal bone becomes channeled leading from the facial discs to large holes in its skull that are its ears. Did you know that an owl can hear a mouse stepping on a twig from twenty three meters away?”

  “Who the fuck cares? Just finish,” I demanded.

  “A transmute’s visual acuity is as great as their hearing. The eyes become enlarged and more flat than spherical in shape. As a result of this metamorphosis, they, like owls, have basically no eye movement. Though their field of vision may only be one hundred and ten degrees, with about seventy degrees being binocular vision, they are able to focus better. Their eyes are fixed in place by a bony structure called a sclerotic ring. They turn their heads to move their eyes, so it must move its entire head to follow movement.”

  He appeared to be anxious as he explained, unconsciously shifting his body as he described the transmute in detail.

  “In order to facilitate this, the neck becomes elongated to accommodate the formation of new vertebrae. This allows the transmute to turn its head through a range of nearly two hundred and forty five degrees, measured from a forward facing position. The derma becomes leathery and tough, with a slight grayish pigmentation. The digits on both the feet and hands become elongated, each provided with a needle-sharp, curved talon. There is also a significant gain in fast twitch muscle and an increased metabolism. Unlike the reanimated, the transmutes do not lose all of their higher brain functions. They can think, reason; they even have basic vocalization, though no longer a vocabulary, more of a language of sounds—eerie, screechy pitched tones… even a clattering and gnashing of teeth.”

  I listened carefully to Doctor France. There was no arrogance in his voice or pride in his accomplishment; only fear, far more than he felt toward me. He had created something that frightened him to his core––a lean, fierce, and strong predator. And it scared the shit out of him.

  “Their desire to kill is not driven by rage but by the need to survive. They are ravenous. They will eat anything warm blooded: pigs, dogs, rats, us… all to quench their insatiable appetite.” He stopped speaking.

  Everyone was silent; the atmosphere in our small group of survivors was thick with tension and despair. Had we come that far only to be prey for a new order? As a race, a species, we were no longer on the top of the food chain.

  The silence, though soothing to my aching ears, was unbearable.

  The doctor began to mutter, almost to the point of sobbing. “The major novelty of my theory was its claim that the most rapid evolutionary change does not occur in widespread populous species, as claimed by most geneticists, but in small founder populations.”

  “Yeah, that’s real deep, asshole,” Joe responded. “It’s all was about you, isn’t it? My theory, my research.”

  “No. That was something my old university professor once said.” He continued to ramble on. “Ernest Walter Mayr. He was the leading 20th century evolutionary biologist and my only friend. I used to tease him. I called him Wally. He hated the name Walter. Never used it in any of his published works, refused to use the initial.”

  “Are we supposed to feel sorry for you now, pity you? The poor, lonely, misunderstood and misguided martyr. You’re a monster! Because of your pettiness, your arrogance, your spite, you’ve accomplished more than Saddam and Bin Laden could have ever tried to achieve. You’re the destroyer of the world!”

  Joe finally had something intelligent to say, and I finally had a small amount of respect for him, though I still didn’t like him.

  “Evolutionary change should be gradual and progressive, not, not… rapid and destructive,” Joe angrily declared, as he finished admonishing the doctor.

  “If we could get back to topic for a moment,” I said, “there are several million living dead out there, and––”

  “Eleven thousand, six hundred and twelve,” Marisol said again.

  “Exactly. Thank you… eleven thousand, six hundred and twelve possible transmutes out there. Exactly how many test subjects did you experiment on to come up with that answer?”

  “Not as many as you are accusing me of. And there are not eleven thousand, six hundred and twelve mutations. Only those with a single copy of the delta-32 mutation will be affected, which is found in up to twenty percent of Caucasians.”

  “But we’re still looking at nearly a forty five percent white ethnic composition in our city. That’s over three million people, and a third of those people live in Manhattan!”

  “Seven hundred and three thousand, eight hundred and seventy-three,” France said.

  “That’s like…?” I looked at Marisol.

  “Nine hundred and sixty-one, point fifty-seven.”

  “Right. What she said. Nine hundred and sixty-one potential transmutes in Manhattan vying for a meal. We won’t be safe even after your living dead drop dead.”

  “What are we going to do?” David asked. “We can’t stay down here. We have no food and very little water.”

  “Exactly.” I stood up. “That’s why I suggested the lab before Doctor Doomsday starting freaking out.”

  The lab was the only sanctuary we would have, and a parade of men in white lab-coats and soldiers in full military gear would not be going in and out of Grand Central on a daily basis. That would draw too much unwanted attention. The researchers and any security force in place would most likely be stationed at the facility for long periods of time, which meant food, water, bathrooms, a self-contained power system, and if we were truly lucky, a cache of weapons.

  My plan was simple. Find the base, kill the undead that occupied it, wait it out in safety for the doctor’s virus to burn itself out, re-emerge, and find out if we were the only survivors. Of course, there was the transmute issue, but I had four months to come up with the ultimate survival plan.

  I knew that finding the location of the laboratory without the doctor’s assistance would be difficult at best, more likely an improbability. Even with my superior knowledge of the city’s underground, I had no idea where the elevator for room M42 was located, and it wasn’t for a lack of previously trying. Even if I had located it, going into Grand Central to access the elevator was stupid and suicidal.

  M42 was not a secret lab. I had seen it numerous times on television. As vast as it was, it was just a power station. If a level below the most secret basement in North America truly existed, maybe the doctor’s tale of a covert government biological laboratory was true.

  There was only one person who could lead us to it, and the doc was proving to be neither cooperative nor forthcoming with the truth, except when it would benefit himself.

  “Again, I ask, why the lab?” David inquired, as he lit up a cigarette.

  “It’s the only place that will have food, water, and hopefully weapons.”

  “Wait a minute, won’t there be infected people in that lab?” Joe asked.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “How many of those things are there?”

  I turned to the doctor. “Well, Doc,” I asked, “how many?”

  “You are on your own,” he replied.

  “That’s not an answer,” Joe told him. “What about those… zombies?”

  “What about them?”

  Joe was persistent. “How many are there?”

  “I am not sure. They brought in two Special Forces teams from Fort Campbell, perhaps two dozen… and the unit that was attached as base security… thirty or so.”

  I pressed further, “What about research personnel, Dick?”

  “There were seventeen on staff. But only three researchers were allowed to remain, in order to oversee the facilitation of the removal of all biological and toxicological specimens.”

  “What about food and water? Is there food and water?” Julie asked.

  “What about guns?” Joe asked, not waiting for the doctor’s response to Julie’s question.
/>
  “There are enough supplies for a staff of fifty for six months, plus weapons. But it would be suicide if you tried to gain access to the facility.”

  “Perhaps, but I don’t see another option.” I turned to my companions. “We can’t go back and Grand Central is a loss. There’s nowhere to go, except the doc’s lab. It’s face the thirty or so living dead or sit here and rot. It’s up to all of you. But the doc and I are going.”

  “I am not going anywhere with you,” the doctor insisted, talking over my sentence.

  “You don’t have an option. You know how to get there and you know the building’s layout. You’re going.”

  “No,” he adamantly responded.

  I grabbed the doctor by the shirt collar, jerking him up to a standing position, and yanked him toward me. With my face almost touching his, I turned my neck left and right one hundred and eighty degrees each way. I looked him straight in the eyes as he cowered.

  “I’m feeling a bit predacious, Doc. Since you won’t help, you’ve lost your usefulness, except as a snack.”

  He whimpered, “You were not listening. You cannot go back to the lab. It is too dangerous. It will be loose.”

  “What do you mean it?”

  “The transmute. That is the reason I left. The transmute, it escaped. They ordered me to terminate the specimen. I told them to shoot it. They wanted the body intact to study. But I refused. I did not want to get near it. It’s pure evil.”

  I shook him. He was holding back.

  “What else?” I demanded to know.

  “You do not understand.” He continued. “It knew. It knew what they were going to do when they entered the room. It broke free of its restraints and killed two guards and my assistant. When the alarms went off, the creature went berserk and broke out of its isolation room. The idiots cornered it in the main lab. It turned over the refrigeration unit where the virus was stored. Lockdown was initiated.”

  I yanked on the doctor again. “Doc, you still haven’t told us how the virus got out!”

  “I am not certain. I was in the command center. It must have been the transmutes.”

  “Transmutes!?” Joe asked.

  “Yes. Yes. We had three specimens––two males and a female. The two sexes were held separately, on opposite sides of the main laboratory. I heard gunfire. I had to get out.”