by JE Gurley
Ice Station Zombie
JE Gurley
1
Aug.1, 2013 Resurrection Base Oates Land, Antarctica
The tension in the operating room was a bitter, sweaty, fear-filled haze that cut through the cloying sterile odor of disinfectant like a surgeon’s scalpel. The room was silent with anticipation but for the steady soft beep of the heart monitor and the gentle whir of the blood pump. Five faces, each rendered invisible behind clear acrylic visors by the reflection of a bank of bright overhead lights, stared at the naked body on the operating table. Out of the deathly still, pale-fleshed young male, sprouted half a dozen intravenous tubes and a multitude of color-coded electrical leads, making him look more like a piece of the complex machinery surrounding him, than a living being.
Dr. Willis Cromby signaled with a blue glove-covered hand to his assistant, “Start the injection.” His sterile protective face shield muffled the apprehension in his voice, but could not mask his hard, determined mien.
“Starting the nanite flow now,” John Gilford, his assistant, announced as he turned the valve that initiated the process. Five pairs of eyes watched intently, as the blue fluid containing millions of microscopic robots, mingled with the crimson blood in the pump. At first, nothing happened. Then, the patient’s heart began to flutter, beating irregularly. The body went into convulsions on the table, digging the straps across his chest and legs, deep into flesh. Seconds later, the body stilled and the shrill shriek of the heart monitor alarm broke the silence of the room.
“No pulse, no heartbeat,” Gilford observed. He reached out and slapped the switch to silence the alarm.
Cromby glanced at the clock on the wall outside the room. “No resuscitation,” he sighed, sounding like a deflating tire as escaping air hisses from its protective hood. “Mark time of death as twenty-two thirty-five hours.” He pulled off his clumsy latex gloves and angrily tossed them angrily into a hamper. Beneath them, he wore a pair of thinner sterile gloves to protect his hands. “Another waste of time.”
Gilford reached over and shut down the blood pump. Its soft throbbing ceased. “He was already brain dead. What did you expect?” Gilford’s voice betrayed the conflicting emotions troubling him. This was patient number thirteen, an ominous number. Gilford placed no stock in omens or curses, but the number still painted dire images dredged from countless books, movies and folk tales.
“I expected to see some minor regeneration at least,” Cromby answered, scanning the digital graph frozen on the screen. “There was none.”
“What about P-51?” Gilford suggested.
“Yes. What about P-51?” Another deeper voice barked. The gruff voice belonged to General Terry ‘The Terror’ Scott, US Army, representing the Joint Chiefs. His visit had come as a surprise to Cromby and his staff. General Scott had shown up unannounced at their door, demanding access to all the records and videos of previous experiments.
Cromby stared at the general, “P-51? That’s madness. You realize, of course, that’s just a whimsical nickname that someone created for serum AR-10. The P-51 Mustang was a WWII airplane. AR-10 is a mustang nanite strain, unpredictable. It’s unpredictable as a regenerative agent.”
“We have the body. We might as well try.” Gilford looked to General Scott for support.
The general nodded. His face was grim.
Cromby shook his head as far as his hood would allow him. “You don’t realize what you’re asking.”
“Do it. That’s why it’s called experimenting, isn’t it,” General Scott growled with a trace of rancor in his voice. “You refused to stop two years ago after the Providence fiasco. One hundred and twenty-nine men dead, according to the report, turned into zombies. A two and a half billion dollar nuclear submarine sunk. The Aussies raked our ass over the coals for that little episode. For the one point two billion U.S. dollars we’ve sunk into this project, I expected to see more than a damn corpse shivering on a table. So do the Joint Chiefs, unless, of course, you want to go back to treating gunshot wounds at Georgetown.”
Cromby cringed at the idea of returning to Georgetown VA Hospital and dealing with patients again. The conditions there had been horrendous, and the staff was overworked. He was a researcher, but it had taken him six years to convince the Army to fund his project. Now, he was tied to them by their generous purse strings, and the general was threatening to sever them.
“No,” he whispered, “I don’t want that.” He nodded to Gilford, defeated, “Bring in the AR-10.”
Pulling on a fresh pair of gloves, Cromby waited while Gilford retrieved the vial of so-called P-51 from a cooler built into the wall of the operating room. He watched with mute trepidation as Gilford filled a syringe with the syrupy, yellow liquid. He had good reason to show concern. The last attempt to use the serum had ended disastrously, with the patient breaking free of his restraints, injuring a nurse, and damaging expensive equipment before dying. Even so, Cromby nodded when Gilford looked at him for the go-ahead.
“Injecting now,” Gilford said, as he plunged the long, thin needle into the cadaver’s jugular vein.
Cromby divided his attention between the clock and the immobile patient. Five minutes passed with no sign that the serum was having any effect on the body. Then, the cadaver’s eyes popped open. Cromby jumped.
“Is that just a death reflex?” General Scott asked, peering over Cromby’s shoulder.
In answer, the cadaver’s feet began to twitch first, and then the arms. A groan escaped its pale lips. It turned its head toward the group of men and howled.
“Jesus!” The general bellowed. “He’s alive.”
Cromby pointed to the silent heart monitor, “No, General, he’s not.”
“What the hell is he then?”
“He’s a zombie, general,” Gilford answered, smiling.
“The A-10 nanites have revived the brain and nervous system,” Cromby explained to the perplexed general. “The subject has no intelligence, no will, and no memory of who he was. It’s not even alive as we normally define life.”
“But the damn thing’s moving!” The general shouted as he backed away.
“It is a marionette, a meat puppet, and the nanites are pulling the strings. It has, but one overriding impulse; to multiply, to spread the infection by biting or clawing another being.”
“Is it dangerous?” The general had backed against the unbreakable safety glass lining the operating room.
“Oh, yes, General, very dangerous. Besides the innate desire to spread its infection, it has a lust for blood to replenish its energy source. Without periodic intakes of fresh blood, it will die within four or five weeks. With adequate supplies of fresh blood, it will last until its flesh rots away and it collapses.” He hesitated before continuing, “The others showed some signs that the AR-10, the P-51 as you call it, was rewiring the brains, creating new connections between neurons.”
“The others?”
“Three others, to be exact, before I discontinued its use. Each one reacted differently, but their brain scans showed no appreciable level of functionality, but there were certain areas of the brain, the truncus encephalis primarily, which continued to function, even improve.
“Truncus what? Speak English, damn you!” the general growled. “I’m a soldier, not a damn scientist.”
“Truncus encephalis, the brainstem. It controls motor functions and some senses. In this case, it severed the nerve connections that allow the body to sense pain and secreted large amounts of dopamine when the subject smelled blood, driving it mad, if such a term can be applied to a corpse.”
Cromby turned to Gilford. “Destroy it.”
The general took a step forward. “Just hold on a minute, Dr. Cromby. You say this creature will function for a month.”
“More or less. Why?”
“Hmm. Then it has some possible application as a kind of shock troop. You know, drop a few hundred into a hot zone and let them go to work on the enemy.”
Cromby was aghast. “Don’t be absurd, General. Once freed, we cannot control them or the possible spread of the nanites, the host carries. This is a mutated species of nanite, an aberration. Our goal here is to develop a means to rejuvenate injured flesh, not animate dead flesh for military purposes.”
“Doctor Frankenstein is afraid of his monster, I see,” General Scott commented. He turned to Gilford, “What about you, Igor. You afraid?”
Before answering, Gilford glanced furtively at his boss Cromby. If the general calling him Igor bothered him, he did not show it. “In some ways, Dr. Cromby is correct. The P-51 is dangerous and so far uncontrollable, but with more experimentation . . .”
Cromby glared at Gilford before turning back to the General. “This is wrong, General.”
General Scott arched a bushy eyebrow and frowned. “Look. We need to go after terrorists. We can’t nuke ‘em, we can’t send in troops and whenever we send in drones, we have to kiss some tin pot leader’s ass, an ass we’ve already bought and paid for. If we can use troops killed by terrorists that would otherwise wind up in body bags, I’d call that irony. I want this looked into, Doctor. The Joint Chiefs want this looked into.”
“But our research?”
“Dr. Cromby, as far as the Joint Chiefs is concerned, the scope of your research has switched gears. This is now a weapons factory. Clear?”
Cromby swallowed audibly and nodded, “Yes, General.”
“Good. I’ll be back in four weeks. Have something to show me or we’ll look for somebody who can produce results. He turned and walked to the hermetically sealed air lock. He pounded on the glass, yelling, “Let me out of here. I need a cigar and a shot of Bourbon. This damn condom suit I’m wearing is rubbing my crotch raw.”
The inner door of the sterilization tunnel slid open and the general stepped inside. From all sides, a light mist of disinfectants washed over his suit. A low hum indicated the de-gaussing field was active, frying the microscopic circuitry of any nanites attempting to hitch a ride. As soon as the outer door opened, General Scott shed his biohazard suit and kicked it angrily across the room, wishing it were Cromby’s ass instead.
“Damn civilian ass kisser,” he mumbled.
From his shirt pocket, he pulled out the silver cigar case given to him by his wife on the day he received his third star, removed a Cohiba Esplendido, and lit it with a wooden match. He had carried a battered, dented Zippo lighter inscribed ‘101st Airborne’ in his pocket, since it had saved his life from an AK-47 bullet in Viet Nam in ’68. However, an expensive cigar like the Esplendido, at 34 dollars each, deserved the purity of a flame from a wooden match. The Cuban cigars and an occasional shot of Bourbon were his only vices. He knew enough secrets about his peers to assure his position, but never allowed a hint of scandal in his own life. While technicians carried away his discarded hazard suit, he stopped, gazed back through the clear glass at the animated corpse on the operating table, and shook his head.
“Christ, what have we created here?”
At the exit in the front office, he grabbed his heavy parka from the row of pegs on the wall and slipped it on over his uniform. Outside, he donned his shades against the snow-blinding glare of the sun off the hard-packed snow and ice surrounding the lab. His driver sat in heated luxury within the enclosed cab of the bright red Sno-Cat. General Scott shivered, but it was not from the chill of the Antarctic air. His deep south Southern Baptist upbringing often conflicted with his duty, but never as sharply as with this project. He had been against it from the beginning, and regretted funding it even more after what he had just witnessed, but the American people expected results. Since the terrorist bombing of a suburban Chicago mall, which had killed over 200 people, Homeland Security had been on full alert. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had orders from the Commander-in-Chief to ‘get the job done’ when it came to terrorists. No questions asked.
Ensconced in the heated comfort of the Sno-Cat, the driver turned to him and asked, “Back to the barracks, General?”
General Scott jerked back to the present. He looked at the sergeant assigned to drive him and imagined him as one of Cromby’s zombies. He shook his head sadly, “No, take me to the hangar. I need to get back to Washington.” He scratched an itch on his chest.
The sergeant smiled, “Ah, yes! Warm sunshine and hot women.”
The general looked at him without smiling, “It’s about to get too damned hot, son.”
* * * *
After the general had departed, Dr. Cromby left Gilford to deal with the screaming mass of flesh that had once been, US Marine Corporal Trenton T. Ellis of Scranton, PA, and returned to his office. As he sat behind his desk, toying with the idea of resigning, but knowing he could not, one of the technicians tapped on his door.
“Come in,” he barked, annoyed at being disturbed in his misery.
The technician held out a blue biohazard suit. “Sir, we may have a problem.”
Cromby sat up, instantly alerted by the tone of the technician’s voice. “What is it, Treadby?”
“We found a pinhole in the general’s bio-hazard suit, sir.”
Cromby’s heart stopped beating for five long seconds; then his head pounded as it restarted and thundered blood into his befuddled brain. “A hole?”
“A very tiny one, sir, in the chest.”
The implications were frightening. “I saw the general kick his suit across the room when he removed it. Could it have occurred then?”
“Yes, sir, but if…”
Cromby waved the technician into silence. Idle speculation could cause a panic. “Where is the general now?”
“Gone, sir.”
He rose partway from his seat, “Gone?”
“Yes, sir. He left the base fifteen minutes ago for Washington.”
Cromby tried to calm his anxiety. After all, he thought, the hole’s most likely cause was the general’s rough treatment of the suit. “The sterilization procedures were not compromised,” he assured the panicked technician. “Any nanites would have been rendered inactive by the de-gaussing even if the puncture occurred inside the sterile room.”
“But metal would shield…”
“The general wasn’t wearing his ribbons and decorations, Treadby,” he snapped irritated by Treadby’s persistent. “He wasn’t here for a parade.” He sat back in his seat and crossed his arms over his head, attempting to show more ease than he felt. “I don’t see a problem. Do you? Dispose of the suit so it won’t be used again.”
Treadby’s eyes betrayed doubt, as he look intently at his boss, before turning away and closing the door behind him. Once he was gone, Cromby opened a desk drawer with a trembling hand and removed a bottle of Putinka vodka that he had picked up from the Russians during a rare visit to Vostok Station. He stared at the clear liquid for a moment, before filling a tumbler to the rim, spilling a little vodka on the desk. If the nanite virus were to become airborne . . .
“Boo-deem zda-ro-vye! To my health!” he said aloud and brought the tumbler to his lips. He remembered an old Russian saying; Only problem drinkers don’t say a toast. He smiled and downed the tumbler’s contents. “Here’s to you, General the Damned Terror Scott. You’ve killed us all, you bastard.”
2
Aug. 23, 2013 Casey Base, Antarctica
Roger Basky shuddered as he placed the naked flesh of his half-frozen ear to the ice-rimed metal door. The sudden biting cold burned through the numbness of his entire body, reminding him he was at least still alive. He could no longer hear the horrible screams in the corridor beyond. He hoped that was a good sign. Maybe the zombies were gone. Earlier, he had heard the bastards stirring around outside the door, scratching
and pounding as if they could smell him and Craig Dylan locked inside the office. He thanked God they weren’t too smart or very coordinated. He had recognized one of the walking dead as Ray Kruge, one of the weathermen. Basky had kicked him in the stomach when Kruge tried to take a chunk out of his arm.
Basky lit his butane lighter to check the thermometer on the non-functioning thermostat, cursing the long Antarctic night. He longed for even just a little sunlight shining through the small, ice-rimed window. He cursed again. The temperature had fallen to -4 Celsius – a twelve-degree drop in three hours. Already his toes and fingers were aching from the cold. It looked as if their choices were limited – freezing to death or becoming a zombie meal.
“Damn zombies,” he muttered aloud, and then cringed when his voice sounded dangerously loud in the small room. Again, he placed his ear against the door to satisfy himself the sound had not carried through the door.
He warmed his hands on the small heater that he and Dylan had rigged when the power had died, using a metal footlocker with empty soup cans as a chimney, venting it outside through a small window. It provided just enough light to see his surroundings. All they had for fuel was wooden office furniture and files from the cabinets. The paper burned hot and fast, but breaking up the furniture made too much noise, and drew too much attention from the zombies. He could no longer feel his hands. Basky glanced at Dylan, now lying stretched out on the sofa with the sofa cushions piled on top of him for additional warmth. In spite of the rapidly increasing cold, Dylan’s fever had grown worse. The bite on his hand was livid, but at least the bleeding had stopped.
“Damn zombies,” he repeated. Basky mentally chuckled to himself. He couldn’t believe he had actually said ‘zombie’, but what else do you call the walking dead, and God knows that was what everyone had become. When the supply plane from Mawson base had arrived at Casey thirty-six hours earlier, both pilots had professed to suffering from a simple case of the flu, which seemed to be running rampant in Mawson, as well as most of Australia and New Zealand. Doc Wiggins had forced both of them to don surgical masks for the duration of their turnaround. It was an ordinary precaution. Flu in a closed environment like an Antarctic base was a real health concern. The pilot and co-pilot’s deaths less than twelve hours later came as a shock to everyone, especially Wiggins. When they both revived a few hours later and began attacking people, biting, clawing, and God help them all, eating human flesh and drinking blood, it had rapidly become a bad horror movie with every man for himself.
