Zombified (Episode 2): Yankee Heights Read online

  "Two women? Is one of them a smokin' hot black girl wearing a purple dress?"

  The guard shook his head. "No, they're both faculty members. The guy in the security office is my boss, Carl, and there's a grad student in the biology lab. He was doing some thesis work when I locked down the floor."

  "Do you know his name?" Matty asked.

  He shrugged. "I didn't think to ask."

  "Are you… fuckin' stupid or something?" Matty exploded. "You keep me in the hall with zombies, asking for my ID, and you don't bother to check anyone else?"

  Backing away, hands raised, the guard stuttered: "Pl-please… I'm so scared, I didn't know what to do…"

  "Whatever. Do you have any weapons or a spare set of security keys?"

  "No," the kid replied. "No weapons… well, we have some mace, but I don't think that works. There are spare keys in the office."

  "Lead the way, chief." Matty fell in step behind the guard; they walked swiftly along the dimly lit basement corridor. Most of the rooms were closed and locked, but light shone from the laboratory area and from a large room at the corner of the hall.

  Stopping at a heavy metal door with an inset window, the guard sifted through his keys; he unlocked the door and pushed it open.

  Seated before a bank of monitors, a hefty man with graying hair and rosy cheeks spun in the chair. "Well hello there. I see you brought company, Shane." He didn't stand up, but he did extend a hand. "I'm Carl."

  "Matty," he shook Carl's hand. Two female teachers, both in their forties or early fifties, sat in folding metal chairs at the back of the room. Matty gave them a curt nod and turned his attention to the monitors.

  "Was that you blasting through the front door?" Carl spun back around in his chair and punched in a command on the blue keypad set beneath the monitors. A full-screen view of the shattered glass doors filled one of the screens. Zombies were staggering and shambling through the broken frame.

  "I tried knocking, but nobody answered," Matty said. He glanced at the other monitors: zombies were filing into the parking lots from every direction, drawn by the gunshots or the exterior lights of the university… or maybe, Matty thought, by some compulsion of memory.

  Carl nodded. "I can't blame ya, young man, but we're going to be trapped down here if all of those things get inside." He used a joystick to pan the parking lots, zooming in on the undead: some of them sprinted to the school, others shambled or lurched like drunkards. "How did it spread so fast?"

  "Dunno," Matty said, "but I'm going to see if our resident biologist has any answers." He watched the screens for a few minutes, trying to get an idea of how many were surrounding the campus. "Can you shut off the lights from here, Carl?"

  "The breakers are down the hall," he answered. "If we throw—"

  Right then all the lights did go off; the monitors and computer clicked off, too. After a few seconds of pitch black, tubes of soft blue-white light bubbled to life in the hallway and then in the security office. The monitors came back up, going through an auto-configuration routine: the cameras zoomed in and out, calibrating automatically.

  "Generators are running," Carl noted. "Figure we got at least six hours, eight tops, before the fuel is empty."

  "I'm going to the lab," said Matty; "I suggest you guys kill all the lights except for the basement. If we only keep the power up down here, that should extend the generators, right?"

  Carl nodded and turned to Shane. "Get on it, Shane."

  "Can I have the spare keys?" Matty grabbed a flashlight from the top of a metal filing cabinet. Carl tossed him a key ring with six keys dangling from it.

  "That's the master keys for utility, janitorial, classrooms, and labs. The number on the key's head corresponds to the building floor."

  Matty nodded: "Got it." He followed Shane out the door and turned right, heading for the entrance to the biology lab.

  THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD

  A staccato of pounding echoed in the corridor; Matty listened, trying to pinpoint the source. He followed the banging to the opposite side of the basement: it was coming from one of the other stairwells.

  Someone's alive! Matty raced to the door, flipping through the keys in search of one labeled 'B' or 'G' or whatever the basement might be called. "Shane! We got a live one on the north stairwell! Get your scrawny ass over here!"

  "I'm coming!" Shane's squirrelly voice resounded.

  Matty hung a right at the end of a corridor; the door was in view and this one had a small rectangular window set just above the lock. He slid on the smooth tile and overshot the door; snagging the handle, Matty raised the key to the lock.

  "Matty, please open the door!" Kayla begged, pressing her frantic face into the wire-meshed glass. "Oh God, please! They're right behind me!" She pounded on the door and screamed; tears were streaming down her face.

  On the landing above her, not more than ten feet away, a gang of sallow-faced, black-lipped zombies clawed, shoved, and tumbled over one another; their hollow moans and feral growls rose up and drowned out Kayla's screaming.

  Shane sprinted down the corridor, basement key gripped in his hand. Gasping for air, he extended the key toward the lock; Matty slapped Shane's hand away and lowered his own key. He shook his head at Kayla and mouthed "I'm sorry".

  Kayla stopped crying and locked eyes with him. Her chin quivered and a fresh fountain of tears poured down her cheeks.

  Did I just break her heart and kill her at the same time? He felt sick but refused to look away. You did this to her… burn it in your mind, man.

  Shane struggled to shove Matty away from the door, but he was half his size and weaker than a sophomore cheerleader. Matty grabbed Shane's shirt and thrust the guard back.

  "What are you doing?" Shane squeaked. "She's going to die out there!" He moved forward again, but Matty's hand closed over the handle of his 9mm. Shane stepped back and started crying… and then he threw up on the linoleum.

  They tore Kayla away from the door, ripping shreds of chocolate flesh from her shoulders and back; teeth bit down on the smooth arms and legs, tearing muscle and sinew in steaming taffy strands. She flailed and beat on them with fists and feet, but the zombies never wavered from their meal. When they removed her face in a single sheet of brown and pink papery flesh, Matty dropped to one knee and vomited on the door and the front of his sneakers.

  He focused on the feeling of her silky flesh and pouting lips; all he wanted to remember was lying on the patio, pressed against her, and smelling her sweet perfume… but the smell of regurgitated turkey, beef, and beer won the battle.

  Matty stood up and backed away from the door. The sounds coming from the other side were nothing short of revolting. He staggered away, gripping the wall for support, and used a shirtsleeve to wipe the puke from his goatee.

  "You let her die!" Shane screeched. "You're a murderer!" He backed away from Matty, his eyes peeled open and his lips contorted like a child confronting the bogeyman.

  Matty nodded. "I am. I chose one murder over six. There were too many, Shane. If I had opened that door, they would be in here with us instead of out there, feeding and distracted." He stabbed a thumb at his chest. "I have to live with it, Shane. Your hands are clean… you tried to save her."

  Shane slid down the wall with knees tucked into his chest and pressed both palms to his eyes. He took deep, quivering breaths punctuated by hiccups and sniffles. "This is so… so… fucked up!"

  Matty walked past him, calling over a shoulder: "I'm going to the lab, Shane. Pull yourself together and get the outside lights turned off."

  He walked slowly back the way he had come, dragging his feet and trying to push the memory of Kayla's death from his mind.

  "Is it time for the pool?" She had said only an hour ago. "I wanna fuck in the pool!" And he had every intention of doing just that… but he had also planned on calling her the next day.

  He felt worse. My chance with the hottest girl on the planet, whom I was damn near in love with, and she gets munche
d by undead on the same night. Matty punched the nearby wall: his fist throbbed. Am I fuckin' cursed? This couldn't happen any other fuckin' night, could it? Of course not… it had to happen on the night my dream woman steps out of fantasyland and into my arms.

  An overwhelming hatred for the munchers percolated from Matty's toes to his brain, setting every sense on fire. He had read dozens of books, watched all the shows and movies, but the reality, he discovered, pissed him off far more than it scared him.

  "Munchers," he murmured; "that's what I'm calling these cannibal langoliers. All they do is munch, no matter who it is."

  He paused in front of the biology lab door and focused on breathing. In through your nose, he inhaled, and out through your mouth. A few repetitions brought his boiling blood down to a simmer.

  Matty turned the handle and stepped into the laboratory.

  CHAPTER 5

  "Mike?"

  A tall burly guy with bushy eyebrows and wild blonde hair looked up from a microscope and smiled. "Matty J, I'll be damned! You're alive!"

  They met and shook hands; Mike was a head taller than Matty.

  "Let me guess: working on your thesis?"

  Mike grinned; his eyes disappeared as his cheeks rose up and met the low-hanging eyebrows. "What else would I be doing?"

  "So you're aware of the hordes of flesh-eating zombies, right?"

  "About that." Mike stepped over to stainless steel countertop and pulled a black cloth off the top of a rectangular object. "I've been trying to figure out what's causing it." Beneath the cloth, a glass tank was divided into two sections; on each side, what might have been a guinea pig or large rat paced its small confine.

  "What am I looking at here, Mike," said Matty.

  "Nothing yet." Mike donned a heavy rubber glove, released the latch, and flipped open the tank. He grabbed one of the rodents and picked up a thin syringe lying on a plastic tray adjacent to the tank. "I found a rat infected with the pathogen and harvested its fluids."

  "That's wonderful, Mike." Matty shook his head. "Add that to the list of reasons why I didn't take microbiology."

  "Ahahaha," Mike laughed; it was a rumbling, cartoon sound that seemed out of place on the tall, Neanderthal-looking scientist.

  He plunged the needle into his subject and pressed the plunger. Within a minute of sealing the cage, the infected rodent was acting strange: it ran into the walls, sneezing repeatedly, and its eyes clouded over with a film of gray.

  "Sixty seconds," Mike observed, jotting down a note on a yellow legal pad. "By ninety seconds, it should be changed." He held out his wrist; the digital face was in stopwatch mode. "Ten seconds."

  Matty's eyes darted back and forth from the watch to the rodent. The creature twitched and stopped moving—it just froze in place, up against the glass in the rear right corner of the cage.

  Mike clicked the watch; it stopped at ninety-one seconds.

  The guinea pig squealed, but it wasn't the typical high-pitched pain-in-the-ass noise normally associated with the rodent; the sound was hollow and drawn out. The furry head twisted back and forth and it turned to face Mike and Matty.

  "What's it doing, Mike? Why is it staring at—"

  SCREEEEE!

  It lunged and smacked into the glass, falling to the bottom of the cage; the rodent righted itself and charged again, banging snout-first into the wall. Large teeth scratched down and tiny claws scrabbled in rapid up-down movements. Blood trickled from its nose, gums, and paws.

  "The larger the animal, the longer it takes for the pathogen to take over." Mike raised an eyebrow and patted Matty on the shoulder. "And that's not the best part."

  Matty followed him over to the microscope; dozens of slides and tubes were arranged around the workspace, flanked by crumpled up papers and a stack of legal pads. A silver and white laptop lay open to the left of the microscope; a marquee screensaver scrolled from right to left on the screen.

  Mike slid a finger on the touchpad and opened a file: a video filled the screen.

  "What am I looking at, Mike?"

  "These," he pointed at a group of translucent circles, "are human cells compromised by the H2N3 virus."

  "That's the flu that's running rampant right now, correct?"

  Mike nodded. "And you'll see here," he pointed to thin spider-like strands wrapping around the virus: "That's what I think is causing the change."

  "I can see what you're pointing at, Mike, but I have no idea what it means." Matty turned to Mike and folded his arms. "Pretend I'm some dumbass freshman in one of your classes."

  "Ahahahaha." Another cartoon caveman laugh. Mike shut off the video and sketched something on the pad. "This is how the virus takes over and replicates." He drew a series of rough diagrams. "It uses the body's own machinery to reproduce."

  "So it hijacks our cells, more or less?" Matty asked.

  "Pretty much, yeah. And although I can't confirm it, here's what I think this zombie pathogen does." Mike flipped the page and started a new series of sketches. "I haven't been able to see it in action and I don't have the equipment to setup an experiment, so this is really just a guess." He handed the pad to Matty.

  From what the drawing suggested, the infection hijacked the already-hijacked cells; they converted the factory to produce copies, overwriting the flu instructions. He shared the observation with Mike. "Is that about right?"

  "Not only that," said Mike, waving his hands around in the air, "but I think it's a parasite! I think this thing actually lives on viruses and bacteria, letting them do the hijacking and then sneaking in the back door."

  "Ooookay." Matty wrinkled his eyebrows. "I get the concept, but I'm not understanding why that's so amazing. Is it unusual?"

  "Unusual? If this thing can use other pathogens to infiltrate systems, it's the first of its kind. Not only does it act like a spy, but also it would be damn hard to defend against. The body cues in on the virus or bacteria. If this thing can piggy-back on any other pathogen… there's nothing we can do about it—at least not in the short term."

  Matty paced the room, rubbing his chin and taking deep breaths. Biology and anatomy and whatever this branch of science covered was alien territory; give him something to read and write and it was a wrap, but things with formulas and forty trillion steps to a solution… thanks, but no thanks.

  "Is this something natural, Mike? If something like this always existed, why haven't we heard about it?"

  Mike shrugged. "Beats the hell out of me, Matty. I don't have the facilities to do any type of DNA testing, so I can't answer that."

  "This is your field," said Matty. "Take a guess."

  Mike picked up a pen and started pacing; he clicked the pen repeatedly, alternating between slow, spaced-out clicks and rapid staccato ones.

  "It's possible something like this evolved through natural processes," Mike blurted out. "Maybe it evolved somewhere away from human populations."

  "Then how does it infect people so fast? Doesn't it need time to…" Matty searched for the word, "mutate, or adapt, or something."

  "It has adapted, Matty." Mike gave the pen a hard click and held the button in. "It adapted to become a parasite on other pathogens. Wherever those pathogens go, it can go."

  "That makes sense." Matty leaned against the counter. "Any other ideas? Could it be some sort of bioweapon or medical experiment?"

  "Hmmmm." Mike stopped pacing and reached up to scratch behind his ear. "It definitely could be. There's always that possibility in this field. I read some fascinating articles about designer microbes intended to seek out and destroy deadly pathogens. Maybe one of those experiments got loose."

  "Are we really that advanced in this field, Mike? Shit, I still get a cold."

  "Ahahahaha," Mike chuckled. "We can clone animals and human tissue, so of course we're that advanced. The bottom line: I have no idea where this thing could have come from."

  They looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then Matty asked another question: "How does it work o
n the dead? If these things tear apart a person, there's no life left to hijack, is there?"

  Mike's eyes popped open. "You know what? I haven't got around to doing that experiment." He walked back to the guinea pig cage and slipped on the glove. "I can't believe I didn't think to do that!"

  "Hey, you wanna catch me up? I have no idea what you're rambling about." Matty stayed back, out of range of the psychotic rodent.

  "Autopsy," Mike said. He reached in the cage and seized the guinea pig: it went berserk, scratching and biting and dribbling blood over the thick rubber hand around it. Droning squeals filled the room.

  With a quick twist, Mike snapped the creature's neck. It's jaw continued to snap and a gurgling "SQWEEEE" noise bubbled from its mouth.

  Matty made a gun with his thumb and forefinger. "Gotta blast the brains, doc."

  "Huh." Mike carried the critter to a separate counter and held it down while he retrieved a scalpel. "That's interesting." He drove the scalpel into the base of the rodent's skull and gave a little twist: a muffled crack ended the squealing and snapping.

  "I don't know how you do that, dude." Matty made a face of 'none of that for me, thanks' and kept away from the table.

  "It's part of biology, Matty." Mike pinned the rodent's limbs and set to work cutting it apart. "I'm going to take samples from different tissues and see how the pathogen affects them."

  "What can I do, Mike?"

  Mike glanced over at him and nodded at the laptop. "Take notes. Type up everything you see and everything I say."

  "Ten-four, homey." Matty hopped up on the cushioned stool and opened a new text document; he noted the time, location, and nature of the report at the top. "Ready."

  They spent an hour documenting every piece of the guinea pig. Matty didn't understand any of it, but he transcribed whatever Mike said.

  Mike brought several samples of different rodent parts over to the microscope. "I'm going to exam each one and see if we can come up with anything. Most of what I'm going to say won't mean anything to you."