K. T. Swartz Read online

  Her barrett swung by her left ear, her ponytail thin and greasy with liquefied skin. May put away her bat, took out the bow. The counter was too high for the zombie to crawl over, not when its simple brain told it only to pursue lunch. Long arms reached for her, left black smears across the green countertop. She pulled her arrow back; let it fly. The zombie pitched backward, an arrow through her forehead.

  In the sudden silence, she listened for the sound of shuffling feet on carpet. Behind the counter, through the glass windows in the adult fiction section, a figure jerked and swayed. She put her flashlight on the bench beside her. Strung another arrow, stretched the string back to her ear. The blind zombie paused in the doorway, swayed on its feet as if listening to music. A collared shirt, pleated slacks, and a nametag on his collar: Jimmy. His thin frame betrayed him as a high-schooler, probably a part-timer here. Black spiky hair stuck out in all directions, though when he turned his head, glossy and slick patches of his skin showed. She let the arrow fly. His head snapped back. His feet slipped out from under him and he sat down hard, head lolling forward.

  She strung another arrow. Listened as silence again intruded. It was always so quick to show, as if on her heels. Everywhere she went, it followed like a pet. But unlike a fuzzy dog or a purring cat, it offered no comfort. Because the silence only ended when dragging feet moved across the floor. This time the library stayed quiet. She eased the tension from her bow, pulled out her new baseball bat and grabbed her flashlight. Section by section, she combed the sprawling building. All open doors she closed – after she checked each room, venturing into areas she’d never been. She found the room with the two-way glass, shined her light inside. There was no one behind it.

  She kept going, walked down the steps to the children’s section. Let her light play across the stacks. She picked an aisle for elementary-aged kids. At the very end, she knelt; let her light shine off the plastic covers. Her finger tapped each one, her eyes searching. Until a familiar title caught her attention. Her favorite book as a kid. She slipped it free from the shelf. The cover was still as she remembered it, of a little boy living in a world with two suns, where one sun turned him human and the other into an animal. She stuck the book in her pack before searching the rest of the stacks. Finding no lingering dead, she headed back to the lobby.

  Well, now that the building was clear, she could get on with her research. She headed for the topmost level but stopped. Looked over the railing to the counter below, to the body she knew was behind it. She trotted down the steps; hopped the counter to sit on it. As far as she knew, there were only two types of zombies. But no cure. And no cases of surviving once bitten. She had largely ignored the news reports that flooded the airwaves with panic and the biased stories designed to generate sales.

  And the reporters named the disease as a mutated strand of the Bubonic Plague. All it took to transmit the disease was fluid exchange, which meant the disease traveled through blood and saliva. No one bothered to further study it; they were too busy trying to keep everyone from dying. The Bubonic plague – what she knew of it – didn’t addle the mind. It created painful swelling around the joints. Necrosis set in while the body still lived. During the Dark Ages, it had spread through fleas and rats, other vermin and unclean living conditions.

  In its morbid history, the Bubonic Plague had been altered genetically before, but this strand somehow propelled a dead body to move and instilled a terrible hunger for the living. But what kept their bodies moving? Well, that question would be easy if she knew how the disease was altered. To do that, she’d need the research notes… well, she needed the location of the lab where it had been altered first. And that wasn’t happening. In any case, those answers were out of her reach. She had only what she knew. Damage to the brain meant final death; covering her scent meant non-detection; silence meant safety.

  She was no scientist, had no head for numbers. She knew that. But she knew how to survive. She pushed off the counter to kneel beside the female zombie. Her flashlight beam illuminated all the rigid, ruined flesh of the zombie’s face. She let the light reflect off the eyes. Though the life had left them, they still stared clearly at her. Degradation had not yet set in. This was the first time she’d actually taken time to observe the process of that degradation. And she had two perfect specimens: one truly dead zombie and one living zombie. She pulled out her current notebook and a pen. She wrapped a bandana around her mouth and nose and fitted two pair of latex gloves on her hands.

  Her knife blade slid along the zombie’s arm; she peeled back the skin to reveal red and bleeding muscle, and veins laced with threads of rot. A mix of health and disease. She hopped the counter, swapped out her latex gloves for another pair before cutting into the reanimated male. The muscle underneath was as black as his blood; shriveled and stringy. It had pulled away from the elbow joint. Like black spaghetti, it slid over the tendons still connected to the bone. Complete decay. She returned to the female. Red and black-tinged blood pooled along the vertical cut up the female’s torso; she made a second cut perpendicular across the lower stomach and another just below the collar bone.

  Her stomach heaved with the stench that rushed up her nose. It burned so bad she had to look away. Gasping for air only pulled the foul scent of rot deeper into her lungs. She gagged. Shuddered. Her chest heaved, dragging in deep breaths until the scent faded, until she got used to it. Shaking her head, she went back to cutting until the chest and torso lay splayed open. Organs floated like chunks of meat in a bloody soup. They weren’t shriveled, were instead laced with rot. She moved to the male. Repeated the three cuts. She jerked back, shielding her nose, but the smell didn’t make her eyes water like before. Instead of soup, shriveled husks clung to the chest cavity.

  She sat back on her heels. Their bodies were completely different, yet still capable of movement. Even when the muscles pulled away from the bone or when the organs were beyond use, the body kept moving, which meant that the disease had to be centralized in the brain. Where else did a human’s muscle coordination come from? But what did the disease do to the brain to keep it moving? She removed the fireman’s ax from her carpenter’s belt. Perfect lighting was required for what she was about to do, and only one place provided it.

  With both heads double-bagged in black plastic, she collected books on chemical compounds, then retrieved the bone saw she’d pilfered from the hospital and biked across town to the trailer she’d left for the dead. She put on her goggles, tied her hood around her face, tightened her bandana around her nose and mouth, and used multiple layers of latex to cover her hands. The bone saw whined when she turned it on, as if it had fully expected to never be used again. Childlike and complaining, it screamed when she touched blade to scalp. Bone shards like rain peppered her coat. Then blood drops spattered her leather coat, the tables, and walls like an enthusiastic painter flinging paint across canvas.

  Her arms shook from holding the same position for so long, but she cut a lopsided square in the back of each skull. The bone saw whined itself into a sulking silence when she set it aside. Her breath was hot against the bandana, but she didn’t pull it away. Instead she set the bony cap aside to expose the brain underneath. Her tongs smashed left and right hemispheres together, then extracted the brain from its home. She dragged over a chair. Sat down. On either side of her specimens was a scalpel and clamps – thanks to the hospital. Two notebooks were beside them, ready for copious amounts of notes.

  She started with the brain of the clear-eyed zombie she labeled Z-1, living. She listed the traits she’d discovered in the library – decomposition levels, smell, and then added a description of the brain. This one still showed signs of healthy tissue. She leafed through an anatomy book she’d picked up at the library, flipped through it to the description of the brain’s parts. She dropped eyelevel with the table and looked from the real brain to the picture of the brain. The Frontal Lobe was grossly swollen, as if dozens of bees had stung it. She poked it with the clamps. Yellowish oo
ze seeped from the grey folds. Her nose wrinkled. She slid to Z-2’s brain. Shriveled like a raisin and dried out as if left in the sun, it was as black as the fetid blood still rotting in his veins. Again she looked from brain to picture. Again the Frontal Lobe was swollen. She poked it too, and her eyes followed the single tear of yellow-black ooze to the table. Did the Frontal Lobe always have yellow ooze in it? She consulted the anatomy book.

  It didn’t say. She poked the left hemisphere enough that the clamp’s tip dipped into the brain matter. It wept yellow-black ooze. She poked Z-1’s brain. Same thing. All right, so whatever this ooze was it infected the whole brain. She set the simple microscope – again from the hospital – on the table and adjusted the lenses. With the scalpel she smeared samples of ooze from both brains onto slides and stuck Z-2’s under the microscope. Increased the magnification. Tiny, hairy, circular blobs floated lazily in the sample. The small hairs on each blob waved and twisted, carrying it in whatever direction it chose. There were too few of them to run into each other. She swapped out the slide for Z-1. Dozens of hairy blobs filled the sample; so many that they bumped and bounced off each other. They were pinballs of the microscopic sort.

  She sat back, chewed on her lip. So, Z-1 – the one that had been alive – had more of those blobs in her brain than Z-2, the fully dead one. She scraped off some samples from the jagged neck wounds and slid them under the microscope. Yep, they were among the platelets and plasma too.

  ‘I hypothesize that the reason so many of these blobs – if Jeremy were alive he’d insert something naughty here – exist in Z-1 is because they’re what’s killing her. They are the genetically modified Bubonic Plague. But instead of just killing the victim, these blobs cause undeath and act as a stimulant to keep the muscle synapses firing. The disease keeps the nasal cavities and ears working, and for awhile the eyes too. Alive or dead, the body still moves. But now the question is what causes the almost instinctive reaction to attack only living bodies?

  Is the attack response a by-product of the modified Bubonic Plague? Is it a defense response as a way to spread the disease? Self-preservation, maybe? If so, why does the victim only attack organic beings instead of a random tree or car? And why don’t the zombies attack each other? If the disease is trying to spread, to save itself, their hosts should be attacking anything and everything that moves, but they don’t. They are capable of distinguishing between prey and non-prey.

  Since zombies rely on their senses to track prey, maybe there’s a way to mislead them besides me covering my scent. There are chemicals and cleaning agents that can blind a person and leave someone coughing and choking on the smell. Will they work on zombies?

  All right, one last question, I swear: Who on God’s Earth would make such a horrible disease like this???

  • excerpt from October 2 entry

  She opened the supply closet and grabbed all her chemical bottles, set them on the table. Scalpel in one hand and a bottle in the other, she added a fresh sample of contaminated blood to the slide, and then squeezed a drop of peroxide on it. The hairy blobs skittered and slid through the foreign material; nothing changed. She washed the slide off. Added another drop of blood and another chemical, this one a powder used for tough soap scum in grout, tile, and all bathroom surfaces. Under the microscope, the blobs floated around the powdered flakes, avoided them as if – well – they were the plague. She jotted down her observations.

  She tested another chemical that proudly proclaimed its use: Removes Rust, Mold, and Hard Water Stains. The chemical did not remove the Bubonic Plague, however. She washed off the slide and tried again. What she hoped to find she wasn’t sure, but she still tested each chemical and wrote down the results. Chemicals, as a whole, were largely ineffective against the undead due to the zombie’s lack of blood flow, unless still alive. But she didn’t have the time to differentiate between dead zombies and living zombies during a fight.

  She added a drop of ammonia to the slide. Instead of fleeing, the microorganisms slowed to a crawl. She frowned, added a second drop of ammonia. The affect was like poison; the cells stopped moving completely. She leaned back, blinked a few times as a flicker of a headache zipped behind her eyes. Her gaze fell to the microscope. All right, so ammonia stunned the disease. Could be temporary; could be permanent. But that was easy to test; it was a shame the temperature was starting to drop. The cold tended to freeze zombies like they were hunks of beef in a deep freeze, and frozen zombies wouldn’t respond to her tests.

  Maybe if she’d arrived in Danville a couple months earlier, she could have made a bigger dent in their number by now, but cleaning out Parksville, with its countless hills and thick forests – with trailers and log cabins hidden around every bend in the road – had taken longer than expected, until she burned the forests to the ground. Well, with winter around the corner, she had plenty of time for research.

  She sat up and looked through the microscope. The microorganisms were grey and curled up like a swatted spider. They were… dead?

  ‘Was I staring at a neutralizing agent? A cure? No way. I have no medical knowledge. The chances of me actually discovering something so important were slim to none. To think the genetically altered Bubonic Plague could be simply wiped out with ammonia made me sick to my stomach. Why hadn’t someone tested this chemical by now?’

  • excerpt from October 2 entry

  She sat back in her chair again; couldn’t take her eyes off the microscope. Then abruptly stared through the lenses again. The disease hadn’t moved. She scooped off just a drop of blood from Z-1’s brain and let it splash onto the sample. The new organisms swam in the blood and ammonia mix for only a moment before they began to slow. As she watched, they stopped moving. She stood, stripped off her gloves, washed her hands in ammonia first, then soap and water. She broke the sterilized seal on a clean scalpel and rolled up her sleeve past the elbow. Just a shallow knick to let her blood collect on the surgical blade.

  She returned to the sample; let her blood drip off the metal tip, into the contaminated blood. Pulling up her chair, she looked through the microscope. The drop of blood spread across the slide. Immediately the tiny hairs began to twitch; the plague cells swam quickly through her blood. As she watched, the dead organisms shuddered, as if waking from a nightmare. They uncurled; their grey color faded. Just like the others, they began attacking the uncontaminated sample. Her stomach sank to the floor. She tried to shallow but her throat closed up.

  Ammonia was no cure. She slid her notebook close, wrote down what she saw. Under the microscope, the tiny blobs began to split into twos. They multiplied, fed by her blood until dozens of hairy blobs danced excitedly. So, the ammonia only induced a coma-like state until fresh blood was introduced. She sat back, her eyes on the microscope. Well, at least she learned something new, and that something could eventually be very useful. Particularly when entering a large building. She could make some type of ammonia bomb. If her tests worked, she could stun every one of the zombies and systematically walk through the whole building, killing them in safety as she went.

  Now, maybe cleaning out larger cities was a possibility. She needed to design and create these ammonia bombs first – probably with a time-release component – before performing her tests. Well, at least she had the coming autumn and winter months for that. She washed off her slides, tossed the brains and skulls outside, wiped everything down with ammonia until her nose stung and her eyes watered. She bandaged her arm, wrapping the tiny cut in several layers of gauze before suiting up. She would need ammonia and gallons of it for her tests. While she’d taken a lot of it from All-Mart, she hadn’t taken every bottle. And fortunately for her, Danville had more than one grocery store.

  She carefully poured ammonia into a squirt gun. Screwed the cap back on. And squeezed the trigger once. A solid stream of eye-watering solution splattered the firehouse floor. The whole room smelled of ammonia, and it made her nose run. She sniffed. The bottle of ammonia still had some in it, so she filled up
another squirt gun. Armed with the two, with arrows soaked in a chemical bath, her first untested attempts at an ammonia bomb, and her bashing weapons, she climbed out of the fire station and went hunting for zombies. The truck engine rumbled softly, its windows foggy in the cold morning air. She turned on the defrost. Kept her eyes focused forward for any signs of movement. But there were none.

  It figured. Just when she really needed a zombie to show, they all disappeared. If her calculations were right, she’d killed maybe four hundred through her sweeps through the grocery stores and businesses that had once been bustling with people. The subdivisions were the real problem. Cleaning them out was a slow process, and extremely risky, but with very high potential gain. The rewards would support her when the stores ran out, and knowing that her safe-houses were full was a comforting thought.

  She put her foot on the brake – at the top of the hill overlooking an empty factory, the Danville Detention and Recycling center, and overgrown train tracks. Now there was something she hadn’t thought about using, a train. She shook her head, had no idea how to work one – not that the problem couldn’t be solved by the library, but right now she had other things on her mind, like the handful of zombies wandering the jail’s fenced-in yard. Perfect.

  She coasted downhill. The truck shuddered and bounced over the train tracks. The stoplight was out; maybe it was habit, but she glanced left to see if any vehicles had their blinkers on. She shook her head, turned right onto the recycling center’s driveway. Behind it – and connected to it – was the jail. She braked; let her headlights illuminate the garage-like building. One of the retractable doors was open. She climbed out of the truck as shadows shifted within. She fit her first arrow on her bow, drew it back to her ear. The smell of ammonia made her nose burn; she blinked, took a deep breath. And let the arrow fly.