Jurassic Dead (13 page)

26.

Adranos Facility

Xander watched through the window while Marcus knelt over the soldier with the exposed collarbone. He couldn’t see his face, but he didn’t need to, didn’t want to. Marcus—
but he wasn’t Marcus anymore, was he, no way, no how—
gorged himself on the flesh of the unconscious soldier. The mercenary was still alive, though. Xander could see his belly beneath his shredded shirt, rising and falling with very shallow, labored breaths.

Marcus Ramirez—the talented paleontologist who had once given Xander pause as to his own job security within DeKirk’s enterprise—was
eating
a living man’s flesh.

He was, for all intents and purposes, Xander thought, a zombie. He stared into the room at Marcus wolfing down hunks of raw human flesh. That’s what he had turned into, but definitely, this thing shared none of the characteristics of the shambling, lurching, slow-moving creatures in most movies. This was…raw power, mixed with speed and ferocity.

A saurian zombie...
He pictured the worker who’d been nicked by the
T. rex
.

The applications for this discovery were limitless...What would Marcus—it was time to stop calling him that, he told himself. What would the creature—the
zombie
—do once it exhausted its food supply in the lab? Xander supposed that, like any organism without sustenance, it would eventually die. He wasn’t certain about that, but he didn’t want to risk it. The dinosaurs—a
T. rex
and two Cryos—were loose on the island. What if he couldn’t create any more zombies? What if DeKirk evacuated his people when he arrived and was overwhelmed by the horrific spectacle of it all? He was used to watching things from afar in the comfort of his remote mansions, after all. In that case, this would remain his only zombie specimen.

Xander had a lot of work to do in the lab before he could be first mover on this new bio-weapon. He needed to concentrate undisturbed. He looked over at the zombie, still feasting on the soldier. Xander’s gaze traveled up the wall to a vent shaft door in the ceiling. He recalled seeing the switch for it in the main lab. It looked large enough for a human—or zombie—to fit through.

He turned and ran back into the main lab. It was time to find out just what kind of mayhem these prehistoric zombies were capable of. Call it an early field test. He walked over to the wall switch for the vent shaft door, flipped it, and jogged back over to the inner door.

Inside, the Marcus-zombie stared up at the open vent shaft, ragged hunks of dripping meat hanging from its open craw. Again, it started with the head movements, detecting the flow of air through the vent. Just as Xander began to wonder if it would try to escape (maybe it had enough food supply in there for now?), it jumped onto the stainless steel table and crouched, looking up at the grate.

Then it sprung—
Marcus sprung
—disappearing into the overhead space.

Xander peered in at the mangled human bodies on the floor.
What a mess.
He turned to leave but motion caught his eye. Unbelievably, the soldier Marcus had been feeding from the most—the one with the missing section of collarbone—
sat up
. Then he began to nod his head rapidly back and forth and after that, he got to his feet.

Impossible!
Xander thought, but he knew it wasn’t, and he was thrilled to witness this firsthand. The new zombie stood and looked around, limping a bit, his severed collarbone protruding obscenely, and his service pistol still clutched in his right hand. He looked down and the jagged, raw bone impaled him beneath the chin, causing a new trickle of blood to fall from his neck.

A hand flattened out on the glass in front of Xander’s face before springing off, leaving a bloody palm print. Xander watched as Collarbone looked up at the ceiling, after Marcus.

Xander was flabbergasted. These men were undergoing the same transformation that had befallen Marcus, and were turning into zombies before his eyes—even after death. The change had been much more rapid, though.
Perhaps because they were bitten by a human-zombie instead of a dinosaur-zombie?
Xander didn’t know, but he fully intended to find out. There was big money—the kind of money lasting empires were founded on—in finding out.

Then Collarbone turned around and Xander was mortified to see a revolting gash in his midsection through which a waterfall of blood flooded—no,
dumped
out along with his intestinal mass.
Zombie Marcus must have done that!
The pale coils unraveled onto the wet floor as the man—no longer could that word truly describe him, though—shuffled toward the table. He made grimacing facial gestures with each step, as though in pain. He tripped once on his own intestines and stumbled headlong into the edge of the table where his gun struck the surface and discharged.

The errant round struck the zombie-soldier in his good shoulder, the left. He slowly rose from the table, both of his arms now dangling limply by his sides, unable to be supported by his decimated upper musculature. He abandoned his gun on the table as he tried to jump to the vent. Unable to raise his arms fully, he couldn’t grip the edge of the vent to pull himself up, and so repeatedly jumped, poking his head far up into the space before falling back to the table. Xander left him there, a zombified pogo stick yearning for the warm flesh to be found at the other end of the vent.

Xander pulled his attention away at last. He exited the lab, trotted down a long, tunnel-like hallway with a polished concrete floor, and subdued LED lighting. He reached the door to the holding room and gazed in at Veronica through the small window. She’d sat next to Marcus—to that
thing
—the whole Jeep ride over, but no, he thought, as he stared at her while she pecked her phone. She looked good. Hell, he’d still do her.

He put a key into the door, causing her to look up immediately, and he pulled the door open. He entered and she shrunk back from him before giving him a death glare once she realized he obviously wasn’t planning on killing her, at least not yet.

“What the hell do you want? What’s going on out there?”

“Good times, Veronica. Good times!” He backed out of the room, but left the door open. “Why don’t you go see for yourself? You’re now free to move about the compound.”

27.

Adranos Facility

Veronica watched Xander leave the holding room. He turned left down the hall, back the way he had come. He’d seemed distracted, in spite of the control he now wielded over her. She’d thought he would have lorded the situation over her more, knowing who she was, but it was as if he didn’t even care, and he was just letting her out? Something more important had to be going on, and she had to find out what it was.

She had to find DeKirk, too. Was he here yet, or still on his way?

Veronica stepped out into the hall. She looked both ways and saw only Xander way down to the left, jogging. She struck off to the right. In here, the place was eerily quiet, but outside in the distance she could hear shouting, and peppered gunfire. She cursed the fact that she’d lost her medical bag in the rush to escape the ship. Not because it had medical supplies—the jig was up on that by now—but because it had her tools of the trade, her operative’s field kit hidden below the false bottom. The multi-tool, her service pistol...Her sat-phone! All she had now was the stupid smart-phone. She’d tried in the room back there to get a signal but couldn’t, no surprise there. There was a wireless Internet connection here, probably satellite based, but she hadn’t been able to get past the encryption, so as of now, she had no way to contact her CIA handlers.

So here she was, walking around the island with little more than the clothes on her back, trying to hunt down a ruthless bio-weapons dealer on an island with dinosaurs running around, and some kind of disease turning everyone else into murderous, marauding zombies...

Gusts of powerful wind buffeted her body as she neared the end of the tunnel, open to the outside. She hunched forward and burst outdoors, now feeling the pelt of rain on her face. A Jeep lay overturned off to the left, no sign of anyone near it. It could be the one she’d rode in on, but she wasn’t sure since they all looked the same—completely open with no doors, no windows. One of the tires still spun in the air.

To the right was a dirt embankment overgrown with ferns. She heard a commotion in that direction. She climbed the small hill, swearing softly as leaves and branches whipped across her face, spitting out pieces of plant matter. She rounded the top and stopped in her tracks.

A soldier was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with another man, only as she looked closer it was clear that his opponent was not a man, or at least he wasn’t anymore. She recognized the tattered jumpsuit as belonging to one of the ship’s crew, and even recalled the face, but it was his face no longer. Gaunt, gray, with yellow streaks and strange vein clusters behind tight scales. Eyes that were mostly black with yellow, elongated irises.

It looked like whatever Marcus had progressed into after his bite, but it wasn’t Marcus, which meant that whatever this...this
plague
was that those idiots had dredged out of that Antarctic subterranean lake, it was spreading.

She stood there shivering behind the curl of a fern leaf while the fight played out not ten feet from her. The soldier had an automatic rifle slung over his back, suggesting that the zombie had surprised him, perhaps jumping out of the very foliage in which Veronica now hid. DeKirk’s man did have a fixed blade knife in his right hand though, slashing with it when he got the chance. She watched as he opened a tear in the zombie’s side, releasing a crimson sheet that soaked his jumpsuit.

The zombie had both arms outstretched, hands on the soldier’s arms as the mercenary sought to push the beast away long enough to sling his gun around, but each time he wrenched an arm free, the former crew member would latch onto him again. At the same time, the zombie continually thrust its head toward the soldier’s neck, making anticipatory biting motions that snapped at the air.

The rain came down harder, blowing horizontally in the forceful wind. Veronica shrunk deeper into the plants, terrified.

The soldier pulled his right hand, the one with the knife—one Veronica recognized as a U.S. Marine Corps issue Ka-Bar—down sharply so that it broke free of the zombie’s spastic grasping. One of the zombie’s fingers was caught under the blade in the process and the severed digit went flying, eliciting a grunt from the quasi-mindless attacker. The soldier backpedaled but the zombie pressed forward in a surprising burst of speed. Veronica thought about the classic zombie movies she’d seen, how they always walked so slowly. This one started slow, but it also seemed to store energy in reserve for the occasional quick burst. Like a reptile, she thought. A cold-blooded reptile that needed to lay in the sun for a while to build up its energy...

A breathy gasp issued from the zombie’s lips, tearing Veronica from her speculation. The soldier had parried and thrust until his seven inch blade was buried to the hilt in his foe’s chest. Left side.

He’s dead now
, Veronica thought, brushing a horsefly off her cheek as she watched the soldier deliver a powerful kick to the zombie’s chest just beneath the protruding knife, sending it rambling backwards until it tripped over a raised root and landed on its back, splashing into the muddy earth.

DeKirk’s trained fighter cocked his head to the right and keyed a radio transmitter fixed to his shoulder. “Bravo to Alpha, Bravo to Alpha: one tango neutralized, Sector 2. I repeat...” While he turned and squinted into the distance, looking for signs of his associates, he failed to notice that the zombie sat up.

Veronica felt her throat catch as she saw the living dead man rise to his feet, seven inches of steel still piercing his heart, a black stain soaking through the fabric of his outfit. She wanted to warn the soldier (
He’s getting up!
) but she was scared that he might spray her position with bullets in a knee-jerk response, so she remained silent. She heard another voice say something unintelligible in reply over the soldier’s radio, and then he turned around and saw the zombie rising, stumbling.

The soldier’s mouth dropped open in absolute incredulity. He swiped his auto-rifle around to the ready position. Raised it. This time he aimed for the head. The zombie fell into a shambling motion that was ungainly, yet nevertheless, resulted in forward progress.

The soldier stood his ground and cut loose with a full-auto bullet hose. The zombie’s face, teeth, eyeballs and brains, crashed through the back of its exploding skull along with the slugs of lead. A small, unseen animal skittered out of the way as the wet matter strafed the ground along with the rain. The zombie’s near headless form hung in a standing position for perhaps a second longer and then it buckled at the knees, crumpling to the dirt.

Behind the ferns, Veronica was shaking. She’d shot people before, killed them, sure. In her line of work as an operative, you did what you had to do, but they were clean kills and proper assassinations with discreet amounts of firepower. This...this was just not right. The degree to which this—this
being
who had once been a man—had been so hideously butchered...so thoroughly deconstructed....was threatening to unhinge her. Even the soldier was unsettled, she could see. He practically tip-toed over to the massacred form, unsure if perhaps it might rise yet again. He stood there grimacing, then his radio blared again, something about half a click southeast, and he was off running.

Veronica waited until she was sure there would be no more movement from the zombie. As the rain let up, she cautiously emerged from her cocoon of greenery and approached the puddle of wasted flesh that had once been one of DeKirk’s men. It looked like part of its lower jaw might still be there, or was that the spine sticking up? She didn’t know, but the knife still jutted from the thing’s chest.

She went over to it and wrapped her hand around the handle, which, even in the falling rain, was sticky with blood. Pushing against the ground with her feet, she yanked the knife free of the zombie’s chest cavity. It slid out with a wet sucking sound. She eyed the zombie with trepidation. If this thing moved now that it had no head, she would lose it for sure.

It didn’t move. She wiped the blade off with some plant leaves because the zombie’s clothing was already sopping with blood everywhere, and she wasn’t about to stain her clothes with that diseased, rotten blood, no way in Hell.

She looked around. Where to now? She spotted the entrance to the tunnel. This experience having soured her on the great outdoors for now, she set off back toward the complex.

She had made it about halfway there when she saw a vaguely familiar human form walk—or more like stumble—around a concrete abutment.
Zombie or—?
She wanted to be sure. A cluster of industrial pipes surfaced out of the ground nearby. She ran to them and ducked behind one of the large ones. She saw the figure stop and sniff the air.

Yeah, definitely Zombie!

She froze, clutching the Ka-Bar in her right hand, even though she couldn’t imagine having to get close enough to the thing to use it, like that soldier did. She wasn’t sure she could do that, and then it hit her—the realization that this zombie… It was missing the hand on his left arm. Marcus Ramirez!

Would he recognize her if he did see her?

She doubted it. He was pretty far gone even on the drive over here, but maybe there was still some fight left in him. Maybe the antibiotics she had given him were somehow fending off the virus. Her curiosity made her want to get a closer look, though. She needed to gauge how far he had progressed, or maybe
regressed
was a better word for the transformation brought on by the primordial infection. Either way, she had to see it for herself.
The Regression of Dr. Marcus Ramirez.
If only she had some popcorn to watch the show with, she joked to herself. The humor kept her going in dark moments. She’d learned that about herself long ago, the only way she had managed to survive after what Xander did to Edgars.

Remaining stock still in the cluster of pipe work, she held her breath as Marcus The Zombie shuffled toward her. When he drew near enough, she looked closely at his face.

Oh God.

It was now sunken and gray, cadaverous, all shrunken and shriveled. He was missing front teeth, too, although, she supposed, they could have been knocked out due to trauma as opposed to falling out, but somehow she suspected the latter. She recalled her confrontation with him in the infirmary when he had accused her of not being an M.D.
In my non-expert, non-medical opinion, Marcus, your goddamned gums rotted out from under your teeth, and that appears to be the least of your problems.
New rows of sharp-edged incisors were coming in, pushing out the old teeth unsuited to their new function.

She waited for the zombie to walk far enough away. Then she bolted for the entrance to the facility. Even hanging out with Xander in there was preferable to this. At least she’d confirmed one thing, she thought, improvising a holster for the knife in the waistband of her jeans.

It took a headshot to kill those things.