Medora: A Zombie Novel (25 page)

“Well, no, not exactly,” Don said, “but we have been held against our will with no contact with the outside world for,
oh, I don’t know, a month now?” He turned to Eli.

“Yeah, over a month.”
She went to the counter and started to unwrap a granola bar.

“We’ve been unable to talk to anyone, not our family or friends. They’ve kept us in these glass walled rooms. There’s about thirty of us.
Well, there were thirty of us, but the rest have all gotten sick just like the rest of Medora.”

“So you’re from Medora
. Are you residents?”

“No, no, I’m from Florida.”

“Then I don’t understand.” He turned to Eli. “Are you from Medora?”

“No, I’m from a tiny town in Utah
,” she said, grabbing her second Pop Tart.

“Then how did you both end up in Medora?”

Don spoke up again, “We were selected for a medical trial of a new drug that would help treat our leukemia. We all have leukemia, everyone that was in Medora together. They flew us in from all over the country.”

“What is it called?”

“What?”

“The drug, do you know what the drug is called?”

“Oh,” he snorted, “Virulex. Supposed to be some miracle synthetic nano-drug that was going to cure our cancer.”

“A
nano-drug? Like they really used nano-technology?” Stark scratched his chin.

“Man, I don’t know, I just took the injections. It was something new though, something very new. It was this huge secret too.
We had to sign about a thousand papers to consent for the treatment and a thousand more non-disclosure papers, too.”

“So why did you sign up for it?”

“Because no treatment was working for us. The whole bunch of us had the cancer really bad. Like, we were all pretty close to death.”

“You look pretty healthy to me now.” Stark acted
as if he was surveying Don’s appearance by moving his head from side to side.

“
Well, yeah.” Eli poured in a bright orange powder into the now strained noodles and followed it up with a stick of butter. “Virulex worked. They told us it was some virus capable of delivering chemo directly to our cancer cells. It worked for a while at least, I guess. They told me my leukemia was totally gone at one point.”

“Oh, yeah I’ve heard of that type of
therapy, although I didn’t know anyone was actually doing clinical trials with it. Well, so, what happened to Medora then if it worked so well for you?”

Eli poured herself a bowl of macaroni and sat cross-legged with her back against the refrigerator. Stark guessed that she was probably nineteen. “Man,” she said, “all that stuff seems like it was years ago now.”

“Whatever happened,” said Don, “the doctors had no idea what they were doing. They didn’t expect a thing, the big jerks.”

Eli interrupted again, “
After a few weeks, they let our family and friends come visit us, which was really nice. That was the last time I saw my brother. He brought me a quilt that my mom made me.”

Don looked at her and then at Stark
. “The virus got out and immediately infected everyone that didn’t have leukemia. It must have mutated or something. The whole town went under in like a day, not that we would’ve known. They kept us under lock and key the entire time. Once they learned that there was an outbreak, we essentially lost all our basic freedoms.”

“So you have immunity
. That makes sense! That’s why I’m not having any symptoms either!” Stark said, becoming more animated. “Now this is something!”

“
Yeah, well hold your horses, because it doesn’t last long, about two weeks by our estimate. We’re the only two people who haven’t turned yet. You wondering where everyone else is from the Medora clinical trials?” Eli looked up at Stark who just looked back at him. “We left them about five rooms back. They all turned over the course of the last day. Not a coincidence that we’re getting infected. It’s just taking the virus some time to work on us.” She smiled and lifted a spoonful of macaroni to her mouth.

“Oh
,” Stark said, his enthusiasm diminishing. He looked down at the green tile and went silent.

Don continued, “
After the Medora outbreak, the government got involved real fast, took over the whole clinical trial and packed us all up into a huge plane. It didn’t matter what we had to say about it. We were going wherever they wanted us to go. They completely trampled on whatever personal freedoms we thought we had.”

Stark stood up, paced to the other side of the laboratory and leaned against a lab bench. Looking back across the lab towards the
kitchen, he watched the two eating in silence. They seemed muted to Stark, as if they had already used up every emotion during what had happened to them the last month. Their brains had switched to survivor mode and the only thing occupying their minds was a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Of all the questions bubbling up in his head, there was one that was repeating itself over and over again with increasing intensity.

“Do you know how far away New York City is from
Medora, North Dakota?” Stark shouted out to the kitchen.

“A long freaking way?”
Eli responded.

“Seventeen hundred miles.”

“Why would you know that?”

“I looked it up.”

“Great,” she said sarcastically while opening the refrigerator.

Stark walked back over to them, “Do you know who Dr.
Beckfield is?”

Eli looked at Don and threw her head back with an exasperated breath. “Uh, yes, we know exactly who Dr.
Beckfield is.”

“He’s the most worthless son of a bitch I’ve ever met
,” Don said, turning from a swivel chair that he had found.

“Yeah, I know him too and I’m beginning to understand why he acted a little too dumb around me.”

“Wait,” Eli interrupted, “so you did work with this asshole? What the hell, man?”

“Yes, but not in the way you think. He worked under me as we tried to figure out what the virus was but…”

“Uh, he knows exactly what the virus is, sir,” said Don. “He’s the one who gave me the Virulex injection.”

“That son of a bitch…” said Stark. “
He must’ve been trying to… stop me. The guy acted like a total buffoon around me, like he had no idea what he was doing. I bet Rambert knew this whole time too. Just another attempt to cover up what was really the cause of the virus. They’re all just covering their own asses.”

“
Rambert?” Eli questioned.

“Don’t worry about it.” Stark found a lab stool and sat down. “I’ve been a complete tool this whole time. I can’t… I mean, I can’t believe this.”
He began speaking out loud to himself, “I bet they were trying to do this same stuff back in England with the whole Mad Cow fiasco.” He paused for a moment. “Hey, do you know a Doctor Crimmel?”

“No, doesn’t ring a bell.

Stark stood up again and walked back across the lab, thinking quietly to himself.

After a small pause of silence in the lab, Stark heard the squeak of a shoe on the tile and a kitchen drawer slam open with silverware spilling to the ground. He turned quickly and saw Eli repeatedly thrusting a long bread knife into Don’s belly. In a matter of
seconds, she had buried it into him a dozen times with large spurts of blood that followed the movements of the knife.

“What are you
doing!” Stark screamed at her as he lunged back towards the kitchen. Don had fallen to the kitchen floor and Eli made one last slice, deep across his throat with the knife.

Stark approached the kitchen, lifted his
leg, and clumsily kicked the knife from her hand. He grabbed both her shoulders from behind and thrust her small frame to the ground. She began to laugh as Stark kneeled squarely on her back, pinning her to the ground. “Oh my gosh! What have you done? What’s the matter with you?”

He looked at Don’s motionless body, which was doused in blood. A thick pool of foul smelling black fluid had collected all around him. His eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling above the jagged open wound that had been torn into his neck.

Eli was crying and laughing at the same time. She let out long and hysterical breaths into the kitchen tile and coughed under the weight of Stark. “You’ve got to kill me!” She finally cried out. “But I don’t want to die like that. I don’t want to die like that, please.” Her breath was momentarily choked as she vomited up several mouthfuls of macaroni and cheese onto the green tile.

“You killed him! He’s dead!” Stark applied more pressure to her back as she gasped for air.

“I’m the last one,” she sobbed, “the last one.”

After a moment, Stark moved away from her and stood up. Eli continued to lay with her belly facing the ground, crying. A putrid smell began to engulf the kitchen.

“He was turning, wasn’t he?” Stark asked.

She rolled onto her back and looked up at him, “Yes.” Her crying turned into silent sobbing. “It’s going to happen to me and it’s going to happen to you.”

After a moment, she got to her feet and put her hand on Stark’s arm. “I don’t want to turn into that. I don’t want it. I know it’s going to happen to me.”

“You can’t ask me what you’re about to ask me.” Stark put her hand down by her side and walked out of the kitchen.

“But I don’t want to feel any pain. Is there any way you could do it with something for me in the lab here? Please?”

Stark wanted to start another metaphysical crisis in his mind
. He wanted to torture himself endlessly with ethical paradox and moral indignation at the prospect of killing this young girl. However, something deeper in his mind shut it all down and turned the ignition off. One way or another, she was going to die and he didn’t want her to go like poor Don who was now rotting on the kitchen floor.

“This is the way it’s got to be,” she said as she walked over to him. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while.” She touched his hand.

Stark took off his glasses and sat them on the table. Looking down at the impossibly young girl, he decided. “Hold on a minute,” he said and turned to a desk in the corner of the lab.

“Okay.” She sat down at the grey metal lab bench.

Stark returned with a single piece of paper and a pencil. “Write down what you want the world to know about you.”

She looked up at him and slowly took the pencil and paper.

Stark then walked across the laboratory floor into a small room at the other end where a small number of mice were kept. He flipped on the lights and after searching for a moment, he found exactly what he was looking for: a small metal canister. Coming back from the room, he saw Eli staring down at the piece of paper with her thin arm holding the pencil motionless above it. He then walked to another long shelf full of darkened glass bottles and began searching through them until he found a bottle of potassium chloride. Unscrewing the cap, he inserted a long hypodermic needle into the bottle and drew up the colorless liquid.

Walking back to Eli, he spoke softly to her
, “Do you know what you’re going to write yet?”

“I already wrote it, here.” She handed the paper to him.

“Oh. Who do you want me to give it to?”

“My
life’s goal was to be poet laureate. I don’t think I’m going to live that long and I don’t think my poetry was ever really that good.”

“Do you want me to give it to your parents?”

“No, they died along with my brother in Medora. Why don’t you just take it? But don’t read it now. Wait.”

“Okay.” He folded the paper in half.

“Is it going to hurt?” She asked with furrowed eyebrows, motioning to the metal canister and syringe that Stark had set on the table.

“No, you’re just going to have surgery. This here is halothane, which we use to anesthetize mice. It’s going to put you right to sleep,
so just remember to take deep breaths. You won’t feel the surgery at all.” Stark could feel his voice quiver as he spoke.

“Surgery.
Okay.” She looked at him and smiled with tears.

“Let’s have you
lie down right here on this table.”

She brought one leg up to the table and lay on top of the metal surface with her knees together and feet sticking straight to the ceiling.

Stark started to open the metal canister. “One time, on the radio, I heard about this guy who walked across the US. Took him like a year to do it. He said that on his very last night that he was camping in the woods right off the freeway in California. He thought of how if he were riding in a car on that freeway, those woods would’ve looked really scary to him, but now that he was in the woods, he could see that there was nothing to be scared of. He understood the woods and he wasn’t afraid of them any more.”

“Yeah, I see what you’re
saying, doctor. I’m not scared anymore.”

He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “Are you
ready, Eli?”

“Yes, before it’s too late. Um…” She looked up at him. “Is it okay to tell you that I love you? I just really feel like I need to tell someone that I love them right now.”