The Zombie Letters (5 page)

Anyway, Samantha came down after getting ready. Five minutes and forty-three seconds. A new record. Samantha always thought it silly to time herself getting ready, but she was always playful at heart. Men always bitch about women taking forever to get ready to do anything. That was true for the most part . . . Samantha liked to look pretty, but sometimes it was fun to haul ass just for the personal satisfaction.

When she walked out the front door, Nathaniel and I were already asleep. I slept for about three and a half hours and woke up to find that Amy, Nathaniel’s fourteen year-old had put makeup on me while I slept. Rouge . . . lipstick . . . eye shadow . . . the whole deal. Their son Michael had painted my toenails and actually did a hell of a job. I didn’t care. I thought it was funny and took it in good spirit.

After all, I was family.

III

You probably want to hear how this all happened now. Sorry I got into all that. I just . . . miss them.

I worked there, you know. I know a lot more than what people give me credit for. Trust me. I wish I didn’t know shit. I never realized how blissful ignorance was until now. My boss and best friend . . . Doctor Nathaniel Winters was a brilliant scientist. Our team was doing some groundbreaking work in the medical field. Changed the world once. For the longest time, we thought we saved it. I remember the day Doctor Winters came back to the facility with that thing; a strange green bulb in a ceramic pot. It was no bigger than a football, but even with the exotic-looking yellow flowers all around its base, it still looked intimidating. I remember asking Nate that out of all the wonderful, culturally beautiful souvenirs to buy in Japan, why the hell he came back with that ugly plant.

“Pretty neat, eh?” he said, pointing at the plant like a kid with a new toy.

“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.” I said something to that effect, anyway.

“Actually, no one has. This plant was thought to be extinct. It’s actually prehistoric. Archaeamphora. I named it Archie,” he said with a laugh. I miss his laugh. “It was one of the first . . . if not
the
first carnivorous plant. See the resemblance to the Venus flytrap? This thing was more than likely its granddaddy.”

“Oh . . . what, is there a Little Shop of Horrors there or something?” I said.

“Funny. Some of these were recently discovered in the thickest areas of a dense forest at the base of Mount Fuji. The government over there considered it a protected area . . . some kind of historical site . . . but when rumors start floating around local hikers and amateur climbers that notice massive vines with bird-eating bulbs on them in parts of the forest so thick, that the canopy blocks out the sun?  An American and Japanese joint exploration was launched and
viola.
Meet Archie, my friend. Leftovers from the cretaceous period. Alive and well.”

“We are not botanists, archaeologists or anthropologists. I don’t see a connection other than you bringing back bug-ugly shit whenever you go on vacation. You have an eye for tacky. If they are so important and apparently rare, how the living hell did you end up with one of ‘em?”

Nathaniel explained. “No, listen. Japan had the resources, the labor force and the cheap manpower. America already had a Locke laboratory there, the money and knew how to keep quiet. Kinda sad that our country was chosen because we are so good at covering up stuff with bullshit. Japan kept it a secret for about four years so America could study it with labs better suited for plant biogenetic study. Aside from it being ancient, the scientists who secretly studied it overseas found that it held no more mysteries. So, I decided to take a crack at it.”

No more mysteries.

Nathaniel brought it from a joint American-Japanese lab out near the area. Even on vacation, he always found a way to get to work. That lab . . . Locke. Named after one of the scientists who worked on the team that discovered the Polio vaccine. Nate was intrigued by it because the big cheese at the lab told him that the plant was legendary to ancient people. They used the plant to live incredibly long lives. It had some kind of magic healing property to them. Nathaniel told me he just liked it because he had a thing for Venus flytraps and this one was massive. I didn’t know this at the time, but the reason he took a ‘vacation’ in Japan was because our government wanted him to go there and study it. The Japanese facility lacked the equipment to do a really in-depth study. The facility over there just gave him one of the bulbs. Poor guy didn’t even know what he had. Apparently, neither did anyone at the airport. They didn’t even hold him up at the terminal, to my knowledge. I think everything was set up by your people so he wouldn’t be.

It sat on a shelf in that pot for a year and a half. Then, one day, a fire broke out in the cafeteria. Some dickhead left a rag on top of the stove and forgot that one of the burners was still on. In the chaos of trying to put the thing out, Brian O’Reilly – a member of our staff, knocked the plant over and killed it with the heel of his shoe. He was running to the hallway outside the cafeteria to grab an extinguisher and bumped into the shelf . . . stepped right on the damn thing. Bye bye, cretaceous era relic of history. Cracked the bulb right in half. Brian had burned one of his hands attempting to put out the fire. As soon as we rendered a brand new facility kitchen into a room full of smoke and ash, Brian picked up the plant by the bulb. He covered himself with a milky white liquid that was seeping out of the crack his shoe made.

In the following days, something strange happened. O’Reilly, already a man in his sixties, seemed to be changing. His burn healed within days. That was odd enough, considering it was a third-degree with absolutely no leftover scarring. The little crow’s feet on the corners of his eyes were fading. When I first noticed, I tied to give him shit for wearing makeup, but even a week later? Not only those eye-wrinkles, but ones he had on his forehead and wrinkles that lined his mouth were blending into his skin. It was almost as if the flesh itself were tightening. I am a doctor before I am a scientist and as I sit here, that was no facelift. A heavy smoker too, Brian eventually stopped that smoker’s hack that those old timers seem to have. Christ, even his teeth were whiter. Even after another month had passed, he had stopped wearing his reading glasses. Keep in mind that the differences were still subtle. He hadn’t transformed overnight and didn’t overwhelmingly change his appearance. To a group of people that saw the man everyday, though . . . we were astounded. I decided to take him to Nathaniel’s office one day while I was out taking my daily walk in the University Park. I saw Brian out there at the courts, playing basketball. I watched that sixty-one year-old man run up and down that court for two hours.

He didn’t miss one shot.

Needless to say, Doctor Winters and I were on the phones for three days to negotiate bringing back another specimen. Nathaniel told the Japanese Locke facility the story and suggested that he would like to take a crack at examining it further. He didn’t mention Brian. He simply said that the lab caught fire and destroyed the first one we had. He told them he wanted to keep studying it and even if he didn’t find anything, Archie was good at keeping flies out of the kitchen.

At least I got myself a trip to Japan out of the deal.

It was immediately studied when I came back with it. My ass usually stayed at the lab nights. Yours truly was a widow of business. I chose it. Never got married . . . no kids. Nada. Just me, my work and Brucie. Sometimes I took Brucie home with me when I felt lonely. Ol’ Brucie. He was kind of the lab’s mascot. That big, beautiful, slobbery, stupid boxer would always be right there in the lab all day. Everyday. He would just be chilling out in his doggy bed and occasionally going outside to fertilize the lawn or knock over the Dean’s trash can. The man ate lobster like they were going extinct. About twice a week, Brucie would sneak out of the dog-door and help himself to some still-warm lobster tails. He had to knock over the trash can to do it . . . amazing for a fourteen year-old boxer who was half blind and suffering from arthritis in his hips. Dean Goldsboro always got pissed, but never really did anything besides cuss at Brucie and toss newspapers at him when he spilled the trash everywhere. I guess the Dean figured out the old dog could enjoy a few good meals before kicking it. To this day, I think Goldsboro placed those tails neatly on top of the trash on purpose.

The plant. A true leftover of the cretaceous, like Nathaniel said. When studied, we all found what we were looking for; what none of the other scientists even bothered to check. A rare chemical called PQP. You don’t want to know the full name. Doesn’t fucking matter, anyway. PQP is commonly found in human breast milk as well as some other plant species. The team, all fifteen of us successfully managed to synthesize it using the prehistoric extraction as a template. Why was the prehistoric PQP so important? All we had to do was look at Brian’s blood. His cells were repairing themselves using extremely high amounts of PQP in his system as fuel. Everyone knows you could drink one hundred gallons of pure PQP-laden human breast milk (the most potent source of it on earth before we found that plant) and the only thing you would get is an upset stomach. The stuff inside Archie was unlike anything we had ever dreamed of seeing. Here we had a compound that predated man . . . a compound that could rejuvenate cell mitochondria at an incredible rate. Alzheimer’s, cancer, degenerative bone diseases . . . every disease now a thing of the past.

And the best application in my opinion? Age.

We cured old age on December 18
th
, 2014. One week before Christmas.

Brian was kept around the lab. He was an excellent sport. He lent us his blood, hair, semen and tissue samples on a regular basis with absolutely no complaint. We submitted him to every test we had equipment for. By the time we started officially testing him, Brian O’Reilly had not one grey hair left on his head. Before, he had gone nearly completely white. We believed that it was the initial Archie exposure to the openly-burned flesh that caused it. We were wrong.

Lucinda Poulidi, out cleaning lady on nights, alerted me to how Brian in fact achieved his youthful appearance and remarkable health. Lucinda told me that every night Brian was on the graveyard shift, he would go into the lab and make a small incision on the bud of the plant and rub the liquid onto his face. See, the PQP in the plant is thousands of times stronger and more effective than anything around the earth today, but it is still not strong enough to change a human being like that in one sitting. Yeah, it healed the burn, but that was open skin, right? Brian
stopped aging.
As a matter of fact, he was reversing it. Brian’s nightly plant-facials went unnoticed and unreported for almost the entire time since I returned from my trip from that forest in the shadow of Mount Fuji.

The version we synthesized was concentrated. Pretty brilliant how we did it. We took the extract from Archie and enhanced it with dead human white blood cells. We filled in the missing information with PQP from human breast milk, and added another formula on top of that. Basically saline solution. For some reason, the serum we made seemed to survive more effectively in water. We had another bud shipped in and Brian was allowed to lance the plant as long as he agreed to keep a daily journal of the results. We experimented with Brian, taking away plant for five days. Within these five days, we noticed the spots returning to his hands and the sides of his head were beginning to show grey again. I realized that in order to maintain his cellular regeneration, he needed regular contact with the plant’s excretions. This allowed us to study how his mitochondrial biogenesis functioned. Brian was the key to synthesizing a version that could do it in one dose. Turned out we didn’t need the white blood cells or the other stuff. Just the plant was doing it all. Nothing but the lab-created cretaceous PQP and natural, spring saline.

That Christmas Eve was one that I will never forget as long as I live. I was out in Downtown Des Moines. I had to get some shopping done for The Winters family, Aunt Catherine, my sister Tabitha, my niece, my secret Santa at work and, of course, Brucie. Des Moines is no vast, sprawling metropolis by any means, but it’s still a city. Busses, beggars and buildings. Strippers, Starbucks and skyscrapers. There’s nothing like the big city during Christmas. Iowa snows like a motherfucker every winter, but the city’s downtown area always seemed to have streets plowed quickly. Santas were on the corers ringing bells, little kids from the Temple City Youth Tabernacle were carolling at the bandstand in the park where they did stock plays in the summer. It was perfect. All the families scurrying about in their thick mittens and wool coats saying, ‘Merry Christmas’ to each other. I loved that. Stocking hats and snow shoes were everywhere as people scurried store to store with the brightest smiles on their faces. I always loved how Christmas changes people. Within the towering concrete giants that watched over our human jungle, the air is always twenty degrees colder on top of Iowa’s famous negative twenty wind chill factor. Any other part of the Midwest . . . shit. People would be terrified to go outside in weather like that. In Iowa, that’s just better weather to spin donuts in Best Buy’s parking lot.