The Zombie Plagues Dead Road: The Collected books. (143 page)

“
You have your
samples?”

“
Yes of course, Doctor...
Rex?”

Ed frowned hard and shrugged his
shoulders in the direction of the thick glass. He lowered his voice
to a whisper. “None down here. That was stupid, Berty.“

“
What was that,” Kohlson
asked Johns in the control room.

“
What?” Johns
asked.

“
That... Whisper, I guess,”
Kohlson said.

“
Oh... That. You know those
two got it bad for each other. Probably making little remarks you
don't want to hear. Besides which, you make a report on that and we
all have to deal with it: Them, sure, but us too because the bosses
will be pissed off about it. Best to let that shit slide: If the
boss wants to know he will. He looks at all of this shit in
depth.”

Kohlson looked about to say more when
Doctor Christmas began talking once more in the autopsy
room.

“
Let's close him up,” Ed
Adams said. He stepped on a switch set into the floor, paused, and
then spoke again. “Lower the air temperature in here. We intend to
keep him a few hours while we attend to other parts of the
autopsy... No one in here for any reason.”

Out in the control room Johns keyed his
mic button. “Will do... How low, Doc.?”

“
I guess about 34
Fahrenheit will do... Just to slow it all down for a
while.”

“
Done,” Johns agreed. He
adjusted a temperature graphic on a nearby monitor via his
mouse.

Kohlson leaned over across the short
distance. “So we got to look at that shit for a while?
Great.”

“
They're gonna sew him up,
so it won't be so bad.”

“
Yeah... That's like, I got
a mild case of flu. It's still gonna suck, because every time I
look anywhere I'm gonna feel compelled to look at it.”

“
Yeah. Me too. It's there.
Draws you to it. Like the Bunny on the Playboy Cover. You look at
the rest of the magazine, but you know you're gonna end up looking
at her. She's the reason you bought the magazine after
all.”

Kohlson nodded and smiled. “And I'd
rather look at Miss January than a dead guy with big stitches
across his belly and over his chest, sewing him back up again. That
is some ugly shit.”

Johns laughed. “But you look anyway...
Human nature. Why do you think people slow down and look at
accidents?”

“
'Cause we're morbid mother
fuckers,” Kohlson agreed.

“
Well, that too, but it is
that fascination with death we have. Look,” He pointed at the
monitor. Do you think Clayton Hunter knew he'd be laying on a steel
slab this afternoon, dick hanging out, with Doctor Christmas
shoving his guts back in and stitching him up with his nursey
assisting?” They both laughed and turned away.

“
She ain't
half...”

A scream cut off the conversation and
both men turned quickly back to the monitor.

Clayton Hunter was sitting up on the
steel table. Arms drooped at his side. Mouth yawning. Doctor
Christmas had backed away until he had met the wall behind him.
Nurse Berty was nowhere to be seen.

“
What
the fuck... What the
fuck
. Get a camera on the floor...
Maybe she fainted,” Kohlson said.

“
Got it,” Johns agreed. He
stabbed at the keys on his keyboard and a view of the table at an
angle appeared. Nurse Bertie's leg could be seen, angled away from
the table, skirt hiked high. The camera paused briefly and then the
view began to shift as Johns manipulated the camera angle. Her face
came into view. Mouth open, blood seeping from one
corner.

“
Doctor,” Kohlson called
over the speaker system. Outside the airlocks had clicked on and
the air was cycling. Good, he thought, in twenty minutes the
Calvary would be here. “Doctor Adams?”

The doctor finally took his eyes off
Clayton Hunter and turned toward one of the cameras. On the table
Clayton Hunter leaned forward and tumbled off the edge of the
table. At the same instant the air purifier quit cycling and three
armed men in gas masks stepped into the airlock.

“
Jesus,”
Johns sputtered.
“You guys can't do
that shit. That air has to be worked?”
Three more men stepped through the lock and the door to the
autopsy room opened as well as the door to the control room. A
split second later the rifles in their hands began to roar. The
sound was louder than Kohlson expected in the enclosed space. He
clasped his hands over his ears, but it did little good. The
soldiers, he saw, were wearing ear protection of some sort. Noise
canceling headgear. The remaining three soldiers had stepped into
the control room, he saw as he looked back up from the floor. They
kept their rifles leveled at them, the others were still firing
within the confines of the small autopsy room. A small gray cloud
was creeping along the floor and rolling slowly into the control
room. The stench of gunpowder was strong in the enclosed space. The
air purifiers were off. Kohlson knew there was another control room
outside this one that controlled this space, and possibly another
outside of that space that controlled that space. Built in
protection; it was clear that they were in a very bad
space.

Kohlson saw Clayton Hunter lurch to his
feet and stumble into the soldiers who were firing at point blank
range in the tight confines. A series of bullets finally tore
across his chest and then into his head and he fell from view. A
second late the firing dropped off and then stopped
completely.

Johns was listening to the sound of his
own heart hammering for a space of seconds before he figured out it
was his own. The smell of gunpowder was nauseating, and he suddenly
lunged forward and vomited on his shoes. As he was lifting his head
he saw that the soldiers were retreating back through the airlocks
and into the outer spaces of the compound.

“
Jesus,” Kohlson managed
before he to bent forward and vomited. They heard the air filtering
kick back on as both of them rolled away from the puddles of vomit
and quickly disappearing low, gray vapor from the rifles firing.
The doors into the autopsy room suddenly banged shut and then their
own door whispered closed as well: Once again they were isolated in
their small space.

They both sat silent for a moment, and
then Kohlson left and returned from the small bathroom with a mop
and bucket from the utility closet there. He left and returned with
a bottle of disinfectant and sprayed down the vomit and the balance
of the small room.

“
That won't do shit,” Johns
said solemnly. We're infected. Whatever they infected that guy
Hunter with, we got it now.

Kohlson ignored him, waited the ten
minutes for the disinfectant to work and then cleaned up the mess.
Neither spoke while he returned the equipment to the small closet
and then came back and sat down.

“
You heard me,
right?”

“
I heard you,” Kohlson
admitted. “I just don't give a fuck... It's too fresh... I can't
believe it right now.” He looked up at the clock. “Mother fucker...
I was off duty in twenty minutes... Twenty goddamn minutes!” He
spun and looked at Johns, but Johns was looking up at the monitors
that were still on in the autopsy room. The smoke was being drawn
out by the air exchange, and the horror of the room was slowly
coming into focus.

Doctor Adams lay sprawled in one
corner, a line of bullet holes stitched across his back. The back
portion of his skull was missing, jagged bone and gray-black hair
clumped wildly around the fractured bone. Johns gagged and looked
away.

“
Jesus... They killed
everybody,” Kohlson said as he continued to watch. Nurse Bertie lay
where she had fallen. Only her legs visible in the shot they could
see. Clayton Hunter lay against the end of the stainless slab. His
head a shapeless mass. The stitches across his chest and stomach
bulging. Kohlson finally turned away too.

“
They're coming back for
us.” Johns said.

Kohlson spun to the door.

“
Not now, stupid ass, but
you can't think we get to live after that. They contaminated our
air. We're dead. No way are we not dead.”

Kohlson said nothing.

~

It was six hours before the soldiers
came. They had finally taken a better look at the room. Johns
moving the camera around as Kohlson watched.

“
Dave... Tell me I'm wrong,
but that fucker came back to life, right?” He was unsure even as he
said it.

Johns shrugged. “I think what happened
is they missed something... We missed something. Maybe a lead came
off. You know, and the lead came of and so he seemed dead and he
wasn't dead at all, not really, he was still alive... Just that
lead was off.”

“
Yeah?”

“
Yeah. I mean... I mean the
alternative is that he came back to life... You don't think that do
you? I mean, do you? Cause that's fucking crazy, Gabe.
Crazy.”

“
No. No, I can see what you
mean I can see where...”

The air lock cycled on and six soldiers
stepped into the hall like space that was actually just an airlock
between the control room, the autopsy room, the former patient ward
and the outside world. Johns tensed, waiting for the door to their
space to cycle on, but it didn't.

The soldiers were dressed head to toe
in army drab plastic coveralls. Respirators, big units, sat on
their backs and a full face shield and breathing apparatus covered
their faces, somehow joined into the coveralls. Tape was wound
around the elastic cuffs of the legs and the plastic boot covers
that joined there. Flexible olive-green gloves covered their hands,
also taped where they slipped under the plastic coveralls. They
never looked their way at all, just waited for the air lock to
cycle and then stepped into the autopsy room. A second later the
monitors went dead in the control room.

“
Fuck,” David Johns said.
“That is not good at all.”

Kohlson got up and left the room. A
minute later he was back with two diet colas. He handed one to
David johns and then sat back down. Johns glanced down at the cola.
The top was open already. He looked at Kohlson and Kohlson stared
back unblinking. The med supplies cabinet was also in that closet.
They had talked it over once. They had decided that... He pushed it
away and focused on the low whisper of the air exchange

“
You think they will
outright kill us,” Kohlson asked after a few long minutes of
silence.

“
Gabe... I think they will,
Gabe.” Johns said after a hesitation. He tried to stop himself, but
he glanced down at the cola in his hand. It was half full. White
powder floated on the surface. Clumped and drifting like tiny
icebergs across a cola sea. “Probably... No. They're listening in
right now, I'm sure. Listening to see where our minds are at: As
soon as those flunkies in there are finished with that job they'll
be in here to finish up the clean up.” He swallowed
hard.

“
Yeah. I guess that's how I
see it too,” Kohlson agreed. He raised his can and tapped the side.
“Been good knowing you, Dave.”

Johns stared him down for a few moments
and then sighed. “Yeah. Same here.” He raised the can in a salute
and then downed it. Kohlson followed suit. Silence descended on the
control room.

Project Bluechip:

Watertown NY: Subterranean
base.

Commanding: Major Richard
Weston

Major Dick Weston read the report
slowly. This was not the first hitch in SS. Last year they had lost
a whole ward, three test subjects compromised, two doctors, and
three control rooms, six personnel there that had to be terminated
because of it.

He rocked back in his chair and pulled
at his lower lip as he read the report. So it had some drawbacks,
but there was too much focus on the problems, and not enough on the
positives of V2765. Of all the compounds they had tested, this one
did exactly what they needed it to do. It prolonged life far past
the point of termination. Grave wounds, starvation, dehydration,
nothing mattered. This compound changed the cells and made them
able to adapt to the consequences of war. The only drawback was
that it did its job a little too well. It continued to allow the
subject to live after death. Everything stopped and then everything
started up again. Usually with a much diminished capacity for
understanding. Just the basic low end survival instincts any animal
had, eat, protect, eat. And it did those things very
well.

Some doctors at the third level, men
whose reputations would be on the line very shortly when V2765 was
released on a squadron of troops bound for the middle East, in
fact, wanted a brain biopsy. They had studied the video and decided
that good Old Doctor Christmas might have been hiding something
with the secrecy he had afforded the previous brain autopsies. He
stopped pulling at his lip. Leaned forward and fed the paper sheaf
from the incident into a shredder.

The thing is there was a secret. Major
Weston had no idea what it signified, he was no doctor, but he had
found the good doctor's private files and brain biopsy reports on
the previous candidates. Significant structural change to the brain
cells. Not just slight modifications as the virus did when it
infected the host, no, something deeper. A mutation. That file lay
nearby on his desk too. He reached for it. If that information got
out there would be a fast end to SS, and he could not have that. SS
was not his baby, some General he had never even met had that
honor, but Bluechip was his base, and SS was a feather in his cap.
It meant jobs. It meant growth. It meant over a mile of top secret
base three miles below ground. These were things that could not be
compromised. If, in the field, there were incidents, so be it. They
could be isolated. Tests so far showed that very few came back
after actual death. Destroy the brain and it destroyed whatever
life had kicked back in. And if there were a large outbreak, they
had spent the last fourteen months working on an antidote to kill
the V virus itself, Rex.