Z-Volution (9 page)

Knowing the chopper pilot would have visual confirmation of the massive oil tanker, the captain looked grimly ahead and then placed his hand on the throttle control. His radio was blaring chatter from the harbor pilot coming alongside, but he no longer cared. Nodding to himself, he shoved the throttle to Full Ahead, then grabbed his personal backpack from the deck and ran from the pilot house.

He’d already rehearsed the run from the pilot house to the helipad with a stopwatch and knew he could make it in just under sixty seconds. As he ran down a metal stairwell, he shouted commands into his handheld radio. “Caesar, you’re almost clear to roll. Open the doors and prepare to transport your cargo.” He heard the roger reply and reached a catwalk at the bottom of the stairs, turned and sprinted down the narrow straightaway. Everything looked good.

He was dubious about Caesar’s chances to drive an 18-wheeler out of here once they struck the dock, especially a truck loaded with forty tons of something straight out of a nightmare, hopefully still tranquilized, and able to remain so for the three hours it would take to transport it to Atlanta.

There was one more piece of the plan, one that was far more immediate—and brutal. So much so that he shuddered at the thought of the release of the other ‘crew’ he had transported from Antarctica. He brought the radio to his lips once again while he trounced along the side of the ship.

“Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm, come in!”

“Right here, captain.”

“Unlock the cargo doors for our guests, and then you know what to do. Get the hell out of there and meet me on the helipad.”

“Aye aye, sir!”

The captain ran up another stairway, taking the steps three at a time and looked left as he emerged on an open deck. What he was trying to see was not difficult to spot. It was hard to hide that sleek black 18-wheeler. Although they did try. A black mesh tarp was hung over it to keep prying eyes in the sky from looking down. Having the thing inside on the deck itself meant for the duration it had been closer than he wanted, really, but it was his duty to ensure the asset was delivered according to plan.

Dreadnoughtus
 
schrani
was a newly discovered reptile from the fossil record, but of course DeKirk wasn’t working with fossils. This was the real deal. A living, breathing dinosaur larger than a
T. rex
, larger than a brontosaurus, even. Even though it was a vegetarian, the thing was ridiculously huge, Whittaker thought, and he had been unable to keep from taking a glimpse or two inside during the trip. Just a few times, when Caesar went in to administer another round of tranqs…administered through a giant needle and a hose system.

Caesar was all set—prepped for his adrenaline-fueled mission to come. Malcolm on the other hand had the unenviable job of releasing the plague of zombies upon the Savannah populace.

“Let’s go, Malcolm!” the captain shouted as he ran to the end of the dreadnought deck toward the helipad, where the chopper now hovered just above the red-painted H in a circle on the elevated portion of deck. His crewman acknowledged with a raised hand as he ran from the great cargo doors after releasing the chain and lifting one side so it opened with an enormous clang.

Whittaker didn’t stick around to see what came out of there. He was being compensated well, and DeKirk was not the type to spare expenses or cut corners when it came to his enterprises, but this was no game, and nothing was worse than facing what was down there. He didn’t want to think about the population, and what was to come, but as it had been laid out to him, it was inevitable. He could either be on the right side of this changing world order, standing with the protected, the victors…or be one of
them
: the prey, the food, the dead…and the undead.

As the helicopter descended onto the landing pad, Whittaker thought of what would happen when this mission was over, as long as it was successful—and why shouldn’t it be with all of the extensive planning they’d done? He hoped he could get away from the mayhem and violence and rest somewhere away from it all. He didn’t need a private island or a mega-yacht or anything like that. Just a quiet little cottage on the rocky Scottish coast where he could live out his remaining years in rugged, rustic solitude, watching the sunset each night with a glass of fine whiskey. Dulling his senses, drowning out the screams and the nightmares that would surely haunt the rest of his days.

Whittaker reached a ladder that led up to the helipad and started to climb. The roar of the helicopter was deafening now, but also very comforting, for it signaled the end of his journey. It signaled success. He topped over the ladder and emerged onto the helipad. One of the two crew besides himself—his chief mechanic, whom he meant to take with him on the bird—was already on the landing pad, hunched over against the forceful rotor wash. He knew the pilot wouldn’t open the door without consulting the captain, so he gave the visual signal and the door was opened. The mechanic, a trusted DeKirk Enterprises employee for many years, jumped inside while the captain rounded the craft to get to the door. As he did so, he glanced off to his left, down to the deck to check on Malcolm.

This time, the sight was not nearly as encouraging. The captain shook his head in bewilderment. The 18-wheeler was revving its engine, but somehow Malcolm had gotten his foot tripped up in one of the chain links bolted to the deck. The captain watched him pry off one of his rubber deck boots in an attempt to pull his foot free of the chain.

It looked like it may have been about to work, but at that moment the shadows in the brig exploded in a rush of arms, legs, rotting flesh and razor-sharp teeth. In the days that followed, the captain would swear that he could hear Malcolm squealing out for help, even through the helicopter noise, but in seconds he lost sight of the crewman under the onslaught of dozens of zombie figures bursting out of the hold, and falling upon him, thrilled at the gift of a meal so close.

Whittaker turned away, looking past the ship, as the Port of Savannah loomed larger. The converted oil tanker was deep inside the sheltered waterway now, and a little Harbor Patrol boat squealed alongside the mammoth ship, light bar flashing, siren wailing. There was absolutely nothing anyone on it could do. Even emptied of oil, a sixty-thousand ton vehicle with existing momentum simply could not be stopped on short notice.

The captain turned back to the helicopter. Except for poor Malcolm down there, they were ready to go. Sure, there were a few lowly deckhands still down below in the bilge area, having been instructed to stay down there until landing in port, but they didn’t speak English, were undocumented, and most important of all, not easily traced back to DeKirk enterprises. In short, they were expendable…and would only serve to whet the zombie’s appetites after they had finished off Malcolm—or let enough of him remain to be reanimated and join the growing army before it leapt onto the Savannah port.

Whittaker climbed the helicopter’s ladder, even as the stench of the living dead mob reached him. It was choking, almost unbearable—and it rose so fast after being trapped in that hold for so long. After a transoceanic voyage confined in an oil tank with no water or drainage, even on the open deck, the smell of rotting flesh mixed with caked-on urine, feces (the captain flashed on a vodka-infused card game in Antarctica during which he’d won a bet with one of the Russian soldiers that zombies do need to “take a piss,” after he’d chained one up in the corner of the room and waited until it soiled itself), and blood was so revolting as to be an almost palpable, physical threat.

Whittaker stopped climbing about halfway up, reeling from the olfactory assault. He gagged, but pushed himself to resume his ascent. The pilot would have no qualms about leaving him behind, fearing what DeKirk would do to him even more should he fail to complete his objective. He turned back and looked down, one last time, to say goodbye to his ship, to the tanker and the dreadnought, and his eyes then locked on the dispersing crowd near the open cargo doors.

“I’m sorry, Malcolm,” he said to the gore-stained deck and the grotesque bloodstain—all that remained of the man he had just so recently played cards with and shared numerous bottles of vodka.

The captain climbed two more rungs and motioned up to the pilot to lift away. The rotor whine increased in pitch and the helicopter began rising from the deck. Suddenly, Malcolm was there—at the bottom of the ladder, leading the pack of the undead, having pulled away from them. Whittaker marveled at the ability of the corpse to even move, as badly devoured and shredded as it was: right leg stripped almost entirely of flesh below the knee, abdomen torn open and insides all but devoured, revealing the bony pelvis and spinal column; his neck open with a dozen bites and his cheekbones exposed, pink tongue wagging in a mouth of vampiric-looking sharpened teeth that hadn’t been there before.

He lunged and grabbed onto the lowest rung of the ladder just before it was carried beyond his reach.

The captain was too many rungs above to pry his former crewmate loose. “Let go, Malcolm! Stay dead!”
Or undead. Damn it, how fast did that transformation happen?

Malcolm tightened his grip, and even more so, his resolve. In a blind fury, a tunnel vision rage that concentrated his every molecule onto a single task, he held onto that ladder as if it were nothing less than life itself.

The aircraft drew out the remaining length of ladder until Whittaker and Malcolm were lifted along with it. The captain could see but not hear the pilot screaming at him to do something while he pointed down at Malcolm. But there was nothing the captain could do. He was worried enough about his own life at the moment, for below, the horde had arrived. As they waited for the ship to crunch into the pier, which was only seconds away, they looked up, hungrily, hoping maybe that Malcolm would shake the ladder loose and drop Whittaker into their midst.

The chopper dipped with the weight, then flew sideways along with the tanker’s motion.

The first zombies, arms outstretched in eager anticipation of a long overdue feeding, crowded under Malcolm, who was now suspended a few feet in the air on the ladder. The helicopter stuttered then dropped when a zombie leapt high, grabbed Malcolm’s ankle and hung on. Whittaker screamed as he looked down and saw the impossible: not only had Malcolm locked on, climbing even, but another zombie had jumped and caught Malcolm’s ankle, and then—others were leaping, connecting, and holding.

They’re making their own goddamned ladder!

Whittaker yelled to the pilot and climbed faster.
Got to get inside, kick off the ladder and all this weight and fly off to safe—

Unfortunately, the pilot and the other crewman had reached the same conclusion, along with the certainty that they wouldn’t last the five seconds it would take for Whittaker to finish his ascent.

“Sorry!” the crewman inside the chopper called out as he worked the ladder’s fastening mechanism.

“No, wait!” Whittaker climbed, reaching for the top, for the crewman, even as he mistakenly took a precious second away from his task to look down. He saw the makeshift zombie ladder, and Malcolm’s grinning eyes as he served as the anchor—and two crazy-fast corpses scampering up the bodies of the others, stepping on Malcolm’s head, then leaping up the rungs. They closed the distance fast to Whittaker, who only had an instant to scream before he felt weightless.

The ladder split and fell free from the chopper, which ascended in a rush of wind and mercifully loud rotor noise.

Loud enough even to drown out his screams as he fell thirty feet to just miss the edge of the deck, to land on his back on the choppy, frothy water.

But the soft landing didn’t matter. Seven zombies, including Malcolm, fell with him. On top of him, under him. They landed and sunk, all in one roiling pile, all of them biting and chomping and rending like sharks to a bleeding, helpless, drowning prey.

The last thing he heard, muffled and echoing in the underwater depths, was the sound of his former vessel crunching into the pier, where the rest of the zombie army—and the monstrous dreadnought—would be released onto the mainland.

Part 2: Patient 0

13.

Langley, Virginia

The fact that the CDC maintained an outpost inside the CIA’s headquarters was one that was little known, and yet, it made great sense. With the advent of bio-weapons, and with biological warfare on the rise, coordination between the two agencies had been increasingly necessary.

Alex and Elsa Ramirez found themselves escorted by a pair of armed U.S. soldiers along with a contingent of hazmat specialists into a windowless conference room. Ergonomic chairs surrounded a wooden table wired for communications over a slate gray, thin carpet.

A trio of upper echelon CDC division managers were already seated at the table, a battery of electronic devices spread out before them including smartphones, tablets and notebook computers. Alex didn’t care. What mattered now was that his mom was finally okay. After all these years of suffering, the uncertainty, the stress of ineffective treatments, at last she was beginning to show real improvement. Nothing could spoil that, not even a sterile debriefing environment with a bunch of government drones.

Yet, as he watched his mother slip into a seat, he knew that something wasn’t quite right. That place where they’d had to escape at gunpoint…the improbability of it all….he wished he could understand it better, to make certain that she was really okay. He seated himself directly across from her so that he could look at her closely. The lighting was bright, more than sufficient to conduct a visual examination of her features, which he did while the officials looked on in silence, aware of what he was doing.

Her eyes had not yellowed or taken on the vacant, distracted look like those infected with the zombie agent had. They appeared her same vibrant blue, and yet while they seemed healthy, they also looked somehow…different. Not something he could put his finger on, though, only a vague feeling that her eyes were not quite the same. Perhaps he was mistaken, he thought, turning his attention to her skin.

It, too, lacked the characteristics he feared he might find. No sickly gray pallor or yellowish streaks. No breaks in the skin oozing bodily fluids. Nothing unusual at all, just his mom’s pale skin, unbroken and unblemished.

Alex hated that she had to be here, methodically scrutinized like this after so much time away, but he was sure that once they established that she was free of the prions she would be free to go. Even if she had been somehow infected at the Grenada facility, she should have been symptomatic by now.

“It’s okay, Alex. I’m fine.”

He eyed her dubiously.

“I feel great, really.”

“Mom, bear with me for a minute, okay? I need to try and understand what’s happening based on my experiences from Adranos Island. To do that I need to ask you some questions.” They had given him the list of questions after he had argued she might be more amenable to his asking them than a bunch of nameless others. “It won’t take long…okay?”

“Okay, son.” She smiled lovingly at him.

The CDC brass exchanged quick glances and then Alex began questioning his mother, for her own sake, and that of society at large.

“Mom, I know these questions may seem silly, but this is…for the record.” He glanced at the trio of CDC men at the end of the table.

“That’s fine, honey. I understand.”

Alex took a deep breath and began. “Once you got to the Grenada facility, did you ever leave until I got there?”

She shook her head. “I was there the whole time. They wouldn’t let me go anywhere, as you saw, and I was in no condition to try. I suspect that even if I did, I would have been politely but forcefully returned to my quarters.”

Alex nodded. “While you were there, what kind of treatments did they give you? Drugs? Surgeries?”

“There were drugs, antibiotics mostly is what they told me, but no surgeries. They did use a different type of treatment on me, though, one I wasn’t expecting.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Like psychotherapy.”

Alex appeared confused. He looked down at the CDC guys, who were paying close attention. “Is that the same as just…
therapy
?”

The CDC guys nodded silently. His Mom shrugged. Alex went on.

“So they were asking you personal questions and stuff? Showing you ink blots?”

Elsa smiled patiently. “I didn’t get a Rorschach Test, but yes, they engaged me in sessions where they…” She paused as she recalled her memories. “They didn’t ask me questions so much as they…I don’t know, it’s silly, I guess.”

Alex shook his head. “No, no, no, it’s not silly, Mom. What did they say to you?”

“They were sort of…
hypnotizing
me, I guess, for lack of a better word.” She ended the sentence with a girly giggle that she licked her lips at the end of. At this, the CDC professionals stopped their smartphone pecking and eyed one another intensely.

Alex decided to get on with it. The sooner whatever was going to be the result of this meeting happened, the sooner he and his mom could get out of here.

“You mean like,
you are getting sleeeeepy
, kind of stuff, dangling a watch in front of your face?”

She licked her lips again while she remembered. “It was more like a lot of repetitive statements, spoken to me in soft, soothing tones. I thought it was more like meditation therapy, biofeedback or something like that. Relaxing words and ambient music.”

“Do you remember any of the statements?”

“They told me I wouldn’t be able to remember any of them, but one time I decided not to take the pills they gave me beforehand. I put them into my mouth along with the cup of water they gave me, but I didn’t swallow them. I spit them out a couple minutes later when I pretended to sneeze into a Kleenex.”

“Why didn’t you want to take them?”

“They had nothing to do with my antibiotics or preventing the prion infection. I knew it had to do with the hypnosis stuff and so I wanted to see if I could remember better if I didn’t take the pills first.”

“And could you?”

She nodded slowly, eyes narrowing. “They would say things like, ‘You will follow the commands when you receive them,’ or maybe, ‘The new sensations you will feel in your head are normal and good for you. Do not fight them…’ Over and over and over for I don’t even know how long. They never had any clocks on the wall and they confiscated my watch and phone upon arrival.”

Alex looked over at the CDC contingent, all three of whom stared at his mother with rapt attention, and suddenly he was sick of it all. This was outrageous. His mother had been through a traumatic experience. Simply having cancer in the first place was bad enough, but then she had undergone some hyper-experimental medical procedure out of country to boot? There was nothing more he needed to learn here. He stood up and stared directly into one of the low profile dome cameras he’d noticed recessed into the ceiling. He figured it was just a regular videoconference camera. This was the lion’s den for the CIA, after all, and if they wanted to put cameras in here that were undetectable to the human eye, he was sure they could do it. Maybe they did do it. He didn’t know and he didn’t care. He just wanted to get his point across, so he shouted it at the top of his lungs.

“She does
not
have the virus, or the prion, or whatever the hell it is! I’ve seen the symptoms, seen them dozens of times on Adranos, and this…“ he pointed dramatically at his mother. “…Is. Not. It!”

His mother smiled at Alex and licked her lips again, this time accompanying the action with a small yet perceptible nod of the head. Alex wanted to tell his mother to stop doing that, if this was her idea of a joke it wasn’t funny in the slightest, but he didn’t want to call attention to it in case it had gone unnoticed by the CDC and all the other invisible flies on the wall in here. He just wanted to get her out of here, to take her home.

“How was she cured, Alex? That’s all we’re trying to find out.” The voice startled him, not because of the words it carried, or the fact that it came from a speaker somewhere on the table, but because of who it belonged to.

Veronica. She sounded calm, matter-of-fact. He had no reason to doubt her. She continued.

“Go ahead and take a break. You’ve given us good information. We have a blood sample from Elsa that technicians are analyzing now. Just give us a few more minutes, Alex. I’ll be in shortly with the test results.”

Alex thanked Veronica and immediately the CDC men began conversing in near-whispered tones, clearly not wanting Alex or his mother to hear what was being said. After a few seconds, they stood and told Alex they’d be in the next room, that he and his mom should feel free to “catch up on things.”

Alex waited until they walked out of the room and the door had closed behind them to start talking, even though he supposed they were being monitored, probably even recorded in here. They were as alone as they were going to be though, so he reached across the table and took his mother’s hand. And her skin felt different. He hadn’t thought to actually feel her skin earlier, he had only looked at it. But holding it now, it felt…
you know the word, admit it…it feels slightly…just a little bit…scaly.

He wasn’t sure if his mind was playing tricks on him, like how he’d heard that if you imagined things for long enough they would start to seem real even though they weren’t. He clasped her hand with his other hand, just to refresh the tactile stimulation and hopefully trigger a new sensation, one of normal, smooth human female skin. But it still had that hint of scaliness.

Yet she looked…
be honest
…she looked good for someone who had until very recently been in the grips of advanced stage cancer. But deep down a nagging worry needled his consciousness. What if the cancer wasn’t responsible for how she looked now? What if she had been cured, but somehow altered in the process? She had been taken, after all, to some foreign facility where FDA laws may very well not apply. He imagined a coterie of overzealous researchers guinea-pigging his mom to death in some sterile laboratory…and then bringing her back. Maybe he’d seen
Pet Sematary
too many times as a kid, but even as she talked to him now, asking him if he remembered that cottage where they went on vacation twenty years ago, but without waiting for an answer, something just seemed
off
about her.

He decided to redirect the conversation. She seemed to be a little more normal when he’d been questioning her. Or was that because she’d known that to exhibit symptoms of whatever it was she had in the presence of the CDC would be detrimental to her freedom, and now that they were no longer staring her directly in the face she felt like she could let her guard down a little? Or maybe she
had to
let her guard down, as if it had taken all of her limited reserves of energy to pull off the charade.

“Mom? Let me ask you about Dad, please. I know you didn’t get to say goodbye. I didn’t either, well…not really, not the way I would have liked, but at least I did have some last
words
with him.” He flashed on the insect larvae pouring from his father’s mouth during his final moments on that godforsaken island, how they had impeded his speech, and he shuddered involuntarily. If his mother noticed the movement, she didn’t say anything. “You didn’t get that chance.”

Elsa smiled that slightly vacant expression again. “I’m at peace with your father.”

Alex thought about this for a few seconds. She had to be just saying that not to make him feel bad. “That’s good. I know he would have wanted to say goodbye to you. It’s terrible he didn’t get that chance. He told me on the ship in Antarctica that he wished I would call and visit you more.”

Elsa Ramirez suddenly tensed, her expression going slack, eyes blank, one of her hands gripping the edge of the conference table.

“You never should have let that asshole tell you what to do. I never did, that’s for fucking sure.”

Alex sat there, not even breathing as he stared at his mother. He’d never heard her talk like this before, ever. He wanted to ask her if she was all right, or maybe if there was something that happened in the past he didn’t know about, but “Mom?” was all that came out.

“He can rot in goddamned Hell for all I care.”

Again, Alex flashed on his father’s diseased mouth and reptilian teeth, the maggots and the Herculean effort he’d required to fumble out his last words.

Alex stood, his chair toppling onto the floor. “Mom! Stop talking like that!”

“Or what?” Elsa Ramirez leaned forward over the table.

Alex was speechless.

“What’s my little Alex going do about it? Nothing, that’s what. ‘Cuz you’re a pussy, son, just like you always were. Can’t do shit.”

He stared, incredulous, for another moment, then backed away. “That’s it. I’m out of here.” He turned and walked around the fallen chair, speaking as he went. “I went through a lot of trouble to come here to try and help you, and this is how you thank me?”

As he rounded the chair and began walking toward the door, he got another look at his mother’s face. Her eyes were definitely yellowish now. Not a faint, jaundiced kind of yellow, but a crisp, electric yellow, and not across the entire orb but only part of the iris. It was weird. He could swear her eyes weren’t like that
before…before…before
all this happened when everything was normal. He wanted to go back to that period in his life, but there was no time for that kind of nostalgic longing now, because Now was obviously so very different from Then, when the woman sitting across from him made him chocolate chip cookies and read him stories and tucked him into bed at night. Now she was cursing and leering at him in a CDC/CIA hybrid facility with yellow eyes, and…