Zombie Ever After (7 page)

Thank you. After weeks, we found that one of the chemicals in the bath had the wrong proportions as well as the wrong strength. Once we discovered and corrected this problem, the experiments continued. The good news was, the brains now were no longer dead.
 

And the bad news…?

Well, in every other way the experiments proved inconclusive. As with the chimp brain results, we found that we could reanimate the human heads to a certain degree. We recorded some brain activity, but the brains were never, by any real definition of the term, alive.

What happened next?

We made some new modifications to the bathwater, increasing certain chemicals based on the recommendations found in the tweaked computer models.
 

We also reduced or, in some cases, even eliminated other substances. Finally, after months and months of nothing, and more months of modest success, we achieved a milestone.
 

The frozen brains placed into the bathwater started to behave in a somewhat normal way. More importantly, we found brain activity in the parietal and temporal lobe.

Would you please explain?
 

Yes, of course. This brain activity told us the brain was responding to stimuli. It was beginning to perceive, in some way, the world around it.
 

We also found activity in the frontal lobe, specifically the hippocampus. This told us that the brain was beginning to relive past memories.
 

Fascinating stuff, just fascinating. We’ll be right back.

Donovan rode in the ambulance to the hospital with Cathren while Rudra drove his car. The medics had tried to resuscitate her at the apartment, but they were unable to get a pulse. They made a decision right away to get her to the emergency room.
 

They raced through the streets of San Francisco, past Karl Malden Square. As they sped along, Donovan spotted a large number of cops, military, and SWAT teams. With trucks, tanks, helicopters, and tear gas. They were shooting anything that moved. Well, more correctly, anything that moved in a stumbling, shuffling, water-drinkers way.

Donovan cringed at the sporadic grenade blasts from somewhere off in the distance. He exhaled loudly. The world he once knew was falling apart completely.
 

Including Cathren.

They pulled up to the hospital. The EMTs flung the doors open and swept Cathren out of the back of the ambulance. They raced the gurney though the corridors to the ER.
 

The intercom was blaring something about some code. At the next intersection, an association of medical types greeted them. Nurses, doctors, technicians, like birds of prey, they swooped in to attack the carrion-rich carcass, which, in this case, was Cathren’s seemingly lifeless body.
 

A nurse pulled up alongside Donovan like a motorcycle cop. “You the husband?”

“What? Not really. I mean, no.”
 

The nurse shrugged her shoulders and said, “This is far enough.” She stopped in front of Donovan, all blank stare, tanning-booth brown skin, and pasta flab. Donovan tried to push past her, tried to look over the woman’s spiked and shining gray-yellow hair to see the gurney, but it had blasted through a pair of swinging doors and disappeared.

“Crap! I don’t have time for this. She needs me,” Donovan said, looking the woman straight in the eyes. “Let me through or, I swear—”
 

“Well, no one’s goin’ in that operating room. ’Cept doctors, nurses, and anesthesia. And me,” she said. “Here. Fill these out.”

“Why?” Donovan said, struck by the inanity of it all.
 

“Because it’s clear that your wife is in no shape to do it herself.” She stuffed a clipboard of forms into Donovan’s hands.

“What the hell is all this?” Donovan said.
 

“Insurance forms. HIPPA. Personal information. Next of kin. The usual...”
 

“I don’t have any of that information.”
 

“Well, she does have insurance I hope, otherwise—”
 

“Yeah, yeah, of course. She works for a living.”
 

“Doing what?”

“She works for, well...”

“Yes?”

“For, um. Oh hell. She works ATELIC Industries.”
 

“All right, then. That wasn’t so bad, was it?’

Donovan stared at the woman. Either she’d never heard of ATELIC, or she was as stupid as she looked.

“Just fill in what you can,” she said. “Her odds aren’t good, anyway, from what I saw, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”
 

Donovan could feel his blood boil. “How do you know what her odds are? Are you a doctor?”
 

“I see this kind of thing all the time, honey. You get to know who’s got a fighting chance and who don’t. She don’t.”
 

“Well, you’re wrong,” Donovan said through gritted teeth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
 

She stared at him. “Sure, buddy,” she said, snapping out of her disapproving trance. She smirked, turned, and—making the talk-to-the-hand gesture—walked away.

With the paperwork filled out as best he could and submitted, Donovan sat alone in the waiting room. Rudra had checked in and tried to console him. But he had to eventually move on, leaving Donovan by himself, waiting on news of Cathren.

Donovan squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them. He was groggy, anxious. What was happening? No one was telling him anything and he’d stopped trying to get answers.

He was left only with his own questions. He breathed deeply, trying to regain his composure. Unfortunately, he breathed in too deeply the scent of disinfectant, disease, and death. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and coughed repeatedly, nearly gagging. When the coughing fit was over, he leaned back and tried to rest.

I don’t really know her, not at all. And here I am her only “family.” Pathetic. I don’t know how to contact her real family, her parents, her—God!—next of kin. I don’t even know how I feel about her. Fuck me, I’m one selfish, self-centered fuck. I knew exactly how I felt about her two days ago. When she was hot—and now that she’s not….

Donovan sighed and looked around. The place was empty. Just him and, at about a mile and a half away at the other end of the room, the nurse/admin. She had started her shift about an hour ago. Donovan hung his head again and closed his eyes.

I don’t know anything about anything. I don’t even know my own feelings. I thought, for sure, this time, that Cathren was the one. Now, I don’t know what to think. It doesn’t matter, I guess. Not anymore.

Footsteps echoed down the hall, louder with each moment, until they thumped right up to Donovan and halted. He lifted his head and opened his eyes. Standing in front of him was a ghost, a wraith, the Angel of Death. Donovan blinked. Scratch that. It was a doctor. He was about thirty-five, black, and his splotchy green scrubs strained against his six-foot, two hundred pound frame. He wore glasses with blue metal frames, which he removed and tucked along the collar of his shirt.

“I’m Dr. David Samach, Head of Surgery.” He cleared his throat while extending his hand to Donovan. Donovan stood and shook his hand. “Mr. Whitney?” he continued.

“Codell. Donovan Codell. I’m just a friend.”

“Oh, my apologies.” He cleared his throat again. “You may want to sit.”

“I’m fine.”

“Right. Well. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just come out with it. I’m afraid your friend, Cathren Whitney, did not make it.”

“Excuse me—say again?”

“Ms. Whitney has passed. I’m sorry. She’s dead.”

Donovan stood completely still, unable to process this information. He stared straight ahead while the doctor went on.

“We did everything we could, of course.” Dr. Samach stood there in silence with Donovan for a moment. Then he said, “Well...” He coughed, cleared his throat again, and walked away.

Donovan sat back down in his chair like he was being lowered into a grave. But he couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t even think about her being gone. When Donovan had collected himself, he got up and went in search of Cathren. Or at least her body.
 

Unable to find his way to the morgue, he found the nearest nurses’ station. And was unable to speak.

“Can I help you?” one of the nurses asked him, after a couple of moments of awkward silence. She had a nice smile and looked like someone’s pleasant mom in her SpongeBob Squarepants smock and red lipstick.

“Yes, um, I’m Cathren’s... I’m with Cathren Whitney?” Without meaning to, Donovan’s statement sounded more like a question.

“Just a sec,” the woman said, typing into her computer. “Hmmm...,” she said. “Did you say, ‘Whitney’?”
 

“Yes, Whitney. Cathren. C-A-T — “
 

“We have a Donald Whitney, heart attack.”
 

“No, no. It’s Cathren. Cathren Whitney.”
 

She looked away from Donovan and went back to her computer screen. She typed in some additional search parameters. “No, I don’t see anyone here with that name,” she said, turning the smile on again. She played with one of her earrings, waiting for Donovan to say something. When he didn’t, she said, “Are you sure it’s Saint Mary’s? Could she be in another hospital, perhaps California Pacific?”
 

“I’m sure, yes,” Donovan said softly, growing more tired and impatient.

“Okay.
Hmmm.
W-H-I-T-N-E-Y. Nothing but Donald again. Let me try W-H-I-T-T-N-E-Y. Still nothing. Oh, here she is. Cathren Witney. They left off the “h.” Let’s see… time of death 9:16:42 p.m. Complications following surgery. Interesting, though, they listed cause of death as ‘unknown.’”

Donovan just stared at the woman. He felt like either strangling her with his bare hands or falling against her bosom and crying like a baby.
 

He did neither.

He simply said, “May I see the body?” And then, in a whisper, “Please?” Donovan felt a hundred years old and like dying himself.

So, Dr. Portanova, in your opinion, what was the cause of the eventual catastrophe?

Well, there were problems we, as a team, were ignoring. First of all, all of the electrical activity was wrong. It was like it was upside down. We didn’t realize it at the time, but the activity closely matched the brain activity found in serial killers.
 

So, in other words, while these frozen heads were coming alive, they were becoming serial killers? Is that what you were thinking?

Right. Of course, none of our findings, or even that the results of these experiments existed, was ever communicated to the authorities. Not to the local overseeing bodies, or national, or CDC.

Why? That makes no sense—the secrecy.

Why? Because Burkhart Egesa was truly thinking he was God now. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t answer to anyone.

“Here we go,” the receptionist said, pushing open a large set of doors.
 

Donovan stepped into a slightly chilly, slightly dark room. Tile shrouded the floor, ceiling, and walls. Drains strategically dotted the floor. Two sets of hoses, one on the left wall and one straight ahead, hung like red rubber nooses. Donovan felt as if he’d fell into the deep end of an empty, abandoned city pool.

Only a single corpse, covered by a sheet, lay on a stainless steel table. Three other polished and empty tables lined the walls. The light over the body, a large round metal cone, was off. Only a single row of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling near the door illuminated the room. Donovan took a tentative step forward to the occupied table.
 

Please, don’t let it be her. Let this be some crazy fuck-up. Let Cathren still be with me and this be some other Catherine Whitney, some old lady who’d died of natural causes. Not my Cathren....

He forced himself to take the corner of the sheet and pull it back. It was his Cathren after all. Looking alien, unreal. She was too young to die. Too pretty—it was crazy, he knew, but he felt it anyway—too pretty to be dead. To be a corpse. Her skin was the color of a used bar of bath soap. It looked slick, opaque. Not like human skin. He couldn’t see Cathren at all in the dead body in front of him. He couldn’t stand the sight of her like that. But he couldn’t look away. Couldn’t drop his hand.

He wanted someone to fix this, someone to make it right. At twenty-four, someone to hold him and comfort him. After all his “conquests,” all his desperate one-night stands, he had actually connected to no one. Not a single soul.

Until her.

And now she was gone.

He finally dropped the sheet and his shoulders fell. He began to weep. For Cathren. For himself. For every promise he’d ever broken. For every lie he ever told. For every time he didn’t tell his mother that he loved her when he’d had the chance. Or his father.
 

Or Cathren.
 

That he loved her so much more than he’d ever suspected.

Donovan left the hospital, or at least now realized he had left, because suddenly he found himself walking along Hyde Street, heading toward the waterfront.

He passed some folks who looked very sick. Water-drinkers, the pallor of death upon them. Whatever poisons had contaminated the water, courtesy of ATELIC Industries, they were having seriously deadly effects.

Donovan slouched his way along Fisherman’s Wharf, devoid of emotion, feeling nothing except hopelessness. He headed into the public men’s room near the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company and ripped a foot or two of paper towel out of the dispenser. Turning on the hot water, he soaked the paper, then washed his face with it, as if trying to wake himself up from a sleepwalking nightmare.
 

A chunky guy came in wearing a wrinkled suit. He was mostly bald, with a sprig of red hair on the sides of his head. The man hesitated, then pivoted back to the door, as if contemplating leaving. Then, having weighed the pros and cons, rushed past Donovan. He slammed the gray half-door behind him after entering the last stall at the back.