Zombies in Love (12 page)

They know,
he thought, crushing the stiff paper in his hand. 
They might even know about Miriam.

ch. 18

              Ian stood over his laundry basket, sniffing his shirt and trying to figure out how to get rid of the weird rotting root beer smell.

There comes a time in every smart person’s life when he realizes that smart only takes you so far, that eventually even the most determined student gets his last A, and that he will find himself in a situation for which there is no obvious correct answer, or possibly no answer at all.  Ian had done his best to avoid such tangles.  Staying in graduate school had offered the promise of an obvious life: get the grades, do well, be set forever.  The only problem was to avoid the temptations: the love of money, the desire for independence, the desire for love and a family.  All this would come later, after the PhD.  Everything would be okay, if he could only get his PhD.

Unless your advisor was a total psycho who wasn’t letting you do any actual work because he had you out chasing zombies.  And now the university knew about the zombies, but they might not know Ian knew about the zombies, so maybe he should just go back to his original research, if he could only remember what that was.  And the only person Ian knew who had any perspective on this had totally vanished.  If only Sarah would come back and tell him what to do!

When Ian signed the letter agreeing to come to Winthrop, he had thought about all of the famous people who had gone there before him.  And at the end of the list, he had imagined his own name.  Going to Winthrop made you one of the elite.  It opened doors.

What a bunch of hogwash!

Winthrop wasn't in the business of making Ian Comanor successful.  Winthrop was in the business of being Winthrop, the most important university in America.  Which meant that Winthrop would do anything to protect its good name.  And if he, Ian, did anything to embarrass the university, they would crush him like a bug.  Probably literally. 

So he needed a Plan B.  If no one was going to hand him a PhD and a tenure-track teaching job, he needed to figure out something else to do with the rest of his life.  The only problem was the world outside the university was a total mystery to him.  He had never lived outside the bubble.  He had no idea how to get a job, unless there was a "help wanted" sign in the window.  And health insurance-- he supposed he couldn't just go to the university clinic any more every time he got the flu.  Did jobs usually come with insurance or not?  He didn't know.  Hell, he barely knew how to cook for himself.  He ate at the Winthrop cafeteria during the week and had ramen on weekends.

Here he was, twenty-nine years old, and unable to feed himself.

"And they expect us to be the great analysts of modern society,"
said a German woman's voice, inside his head.

Goddamn it, I'm hallucinating again. 
And why did his hallucination have a German accent?  Did that make sense?  Was it some kind of Freudian thing?

"Lie down on the couch, and we'll talk about it,"
said the voice, with a freaky little laugh.

Don't pay attention to the hallucination,
he reminded himself, for the twentieth time. 
It only encourages her.

Someone was pounding on his front door.

He looked through the peephole.  It was Sarah.  There she was, the most beautiful woman in the world, dressed in a very short skirt.  His brain seized up momentarily, then recovered. “Thank God you’re back.  Prof. Leschke’s been going totally bat-shit.” 

She looked totally unsurprised.  Maybe it was time to win some points?  Points capable of being exchanged for actual physical contact?  “I didn’t tell him you were there when Uncle Fester escaped,” he added.  “He thinks it’s all my fault.”

“That’s really sweet of you, Ian.”

She didn’t look happy.  A horrible memory descended on Ian, of Sarah, bleeding, locked in a cage, his tranquilizer dart embedded in her chest.  “I’m really sorry I shot you,” he mumbled.  “Are you mad at me?”

She waved dismissively.  “It’s okay.  It probably made the bite hurt less.”

“He wants us to find another zombie.  Where are we going to find another zombie?”

Sarah nodded.  “I’ve been thinking about that.  And I know exactly where I’d go if I were dead.”

#

Why didn’t I stay at Mankato State?
wondered David Leschke as he scanned the list of names carved into the slate walls lining the Hall of the Dead.  And there it was. 

DAVID LESCHKE.

He’d heard about this before.  How did the Board of Overseers manage to have your name, your own name engraved on a wall that had apparently stood, unchanged, for the past hundred and fifty years?  One of the many things he found unpleasant and disorienting about Winthrop-- its apparent existence outside the world of normal scientific laws.  He wished he'd known about it before he decided to come, but you couldn't turn down Winthrop, could you?

He touched the name and the letters melted under his fingertips to nothingness.  To his left, another slate panel shifted open.  Behind it was the iron cage of an old-fashioned elevator.  The elevator shook slightly when he stepped into it, and he closed the cage behind himself.  There was no button, and the elevator sat in place for a moment while David wondered whether he should just open the cage and get out.  Then, with a jolting lurch, he rattled upwards.

Up was good.  He'd heard some wild stories about what was lying under the tower of Memorial Hall, and he was glad he wasn't going to find out personally.

At least, not yet.

The elevator doors opened on a scene of unbelievable masculine plushness.  The walls were paneled in some rare wood that Prof. Leschke could not identify, and the floor was marble, but covered in an enormous antique Oriental rug.  Taxidermided animals lined the walls-- and every one that Leschke recognized was extinct.  (Where did you even get a taxidermied dodo bird?)  Seven portly, middle-aged men sat in a circle of club chairs.  Whenever one set an empty drink on the table by his side, a white-jacketed waiter instantly replaced it with a full one.

They had reserved another club chair for David, and it was only after he sat down that he realized that it was somewhat smaller than those belonging to the others.

They'd thought of everything, before he even knew it was time to stage a counterattack.  They'd had so much more practice than he had.

The man in the center chair spoke.  “So glad you could join us, Prof. Leschke.  You may call me Mr. Dudley.  I speak for the Board of Overseers.  Would you care for a drink?”

Anything to delay this discussion
.  “Yes, all right.”

A servant-- where had he come from?-- pressed a tumbler of scotch on the rocks into David's hand.  It was only then that he realized that, unlike the members of the Board, he hadn’t been given a table for his drink.  He held the glass awkwardly on his leg, feeling the condensation run through his pants, leaving a dark circle.

"You will grant me the old man's privilege of telling the story slowly, and with a discursion or two," said Mr. Dudley.  "This is an ancient university, professor-- more ancient than our young nation, and in many ways, far older than that.  And as you might expect, very little remains beyond our dear Winthrop's experience.  About a century ago, Winthrop, like many other institutions of its era, was suffering through terrible labor disruptions."

"Bolshevism," rumbled a similarly stout man to Dudley's right.

"As a progressive man, my predecessor, Mr. Faneuil, met with a previous holder of your position, a Prof. McGill, to see whether there might be any scientific solution to this problem.  And while McGill did find an alternate labor source, my predecessor was forced to acknowledge that these workers were far more trouble than they were worth.  The experiment had to be terminated.  And I regret to say that Mr. Faneuil appears to have been lax in destroying the records of Prof. McGill's efforts.  Otherwise, why would we currently be suffering from a recurrence of the problem?"

David had reflected whether there was any use in trying to bluff.  Definitely not.  “My students and I are working very hard to resolve that issue.”

“Really?  How’s your wife, Prof. Leschke?”

David froze.  So they knew absolutely everything.  Then why had they called him up here?  What did they want from him?

“My colleagues and I think that it’s time we brought out some people with more expertise to address the matter.”

So they were taking it out of his hands?  Or, to put it another way, were they saying that he had become unnecessary?

He had heard a story a year or two after he had taken this position.  Something that had happened in the Eighties.  A group of animal rights activists decided to break into one of the buildings and free the poor bunnies and puppies and mousies.  But somehow the Board of Overseers got wind of it, and before the activists got there, replaced the whole menagerie with a pride of ravenous lions.

Was it true?  Who knew?  But God help him, and God help Joshua, if the Board decided that David was an unnecessary complication.

“We’re getting very close,” he said.  “We’re getting great results from the antivirus.  Very promising results.  Our prior expertise in this project--”

Dudley cut him off with a wave of his hand.  “I have reflected that Mr. Faneuil's worst error was to have prevented Prof. McGill from correcting his mistake.  Otherwise, how could my predecessor have allowed records of the experiments to escape?  Obviously Mr. Faneuil was unaware of their existence.  Of course our experts will benefit from your prior researches into the matter.  And your own personal involvement.”

Which means nothing more or less than I live as long as I'm useful. 
He gripped his icy glass.  “Thank you, Mr. Dudley.”

#

Dancing lights flickered over Ian's flannel shirt, and his ears were beginning to ache.  Any minute now, Ian was sure, Sarah would tell him what they were doing in a nightclub.  Because he felt like a giant dork, especially with his tranquilizer gun tucked in his belt.  “Sarah, where’s your sniffer?”

“In my purse,” she said.  She held up a tiny sequined square of fabric that couldn’t have held anything larger than a tube of lipstick.

“Must be one of those TARDIS purses.”

“Fine,” she smiled.  “You got me.  I didn’t bring it.”

“How are we supposed to hunt zombies without it?”

“Well, they’ll be the ones who look like this--” and, rolling her eyes back in her head, she stuck out her hands straight in front of her.  She may have moaned, too.  It was kind of hard for Ian to hear her over the thumping bass.

“We’re going to get into so much trouble.”

“You’re cute, but you’re such a dork.”  Without warning, she leaned over and kissed him on the lips.  A real, honest-to-goodness kiss from Sarah Chen.  Like a visit from Santa Claus.

“What was that?”

“An experiment.”

“Did it work?”

“We won’t know until we replicate it.” 

She kissed him again, her arms around him.  For how many months had Ian dreamed of being so close to her slim little body, her hair falling around them like a curtain--

And she’d never been interested before.  What had changed?  He pulled away from her.  “You’re trying to distract me.”

“No!”  She looked down at the floor.  “Not entirely.”

He shook his head.  “We should get back to the lab.”

“Wait!” she cried.   “Ian, if we made a working antivirus, what would happen if we injected it into a zombie?”

“Well, he’d stop being a zombie.  He’d just, you know, be dead.”

“Okay,” she said.  Why had she switched into Socratic mode?  Ian hated Socratic mode.
Just tell me the goddamn answer!
  “What would happen if we injected it into someone who was infected?  Like you, or me?”

“I don’t know.  Nothing, probably.”

“Are you sure?  Sure it wouldn’t kill us, too?”

“Why would you think--”

She interrupted him impatiently.  “The virus is already affecting me.  Look at this.  The bite I got yesterday.”  She pushed up the sleeve of her little sweater.  Instead of a huge gaping hole, the only thing left was a scab, like she’d fallen from her bike.

He took her arm and looked closely.  “It looked much worse than that.”

“It was much worse than that!  Don’t you see?  It’s starting already.”  She yanked her arm back and pulled the sleeve back down.

“Well, okay, but that’s irrelevant.  Because we won’t inject ourselves with the antivirus.”

She planted her hands on her hips.  “We won’t have a choice.  Prof. Leschke will make us do it.  And if not him-- you know."  She whispered in his ear.  "The old guys.”

“So what are you saying, Sarah?  That we should just never go back to the lab?  That we should never graduate, throw eight years of my life away?  What the hell am I going to do with a master’s degree?  Everyone will know I washed out!”

She twirled her hair around her finger, a nervous gesture he couldn't remember ever seeing her make before.  "What if we started again somewhere else?"

"Start again!  You want to spend another five years in graduate school?  Is that what you'd call a good idea?"