Dead World | Novel | Dead Zero

by Platt, Sean

  The syringe was out of the ordinary, and right now everything unusual was suspect. Syringes were for injecting, not typically drawing. But there was blood in it now, so of course Sanjay was telling the truth.

  Except for that burn. He’d never had a blood draw burn like that before.

  He looked at his arm while Sanjay removed and wiped his glasses, and the assistant went for a mop. It was bruising severely — all that blood now welling up under his skin. But even allowing for bruises, an odd color had stained one area on his ad-hoc bandage.

  What could be staining it black?

  “Did you inject me with something?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Rick grabbed for the syringe with his good hand.

  Sanjay tried to stop him, but Rick Shelton could only be pushed so far. He was being manipulated and he knew it, and Sanjay, unless he was stupid, had to know that Rick knew it. What games were left to play?

  He shoved the doctor’s hand back, nearly causing him to slip in the blood puddle on the floor.

  On the vial was a handwritten label. It said, NECROSIS FACTOR.

  “What did you put in me?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Don’t lie!”

  “Please. Keep your voice down.” Sanjay’s hands were up, making peace. “All right. Yes. Okay. But it’s safe, I promise. We’ve all but concluded you’re immune.”

  Rick stared at the syringe. They’d tried to fool him, and that really pissed him off. Injecting something and then using the same syringe to draw blood back out couldn’t be clean protocol; it’d contaminate the sample. The fact that Sanjay had done it — and on the sly — meant one of two things. Either the draw wouldn’t be ruined by trace amounts of the shit he’d been injected with, or the draw didn’t matter.

  Either way, Rick didn’t like being a pawn.

  “Did you … Did you inject me with what they have?”

  “Well, yes, but you’ll be perfectly—”

  “So you did do this!”

  “No!” Sanjay shouted. “No, we extracted it from a corpse!”

  “From a corpse?”

  “Please, Mr. Shelton! Please calm down.”

  Rick was up in a second, taking Sanjay by the neck.

  The assistant had returned to mop, so Rick jabbed a foot out to slam the door, locking all three of them inside. As Rick stood, he knocked the rolling tray to the floor, raising a clatter.

  Sanjay was practically choking, shirt balled tight enough to smash his windpipe.

  “You were at the mall for me,” Rick said, his face inches from the doctor’s.

  “Sort of!”

  “What the fuck’s that mean?”

  “You were all there! Everyone in your cohort!”

  “My ‘cohort’?”

  “Your test group! Everyone who’d been given BioFuse! Please, Mr. Shelton!”

  Rick relaxed his grip slightly, but moved so his back was to the door. The assistant looked mild enough, but he still kept watch on her hands, knowing the room was full of everyday objects ready to be used as weapons. And he did feel more or less safe, knowing that if they didn’t need his voluntary cooperation, he’d either be dead of in handcuffs.

  Help could be summoned by the pitch of their voices. There was more than enough firepower outside to neutralize one ex-Marine.

  Rick was wondering if he should formally hold Sanjay hostage when there was a knock on the door.

  “Doctor? Sir?”

  It was one of the soldiers. The man in scrubs wouldn’t sound so formal.

  Rick glared, still holding tight. Sanjay said, “Yes?”

  “Everything okay in there?”

  “Oh yes. Yes, fine.”

  “Sounded like something fell over.”

  “I’m just clumsy, is all.”

  That made Rick relax more, as the footsteps walked away. He let the doctor go.

  “What’s going on here? For real this time.”

  “Okay,” Sanjay said, and suddenly the most cordial parts of his personality were gone. He didn’t become severe, but he did become serious. “The infection the public calls ‘Rip Daddy’ is mutating. We believe it’s in a sort of ‘adolescence’ right now, halfway between a juvenile form and a more mature, evolved form of the same thing. Like any adolescence, it’s a time of tumultuous change. There is confusion and upheaval. Your grandson looks to be about that age. Perhaps you can relate.”

  Rick barely moved. He’d let go of Sanjay’s neck, but he hadn’t forgotten what they’d just done to him. He’d grown older, but he was sure he could still kill a person with his bare hands — and wanted both people in the room with him to understand that. Maybe they could call for help, but Rick bet he could take at least one of them down before the cavalry arrived.

  “Eventually we believe the virus will stabilize, once it reaches a form that can find equilibrium with the rest of its ecosystem. For that to happen, though, requires a lot of experimentation on the virus’s part. It needs to try this form and that form to see what works best. Those experiments could cost a lot of lives — but more importantly, by the time it does finally stabilize, it may well be beyond our ability to rein it in. That means we must battle it at the worst possible time, when the target is moving the fastest.” He nodded toward Rick as if he were a prop. “And it means we must take some risks. Do some things we’d rather not, for the greater good.”

  “So you’re trying to stop it.”

  “Of course we’re trying to stop it. Halting the spread is Mr. Burgess’s number one priority.”

  “How can it be his number one priority? It’s brand new!”

  Sanjay shook his head. “It’s not new. It simply hit a critical developmental milestone. We’ve been tracking changes in wild type Rip Daddy for three months now.”

  “What does it have to do with me?”

  Sanjay paused before answering. Another lie coming? Rick wasn’t sure.

  “BioFuse shows potential as a way to inoculate against mutated forms of Rip Daddy. Unfortunately, we think it’s done just the opposite. Rather than protecting against the disease, one or more members of your cohort contracted a Rip Daddy strain that used BioFuse as a selection pressure.”

  “English, dammit,” Rick said.

  “It’s like if you’re attacked with a knife. Maybe you almost die, but if you don’t die, now you know how to defend against a knife. We didn’t go out there and infect the others in your trial; the goal was to develop immunity without introduction of the disease agent. But we think some of them contracted it anyway, and BioFuse did its best, but the result was like you winning that knife fight. It adapted. It ‘learned how to defend against the knife,’ which in this case was BioFuse. The result was stronger and more virulent than we ever could have suspected.”

  Rick didn’t think Sanjay was telling him the whole truth. For instance: If someone caught Rip Daddy while on BioFuse, how was it spreading so fast — and why did it start (at least partially) at the mall? They saw at least three of these things there. Unless all three, quite independently, were bitten by a single creature before coming in?

  “Why did you have five vans at the mall?”

  “Because as I said, your entire test group was at the mall.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “Subtle psychological manipulation. It’s complicated.”

  “There were supposed to only be two subjects per county.”

  “That wasn’t technically true.”

  “What about Miles Pope?”

  “You know Miles Pope?”

  “I know him enough.” Rick shoved the doctor to remind him that this wasn’t just a conversation; he was still the one with a metaphorical knife to their throats. “He keeps popping into my mind.”

  “He does? Would you say it feels … extrasensory?”

  “Never mind your bullshit! What’s Pope to you?”

  “Well, he’s not insignificant, and that makes your question just now noteworthy indeed. Our
best guess pegs Pope as the one who first contracted Rip Daddy. The one in whom the new illness first manifested.”

  It was a diversion. “What were you planning to do at the mall? Why did you make sure we were all there at the same time?”

  “Well …”

  Rick moved closer. His hand rose as if to, again, grab the man’s throat.

  “All right,” he said. “We felt it was necessary to see what would happen. That required a large population sample, in an enclosed space, to test varied forms of the virus.”

  “In what way?”

  “Miles Pope’s form is nearly stable. It develops slowly, without the frenetic burn-out of most of what you’ve seen today. Our hope was that a random toss in a contained population, some of whom were on BioFuse, like you, and some of whom were not …”

  Now Rick really did grab him again. “Holy shit. You let that outbreak happen.”

  “In a controlled fashion!” Sanjay blurted. “Some of the variants are incredibly aggressive, so a fixed, closely observed study in a wild setting—”

  “With real people? Real human beings?”

  “Acceptable losses! Rip Daddy is already out there, and it’s nationwide. The question of its evolving into a deadly form was a question of if, not when. We had two choices: either conduct a single, closed-system experiment under the supervision of our people, that we could control, utilizing a potential inoculant we felt had enormous potential to stabilize and eventually eliminate the mutant forms … or we could let the same thing happen at a random time, in a random place, where we couldn’t control it or slow the spread at all!”

  “And how’s that working for you? The whole fucking city is infected!”

  “Yes! It is! But we are not careless, Mr. Shelton. We always planned contingencies atop contingencies.”

  Rick felt cold. His fist slackened involuntarily. “That’s why the military was already here. Because you figured if you couldn’t contain it at the mall, you could at least contain the city.”

  “It was the best we could do. It’s densely populated, under half a million to limit exposure, but still large enough to provide a statistically significant test.”

  Rick tossed the doctor back again, then looked at his bruised arm. “So? Am I immune?”

  “You received an intravenous dose of the most virulent strain we know so far. If you weren’t immune, you’d be changed by now. Not that you were the only one taking the risk. You do understand, the two of us voluntarily got in this room with you. We could have contained you for it. Given it to you through bars in a cage.”

  “You’re champs. Thanks.”

  “Mr. Shelton, please, try to understand. I don’t blame you for resenting our methods, but I promise, this was the only way. We need you.”

  “That’s why you took Rosie, and let the others go.”

  “We saw you with her. We wanted to study your connection and that could only be done here. But you were never in any danger, and we’d have brought you here if you hadn’t ‘tuned in’ and come on your own to get her. We’ve never taken eyes off you, Mr. Shelton. You may not always have seen us, but we’ve been right behind you all day.” Sanjay held up both hands, trying to make peace. “Your immunity, whether it’s due to a ’stubborn’ brain or something else we’ve yet to determine, might be what BioFuse wasn’t. It’s better this way, so long as you agree to serve your fellow man. The drug was developed to treat Alzheimer’s. It was always a stopgap. Discovery of its affinity for Rip Daddy was mostly an accident.”

  “Mostly?”

  Sanjay continued. “But you? You developed immunity in the wild, or always had it. With your cooperation, we might be able to prevent this from happening again in other cities. We might be able to make a vaccine, or find ways to stimulate brains to be more resistant, like yours.”

  Rick had heard enough. The little shit was defending mass murder. Hitler had claimed aspirations for the greater good in exactly the same way.

  “That’s a pretty good story.” Then in one quick motion, Rick grabbed the doctor, spun him around, grabbed a scalpel from the shelf, and pressed it against the man’s throat. “But instead, how about I use you as a human shield to get out of here?”

  “Please! There are seventeen armed soldiers outside this door!”

  “I guess you’d better convince them, then.”

  Rick’s non-scalpel hand relaxed, prepping to reach for the knob.

  “WAIT!”

  Rick didn’t want to hear another word, but something in the doctor’s tone made him stop.

  “What?”

  “Your daughter-in-law. She’s bitten.”

  “And?”

  “The fact that she’s still coherent means she must have contracted the Pope strain. Whatever attacked her had probably been changing over the course of weeks, then self-realized when all the others reached critical and started to—”

  “Make sense, dammit.”

  “There’s a treatment!” Sanjay spat, stuttering against the blade on his throat. “It’s still experimental, but it’s been effective in mice. It’s the only chance she’s got — otherwise she’ll turn just like the rest of them!”

  Rick let go, but he didn’t drop the scalpel. Sanjay, knowing he’d scored a hit, adjusted his collar.

  “Help us and don’t reveal what we’ve discussed here, Mr. Shelton,” he said, now less panicked. “Do that, and we can keep your daughter-in-law alive.”

  Eighteen

  What Bakersfield?

  Thom could tell something terrible had almost gone wrong, or had already but nobody was talking about it.

  The way Rick emerged with Sanjay and the tech (both sweating, Sanjay disheveled) was full of unfriendly body language and unspoken truths. Thom tried to ask; Rick brushed him off like swatting a fly. He was handling things his own way no matter what anyone else thought or cared, same as he always had.

  Rick had a huge bruise on his arm, wrapped in gauze. Despite the shouting and crashing, Rick said it was an accident, like the arm, and that everyone could just trust him and let it go. Thom thought of reminding him that he was an Alzheimer’s patient and that Thom was technically still his guardian, but doing so felt like a phenomenally bad move.

  He wasn’t feeble at all right now, and truthfully hadn’t been for weeks, maybe months. He insisted that his brain scans revealed something in the neighborhood of a cure, not remission, and while Thom had doubted it at first, he certainly wasn’t about to doubt it now. Once your father was right about zombies, pretty much everything else was off the table.

  There were more medical tests and proddings with needles, but this time Rick did them in the middle of the main room, almost defiantly. A new stern expression — one he hadn’t worn when Thom and Carly had gone for the nap that’d never happened — dominated his features. Rick was a strongman all over again, but instead of making him feel confident, it made Thom feel weak. His father had always been a man’s man. By implication, he’d always been something less.

  They waited. Brendan found a stack of games from when the place had been a clinic, stored in a wall cupboard. They were a bit young for him, but Thom, Brendan, an increasingly sick Carly, and even Rosie played anyway. The game was called Uncle Wiggly — familiar only to Rosie, from her childhood. Though she’d been spacey all day, she was rock solid at the board game. Brendan complained, with surprisingly good humor, that Rosie was making up the rules.

  When the last game they could stand ended, Brendan’s face fell like a pile of bricks. He’d glanced at his mother, who hadn’t simply exhaled and said, “That was fun” like normal, but had instead fallen back against the waiting room couch like a person relieved of strenuous duty. This seemed to remind him of something he’d been trying not to think about, before sending him to read old magazines alone in the corner.

  Rick came over. It was late by now and the day had been impossibly long. Even he was sagging.

  He sat beside his son.

  Thom looked over as if the old
man had made a mistake and not yet realized.

  Rick handed him a syringe. “It’s not the zombie thing that’s making her sick. It’s sepsis.”

  “What?”

  “Bacterial infection in her blood. From the biter’s plain old human saliva.”

  Rick looked down at the syringe. “What’s this?”

  “Antibiotics. I suggest having Carly try giving it to herself if her hands are steady.”

  “You don’t think I can do it?”

  “I think you’re untrained, like me. She’s done this before.”

  “Not on herself.”

  “What?” Rick started to stand, then slapped Thom on the back. “You guys never do heroin?”

  His father turned with an unlikely smile on his face. He looked so tired.

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened while Carly and I were in the back?”

  “Nothing.”

  The shortness of his father’s response made him angry. “You think I can’t handle it?”

  “I think you can handle it just fine. This is just the way it has to be.”

  “Why are you keeping secrets?”

  “Because I have to.” It sounded like such a strangely proper answer.

  “Dad,” he said when Rick turned again.

  “Yeah,” his father answered, looking down.

  “How do you know it’s not the disease?” Quieter: “Carly, I mean.”

  “It’s too fast,” Rick answered.

  “But they turn fast.”

  “Not Carly.”

  “Why?”

  “Just trust me, Thom.”

  “DAD.”

  Rick turned a third time. He should be exasperated, but he seemed exhausted more than anything else.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed me either. I’m sorry I was right.”

  Do it. Take the risk. So Thom said, “You haven’t ever really believed in me, have you?”

  A baiting question. He was sure Rick would deny it, but instead he said, “What have you given me to believe in, Thom?”