The Zombie Theories (Book 3): Conversion Theory

by Rich Restucci

  I heard gunfire through the ringing in my dome, and saw Ship, Alvarez, and Remo shooting at the ladder. They had killed or at least seriously fucked up the two stooges that had come sliding down. I sat up, a colossal task considering the pain, exhaustion, and confusion that were fighting for control of me. Donna helped me the rest of the way up, and I got my NVGs situated. I used my MP5 to give a 9mm facial to a couple of undead stragglers who were closing on us. I was beginning to feel pretty yucky. My insides were roiling, my mouth dry, and my arm was hurting quite badly. My side was a dull pain in comparison.

  “Anybody else comes down gets the same fuk’n thing!” Alvarez yelled.

  I blinked again and saw Remo on one knee. Kinga was on his face on the deck, and Remo rolled him over on his side. Kinga had thrown himself at Todd when the ‘nades came down the hatch, and they had both gone down in a heap but not before my buddy had taken the brunt of some hot jagged steel. Todd climbed out from under Kinga and over a re-killed zombie. He seemed unscathed. Alvarez put down yet another straggler.

  Kinga was wheezing this horrible rasp. He sounded like one of the dead. I could see the tip of a hunk of misshapen metal sticking out of his right side about an inch and a half. Blood soaked everything. Kinga’s red stuff and that black shit that zombies have in them coated my pal.

  “Shit,” Donna said, and knelt down to check him out. She stood back up immediately. Kinga coughed a great gout of thick red. “He has a lacerated lung.” She said shaking her head, “I… I can’t…” My MARSOC buddy nodded as well as anyone can with a hunk of grenade shrapnel in his bronchial tubes. He wiped his mouth with his forearm, looked at me, and whispered one word: Live. He was reaching for his sidearm, but couldn’t quite get it. I could see the agony all over him. My Sig was empty, and I had no more ammo for it. I lifted my MP5 and he smiled. He smiled at me. Thank you, Round-Eye he mouthed. I took aim and shot him between the eyes, then I cried like a baby. Donna was there for me, and Ship put his hand on my shoulder. Remo began removing anything useful from Kinga’s body, and yanked his dog tags.

  He stood and looked at Todd. “Where’s this crew service hatch?”

  The engineer pointed. “It’s through here,” and he began to move forward. Remo put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Just tell me, I’ll go first.”

  We began moving, me wiping my eyes. I checked Donna’s bullet graze, and no zombie shit had gotten near it, but I would imagine everyone here would have to sit through a two-day quarantine if we made it back to Atlantis.

  We smoked three more stealthy undead on the way to the hatch, and suddenly, we were in front of it. It was tall and wide and in the side of the bulkhead, not the deck as I had thought. “This leads to the port-side, about fifteen feet below the port rail. There are handholds in the exterior bulkhead,” Todd told us looking at the white steel. “I really would rather not go up there.” He swallowed and looked at Remo, “It’s worse up there than down here.”

  “Tell that to Kinga.” Remo looked the hatch up and down, then at Alvarez. “Cover.” Alvarez turned around, the business end of his M4 lazily pointed back the way we had come. A small, hand-held operating thingie with a red button and a green button rested in a holster next to the door. Remo grabbed it and pressed the green button. The hatch immediately began to lower. It was like a mini-gangway where the top moved down.

  The sounds of a helicopter were evident with the door open. It was above us, out of sight, but Remo stopped the hatch when it was open about two feet. The pitch of the helo sound changed, and suddenly, the bird rocketed into sight. It was leaving, but I had no idea which direction it was heading. I also realized that I was woozy. I flipped up my NVGs putting my hand on the bulkhead to steady myself. Ship’s immense shadow suddenly appeared, blanketing me in just a little bit more darkness, and I looked up at him. His face completely changed when he saw me. He pressed the tactical light button on his M4 and shone it in my face. I was too damn tired and dizzy to lift my hand up in front of my eyes, so I closed them.

  “Do you mind, Big Guy? You’re already all looming and shit, do you have to blind me too?”

  Sasquatch moved his light off slightly, leaned in (way in) to look at me, then did something I had never seen him do before. He took a frightened step back. In all the battles we’d been in, Ship was a rock-solid superhero. He was always the first one into a fight and the last one out, and this includes battling hordes of infected. He wasn’t just brave, he was smart brave. Never reckless, always prepared, and the size of a pissed off Bruce Banner. This guy simply did not acquiesce to fear. Him, taking that half step back with that look on his face, was one of the scariest things I’d seen since the beginning of all this shit.

  Donna furrowed her brow and made to take a look at me, but, in the second scariest moment of today, (and don’t forget I had been shot and chewed) Ship put one of his massive mitts out to stop her.

  “What the hell are you doing, you big gorilla? He’s losing blood and I need to check him!”

  Ship nodded no. He didn’t move his hand off of her chest, and short of using a chainsaw, or nuclear device, nobody was moving Ship’s paw when it was firmly planted. The silent bastard pointed at my quizzical face, and Donna squinted in the semi light. Then it was time for the next bit of fear in a long litany of chilling shit for today. She gasped. She looked in my eyes and gasped.

  Now everybody was looking. Did I grow a penis on my forehead? What the fuck was everybody staring at? They were all wide-eyed and stupid looking and I wanted to fucking kill them all! I blinked, the idea of my last thought haunting me. I loved these people, what the hell had I been thinking? I shook my head and my eyes began to water. I wiped them with my knuckles and suddenly it was hard to see. I looked at my hands and they were bloody.

  My eyes had started bleeding.

  Infected. Again

  Since this whole Armageddon-apocalypse thingy started, there have been several instances transcribed into these journals where I related that a particular moment in time was the scariest ever. I just wrote it down up above if you remember correctly. Being chased by machine-gun toting rednecks on snowmobiles? Scary. Zombies coming for me in the dark? Scary. Running through a military base overrun by thousands of infected with bullets flying, and tank rounds going off all over the place? Pretty damn scary. Being bitten. Now that was frightening as fuck, because I absolutely knew I was dead. Worse, I didn’t have the balls back then to swallow a bullet, so my shambling corpse would have been forever trapped in a shitty 1960’s Airstream trailer. When I got better after the first couple of bites, I realized that I couldn’t contract whatever it is that both kills someone, and then brings them back to life. Maybe contract isn’t the right word, because I do get sick, but then I get better. I don’t know, I’m not a friggin’ doctor.

  The point is, for a split second, I had wished violence on the people I care about. I don’t mean I wanted to shout I hate you at them. Everybody’s done that and felt bad about it afterward. I had wanted to eviscerate them. Play with their innards and squish their eyes and stuff like that. It popped into my head so fast I couldn’t help it. The feeling was gone just as quickly as it had come, but still, that isn’t me. I will kill someone to save me and mine. I will most certainly smoke an infected. I will even murder living people as a preventative measure for the protection of the folks I love. They would have to be assholes, but there it is.

  This time, I had really wanted to kill my friends, and that scared me on a level I hadn’t known I possessed. I had seen this type of wanton behavior before. Each and every Runner must exist in a state like I just had. It’s my theory that they don’t just want to rend, gnash, and kill, but it is a primal need of theirs. They have to do it, just like you and I have to eat, or drink, or watch football.

  I had fought off this infection thing a few times now, but this was the first bite that was actually damaging. I had to reevaluate my situation. What if because this bite was so deep, it did infect me? Turn me into a Runn
er, so I could scream that horrible scream and tear into people. Kill my friends and anyone else that got close.

  I couldn’t live with that.

  Todd was all kinds of shocked, “Your… your eyes are bleeding.”

  “Figured that one out all by myself there, Chief.”

  “He’s bitten!” he shouted. “And now his eyes are bleeding! He’s going to turn!”

  “If anyone was not going to turn, it would be him,” Alvarez told him.

  “What? Nobody lives through a bite. I’ve seen dozens. Before the news stopped broadcasting, they said anyone bitten or scratched had to be isolated.” He pointed at me. “He doesn’t look isolated! Nobody lives through a bite,” he repeated.

  “He does,” both Alvarez and Remo said at the same time.

  I felt my ire rising again. They were talking about me like I wasn’t here. I quelled my pent-up pissy, closed my bloody (not British bloody, actually bleeding) eyes, and counted to ten. “Todd,” I began, “I’ve been bitten before. The reason those assholes that were just shooting at us were here is undoubtedly because they are aware that I have survived a bite. I was in a secret government lab for a few months where they experimented on me.

  “And you escaped?”

  “Kind of. Much like on this stupid boat, the very same assholes decided it was a grand notion to stock a secure facility with shit-tons of dead cannibals for study. In a shocking turn of events, the infected broke out and killed everybody. I made my hasty exit during the ensuing carnage.”

  Todd looked at me funny. “What?”

  “I broke the fuck out.”

  “Oh.”

  Remo dropped the crew door all the way down, tested it with his boot, and stepped out onto it. He peeked (do badass military guys peek? No, they assess) around the corner and up, then ducked back in.

  “Can’t see shit.”

  Todd looked longingly out the door at the ocean. “I haven’t seen the sun in two months.”

  Ship scribbled for a minute, then passed his notebook to Remo. Remo looked at it, said, “Huh,” and passed it to me. We’ve most likely killed the leader of the men attacking us, or at least their mission commander. The departing helicopter may be indicative of a failed mission for them. Rather than go up and across the deck, I suggest we double back and use the stairwell they just cleared to obtain access to the wheelhouse.

  “Ever the smarty-pants,” I said with a grin, handing the book back to him.

  He began writing immediately, and passed the book back to me when he was finished. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t watch you. You’ve explained to me in great detail of your previous encounters with the infected, but never mentioned bleeding eyes. Has this happened before? If not, I would hypothesize that this bite is somehow different. For that matter, maybe something you ate, or a hormone imbalance or any number of bodily or environmental factors prevented infection from taking hold prior to now. Perhaps those factors are no longer present. Then there’s a hypothesis that this plague could be nothing more than an allergen, and after repeat bites, you have finally reached your allergic threshold and can no longer fight off whatever this is. You could very well be infected.

  I wiped away another crimson tear. “Dude, for someone who can’t talk, you sure don’t know how to shut up.”

  Remo stepped away from the hatch. “He’s right though. Their ride just left. They also threw grenades at a target that they were supposed to acquire.” He looked at my blank expression. “You. They tried to kill you, or at least didn’t give a shit if you died. That guy,” he thumbed at the guy Ship had drilled, “was probably the driving factor in their mission, and once he was dead, compounded with the fact that they had sustained losses, they just took off. Besides,” he said looking at his watch, “we should be having company soon, and that would have scared off any chopper.”

  He moved back the way we had come, and we followed him. I looked at Kinga’s body on the way by. It was fucked up that we were going to leave him here, but that’s how it was now. Remo stood over his body for a second, then glanced at the ladder. He slung his rifle, and picked Kinga up by his armpits. He began to move him back toward the crew hatch, and it dawned on me what he was about to do. I slung my rifle as well, and made to pick up Kinga’s feet, but Donna was suddenly there.

  “Don’t even fucking think about it. You’re not picking up anything heavier than that rifle for a week.”

  I stared her down. “This is different.”

  Her eyebrows raised and she stared right back. “Do you think he would want you to open up your already-bleeding wound to help carry him?”

  Ship, who I have no doubt could have carried Kinga’s body while it was in a horse-drawn carriage, horses and all, bent to pick up my dead buddy’s feet. “I got it,” Remo said, and effortlessly threw the lifeless man into a fireman’s carry. Remo brought the body to the crew door, opened it with his free hand, and gently placed Kinga on it. He knelt down, said something under his breath, and pushed Kinga over the edge.

  Remo strode past us and climbed up the ladder without a word, using his collapsible stick-mirror to check around while at the same time keeping his head out of the way of bullets or teeth from above. We followed, and I noticed that the heavy guy that we had lost to the dead was moving. There wasn’t much left, but he was still attempting to crawl toward us. I stopped Todd, and tried to borrow his broom handle.

  “Oh,” he said, looking at the pathetic thing that had been a human being less than a half hour ago. “You’re hurt.” He strode past me, putting a hand on my chest. He tried to thrust the sharp end of the spear through the dead man’s head, but it wouldn’t go. It kept sliding off. Ship appeared, and gave the dead man a kick that nearly decapitated him. That did it, and whatever damage my pal’s huge hoof did was enough. The thing ceased moving.

  Remo did this cool slide thing back down the ladder and approached us, getting down on his haunches. “There’s nobody up there that I can see, living or dead. I can’t believe they didn’t breach the galley, as well as coming around like we did.” He brushed the deck with his hand and began to draw with his Sharpie marker. He drew the galley, the corridors, the stairs, and pointed to where we were. It was amazing. Ship looked impressed at Remo’s recall powers, and it was not easy to impress Sasquatch. “I’m going to go first. You and you next.” He pointed to Todd and Donna. “Then you. Ship can help.” Guess who he had pointed at that last time? “Alvarez, you’re up last. Check your six when you’re the only one down here. When we’re all up there, I’m still moving first. Nobody goes past me for any reason. I will clear the way. If I go down, Alvarez is on point and Ship covers the rear. If they die, the rest of you are on your own. We’re heading for the wheelhouse by way of that stairwell. Whoever hit us must have cleared it or they wouldn’t have made it down to us. Absolute, utter silence as well. Don’t say anything unless you believe not speaking will get someone killed. Questions?”

  Other than when he had been training me in hand-to-hand combat, I had never heard Remo say so much at once. Todd meekly raised his hand. “Can I have a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Remo looked at him, and Todd lowered his hand. “If you need a weapon, there will be plenty on the deck.” He pulled something from his pocket and passed it to me. I thought it was his magic marker, but it was Kinga’s mirror. “You said you wanted one.” With that, he looked at each of us in turn, stood, spun, and was up the ladder looking into his mirror again before we could reply.

  I wiped my eyes. They were really irritated, and come to think of it, so was I. I was beginning to rage about these assholes who had killed my friend. And who was Remo to tell me what to do? This whole fucking op had been my idea. Did he think just because he could kill me, that he was the boss of me?

  Holy shit, it had happened again. I looked around at the folks with me, Donna now climbing the ladder after Remo. I was pissed and wanted to smash something. The nearest things were my friends. I took a
couple of deep breaths and it passed, but it was beginning to really frighten me.

  Todd was up and it was my turn. I climbed for what seemed like a half hour, looked down, and saw Ship’s chest. I looked up and he was eye to eye with me. I had made two rungs. He nodded in an upward direction, indicating that I should continue climbing. When I had made five rungs, the big guy grabbed me by the back of my legs. I looked down at him and he nodded, lifting me up to Todd and Donna, who grabbed me and helped me up. I was getting weak.

  Ship came up, followed by Alvarez, and we were all there. Todd began walking toward the open hatch which would lead to the galley doors, looking in all directions with his spear in front of him. He got about fifteen feet before Remo said Stop. He hadn’t said it forcefully, or loud, but there was definitely an air of do what I tell you or you’re fucking dead. Todd turned, swallowing, and Remo told him not to move. Not even a step. Todd nodded and stared at Remo.

  My MARSOC buddy moved toward the frightened guy slowly, reiterating the don’t move command. Remo had his hands up in supplication, like he was on the end of a mugging, with his rifle dangling as he moved toward Todd. He got on one knee in front of the crewman. “Really, don’t move. At all,” he said, and fished out a pair of clippers from his pack. Remo was bent over looking at something. He looked back at me. “I’ll need that toothpick back.”

  I limped forward carefully, removing the cellophane wrapped, pointy piece of wood from my tactical pants. The end of the dental helper had broken off in my pocket and I saw Remo’s eyebrows raise as I handed it to him. He shook his head as he returned to what he was doing. I looked over his shoulder, and even with my bloody, irritated eyes, I could see the words FRONT TOWARD ENEMY raised in the green plastic. A claymore. A fucking mine, the trip wire of which was resting on the top of Todd’s boot, most assuredly with the aforementioned raised words pointed toward all of us. I had seen what these things could do to people in an outside environment and it was devastating. Devastating. Inside a metal corridor, there would have been nothing left of us except something all over the walls resembling a demented Jackson Pollock painting.