Parasite ; Sleeper Cells ; Kingdoms of the Dead

by Ian Woodhead

  A huge blast of nausea crashed into his head when he turned. Tony squeezed his eyes shut and slowly counted to five, just like he’d been shown. When he opened them again, he found that the sickness was already leaving him.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  “Motion sickness,” he replied. “It’s nothing to be concerned about. Joseph did warn me that I’d feel a little queasy if I was suddenly pulled out of the sim.” He shrugged. “Don’t look at me like that, honey.” He looked into his wife’s intense blue eyes. “You did say that you’ll join me in the experience later tonight, Ellen. I’m holding you to that promise, you know. As for your initial question?” Tony laughed. “Good? It’s just incredible. Even the software’s implanted memories felt real.”

  She leaned forward and brushed her lips across his. “I asked you about your breakfast, honey.”

  Tony chuckled. “Sorry, I got a little carried away. Yes, Ellen, just how I like it.”

  She paused. “So, it felt as though you were really there?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.”

  “If there are any pretty girls inside this thing of yours, I will not be happy with you, Tony.”

  He grabbed her shoulders. “Trust you to say that. Come on, let me show you, it’ll only take a few moments.”

  “Later, Tony. You can show me your new toy tonight after work. Right now though, I want you to stop drooling and eat. You’ll be late.”

  Tony stretched his legs, feeling the pleasant ache running through his lower muscles. Both his arms felt the same. He had trouble believing that this was still only the first part of the orientation program. He’d yet to even check out the combat sections. Tony really had been tempted to forgo all the training stuff and jump straight into the fun bit, but Joseph had warned him against that course of action, saying that he’d be dead within a few minutes. After what he’d gone through, Tony now saw his point.

  He followed his wife out of the recreation room. “This new piece of software is going to save us both a fortune on credits and favors.” He chuckled. “Trust me on this.”

  “I’m not sure how, honey. I know that you said we could use it to strengthen our skills, but I’m sorry if I seem a little sceptical.” She pointed to the framed picture of her latest certificate on the wall above their television. “Now, don’t get me wrong, honey. You of all people know how much I need to improve my talent. Coming in third in our district’s stand-off kill-zone competition just won’t cut it with the company.”

  He shrugged. “Ellen, you’re the one who won’t put on the headset.”

  “Yeah, I know that I’m casting doubt without even trying it out. Can you blame me though? I mean, think about it. Before the outbreak, the combined global community of computer geeks failed to get anything remotely looking like real life with their VR experiments. Yet, all of a sudden, your friend Joseph just happens to pull one out of his ass? The defense sessions are the only way for me to improve and you know it.”

  “How’s your leg?”

  Ellen followed his gaze down to her left ankle. “I’ll live,” she murmured, lifting her leg on the hallway step. She rolled up her dark blue leggings and pointed to a large bruise spread over her ankle. “It was your friend, Henry, who did that to me.”

  “All the more reason why you should at least try out the device.” He rolled his eyes. “Wait a minute. If I remember correctly, Henry was trying to get you to the next safe zone. You’re the one who tripped up. He grabbed you before those three clamped contestants fell on you.” Tony sensed, judging by the way her glare was now drilling two holes into his forehead, that perhaps he should not have run off at the mouth.

  “Now why did I know that you would leap to the defense of our district commander? There are moments like this when I seriously wonder if you’re married to me or him.”

  “Come on, don’t be like that. Okay, so he’s my boss, but I wouldn’t leap to his defense. To be honest, I think he’s a bit of a dick.” He saw a slight smile creep onto her face. “Admit it, Ellen. We both have idiots for bosses.”

  She giggled. “A good point. Saying that though, Rossini is a way bigger dick than your boss.”

  Tony caught up with Ellen and wrapped his arms around her slender waist. “Believe me, honey. I’m only married to you. Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that my boss does have a cute ass, but yours is the only one that I want to caress.” He spun her around. “Honest.”

  His wife chuckled and wriggled out of his grip. “Just you wait until I explain to your boss that you have the hots for him.”

  He smiled back at Ellen, just thankful that his timely intervention had put a break on her imminent temper explosion. His muscles still ached. The last thing he needed this morning was his wife to start throwing household objects at him again.

  She rolled her leggings back down to her ankle. “I just hope that the bruise will have faded in time for the party next week. I’m not going to wear slacks for anyone.” Ellen scowled at him. “Rossini’s wife has had her dress flown in, you know. Now that is just showing off.”

  “It doesn’t matter where she got the dress from. She looks like a fat corpse and no dress can disguise that fact.”

  He listened to her giggle whilst hurrying through the living room and disappearing into the kitchen. Tony got rid of his own smile and collapsed into his armchair. As soon as he shut his eyes, Tony found his thoughts drifting back to the simulation. When he was running through the deserted streets of that ruined city, there wasn’t much time to stop and gaze at the landscape, not when half a dozen zombies were trying their hardest to catch and eat him.

  “Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” he muttered as the image of the wall that he’d taken shelter behind appeared at the front of his mind. As he stood up, Tony remembered the remains of what looked like an aircraft hangar just to the left of him. “It’s the old bus station!” This city was where he’d grown up. Tony vividly remembered waiting in that terminus many a night after finishing university.

  It felt a little spooky to find himself running for his life in the ruins of the citystate where he’d spent his childhood. It was even stranger for him not to have noticed until after the fact. Tony sighed and shook his head. Why was it strange? After all, how can you stop to drink in the sights when you’re on the run from a horde of blood-crazed zombies?

  Tony’s eyes snapped open. He took a deep shuddering breath and looked over to the kitchen. That was one thing that he hadn’t mentioned to his wife. It had felt real, that he couldn’t deny. What had impressed him more than anything was that there had been no sense of detachment involved. He wasn’t some outsider looking in. Tony had actually believed that the shit happening to him was real.

  There was something else too; looking back, it felt as though he wasn’t the only one occupying that character’s body. Like he had a hitchhiker? Or was it that he was the one who’d invaded that body? Tony quietly chuckled. Listen to him, actually thinking that digital scenario actually existed.

  Still, the chances of the machine constructing a sequence involving another citystate, more to the point, one where he’d grown up, were astronomical. There must be thousands of areas programmed into the device, each one supposedly randomly selected.

  He’d just have to ask Joseph when he arrived at work this morning.

  Tony turned on the television. Early morning was the only time when he’d willingly watch anything. After midday, all those crappy programs that his wife was involved in started up. He’d rather scoop out his eyeballs with a spoon than subject himself to any of that crap. Even when it had been his district’s turn to be highlighted for this year’s contestants in Hunt the Stray, Tony still refused to tune in, despite the fact that it had been his darling wife who’d claimed the kill.

  It took Tony a moment to pull his attention away from the pretty newsreader’s deep blue eyes and focus on the live pictures superimposed in the top corner of the dark blue background. />
  He felt a rare flush of excitement at the sight of one of the security force’s helicopters flying across the deadzone towards the huge wall of another citystate.

  The feed switched to show Tony the cockpit. He grinned at the sight of another citystate’s huge boundary wall filling the helicopter’s view. The founders had kept their promise to expand past the walls after all. The helicopter flew over the wall and the camera panned down to show hundreds of reanimated corpses milling around several metal platforms that the forces must have dropped earlier. “You’re an idiot, Tony,” he whispered, chuckling. He found himself getting caught up with the action, forgetting most of this would be staged for the audience. The off-screen gasps and sighs from the camera crew just had to be staged. They made it look as though this was the first flight into unchartered territory, the first brave souls venturing into an unexplored region.

  The forces had probably been in this city for weeks before allowing the cameras inside.

  A cold shiver travelled up his spine when the camera panned across the ruined city. This looked nothing like the citystate in the sim. Here, the vegetation had run riot. After four years, the color running through the place was predominantly green. Weeds, shrubs, bushes, and small trees had taken root everywhere.

  Three huge men protected by black armor abseiled down from the other helicopter and landed on the roof of the only visible building in there that looked more or less intact.

  “Oh hell, you have got to be kidding me. Where have all the trees and grass gone?” Tony had run past that building not that long ago. He leaned closer to the TV screen, taking in all the details that the cameras had to offer. None of this made any sense, no way could this be just another coincidence. He felt fingers of ice caress his spine as the camera panned across the landscape, tracing his route from where he’d entered the city to where he’d awakened. “Am I fucking dreaming this?”

  Tony forced his eyes away from the TV and looked over to the kitchen door. “Honey, come here a minute, there’s something that I want to show you!” He dug his fingers into the edges of the armchair, fully aware he was panicking.

  “Jesus, hon,” cried his wife, rushing into the room. “What’s wrong?”

  He pointed at the television screen, then watched in confusion as the camera swept across the broken skyline. “What the hell?” Tony looked at his wife. “It showed a different city a moment ago. I swear, the picture has just been switched.”

  “Is this some sort of joke? If it is, you should put in some more work as I really don’t understand any of it.” She hurried back into the kitchen. “Sit back down, Tony,” she shouted. “Your breakfast is just about ready.”

  He did as he asked, not exactly sure what had just happened there. “Maybe that’s another question to ask my boss,” he growled. He’d never mentioned anything about experiencing any possible side effects.

  Tony looked up and gave Ellen a warm smile when she reappeared from the kitchen, carrying his tray. She gently placed it on his knees. “Thank you, honey,” he said, trying not to allow his eyes to drift back to the television. “This looks great.” The smell of the hot bacon was already making his mouth water. Even now, after six months, Tony still found it hard to wrap his head around the fact that he could actually enjoy this type of luxury almost every other day. Thanks to his wife’s recent pay upgrade, bacon was no longer one of the foods only enjoyed by the rich and privileged.

  She nodded back. “You have no idea how much those eggs cost me, Tony.” She chuckled. “Who’d have thought that hen’s eggs are now rarer than hen’s teeth. Still, duck eggs are a decent enough substitute.” Ellen sat down beside him. “God, what a mess. It doesn’t look much like the arenas that we use in the defense sessions.”

  He forked a piece of bacon into his mouth and watched the three soldiers look up at the camera operator. It looked as though they wanted him down there on the roof with them. Wherever they had landed, Tony was now sure that this place was not where he was born. Those ice fingers were still there though, moving up and down his spine. What the hell was wrong with him?

  “Do you think there could still be survivors in there?”

  That was one question that he used to ask himself on a daily basis, up until a couple of years ago. Back then, the news of groups of survivors somehow escaping from the deadzones were few and far between. Now though, he didn’t think anybody could still be alive so far north. Tony had already accepted the fact that his family had been wiped out when the outbreak had almost ended the world five years ago.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, just look at all those zombies, all crowded around the machines. Without them, keeping their simple minds distracted, the soldiers wouldn’t last five minutes in that city, and they are heavily armed. What chance would a few starving, traumatized survivors have of getting out of there?” He forked in some more food, listening to the newsreader give the usual statistics about the challenges that the purge squads would face if they did choose this citystate to clear. He sighed to himself. As the head medical officer for the district, he already knew the facts and figures. It annoyed him how she seemed to insinuate that the purge squads had an easy task and that the government was delaying the island’s cleansing.

  “Are you okay?”

  Tony nodded. “Yeah, sorry.” He switched the channel over, pulling a face when he saw the news had ended and this morning’s round of In the Dead House was about to begin. “People like that newsreader just make me crazy. They don’t understand that it would have probably only taken us a couple of weeks to put down nearly every single walking corpse. The problem is how to dispose of the flesh.” Tony cut into his egg. “Every single one of those things is a chemical disaster. As long as the zombies still shuffle about, their bodies stay together. It’s only when the things are truly dead when the fun and games begin. Their flesh is nothing more than a foul concoction of highly toxic and corrosive chemicals.” He looked at his wife. “How on earth do you dispose of countless millions of corpses that refuse to rot?”

  Ellen silently took his empty plate and hurried back into the kitchen. Tony knew that he was going over old territory here, and his wife was too polite to tell him to be quiet. If he was truthful with himself, he did enjoy talking about the subject, especially this morning. The cold, hard facts kept his mind focused, and it stopped those thoughts wandering towards the unexplained shit that had already crashed into him.

  “They just don’t understand,” he continued. “None of the uninformed have thought this through. The only way to get the things to decompose as they should is to ensure that they turn back into humans.” Tony flipped through the channels, trying to find a program that didn’t show a bunch of cityblock morons running through badly painted studios. He stopped when he found a male newsreader showing old footage of huge piles of bodies just before soldiers dowsed the pile in gasoline. “Yeah, I notice you don’t mention the tiny fact that those bodies are all full of your precious drug. Not that anyone would ever admit to that.” Soldiers carrying flamethrowers fired into the piles, then staggered back as the huge plumes of black smoke rose into the blue sky. Tony stood up and angrily switched off the television.

  “Have you finished with your morning moan, honey?” asked his wife, giving him a sweet smile.

  He didn’t bother to answer her. He loved his wife to death, but even she couldn’t grasp the simple problem that every one of them was living on borrowed time. They hadn’t stopped Armageddon, they had just postponed it. As each month passed, he saw reports that their miracle drug was becoming less effective in preventing the already infected from finally undergoing the ultimate change from living human to dead monster with an insatiable craving for fresh meat.

  Not that he really blamed them for being unable to grasp what was painfully obvious to him. The species had only just begun to believe that they weren’t going to become extinct after all. He suspected that if they knew the truth, the suicides would go through the roof again. No,
it was better for them to allow the government to keep the masses distracted with the new television shows; it gave them all a reason to live.

  Tony lifted the tray off his knees and stood up, trying to put a lid on his bad mood. It seemed ironic that he believed that the lesser orders wouldn’t be able to cope with the realities of life without a routine when he was just as guilty as the rest of them.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine, honey,” he said, kissing the back of her neck. “Now, why don’t you tell me what you have planned for today while I’m over there in that big important building, trying to save the world?”

  Ellen rolled her eyes. “Just listen to yourself, Tony. You make it sound as though without you and your friends, we’d all be shambling about, looking for a tasty human to munch on.” She held up her hand. “Don’t bother to reply, honey. You know I’m only joking.” His wife smiled. “Well, if you must know, I’m entertaining this afternoon. A group of us ladies are getting together just past the ruins of the old government house. Our First Lady is going to be guest of honor as well.” She chuckled. “So, it’s not just you who has friends in high places, mister. It’s not every day when you meet the wife of the country’s First Chancellor.” She winked and walked past him, smacking his bottom as he carried the tray into the kitchen. “Don’t you worry, babes, I’ll make sure that your name pops up in conversation. If you’re lucky, I might even mention just how much you enjoy kissing the district commander.”

  Tony allowed a smile to play on his face. “I’m sure that will make the lovely woman blush a deep red.” He leaned around the doorway and watched her walk through the room and start up the stairs. Tony had to admit, the chance of spending some quiet time with the wife of the most important man in the county would be something that he would cherish.

  Gloria Hainsworth was indeed a fine-looking woman; he didn’t know many men who didn’t have a thing for her. It was amazing what power combined with a beautiful face and large breasts did to the men that he worked with. Himself included. Tony wouldn’t have minded spending a night or four with her as well.