by Amy Spahn
Their spacesuits lay abandoned in a pile next to one of the upended metal tables. Viktor breathed the planet’s air, wondering if even now it was rewiring his body, causing untold horrors to his internal organs. He wasn’t a biologist; he had no idea how long it would take for the zombie plague to take effect. But so far, despite the initial panic all three had felt when their air ran out and the zombies removed their helmets, they seemed fine.
Areva crouched almost out of sight behind one of the tables, but from time to time her hand would reach out, pull one of the suit’s wrist monitors to herself, and check it.
“Twenty-six,” she said.
Ivanokoff ignored Chris’s huff of indignation. “How do you both feel?” he asked.
“Fine,” said Areva.
“Nauseous,” said Chris. “On the brink of hyperventilation. Bad headache. I think it’s starting to affect me.” He shivered and rubbed his arms, despite the blue UELE uniform providing more than enough warmth in the temperature-controlled room. “If it takes me, if I start to turn, what do you plan to do?”
“Kill you,” said Ivanokoff without missing a beat.
The scientist’s horrified expression made him laugh.
Chris’s face melted into indignation. “That was mean.”
“Yes.” Viktor stifled his chuckles and shook his head. “The zombies have not harmed us. If we turn, we will not become hostile.”
“Maybe I won’t, but both of you are trained killers!” Chris said. “How do I know your baser instincts won’t suddenly take over and make you try to eat my delicious, science-filled brain?”
“You told them to eat my brain for its literary knowledge.”
“I’m serious!”
“We will not eat your brain, Sergeant.” Viktor wondered what would happen if zombieism brought out his suppressed instincts. He doubted he’d attack anyone. More likely, he and Areva would wind up like that hand-holding couple from the group of doctors. He smiled. As zombie plagues went, that might not be so bad.
On the topic of the zombie doctors, Viktor wondered where they had gone. After ensuring the three had ample time to breathe the planet’s air, the doctors hung around to watch them for ten minutes or so, before wandering from the room. They’d heard the magnetic lock on the door buzz, trapping them inside.
Chris paced to the door and tried the handle for the forty-seventh time. “They’re waiting for it to take us,” he said. “I just know it.”
“If we were going to turn, wouldn’t we have started already?” Areva asked. “We’re not the same species as them. Maybe we’re immune. That could be why they locked us in here, to see if we’re unaffected.”
“If so,” said Viktor, “that may be why they captured us. If we are immune, they may wish to make themselves the same.”
“Great,” said Chris. “We’re back to the dissection theory.”
“They may simply ask for help,” said Viktor.
“What is it with you people being so optimistic? It’s like I’m working with a roomful of Matthiases here.”
The magnetic lock on the door stopped humming. Viktor rose. A moment later, the liver-spotted zombie doctor entered and shut the door behind him. The humming lock resumed.
“What do you want?” Viktor asked. The zombies had left the talkie box on the counter to translate their words.
It took several seconds, but the doctor appeared to understand. He pointed to all three of them, then to himself, and then waved his hand between them in a negative gesture. The effort at communication appeared to strain his capacities.
“Correct,” said Chris, “we’re not like you. We don’t want to become like you, so please let us go back to our ship.”
Blank stare.
“Our ship. Shiiiiiip.” Chris pointed up and mimed flying.
Still no clear sign of comprehension, but one of the doctor’s hands drifted up to point a claw at the roof.
“Up?” Viktor asked. “The ship is here?”
More blank staring.
“The shiiiiiip,” said Chris, flapping his arms like wings, “is a-bo-ve us.” He pointed up, eyes wide, head nodding.
The zombie stared some more, then made another negative gesture with his hand.
“Not the ship,” said Viktor. “Something else is above us?”
Relief spread on the zombie’s face, and he nodded.
“Right, the thing that made you undead,” Chris said.
Negative.
“No, you didn’t understand. The thing that made you all into zombies, it’s in your air.”
Negative, this time more forceful. Something glimmered in the doctor’s vacant eyes. Viktor sensed that he was trying very hard to make a point. Given the absent-mindedness inherent in the others, it must be taking all he had to focus. They might not have long before he forgot what he was doing here and wandered away again.
“You pointed up,” said Viktor, doing so. “That was to show that you breathed in the disease?”
Nod.
“So you are corpses because of something in the air.”
Negative.
Chris threw up his hands. “This makes no sense.”
Viktor’s frown deepened. “If not in the air, where is it?”
That sentence proved too complicated for the zombie, so Viktor ran through a litany of possibilities. “Are you zombies because of your food?”
Negative.
“Radiation?”
Negative.
“Water?”
Negative.
“Infection?”
Pause. The zombie lifted his elbows in an uncertain motion.
“Was it a disease?”
Negative.
“An accident?”
Negative. Forceful negative.
“You infected yourselves on purpose?”
Nod.
Excitement began to pump through Viktor as he gathered momentum. There was more to this story than they had assumed. “Your government claimed responsibility. Did they organize the infection of your people?”
Nod.
“You are a doctor. Was it a medical treatment?”
Nod.
“An injection?”
Nod.
“If you injected the infection that killed you, then what is in the air?”
Negative, nod, negative. Frustration creased the doctor’s sallow, tattered face.
“Does he mean there are two plagues?” Areva’s voice asked from behind the table.
Chris stopped his pacing, one finger poised in the air, mouth open. “There are two plagues!”
“I just said that,” said Areva.
Viktor, now thoroughly intrigued, approached the doctor. “Is the problem in the air related to your people being undead?”
A pause. Then a nod.
“Did one problem lead to the other?”
Negative.
“But they interact in some way.”
Nod.
Chris fluttered his hands excitedly. “And you’re holding us to see if the thing in the air is affecting us!” He mimed breathing, then pointed to his companions.
Nod.
A slow breath seeped through Viktor’s lips. “That is it. They are confused because we have not died from the air, and they want our immunity.” He did his best to use gestures to communicate this to the doctor.
Nod, nod, nod.
Pieces of the information they’d gathered fell together in Viktor’s mind. He turned to Chris and the table hiding Areva. “The recording we found stated that the plague was the result of government fallibility, but he did not say which plague he meant. Perhaps the government made an error that caused the problem in the air, and they distributed the zombieism to combat it.”
“Dumb way to do that,” said Chris. “Dying doesn’t really solve a plague.”
Viktor held up a hand. “What is the most important mechanism on the Endurance?”
“The coffee maker,” said Chris at once.
“No.”
; “The D Drive.”
“No.”
“Archibald’s vacuum cleaner.”
“No. The air recycler.”
Chris huffed. “Technically that’s a subsystem of the environmental mechanism, which is interdependent with …”
“The air recycler allows us to live on the ship,” Ivanokoff continued. “It filters contamination, the way trees do on planets.”
“Look who passed high school biology,” Chris said.
“Whatever contagion is in the atmosphere, their trees could not correct it. What would happen then, if the air was bad and the people had to breathe it?”
“They’d die,” said Areva, poking her head around the edge of the table in curiosity.
“Death by disease,” Chris said. “Thanks, I needed another pleasant outcome to consider.”
“Correct,” said Ivanokoff. “Now suppose the people did not need to breathe …”
Chris’s eyes widened. “They could go on living, even on a contaminated world!”
“Da.”
“The mayor was apologizing for whatever situation brought about the air problem, not the zombieism. They had everyone injected with the zombie virus to protect them!”
“By killing them,” said Areva’s voice, her face hidden once more.
“They still have emotions, and some semblance of society,” said Chris. “That’s better than mass extinction.” Now heedless of his germophobia, he grabbed the doctor’s arm. “We’re immune to whatever’s in your air! Don’t give us the zombie drug!”
The doctor merely blinked at them, apparently content to let them talk. Maybe he’d already forgotten why he came.
“Good,” said Chris, letting go of the zombie. “Now, time for solutions. If we get a few samples of atmospheric content, we might be able to fix their air, and then we can reverse the zombieism and set this entire planet back to normal. How’s O&I gonna like that?”
“I don’t think they will,” said Areva.
“Decidedly not,” Viktor agreed.
Chris sighed. “The two of you have the combined sense of humor of a nihilist joke book.”
“Thank you,” said Viktor.
“That wasn’t a compliment.”
“You have clearly not read a nihilist joke book.”
Chris waved his hands. “Whatever. The point is, we know what we’re dealing with, and we can do something about it.” He grinned broadly at the zombie. “So how about it, Doctor Decay? Can we go back to our ship and try to fix your society?”
* * *
Thomas grew tired of his O&I shadows, but he didn’t think it would help their report if he confined them to their berths.
Matthias had asked to fiddle with some bridge controls to scan for their missing people. Now half an entire console lay in pieces on the floor, and Thomas could hear the two suits making scathing notes on their pocket comps behind him.
“Whoops, that shouldn’t be wired like that.” Matthias’s chipper voice filled the bridge, only slightly muffled by his position beneath the console. Something went zap, and something on the other side of the bridge went fzzzzBANG! The engineer emerged, grinning. “Fixed it. You know, I bet with enough rewiring, I could make these things detect the cold bodies of those undead people. Could prob’ly make it find ghosts with enough experimentation.”
Tap, tap went the two suits’ note-taking fingers.
Thomas tried to ignore them. “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Lieutenant.”
“Sure there are, Cap!” Matthias bounced to his feet. “When I was a kid, my family went to stay in these ruins of this ancient pyramid—one of those package tourist trips, you know—and I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, and on my way back in, I heard these footsteps coming from inside the room where we were all sleeping, so I hid. The footsteps stopped, but when I got back to the main room, no one was there.”
“Your family was gone?”
“No, no, they were there. But no one else was. So …” Matthias widened his eyes, and his voice dropped to a spooky hush. “Who was making those footsteps?”
Thomas was spared from having to answer that question when an alert message began flashing on one of the bridge consoles. “One of the EVA suits just pinged.”
The officer currently stationed at scanners slid her chair back into position and brought up her displays of the area outside the warehouse. “It just appeared, sir. Probably left a building shielded by a jamming field to block radio signals. Or they turned the field off. Or something. I’ve got all three of them now, heading this way.”
“Visual?”
“Buildings are in the way, sir. I’ve only got thermal.”
“Let’s see it.”
A moment later, one of the screens suspended over the bridge’s front window ports switched from its normal display of engine output to a multi-colored wash. In the dull greys of the lifeless buildings and decrepit roads, Thomas made out three distinct warm bodies moving in the center of the screen. There was also a dark form partially obscuring them—a decidedly humanoid figure that shambled along in front of the others, clearly heading to the same destination.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but that looks like four people.”
The officer squinted at her own display of the same data. “Confirmed, Captain. We’ve got four incoming.”
“Maybe they brought a zombie with them,” said Matthias.
“We’re not calling them zombies,” Thomas said absently, rubbing his forehead with one hand while his other clutched an armrest for support. Surely Ivanokoff wouldn’t be that stupid, or Areva that reckless, or Chris that, well, brave.
The orangey figures grew on the display as they approached the ship, proving Thomas wrong.
He slowly raised his hand to his intercom interface. “Page medical.”
“Paging medical,” confirmed the ship’s automated voice.
A moment later, Maureen Habassa’s soft soprano answered. “Chief medic responding, Captain. Can I help you?”
“Our people are coming back, and after this long, they’ve got to have breathed the planet’s air. Worse, they’ve got one of the locals with them. I know you’re no doctor, Officer Habassa, but we’re going to need whatever training you’ve got.”
To her credit, Maureen didn’t panic, or even raise her voice. “I’ll do my best, sir. I’ve got some good reference materials on respiratory function that I’m sure will help.”
“We’re going to have to keep them in isolation, so set up one of the empty berths as a ward. I don’t want anyone coming into contact with them without protective gear.”
“Understood.”
Thomas took a deep breath to still his racing nerves. If the most junior member of his crew could handle this calmly, so could he. “I think we’re about to get some answers.”
Bradshaw the suit glanced up from his pocket comp. His twitching eye narrowed to a slit. “I hope they’re good ones.”
* * *
It took over an hour and a full medical examination by every remotely qualified scientist on the ship to convince Captain Withers that Viktor, Areva, and Chris were not infected with the zombie plague, and therefore humans were likely immune to the air contagion.
Ivanokoff considered that a victory, especially since it had been achieved with so little shouting.
The zombie doctor was another matter.
Withers refused to allow him into the ship until Maureen admitted she couldn’t perform an examination of the doctor while wearing an EV suit, and the science posse ganged up to argue that since humans were immune to the plague, there was no reason to fear bringing the doctor aboard. The captain finally agreed, but the zombie still had to pass three rounds of decontamination in the airlocks and be escorted to the isolation ward, which no one could enter without full surgical gear.
Chris performed the introductions. “Doctor Decay, meet Captain Withers. Heh heh.”
The zombie took this without reaction.
V
iktor stood with the captain to watch Maureen take samples of hair, skin, and blood from the zombie and place them carefully in slides. “She is improving.”
The captain gave a grudging nod. “She took some correspondence courses.”
Maureen moved the slides to a microscope she’d borrowed from the science team and peered at them.
“So you convinced them to let you go?” the captain asked.
“Da. We discovered our immunity. We realized this zombie—”
“Don’t call them that.”
“—undead state was protecting them from breathing the plague in their air. We offered help.”
“And they believed you?”
“It was truth.”
“Yeah, but they believed you?”
“Why not?”
The captain shrugged. “Most of the people we’ve found out here aren’t the trusting types.”
“Death has slowed their higher thought processes.”
“So they had to be half brain-dead to trust you?”
Viktor grimaced. “I did not say that.”
Maureen made an “aha” sound and leaned forward, keying various commands into the microscope control pad.
“So,” said the captain, “who did this to them?”
That same question had been needling Viktor since he realized the true reason behind the zombieism. Why was the air contaminated by that deadly plague? Given the nature of the recordings in the library, he doubted these people did it themselves.
The not-a-doctor stood up and twirled away from the microscope, her ponytail of long curls dancing with the movement. “Well, I think I’ve learned all I can from that analysis.”
Withers leaned forward. Viktor did not.
Maureen nodded to Doctor Decay. “This man is definitely dead.”
They waited for more.
That was it. Maureen smiled pleasantly.
“We knew that,” said the captain. “He’s not breathing, and he has no pulse, and, I mean, look at his flesh.”
“True,” said Maureen, “but now it’s proven. Scientifically.”
“Is there anything new?”
“I can confirm that he’s a corporeal being.”
Viktor’s lip curled. “How does that help?”
“Well, he’s not a ghost, even though he’s clearly dead and mobile.”