Zombie Fever 1: Origins

by B.M. Hodges

Two days later and the sky filled with dark clouds and it began to rain, the normally bright San Diego night now dark and foreboding. It was time.

  It was closing in on ten o’clock. Tomas checked in with Dr. Greer one last time to go over the plan and double check his mental diagram of the Vitura Pharmaceuticals compound. Dr. Greer was upbeat and positive. “I know you can do this, Tomas. You have a fire within you, I know it and your father knew it. He was always bragging about your inner power.” She was still on the schooner on the way to Panama and full of caffeinated pep of someone set free. Once in Panama, she explained to him that she planned to meet one of her contacts for a round of cosmetic surgery that would alter her profile. Then she was going to procure a passport that would match her new face and get her into Australia undetected to start her recruitment drive to find allies in their battle against corporate zombie contagion.

  He made one last phone call to the pilot he’d hired on standby to prep the single-engine Cessna Skylane. The pilot had been sitting idle at Lindbergh Field for the last two days. He was obliging but eager to make the run. Tomas had booked the pilot and plane open ended and the bill was running high, but he couldn’t risk not having the plane ready at a moment’s notice; and even as the bill neared the ten thousand dollars, it was relatively small compared to his new found wealth. Besides, the pilot agreed to keep his flight off the books and to be at his beck and call for a lump sum payment. Before hanging up, the pilot reminded him they’d have to stop to refuel in Stockton as the plane’s maximum range was just short of their destination. The small Cessna had barely enough cargo space to accommodate the coffin’s dimensions with the rear seats removed. He’d thought about opting for a larger plane for its longer range and space, but didn’t want to be too conspicuous.

  Tomas fingered the security pass in his pocket and did a final inventory check of the duffel bag by the apartment door. He thought again about bringing along a weapon, staring at the block of kitchen knives on the kitchen counter. During the last two days he’d struggled against the urge to purchase a combat knife, stun gun or even pepper spray. But he’d always been opposed to physical confrontation and didn’t want to invite trouble by preparing for it.

  He looked around his father’s living room, knowing this would be the last time he would see the place, recalling fast food dinners on the coffee table, building forts out of sheets and the dining chairs, kissing a girl for the first time at the age of twelve on that worn sofa one night while his father was working late. “I’m coming for you, Dad,” he said, not realizing that he’d used the ‘D’ word for the first time since he was a small boy.

  Tomas walked briskly to the moving van in the RV parking section of the parking lot. He’d secured the coffin and his motorcycle inside the rear the night before. He set the duffel bag on the front seat and climbed inside. The smell of the fresh pearl white paint was strong in his nose. He started the van and pulled away.

  Dr. Greer had said that the best time to attempt an infiltration into the compound undetected was during the change of shifts at three a.m. But Tomas wasn’t sneaking in. His plan was to hide in plain sight. After all, he needed to get his father out of there and the only way he believed that would be possible would be to sneak in with a transport van similar to the ones he’d observed parked in the compound. He figured that once he made it through the front gate, the rest of his plan would fall into place.

  He turned on the windshield wipers as droplets of early summer rain began to fall. His vision was limited as he’d painted most of the windshield with a dull gray paint to obscure his face from the security cameras out in front of the Vitura compound. He had to lean forward close to the wheel to see out the small clear horizontal line he’d left as his only means of seeing ahead.

  The rain began to beat a steady rhythm on top of the van as he waited at one of the many stop lights along Mira Mesa Boulevard. He held his breath, hoping that a random police officer on patrol wouldn’t come up behind him and run the plates he’d stolen off one of Andy’s neighbor’s trucks, or notice that his windshield was intentionally obscured and pull him over for a vehicle violation.

  But the promise of rain must have driven most late-night commuters indoors as the boulevard was virtually empty and less than five minutes later he was driving along Sorrento Valley Road.

  Before turning into the small dead end lane where Vitura Pharmaceuticals was located, Tomas pulled to the side of the road and switched off the lights. When the road was clear of vehicles, he climbed out of the cab, went to the back of the van and, as quietly as possible, lifted the rear door, pulled down the ramp and rolled the motorcycle out of the bed, parking it off the road under a cluster of trees. Every getaway movie he’d ever seen had a Plan B. The motorcycle was his Plan B; - a means of escape in the event everything went haywire.

  He got back in the van and drove into Vitura’s drive. His stomach started doing summersaults as he got closer. While he wasn’t opposed to ingesting the occasional illicit drug or breaking an inconsequential law to, say, skinny dip with his ex in a hotel pool after hours, he was an exceptionally law-abiding person when it came to other people’s welfare - his moral compass holding steady when it came to harming people. But his plan involved committing several serious and potentially violent felonies. Breaking bad was something new to him and wracked his nervous system.

  “Doc, you there?” Tomas asked. His throat was dry and his voice cracked.

  “I’m here, Tomas.”

  “I’m turning towards the gate now.”

  “Tomas. Focus and don’t hesitate or you’ll look suspicious. Remember, fluid movements. Calm and serene. You can do this.”

  The van pulled up to the gate. Tomas cranked down the window and held the badge out high towards the cameras. He turned his head away and waited.

  There was a clank and the gates trundled open.

  Tomas rolled up the window and drove through. It was a mystery to him why his father’s old security badge was still functioning and he couldn’t help but wonder if Dr. Greer didn’t have something to do with it. Even exiled, he imagined she still had colleagues working inside the compound sympathetic to her cause and willing to do her favors when called upon.

  The white cargo van stopped alongside a line of similar white vans. As casually as possible, Tomas exited the compartment with his head down and cap low, carrying the unzipped duffel bag, his eyes darting back and forth searching for trouble.

  He raised the van’s door up and pulled the ramp down, leaving the door open for easy access when he had his father in tow.

  His father’s soft-soled orthopedic shoes were cramped and hurt his feet as he walked. Tomas winced, his pinky toes screaming in pain as his toenails snagged against the torn bits of leather inside the worn shoes. Two scientist-looking types appeared on the sidewalk in front of him. He nodded as they approached but they ignored him as they strolled past, absorbed in their conversation and above acknowledging a lowly security guard. This gave Tomas some relief. If it were common practice to ignore the working class employees, then all he had to worry about were the other security guards, and maybe the janitors, blowing his cover.

  He turned and followed the sidewalk between the buildings and started circling the administration building. When he thought the coast was clear he veered close to the building, reached into the duffel bag and, as he walked hurled, two tannerite devices - one at a time - onto the roof of the three-story structure.

  Even with the light rain and cool wind blowing in from the nearby coast, he was sweating nervously: the khaki guard’s shirt sticking to his back, saddlebags of perspiration forming under his pectorals. He zipped up the bag, acted like he’d forgotten something, turned and began walking back towards the two rear buildings, taking deep breaths and gathering his courage now that the initial stages of the plan were behind him. If the plan were to fail, he’d expected it to happen when trying to enter the compound or when he was throwing the bombs onto the building. Both of tho
se aspects of the plan required a dangerous degree of exposure. Now he just had to keep his head down and find his dad.

  The buildings didn’t have any signage or markings.

  Dr. Greer said the laboratories were in the building diagonal from the administration building he’d been in earlier in the week.

  Tomas rounded the corner and, to his relief, saw that the cargo bay doors were wide open. There were three men inside using a noisy forklift and heavy-duty pitch arms to load a truck with large metal containers. The forklift made a racket and the pitch arm’s joints whined as the men angled the containers in with the mechanical extensions. They didn’t notice the unfamiliar security guard making his way along the far wall behind the shoulder high crates packed with industrial machinery.

  He counted off the paces … thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty … stopping when his feet hit a hollow plate on the concrete floor. He poured the thermite into a convenient little mound on top of the metal floor panel and stuck the magnesium cord into the pile.

  Now for the telephone call.

  Tomas dialed the fire department and whispered, “There’s a huge five alarm fire at Vitura Pharmaceuticals on Sorrento Valley Road. I think there are people trapped inside. Bring everything you’ve got.” He hung up before the operator could ask any questions.

  He lit the magnesium cord and ran down the aisle away from the flashpoint, knowing that it would release an extreme amount of heat energy and light, possibly attracting unwanted attention. As he ran, he clicked the call button three times on his phone and heard two successive booms outside from his roof bombs. Yellow warning lights inside the building began to swirl around and the emergency sirens began to wail.

  The thermite was doing its business; a radiant glow and popping sounds came from the molten iron that streamed off the metal plate. The thermite ate into the compartment onto the thick cable underneath.

  Tomas watched the three workers as they evacuated the cargo bay. One of them noticed the radiant light on the far side of the room from the thermite burn. He shouted to his co-workers but they were more concerned about their own hides and pulled him along with them out of the building.

  There was a metallic clunking sound and Tomas panicked as he watched two-foot thick steel shutters begin descending along their tracks in front of the cargo bay doors.

  He was going to be trapped.

  But the shutters stopped three-quarters of the way down as the thermite finally ate through the security cable, disabling the emergency system.

  “I’m in,” he said to Dr. Greer who was waiting anxiously to hear those very words.

  “Okay, Tomas. Now, I need you to listen carefully. This may sound antithetical to your current situation but I want you to hold where you are for five minutes. You need to give the scientists and other workers time to evacuate before you start searching room to room. Otherwise, someone will stop you. Sit tight and breathe. I know this will be difficult, but it needs to be done.”

  “Roger.” He went a step further and climbed under a large fabricator on blocks beside the flight of stairs to the second floor. Safely hidden, he watched as employees ran by, their feet not more than six inches from his nose. He wasn’t sure whether exactly five minutes had passed, but it had been two minutes since the last pair of sensible shoes had hurried by, so he crawled out, climbed the stairs and slipped inside.

  The yellow lights and emergency sirens gave the corridor a fun house appearance. Just as he entered the hallway, a group of workers in lab coats came thundering down the hall towards him. He was too early after all. Tomas straightened up, held open the door, and said authoritatively, “This way, people.”

  They ran by with scarcely a glance his way.

  The double wide corridor stretched down the center of the second floor for at least a hundred yards and there were at least a dozen doors on each side labeled Laboratory 1, Laboratory 2, Laboratory 3, etc. Every door had an electronic lock with palm and iris scanners. It would take him at least an hour to break into each of them with the angle grinder and search inside for Andy. “Doc, I’m on the lab level. There’s like a kajillion labs up here. Any advice on where to start?”

  “Sorry, Tomas. My research department wasn’t in that building. I’ve only been on that floor a few times. Do you see the security booth to the right of the door? Maybe you can still access it with Andy’s card. There should be a manifest or something of that nature that might be of use to you.”

  Tomas went to the booth and jiggled the door handle but it was locked. He slid the security card through the reader attached to the door frame but it flashed red. Frustrated he cupped his hands and peered into the booth, hoping to get a glimpse of a handwritten list among all the scattered papers on the desk or a blueprint of the floor or anything helpful. But there was nothing in view worthwhile. He was about to abandon the booth and break the door, when the rotating image on the desktop monitor flicked to a different view.

  Tomas gasped.

  The hi-def picture showed a tight shot of Andy, crisp and clear, unconscious and suspended upright in an acrylic cylindrical tube in a translucent fluid, an oxygen mask clinging to his face and hundreds of tiny colored wires sticking out of tiny holes in his skull. And underneath the image, the screen read, “Laboratory 9.”

  A rage consumed Tomas - the likes of which he’d never felt before. He remembered the cold, reptilian way Bertrand had explained his father’s ‘death’ and the sorrow and guilt that had coursed through him when he dumped the urn over Sunset Cliffs. And there was his father, alive, just as Dr. Greer had said, being ruthlessly experimented upon for the benefit of a misguided, nefarious multinational corporation. Andy may not have been the best father, but he always had the best intentions in mind for Tomas. No matter what type of contract he signed, no matter the amount of money paid, that poor man didn’t deserve to be exploited in such a shamefully heinous manner.

  Tomas sprinted down the corridor counting off Lab 1, Lab 2, Lab 3, until he finally reached Laboratory 9 near the end of the corridor. He made a mental note that he’d have to make a gurney with the tarp inside the bag and pull his father all the way back to the cargo bay. His initial plan was to lead Andy along with the rope. But now that seemed impracticable seeing the state his father was in. He dropped his duffel bag beside the door, retrieved the angle grinder and began cutting the door jamb near the bolt. Dr. Greer had said interior lab security was more for unauthorized entry of personnel than to secure the contents inside and that the palm readers and iris scanners were the main impediments to entry. The doors themselves were standard variety commercial doors and the angle grinder sliced the metal with ease. Less than a minute later and it was open.

  Laboratory 9 was a mammoth place that had the air of a medieval torture room. There were large circular saws attached by long arms to stainless steel tables. There was a row of shelves with large jars with brains, heads and other body parts floating inside. Tomas counted off fourteen different machines bizarrely sadistic in nature. All of them had diverse configurations but they shared some common features; chairs or seats inside or on top, complete with leather straps, head prongs, long tentacles attached to probes, cutters and small metal hands. And in the rear of the chamber were six upright cylindrical chambers: five of them were empty, but the last one held his father.

  The duffel bag dropped to the floor, forgotten as Tomas ran to the tube which stood on a waist high pedestal crammed with electronics. He touched the side of the tube and it was cool. The curvature of the glass gave his father the circus side show look of an image reflected in a funhouse mirror. And Andy was in a much worse condition that he’d seen on the security monitor. Andy hung in the jelly-like fluid nude, a thick tube running into his rectum and equally grotesque catheter jammed into his urinary tract where his genitals used to be. There were countless wires protruding from his skull and they’d removed his right arm below the elbow and inserted tubes into the stump, capping it with a black rubber sleeve. The utter lack o
f humanity, the sole crushing humiliation and disregard for the dignity of this individual’s life struck a chord in Tomas.

  He felt a profound shift in his core, unaware that seeing his father exploited in this manner had severely altered his world view.

  He circled around the cylinder, looking for a way to open it to get Andy out of the chamber. But it looked as if the only way to extract him was from the top of the container, at least four feet above his reach.

  “Doc, I need more advice. Andy’s floating in some tube. Have you seen this before?”

  There was silence on the other end and Tomas thought Dr. Greer hadn’t heard his inquiry until she spoke. Her voice was different somehow; compassionate yet gravely serious, “Tomas, I’m afraid you’re going to have to abandon the rescue. I was wrong about their plans for Andy. I thought that my absence would set back the zombie fever project but it sounds as if Vitura had accelerated their timetable. It seems that my colleague Dr. Taverna has taken over and final approval has been given for the deployment of the current IHS strain. They’re not going to ruthlessly experiment on Andy after all. What you’re seeing is the latest in advanced stasis. They’re planning to preserve Andy for as long as possible. Tomas, they’ve turned him into a living culture for the virus. They’re going to keep him like that indefinitely, withdrawing live virus to use on the rest of the world. He’s become patient zero for the program.”

  There was a clinking noise behind one of the steel tables.

  Tomas ducked behind the stasis chamber and scanned the dimly lit room looking for the source of the noise.

  “Tomas? Did you hear me? You have to turn off the machines running the stasis chamber. There should be a purge button on the control panel. Tomas? Are you still there? You have to shut it down. Shut it down, now,” she ordered.

  With the angle grinder in his hand still in his hand, Tomas circled around the source of the noise. A man in a white lab coat was crouched behind one of the vivisection machines and as he got closer he could hear him whispering.

  He grabbed the man by the collar and yanked him backward onto the floor. The cell phone that the man was whispering into slid across the tiles and under a table.

  “Who are you?” Tomas yelled, the burning fire of righteous anger fueling his attack as he took to one knee and, not giving him a chance to respond, repeatedly pounded the man’s face with the angle grinder.

  Dr. Greer was yelling into his ear, “Tomas! What’s going on! Tomas! Speak to me!”

  But he heard none of his.

  He was violence.

  He was animal.

  Sometime later, breathing heavily, his arms hanging limp at his side, the knuckles on his right hand scrapped and raw, the angle grinder coated in gore, Tomas stared blankly down at the blood from the man’s crushed nose and busted face. Teeth jutted from the crimson pool like remote islands around his head and the gold name tag with ‘Dr. Taverna’ hung from the torn lapel of his lab coat.

  Minutes passed as the scientist fought against death with Tomas standing over and watching.

  Dr. Taverna rasped and gurgled through his broken jaw, little bubbles of air escaping through the effluvia obstructing his nasal passages.

  He’s lucky to be alive.

  Tomas wiped his hand on his cargo pants and dug into his ear, pulling out the com-link to Dr. Greer and crushing it underfoot.

  Still hanging onto the angle grinder, he marched over to the stasis chamber.

  Screw Vitura.

  Screw Dr. Greer.

  I’m going to get my dad out of there and find a way to save him from the virus.

  He steadied the grinder against the base of the glass, intending to drain the fluid near the base, and then cut a hole large enough to squeeze Andy out of the chamber.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a familiar voice said behind him.

  Tomas glanced back over his shoulder at Supervisor Bertrand and four security guards brandishing semi-automatics. In his periphery, he saw two other guards attending to Taverna. They hoisted him by his shoulders and legs and carried him out. “And what if I do? Are you going to shoot me?” He raised the arc grinder and flipped the switch, the blood on the blade splashing in spurts across the acrylic glass and Tomas’ face.

  “Well, that fluid inside the chamber is teeming with infection. If you don’t want to die an excruciating death akin to an Ebola fever, I suggest you do as I say.”

  One of the security guards fired a warning shot at his feet.

  Tomas was more stubborn than brave, and he would have tried to take them on. He knew that youth was on his side. He was considerably stronger than the forty-something guards due to that fact alone. And he would have if they were brandishing clubs or bared fists. But guns were another matter. Maybe it was the peace-loving Canadian-style neo-hippy upbringing, but he’d always had a healthy fear of firearms. Getting shot wasn’t in his plans.

  He switched the angle grinder off and its humming blade hummed to a stop.

  “Put the power tool down and raise your hands,” the lead guard commanded and Tomas complied, dropping the arc grinder onto the floor beside him and slowly raising his hands into the air.

  Two of the guards cautiously approached him, spread his legs and press him up against the stasis chamber, mashing his face into the glass. Tomas tried not to look at his father’s body and the humiliating way his private area had been mutilated and violated with the catheter and exposed for anyone to see. It filled him with renewed rage.

  As he was frisked, Supervisor Bertrand gloated, “You chose the wrong assignment, Buddy. We knew all along that Dr. Greer would try to sabotage our work once we found out she’d defected from our organization. My hat’s off to you. You almost did it. I don’t know how, but you managed to hone in on the heart of our project. If Dr. Taverna hadn’t stayed behind to secure his work and warned us when he discovered your intrusion, your little operation could have set us back years. But you’ve accomplished nothing except to make this evening a little less mundane for our nightshift employees. Are you in contact with Dr. Greer now? Dr. Greer! Can you hear me?”

  The guards turned Tomas around to face Supervisor Bertrand.

  Bertrand had the smirk of ‘gotcha’ on his face but that quickly turned to bewilderment when he recognized this would-be saboteur who was now his captive. “Tomas Overstreet?” It couldn’t be. The shiftless, heavily sedated young man he’d met earlier in the week didn’t seem capable of holding a minimum wage job, let alone pull off a stunt like this. He shook off his surprise and let out a hearty laugh, “Oh God, please don’t tell me you’re here to save your father!” He looked up at Andy’s blank face behind the oxygen mask, “You didn’t risk your life for this piece of meat, did you? Damn it, boy. I told you your father was dead.” He pointed at Andy, “That isn’t your father. That is a Petri dish.”

  One of the guards handed Bertrand Tomas’s phone.

  “Is this how you’re keeping in contact with Judith?” he asked, referring to Dr. Greer by her first name. “Let me guess. She buttered you up with complements and used the last of her aging feminine wiles to connive you into doing her dirty work. Did she make it sound as if she had changed as a person? Did she tell you she’s the matriarch of this program?” He nodded at the stasis chamber. “Boy, you’ve been sold a bill of goods. Judith is out for Judith. You’re here to eliminate her competition. This,” he waved up at Andy, “was a carrot; an incentive to manipulate an impressionable kid.”

  Tomas remained silent. Bertrand and the guards hadn’t noticed his discarded duffel bag leaning against one of the vivisection machines behind them. His mind raced. Time to improvise.

  “You’re right,” he cried and hung his head against his chest. “Please, don’t hurt me. I was only trying to free my dad. Sir, I can get you Dr. Greer. Give me the phone and I’ll tell her I was successful and got Andy out. If you give me the phone, I can get her to tell me her location and you can let me go. Please, sir. I don’
t know what I’m doing here. Maybe if it were your father you’d have done the same,” he sniffled.

  Supervisor Bertrand was an exquisitely intelligent man. He’d gone to the finest European schools and was bred for power and success. But like all men, he had a weakness. And his weakness was Dr. Greer. He’d fallen for her the day he’d recruited her from the Ivy Towers of Cambridge. She was brilliant in her field and had an unwavering scientific mind. Nothing got in the way of her research. That is until Andy was hired on as a security guard. He’d known about their affair for years, but couldn’t bring himself to interfere. His weakness had allowed her to become too valuable to the San Diego campus’ operations. Instead of rotating in other young budding intellects into her position as was standard practice at Vitura, he’d allowed her to remain well beyond the typical two year contract, stretching her tenure beyond a decade. And he’d done the same for Andy because he knew it kept her happy and loyal.

  To say that Judith’s sudden defection after Andy’s death was a shock to Bertrand was an understatement. He’d always thought they had a personal connection, albeit platonic on her part, which went beyond the professional. He had to get her under his control again; if not to limit damage to the zombie fever project, then at least to keep her close.

  So, in another moment of weakness related to his infatuation with Dr. Greer, he let his guard hand over the phone to Tomas and stepped back beside his comrades. “Go ahead, call her,” Bertrand said.

  As Tomas dialed in the number, his hands began to shake uncontrollably. His eyes darted up to meet Bertrand’s, who stiffened when he saw the now frantic look on Tomas’s face.

  Supervisor Bertrand raised a hand and was about to bark an order to his guards when Tomas tapped the talk button three times.

  Click. Click. Click.

  The remaining tannerite cakes ignited inside the bag behind them. A confetti blast of twenty thousand dollars worth of shredded hundred dollar bills was expelled into the air, the concussion slamming against the backs of the guards and Bertrand, sending them crashing forward towards Tomas onto the floor. The blast blew the vivisection machines in an outward circular radius, smashing into the shelves holding the body parts, their containers exploding into the tile floor in wet sloppy clumps of preserved flesh and organs.

  Tomas was hit by the blast. But while it did knock the wind out of him, he managed to stay on his feet.

  Bertrand and the guards weren’t going anywhere soon; the concussive force knocking two of the guards unconscious, the remaining two and Bertrand clawing at the floor, their nervous systems unable to comprehend what had happened, blood leaking from their ears and noses.

  The stasis chamber had been pushed back a few feet, but was still running and Andy remained undisturbed inside.

  One of the guards lying on the floor was trying to work his assault rifle, his hands above his head flopping uselessly against the stock of the gun. Tomas lurched at the guard and wrestled the gun’s strap from around the man’s neck and circled to the rear of the stasis chamber. There was a rubber-coated cable about a foot in diameter attached to the chamber, the other end snaking back ten feet and disappearing into the floor. Correctly assuming the cable was powering the chamber, Tomas checked that the rifle’s safety was off, aimed at the cable and fired a short burst of rounds into the cable and floor.

  The lights and monitors surrounding the chamber’s base flickered then died.

  Andy eyes opened wide and he began to convulse in the tank as oxygen deprivation took hold. Tomas pressed his hand against the glass as he watched his father suffocate, telling himself that the bewilderment and terror in Andy’s blazing zombie red eyes were instinctual and that he was beyond comprehending what was happening. Tears trailed down Tomas’ cheeks through the dusty muck from the explosion, rivulets of sorrow from the heartbreak of having to assist his father into the void.

  And then he was still.

  “You won’t get away with this Overstreet,” Bertrand’s groaned thickly as he tried to sit up, “not a chance.”

  Tomas took three steps and kicked him squarely in the jaw, knocking him unconscious onto the tile. He dropped the rifle and ran through the lab towards the hallway. But as he approached the door, he heard boots clanking up the stairs from the cargo bay.

  He ran into the hallway and turned left, away from the security reinforcements now giving chase and shouting for him to stop. One of them fired off a round and it whizzed by his head. He reached the end of the corridor and found a travelator to the first floor used to transport the heavy machinery conveyer-belt style. Dr. Greer had advised when discussing the breakout that it could be useful as another means of exiting the building.

  Tomas ran down the travelator’s belt and into the cavernous storage room that took up most of the first floor, listening to the guard recklessly stumble then tumble down the belt as the momentum of gravity from the thirty degree incline got the better of the guard in the lead.

  There was an emergency exit near Tomas but its two-foot thick shutters had closed blocking his retreat. A fork lift sat idle in the hallway facing the exit. Tomas jumped onto it and by raising the fork into a tall stack of wooden crates, managed to create an avalanche onto the lower end of the travelator, momentarily blocking the security guards from reaching the first floor.

  Then Tomas grabbed a tank of oxygen from a rack and hefted it into the driver’s seat against the gas pedal, released the brake and unleashed it on the shutters.

  The fork lift accelerated into the shutters, pulling them off their hinges, and bursting through the double doors. Tomas climbed over the wreckage and squeezed through the opening. He did a quick sprint away from the damage then slowed to a casual walk in the direction of the front gates.

  San Diego fire trucks and emergency personnel had come through and responded to his call with everything they had available. There were countless firemen evacuating workers and spraying the roof of the administration building where his first two supposedly low-yield explosives had turned the building into a raging inferno, billowing black smoke and flames rose above the structure. Stunned Vitura employees gathered in groups towards the perimeter gate, mouths agape as they watched the fire dance and leap across the central walkway onto the other buildings setting those ablaze as well. The rear building where Tomas had just escaped was yet to be touched by the flames but it was obvious that the fire was out of control and it was just a matter of time before all the buildings were ablaze.

  “You!” a fireman supervising the fire noticed him in his guard’s outfit walking towards the administration building, “Get back towards the fence with the rest of your colleagues. We don’t need your assistance up here. Make yourself useful and tend to your personnel.”

  “Yes, sir!” Tomas saluted.

  Well aware that the remaining guards on duty had been alerted to his presence and were combing through the compound below, Tomas walked towards the groups of Vitura employees, casually turning towards the curved path that led up the hill to the gates. He slipped out of the compound as two more fire trucks drove inside, sirens blaring, their red and white flashing beams lighting the night.

  The Nighthawk fired up and Tomas took off towards the freeway. He roared up the onramp and, instead of turning south towards Lindbergh Field and his awaiting plane he turned north instead.

  Vancouver was a long, long motorcycle journey from San Diego, more than a thousand miles of road grime and blacktop.

  Tomas vaguely wondered if the thirty year old motorcycle would be able to handle the trip to Canada then shrugged off the negative thoughts as the cool night hit his bare face under his black half helmet, the air crisp and salty.

  Tomas gunned the engine and as the miles ticked by, tried to empty his mind and keep his thoughts in the present and the physical sensations that kept him rooted in the moment; on the sound of the engine, the smell of the ocean, the vibration of the motorcycle underneath.

  But his father’s fate and thoughts of zombi
es kept creeping back in.

  The End.

  ******

  Bonus Preview

  Zombie Fever 2: Outbreak

  ******