Medora: A Zombie Novel

by Welker, Wick

  He felt feverish, a chilled sweat was brooding on his forehead and his stomach had a sack of concrete sitting in it. What he really wanted to say to Rambert was that he was wrong to call him in; to fly him out and give him a special lab to help save New York. There were hundreds of other researchers more qualified than he was to be doing this. Everyone expect Beckfield.

  He peered at him across the room, looking through a microscope. His grey laden hair had grown out over his ears and glasses giving him a dopey appearance.

  “Dr. Beckfield,” he called to him across the lab, “do you think it would be a good idea to start running more western blots on Danny’s white blood cells?”

  “Yes, I think the last one didn’t have the right markers. I’m confident that if we probe for a new profile of markers, we may be able to isolate the protein.” He turned to Stark with his glasses slid halfway down his nose.

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too.” He walked over to where Kyle was being kept and looked in. Kyle was staring right back at him with his neck stretched forward making his head jut out towards the glass. The infected man was continuously biting the air in front of him, cycling between lunging his upper jaw and then recoiling backwards for another bite at nothing. “I was thinking, what if we took a sample of Danny’s blood and mixed it with some of Kyle’s? We might be able to observe some cross reactivity. May give us some hint about an immunological process that we’re not picking up on.”

  “Hmm,” Beckfield got up from the bench where he was working. “Yeah, I don’t know about that. It could take a lot of time to try to put that together. The people down in the lab are busy enough as it is. I’m just not confident that that would lead us down the right path.”

  “But, we might be able to see a difference in antibodies that they might have, and that could be huge if we could identify it. It could help us understand what the virus is made of if we know the cross reactivity of his antibodies.”

  “I’m not confident in that at all.” He approached Dr. Stark and loosely rested his crossed fingers over his thigh.

  “Exactly what direction do you see us going then?”

  “Where do I see us going? What are you trying to suggest, Dr. Stark? I detect a hint of an insinuation?” He asked in an inquisitive yet sarcastic tone.

  “I only want to know what you think the best course of action is here. I don’t have to explain to you how everything we do is extremely time sensitive.”

  Beckfield took off his glasses and rubbed the reddened spots left behind. “The correct direction is vaccination. Vaccination is what we must do. I know we can develop a vaccination.”

  “Of course we need to develop a vaccine. That’s one of the many things that we’re trying to do. We can’t even begin to do that since we have no idea what the virus is. Do you understand that?”

  “Of course I understand!” he erupted, “I understand everything about it! Where do you think I’ve been this whole time? You think the Secretary of Health really wants you to lead this project? Give me a break.”

  “Dr. Beckfield, why are you mostly focusing on the behavior of the sick? I feel like you’re spending too much time on how Kyle ingests food, what he eats and what his physiology is like. I get that these are important things to study, but not now. Not while we are trying to wrap our collective brains around this virus. Who cares what the damn things like to eat!”

  “I don’t need to listen to this,” he said quietly.

  “I really think our priorities right now should be focusing on figuring out what this virus, if that’s what it even is, is made of and then we can focus on a vaccine once we have that figured out. I really think we want the same things here but we just have different ideas of how to get there, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose you’re right. There’s a lot at stake here and I know that we can’t be letting our egos get in the way of all this.” He gave a defeated smile to Stark. “Alright, what’s our next plan of action?”

  Slightly suspicious of Beckfield’s amicability he continued, “I’m thinking we need to isolate the virus again from Danny’s bloodstream. Something is stopping the virus, or at least halting its progression within him. I’d like to figure out what the virus is made of and search for any corresponding antibodies that Danny might have for it. I think this is our quickest way to developing a vaccine. We’ve wasted far too much time in this laboratory trying to figure out what the virus does once it has infected people; that’s a job for far later down the road once we’re over this thing.”

  “You’re right, Dr. Stark.”

  “I’m going to get another blood sample from Danny and I think the next best thing is to do some chemistry tests looking for more inorganic materials that the virus may be made of.”

  “What did you have in mind? What do you think it’s made of?”

  “Well, it sure isn’t made of protein, at least I don’t think. I want to call downstairs and run some gas chromatography and maybe some x-ray crystallography as well.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe it’s more metallic or salt based.”

  Beckfield gave out a fast breath of air through pursed lips, “Sounds reasonable, I suppose.”

  “I know it’s a shot in the dark but it won’t take long and it could uncover some important details about the virus. Would you mind calling down to the chemists? I’ll go and get some more blood draws from Danny.”

  At that moment, the pager on Beckfield’s belt began ringing. After looking at the page he quickly got to his feet and ran out the door.

  “Where are you going?” Stark asked.

  “I’ll be back in a minute. Got a little emergency somewhere.” He vanished from the doorframe, leaving Stark alone in the lab.

  Stark sat down at a lab bench and looked over again at Danny’s holding area while he prepared some test tubes and syringes. Danny was standing up and looking right at him, holding a pillow at his side. Stark glanced out the window and could see the top of the U.S. Botanic Garden across the street. He had never been to D.C. before Rambert called him to come here. He thought what a shame it was that his only experience of the city so far was white sterile rooms and a sad little call room that he slept in with a cardboard pillow.

  “Once this is all over, Danny, maybe you and me can go visit the Lincoln Memorial. Have you ever seen the Lincoln Memorial? It’s just like what you see on the back of a penny.” Stark talked while carrying his tray prepared with needles and little bottles. Danny yawned and rubbed his eyes as Stark sat down on a tiny swivel stool, inserted the tray into an air locked working space at a containment window and put his hands into a pair of containment gloves that were built into the glass wall. “Alright, pal, I know I’ve stuck you a million times but I got to do a couple more right now. I’m sorry, but I’ll make it fast.”

  Sitting at the working window, Stark took the cap off of a hypodermic needle within the holding cell and grabbed onto Danny’s arm. “Okay, just a little prick…” He quickly buried the needle into a small purple vein and filled the chamber with thick blood that slowly oozed out.

  “Hey, whoa… are you feeling okay, buddy? Something is not right with your blood.” As Stark quickly looked up, his glasses hit the glass window, knocking them down his face. As he was about to pull his hands out of the gloves to adjust them, he felt a sharp, punctuated pain around his thumb, yanked his hands out of the containment gloves and fell off the stool.

  “Hey, hey, Danny what’s going on here?” He finally adjusted his glasses and looked up from the floor at Danny standing above him behind the glass. Danny’s cheeks were sagging out below his jaw line with the right side of his mouth drooping down with it, and he drooled a pearly white liquid. One eye was forced shut from the swelling of his forehead and his other eye was in a continuous rhythmic cycle of darting quickly to the left and then slowly turning inward. Stark backed away from the glass on his back, shuffling with his hands and feet. “Oh no, Danny, no, no. This
can’t be right. Can you hear me, pal? Can you hear me talking to you?

  The boy came closer to the glass and let his head bang suddenly into it, producing a resounding thud. He held the position of resting his head on the glass with his legs completely flexed, forcing his back to arch forward. Stark watched his only open eye move rapidly out and slowly move toward his nose repeatedly, his pupil the size of a grape.

  As soon as Stark looked down at his thumb, his heart jumped in his chest. Blood was slowly running down it from a small bite mark just above his nail. “Okay, okay, okay, what now? What’s going on now?” Stark was talking to himself, trying to calm himself, wondering what would happen in the next few moments. He quickly stood up as if to prove to himself that if he could at least do that, then he must be healthy. Walking over to a lab bench, he quickly washed out the small puncture wound with soap and water, letting a stream of steamy water run over his thumb. He looked over his shoulder and saw that Danny was still in the same arched position with his forehead planted flat on the glass.

  “Somebody help me over here!” He began yelling. A deep feeling of alarm set into his muscles and lungs, making him want to run out of the building, away from the infection that was now traveling through him, advancing further and further into every organ system of his body with each panicked pump of his heart.

  “I need help!” He yelled again, advancing towards the door, holding his injured hand. No, no, no, he thought. The room had to be quarantined. He couldn’t risk becoming infected at any moment and attacking whoever came to his aid. Putting his back to the metal door of the lab, he grounded his feet to prevent anyone from opening it and reached for the telephone mounted on the wall. Pulling the receiver from the cradle, the door suddenly burst open from behind him, making him sprawl on the floor. He looked up and saw Beckfield in his white long coat looking down at him.

  “No, Dr. Beckfield, you’ve got to get out of here…” he was losing his words, “I’ve been hurt. I’ve been hurt here and I don’t….”

  “What’s going on?” He looked over at Danny’s room. “Were you bitten?” he asked pointedly.

  “Yes, yes, I think I’ve been bitten and…” Stark could feel it now. The virus was taking hold of him, robbing him of his faculties, paralyzing his tongue and clamping down his jaw. “You’ve got to get out…” He was now seeing through tunnel vision as Beckfield stepped over him, and out of his sight. Gasping and turning, the last thing he could remember was Beckfield crouching down in front of the glass where Danny was and putting his hand on it thoughtfully. Then his mind shut off.

  What he remembered was foggy and hot. He remembered the back of his eyelids glowing with light and an overwhelming grasping fear of falling and suffocating at once. His mind was not fully in a conscious state to contemplate the fact that he may or may not be dead; may or may not be infected and become part of the millennial scourge of humanity. Spiraling downward, his stomach jumped and heaved, his arms and legs knocking on the cool tile of the lab. There were no voices or sounds, only a sick, patient silence that passed through his body. Waves of nausea and numbness sifted through him, dulling him to any other senses. He felt himself concentrating on something but he didn’t know what. Only concentrating on the idea of being, and the idea of opening his eyes and standing up, but then it happened.

  Stark looked up at the ceiling tiles of the lab and inhaled deeply, feeling sweat dripping into his stinging eyes and down his cheeks. Clearing his throat, he sat up and immediately looked around him. Danny was not in his holding cell. An empty room stared back at his blank expression. He had no clue how much time had passed since he went unconscious but it was still daylight outside so he figured it couldn’t have been more than a few hours. How was it that no one was in here? Where the hell are all the safety measures? Why am I not in quarantine myself? He kept asking himself dozens of mysterious questions already knowing the answer lay with the fact that Danny Krumpke was not in his holding cell.

  Standing to his feet, he carefully balanced himself on a workbench and made it over to a sink. He looked in the mirror and saw his regular self; no signs of infection other than a slight fever. Damn, he looked tired and worn as hell. His eyes were darkened from lack of sleep and he had about three, five o’clock shadows overlapping one another. He felt a slight shiver in his arms but overall felt surprisingly well. Rushing over to Danny’s holding cell, he saw the door was slightly ajar with no signs of forced entry or violent escape. It gave him some relief that perhaps someone had moved him somewhere else, but why would he himself been left on the floor with an obvious bite wound? Nothing was making sense and he knew he had to talk to Rambert immediately.

  He dialed Rambert’s extension at the wall and heard one ring after another, hoping that after each one, he would hear his friendly voice reassuring him that everything had been taken care of. The phone continued to ring with no voicemail picking up. Stark slammed the phone on the receiver and walked out into the hallway. “Hello?” He yelled down the long, illuminated corridor. There was a still silence. “Hello? I need some help down here!” No one.

  His heart began knocking in his chest, pumping a new dose of survival hormones into his blood stream, squeezing his blood vessels and tightening up his stomach. In the back of his mind, he started throwing up conjectures and theories about why he hadn’t turn into one of the sick. He wasn’t sure if it was because of the change of the virus in Danny or that maybe that he shared a common gene with Danny that prevented or rather delayed Danny from getting sick. Stark immediately went back into the lab, rummaged in a drawer and found a hypodermic needle. Quickly, he tapped a vein from his forearm and took a blood sample, pocketing the small vial in his lab coat pocket. He then ran out of the lab and down the hallway towards the stairs that would take him to the microscopy lab.

  Suddenly, he stopped; there was water flowing somewhere, leaking out of something. He swiveled his head back and forth trying to pinpoint the direction of the sound and headed back down the hallway in the opposite direction. The sound became louder, more refined and changed in character, making him no longer sure that it was running water. Turning a corner and down another hall, the sound was louder still and began to have the quality of a mixing sound, like stirring a thick soup.

  Approaching the threshold of a room, he knew it was the source of the sound. He quickly cut into it from his jogging pace, stopped abruptly and fell over a gurney that was positioned at the entrance of the door. He looked up from a kneeling position and saw four people in the corner of a patient wardroom on their hands and knees huddled around something. Quickly on his feet, he grabbed the first hard object closest to him on a bed: a bedpan. None of the four people seemed to notice or turn around to him. Stark could see that they were busily occupied with what he discovered was feeding on a human being. One woman, a lab tech he recognized named Jodie, was crouched down low with her jaws tightly clamped onto the corpse’s thigh. She gnawed up and down, trying to free the meat from the leg. Stark saw that the back half of Jodie’s skull was somehow cracked open, exposing parts of her brain. Half her scalp was still hanging onto the edge of the wound with a ponytail of hair still attached, swaying vigorously with the erratic feeding movements of her head. The other infected had positioned themselves likewise, assuring that they all had their own spots to devour the meat.

  Stark’s felt a heavy dizziness thinking about the surrealism of the scene that an outbreak had apparently happened here at the government’s classified facility for finding a cure to a disease that was currently ravaging New York state, right in the middle of the nation’s capital. He slowly backed out of the room, put each foot down as quietly as possible until he could run like hell down the hallway. In essence, he had no idea what to do next but he did want to leave that room.

  Backing out slowly, the pager on his belt suddenly burst into life, sending a high-pitched electronic squeal through the room. Simultaneously, four heads turned at once to him. Jodie quickly got to her feet and began walking b
riskly towards him, a long white tendon hanging from the corner of her mouth. Another also stood up, but his left knee quickly buckled beneath him, making his approach slower. In his hastiness to leave, Stark turned to run but accidentally butted his chest into the corner of the doorframe and stumbled back. Jodie was almost on top of him now. Gripping the bedpan tightly, he waited for her to lunge at him and then he swung it squarely into the side of her face, making her tumble over.

  Turning towards the door, he sprinted out, losing one of his loafers behind. Running down the long hallway, his foot now kept slipping as his sock slid along the smooth tile, but he still managed to put distance between himself and the sick. He looked over his shoulder and saw only Jodie following him several yards down. The others must have been happy with the meal that they already had.

  Making it back to his lab, he slammed the door and locked it. How far was the outbreak? Was it just on this floor? This building? Had it made its way to the streets? Stark quickly looked out the window to the botanical gardens across the street and saw cars whizzing back and forth and a heavy set teenager waiting at a bus stop. He had to get hold of someone to stop the infection at the building. Hurriedly, he went to a locker, took out his gym bag and put on some tennis shoes. He wasn’t sure who to call for what was going on. 911? He wanted to, but he didn’t want to go prison for the rest of his life for revealing a classified government lab. Then it hit him; the pager, someone had paged him. He didn’t recognize the number but he hoped it was Rambert so he made his way to the wall receiver and called.

  After one ring, someone picked up “Stark!” It was Rambert.

  “Larry, we’ve been compromised over here. The infection has gotten out and has spread to the employees. I’m not sure how or where…“