CHAPTER 48
Simone was struggling so hard with Wolfman and his buddy that she almost lost her stiletto heels, as the two creeps dragged her down the corridor.
Fuck them, she thought. She wasn’t going to make it easy for the screws, that was for sure. They would have to drag her kicking and screaming the rest of the way to the decontamination room. So be it.
Twisting her body as they held onto her, she was trying to knee the two of them in their groins but wasn’t having any success hitting her targets what with the awkwardness of her position and the bulky hazmat uniforms that protected their bodies.
“Stop it, bitch,” said Wolfman. “This is for your own good.”
He came to a halt and kicked one of her flailing legs with his boot.
She groaned at the pain in her leg. “Where’s Travis?”
“You’ll find out as soon as you get decontaminated.”
Despite her pain, she kept struggling to break free. She launched another knee at what she guessed was Wolfman’s groin ensconced in the hazmat uniform, but she didn’t feel her knee smash home. Her knee ended up hitting nothing other than the baggy uniform, which concealed the silhouette of his body and absorbed the blow of her attack.
He resumed dragging her until they reached a door with the number 208 on it. Wolfman unlocked the door with a key card and, with his cohort, hurled her into the empty white room.
“Take your clothes off. It won’t take long,” said Wolfman as he slammed the door behind her and locked it.
Like hell she was going to take her clothes off, decided Simone.
Her hair frazzled, she sat there motionless for a moment, worn out from struggling with them, panting for breath.
She was fast reaching the point of total indifference. What more could they do to her except kill her? Why should she care if they did? Annihilated by plague and then by nukes, the world had turned into a virtual wasteland. Where was she going to go, even if she managed by some miracle to get out of this tomb in one piece? She shook her head at the answer. She wasn’t going to think about it.
She wasn’t ready quite yet to curl into a ball in a corner and die.
Indifference would be her weapon of last resort against the bastards.
She got to her feet unsteadily. It wasn’t easy standing up on stiletto heels. She had half a mind to take them off. They weren’t the most comfortable shoes in the world. But she had mastered the art of wearing them through long practice. Since they were boots, and tight at that, she could not remove them easily. If it wasn’t for the fact that they were boots, she would have lost them for sure in her scuffle with the two goons.
She scoped out the small room. Another white room, she decided. They needed to fire the interior decorator for this bunker. She could not wait to get out of here. She would go stir crazy in no time if they kept her locked up in here much longer. Not a whole lot better than the slam.
She approached one of the walls. She marveled at their immaculate whiteness. They seemed to gleam, in fact. She wondered how Hector and his gang could keep the white paint so pristine. Maybe they had painted the walls recently. She walked close enough to the nearest wall to touch it.
Surprised, she ran her fingers along the smooth surface. It wasn’t paint at all. It was some kind of porcelain like they used in bathtubs. Originally she had thought the walls were made out of cement painted white, like in the other room Hector had locked her and the others in. Maybe those walls were constructed out of porcelain too, for that matter. She had not thought to inspect them.
The fact that they were porcelain explained how Hector could keep them so clean. It was a lot easier to scrub porcelain clean than it was to clean a painted surface. But why porcelain? she wondered. Why would anyone want to construct a room with porcelain walls?
She gazed down at the floor. Stooping, she ran her hand along its surface. It, too, was smooth and cold to the touch. She had not even realized it when Wolfman had flung her onto it, but it, also, was constructed of porcelain. Curiouser and curiouser, she thought, knowing how Alice in Wonderland felt.
Simone straightened up. She tilted her head toward the white ceiling. She wondered if it was porcelain to boot. It was certainly shiny enough to be porcelain. She would bet her bottom dollar it was porcelain. The ceiling was too high, though, for her to reach it and verify her supposition.
A porcelain room, she decided. Didn’t that beat all? Maybe the whole room was a shower. But where was the showerhead? She canvassed the ceiling to no avail. There was no sign of a showerhead. And there was no shower stall—unless it lay beyond that white door that hung ajar in front of her.
It was at that moment out of the corner of her eye that she caught sight of a drain in the middle of the floor. The drain was difficult to discern because it was the same color as the floor. Then she realized that the floor shelved slightly down toward its center.
Why have a drain in the room when there was no running water available? she wondered.
How did she get into this mess? Her life was the proverbial train wreck.
Her first boyfriend Mario who she thought was a dashing Prince Charming turned out to be a piece of work. He was in fact a pimp who had introduced her to a career of hooking in Vegas. The curse of being born with a killer body, she decided. Plus she watched her diet and took care of herself. Her body wasn’t all nature’s handiwork.
When she showed no interest in such a livelihood, the bottom-feeder beat her up several times to change her mind. He told her it was easy money and she could make a gazillion bucks thanks to her looks. He preyed on her loneliness in the world and her lack of a father, who had run off, abandoning her and her mother, when she was nine. Mario deftly exploited Simone’s hatred for her father as he played her like a fiddle and lured her into a life of prostitution.
That was how she met skanky lawyers and even skankier politicians who would pay thousands of bucks for her charms. The skeevy rich drug lawyer who wore makeup, donned a wig, and wore a dress when he had his sessions with her. The sleazy politician with shifty eyes who wanted a golden shower before every trick she turned with him. She would rather have given him the golden shower afterwards so she wouldn’t have to smell his rank body during their tricks. The billionaire software maven who taped a picture of his mother over their bed every time Simone turned a trick with him. Did these slimeballs have issues or what? Or were they just like every other man, save for one difference—they had scads of money so they could indulge their twisted fantasies?
Whatever, she decided. If her johns were willing to pay her thousands of dollars for their skeevy fantasies, she experienced no guilt obliging the idiots. She would go laughing all the way to the bank. She had no hang-ups about fleecing scumbags.
That was then. This was now.
She wasn’t turning tricks anymore.
Now she was trapped in a bunker in a radioactive world devoid of human life with nothing to look forward to other than surviving another day. In a giant bathtub no less, she decided with a rancorous laugh, surveying her porcelain cell.
She massaged her temples. To tops things off, she had a killer headache, and her eyes were burning. Her prospects were looking up, she decided with a caustic sense of humor.
When was the decontamination process going to start? she wondered. Maybe this wasn’t the decontamination room, after all. Maybe she was supposed to go through that door to it.
She approached the white door and opened it. She noticed it was smooth like the walls. She rapped on it. It made a hollow sound. A porcelain door. Nothing surprised her anymore in this place. But it had no latch, she saw. What was the point of having a door without a latch?
Her curiosity aroused, she opened the door and peered down a white corridor. She didn’t get it. Where was the decontamination room?
CHAPTER 49
She entered the hallway, thinking bleak thoughts.
All her life she felt like a victim. Her crummy father victimized her when he deserted her. Her boyfriend victimiz
ed her when he scammed her into becoming a whore. Her johns victimized her in bed. But at least with them she got money out of them when they used her body. Still, she felt like a victim as a hooker. When would all the victimization end? she wondered.
She reached the middle of the corridor and halted. She smelled something. She sniffed the air. It smelled fusty and rotten, like spoiled garbage.
The white door at the end of the hall opened.
Her heart stopped at the sight, not of the door but of what passed through it.
Half a dozen zombies spilled out into the corridor and schlepped toward her.
“Jesus Christ!” she screamed, eyes wide.
The first thought that came unbidden into her mind was to flee in fear. It was the same thought that had paralyzed her as she had watched safely from Jacqueline’s apartment as the flesh eaters had torn Jacqueline apart in the street.
Simone decided she wasn’t going to cave in to fear this time. She refused to be a victim anymore. This time she would stand up to the flesh eaters. She was going to kill them. But how? She had no weapons. Then she remembered her stiletto heels.
The creatures slogged toward her, an armless one at the front of the marching herd.
Hurriedly, she yanked off her boots, difficult as it was thanks to their tightness. The adrenaline coursing through her had no doubt helped her remove them. She dropped them to the floor. Crouching down she snagged one of them. She straightened up, boot in hand, the stiletto heel pointed outward.
She was primed now to attack. This time she would attack. She wasn’t going to stand by passively, as she had when the creatures had torn Jacqueline apart and consumed her.
This time was going to be different.
Working herself up she charged the lead creature, boot in hand, screaming her lungs out. She thrust the tapered heel into the flesh eater’s white-filmed eye. The cornea burst, and aqueous humor spurted out of the eye socket like yolk from a broken egg.
Grinding her teeth, she swiftly removed the heel from the ruptured eye, drew a bead on the creature’s other eye, and stabbed the narrow, pointed heel into it—with the same result. Another burst of aqueous humor spilled out, landing on her face and hand. Disgusted, she brushed the filthy ooze off her cheek with the back of her hand.
She pulled away from the blinded creature. Without eyes it could never find her.
Now it was the next creature’s turn, she decided. A fat zombie in a grimy suit with a smutched pink silk tie dangling around its necrotic neck. She didn’t even want to think about what the smutches consisted of. The creature reminded her of one of her slimy politician johns. The one who wanted only blow jobs. Perfect. It was going to feel good to gouge its eyes out. Like the time she bit his dick so he couldn’t come because of the pain. Only this would feel better than that. This time she would kill him.
And after him she would do the same thing to the bare-chested tattooed creature behind him. The one wearing a Mohawk the better part of an inch high. With the tattoos all over his muscular body he reminded her of one of her drug dealer johns. She was going to enjoy blinding these scumbags.
She didn’t feel fear of the infected creatures anymore. All she felt was hate. Pure, distilled hate.
Ready or not, here I come! she thought.
Stiletto heel in hand, snarling, she lunged at the porky creature that was baring its jagged teeth at her.
CHAPTER 50
From his office, surrounded by CCTV monitors that showed Simone from various angles, Guzman watched her die in a welter of bloodletting.
She had done better than the teacher had in defending herself, he decided. He would grant her that. She had lasted much longer than that putz. She was in the pink and had an excellent figure. No wonder she had had such a successful career as a call girl. He could see the firm contours of her body quite well on the monitor’s high-res screen as the infected ghouls first tore her clothes off then tore her body apart with her blood jetting all over them as they cavorted in a mad danse macabre wolfing down her toned flesh.
Her sensuous body was arousing him now even as he remembered her when she was in one piece.
If circumstances had been different, he would have spared her life and made her one of his mistresses.
After the zombies had polished off Simone, Guzman reached for the phone on the desktop in front of him and told the cleanup crew to start hosing down the “decontamination” room and preparing it for the next guinea pig.
The crazy bitch had actually managed to put three of the creatures out of commission. She had attacked them like a whirling dervish on steroids with that stiletto heel of hers. He didn’t have to worry about it, though. There were plenty more ghouls where those came from. He would have to have the three blind ghouls eliminated. They were useless to him in their condition.
Thinking of steroids he realized it was time to shoot up. He pulled out his desk’s top drawer, removed a hypo and a vial, inserted the hypo’s needle into the vial, and filled the hypo with the clear fluid inside the vial. He held the tip of the hypo up and squirted a tiny spritz out of it.
Then he shot himself up in the crook of his arm with human growth hormone. It wasn’t steroids that created supermen but growth hormone. This particular hormone, one that increased the size and receptivity of the brain, was the one he and his fellow transhumanists used to achieve their superiority over the hoi polloi. As the transhumanists knew, true power was acquired not through physical strength but through mental strength. Not only was his brain bigger in physical size than the average human’s, it was also capable of utilizing all of its potential, unlike the average human’s.
The transhumanists were the next stage in man’s evolution. Where the Nazis’ Mengele had failed in his experiments with eugenics, the transhumanists had succeeded with the use of drugs to create a superman, as Guzman himself was. It wasn’t simply about selective breeding, as Mengele had believed, it was about drugs and chemicals injected into the body that created a superman. Whereas selective breeding would take generations before it would create a superman, the transhumanists’ use of drugs worked immediately.
His father SS-Oberfuhrer Oswald Gutman had helped Mengele with his experiments, which had come to naught thanks to the demise of the Third Reich. After Oswald sought refuge in Argentina, he did not pursue Mengele’s experiments in eugenics. However, Hector became fascinated with the subject (he even suspected he himself was a product of selective breeding), and it was his interest in it that had brought him into contact with the transhumanists, who were pursuing the same end result—the next link in the evolution of man, a superman.
Hector’s vast amount of money opened doors to him that would otherwise have remained shut. His fortune enabled him to buy his way into the Orchid Organization, a collection of wealthy philanthropists bent on improving the human race by means of science and technology. One of the philanthropists he had met, in fact, wanted nothing less than to transform himself into a computer so he would never die. Guzman had no interest in becoming a computer, but he did want to become the next phase in the evolution of mankind.
The transhumanists, he believed, were onto something, and he wanted to be part and parcel of it. Their goal was to make the world a better place to live. The means of accomplishing that were developed in the top secret document entitled “The Apocalypse Equation.”
On one of the monitors Guzman watched a knot of his men in hazmat uniforms herd the zombies into their room with ten-foot-long electrical prods that shocked the creatures and forced them to retreat.
Once the door had shut behind the last flesh eater, Guzman flipped a switch at his console that electrified the steel door to their room to prevent them from trying to escape.
Meanwhile, his men hosed down the blood-soaked carnage of what remained of Simone that littered the corridor’s floor and walls. The water sluiced a slurry of bloody nubbins of shredded human flesh and cracked bones along the floor into the decontamination room. Once there, the water and blood slo
shed down the drain, while the body fragments that the zombies had not consumed gathered around the drain’s perimeter like sediment deposited by a river.
The cleanup crew then collected the insoluble items from the floor and deposited them in galvanized steel buckets that they transported out of the room, leaving the room as spick-and-span as it had looked when Simone and Probst had entered it.
Who would be next? Guzman wondered.
He was pondering the answer when the hum of his encrypted satphone in his trouser pocket snapped him out of his reverie. His bleeding-edge Iridium satphone was his only contact with the outside world. Courtesy of the satellite dish mounted aboveground, he was able to receive calls from anywhere in the world. Each room in the bunker was wired to transmit and receive the radio signals of satphones via the dish.
“Hello,” he said.
“Plato?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Socrates.”
“What’s up?”
Guzman hated using these stupid code names, but it was the only way to keep the identities of the Orchid Organization’s members secret.
“How are the experiments proceeding?” said Socrates.
“We haven’t found a new method of elimination yet.”
“How long do you think it’ll take?”
“No idea. We brought in some new guinea pigs recently. They should help speed matters along.”
“We need more methods of elimination. Do you roger that?”
“Yeah,” said Guzman.
“The A-bombs were not successful. I repeat, the A-bombs were not a hundred percent successful. Do you copy?”
“Roger. I copy,” said Guzman, not surprised by Socrates’ revelation. He knew flesh eaters were still roving the earth. What did Socrates think he was using in his experiments?
“We need new methods of destruction yesterday.”
“All right, already. I get the point,” said Guzman, ticked off at Socrates’ reiteration. “My hearing’s fine.”
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 130