I Zombie I [Omnibus Edition]

by Jack Wallen

  So this was Godwin’s grand plan: Create a legion of moaners and take down the feared German Empire one bite at a time.

  “Godwin! Godwin! I know about your plan, you twisted, sick fuck. It won’t work. If you think I’ll agree to join your army and zombie-stomp all over the German people, you’re wrong! Do you hear me?” I knew I didn’t have to yell, but it did feel good.

  “I hear you, Jacob. Quite well, I might add. There are a couple of things you neglected to take into consideration. You cannot escape, and you are infected.” There was a frightening certainty in the doctor’s voice. That certainty crept deep into my brain.

  A door opened, and Dr. Godwin walked into the external room. In his hands he cradled a folder as if it were an infant.

  “In my hands I hold every bit of information about my research. I am going to give this folder to you so you can fully understand what is happening. Do not worry, these documents are only copies. Naturally, I have all of the originals.” Dr. Godwin slid the folder into the sliding box and pushed it to my side of the room. “You might find some of this material a bit, well… frightening. Let me assure you, this is all very real.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Simple, my dear man: so you can finally understand and appreciate the brilliance that has gone into this plan.” Godwin’s ego was billowing the sails of a giant ship.

  “No, I meant, why are you doing this to me?” I felt like I was talking to a child.

  “Oh, silly me. It must be done. Some call it destiny. Some call it natural selection. I prefer ‘coerced evolution.’ And as I am the one doing the coercing, I prefer the term Godwinism. Fitting, don’t you think?”

  With a smug smile, the doctor turned and left the room. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. This man, this truly brilliant man, was a lunatic beyond imagination. And to compound matters, he was a lunatic with power.

  I stared at the folder in the box for quite some time. My brain was bouncing between reading and destroying the material. It was torment. On one hand, ignorance could be bliss. On the other, it might be helpful to know exactly what was going on.

  Of course, the very thought of ignorance made a thimbleful of bile creep to the back of my throat, making me well aware that my choice was preordained. I grabbed the folder, dropped heavily back onto the bed, and plowed into the material. I managed to get only one sentence into the dossier before I realized with absolute certainty that I, and quite possibly the entire world, was fucked.

  My name is Dr. Lindsay Godwin, and I have been hired for one purpose: To thin the world’s population.

  I read the opening sentence over and over. It didn’t really matter how many times I read it, I still wound up with sickening chills cantering up and down my spinal column. And yet, I read more.

  I have decided the only logical way to accomplish this goal is through mechanized, biological weaponry. The complications with this method are many, the primary one being detected introduction of said weaponry. It is with this in mind that I have opted to weaponize the human being via transmittable infection.

  I realize this method of deployment offers one very specific problem, that of control. It is my hope that with enough research I can develop the means with which to control the weaponized virus. If I am unable to control the virus, one of two things will happen: 1) I will have failed completely or 2) I will have succeeded absolutely. One brings an end to the human race while the other merely contains the population within acceptable limits.

  I wanted like hell for this to be fiction. I wanted to close this file and see a recognizable title like The Dead Rise at Dawn! Or Earth vs. Zombies. That, however, was not the case.

  There was something terribly ominous in the phrases “failed completely” and “succeeded absolutely.” I couldn’t help but wonder if both failure and success could, in this instance, be the same beast. I didn’t have to reach the final chapter to know this would end badly. But seeing as how I was caged up with nothing to do―

  The virus has been in existence for some time now. Developed during World War II, there is little record of its creation. But there is plenty of rumor, the most widespread being that Hitler’s own Josef Mengele created the virus to urge on the birth of the super race. The virus was referred to only by the letter “I”. At first, I was in doubt about the origins, but the more I researched, the more I was led back to Nazi Germany.

  Perfect. Now the Nazis were involved full-force. This whole bitch of a scenario grew ever more intriguing with each turn of the screw. The only things it needed were a spaceship, an empath, and a mushroom cloud.

  Mengele. Really?

  I wanted to smack Godwin. If ever there was a scientist whose research needed to never be resurrected, it was Josef Mengele.

  Nazis. Really? Fuck me.

  Read on, Parsifal.

  From a rather suspect connection, I gained some invaluable information. Mengele has a surviving relative who apparently has in her possession the only existing notebook of the dead, mad genius. I have been given nearly limitless resources to recover that book, which is said to contain encrypted passages that hold the key to creating the virus. The relative is located in Paraguay…

  I had become so engrossed in the writing I failed to see Dr. Godwin enter the external room.

  “Fascinating reading, isn’t it?”

  “You’re insane, you know that, right?” I was sure he was completely unaware of his fragile sanity.

  “When I told you I was forced into doing what I did, I was not deceiving you. I had been threatened with the loss of my child. What I neglected to tell you was that I became obsessed with what I had discovered.” The doctor had my attention, partially because I had nothing better to do than listen. “You have to understand, I am a scientist to the core. When I read Mengele’s notebook, I had to know if what he theorized was possible. I had to follow through with his work. And as much as it pained me to admit, his work was brilliant.”

  “Godwin, the man was a genocidal maniac. Mengele was the right-hand man to pure and absolute evil.” I was astounded to think anyone on this planet could defend such an abomination of the human psyche.

  “I disagree. The man was a singularly focused, purpose-driven scientist. The man had one goal, and everything he did in his life was geared toward that goal!” Dr. Godwin’s voice had risen above a conversational tone into the heights of obsessive and righteous rage.

  “Exactly. And that purpose was to eradicate all but the chosen race. Seriously, what intelligent human being would ever stoop to that level of thinking?” I hated this conversation. I despised that I was actually engaging in a conversation with a man who thought anything good could come from Josef Mengele, outside of his death.

  “Jacob, you have totally missed my point. I wasn’t obsessed with Mengele and his ideology, I was obsessed with his research, with his theory that a human being can be used as a weapon against itself. These theories were not about race, religion, or sexuality. These theories were about biology and man as a contagion. I took these theories and made them real.”

  The doctor had disappeared into some fantasy where the disaster he’d perpetrated was still trapped in some control-group experiment. He had no idea of the true damage he had wrought.

  “Wait, in your research you said Mengele created the virus, but just now you said he only developed the theory behind the virus, which you made real. So which is it? Did you or Mengele create this nightmare?”

  The doctor sat there, completely checked out. I was waiting for him to go OCD on me and start counting down from ten to zero over and over. But he just sat there, staring ahead.

  He finally answered, “We created the virus. He and I. He created the original strain, and I reshaped it such that it would give us more control. An airborne strain would be disastrous. There would be no method of containment. What I created is elegant and completely self-contained.” The doctor’s voice was trance-like. “Once infected, the body becomes a time bomb. After a short p
eriod, it self-destructs. But during this period of incubation, a single human can infect hundreds of others. The true elegance, however, is in the randomness of the timing. The period between exposure to outbreak is totally unpredictable. You could be exposed and turn instantly, or not turn until several days afterward. Random. A touch of chaos.”

  Turn. There was an ominous undertone to the word.

  “You have been a very interesting case, Jacob. Your transformation has been gradual, rather than instantaneous. Most specimens flip from being normal, pedestrian Homo sapiens to their violent, zombie state. You, on the other hand, have flipped back and forth. Although it was nearly tragic when you attacked Susan, it has been fascinating to watch―really quite amazing.”

  The doctor stood slowly. “Speaking of Susan, I must go check on her. Please continue reading. I am sure you will find more of interest to you.”

  “No, wait. You can’t leave me in here.” My desperate plea brought no sympathy. The echo of the door slamming behind the doctor was one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard. It rang in my ears far longer than it should have. I sat on the end of the bed staring at the folder. I was confused, angry, scared, lonely, and hungry as hell.

  Chapter 19: The truth revealed

  I woke from a horrific dream with sweat pouring from my body and the sheets soaked and quickly growing clammy. My breath was ragged, my throat was raw, and my heart was pounding out of my chest. That feeling, the very second of waking from a nightmare as my heart did a tango with my liver and head, flooded my system. Nervous emotion was flowing through my body. I could feel the transformation about to happen again. The overwhelming feeling was not unlike being startled out of sleep. My heart raced, and my breath was shallow, as if I was getting only enough breath to live on and no more. Every sensation was heightened, but thought was dulled into a nearly-void lull.

  And then a ringing, barely audible at first, began to develop in my ears. Had it not been for the silence of my cell, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it. After a short time, the ringing grew painful, drowning out all other noise, which completely confused my brain’s ability to process. Every thought seemed nothing more than a jumble of words. Randomness gave way to nothingness. My mind became blank. For a moment it was pure bliss, but then that placid emptiness was spiked, once again, by that horrid sound.

  This time around, something new joined the fun. My vision grew tunneled. All I could see was a small circle in front of my body. If I looked to the right or left, I was completely blind. My eyeballs felt heavy, almost solid.

  The fun wasn’t over yet. Growing in my gut was an impassioned hunger that longed for something other than food. I wanted something I couldn’t have. I hungered for something I shouldn’t want.

  Deep down, deep within that inner sanctum of humanity that might be considered the human soul, all I wanted to do was to keep others from suffering this same pain. It was a pain no one should ever know. And then… it all ebbed away. First the hunger, then the vision, then the pain, and then the sound. I had no idea how long it had lasted, but I could feel that it had left something behind, something corrupt, something ugly.

  …

  …

  …

  I made it. Another attack came and went, and I’m still here. Just when it seemed as if there was no end or release, I was washed back up on the shore of the cell holding me captive. After my body was finally rid of every ugly sensation, the one thing that stuck was relieving the suffering of others in the hope that someone, some other zombie, would relieve me. It seemed I finally managed to get to the core of the undead threatening to overtake the whole of humanity. It was nothing like what the zombie flicks would have you believe. There was no hunger to consume human brains. There was only the all-consuming desire to rid others of their suffering, hoping that someone would return the favor.

  That bitter pimp, Irony, was happily making us all its bitch. In the process of trying to save, the zombies are only condemning us all to their same damned fate.

  “Jacob!” Bethany’s voice jerked me back to reality. She came through the same door Godwin had exited only moments before.

  “How did you find me?” Of course I knew the answer to that question, and the look on her face verified that answer. She was a hacker, and a pro at that. There was probably little she couldn’t do.

  “I’m getting you out of here,” she said as she frantically punched a sequence on a keypad. The door to the cell hissed open.

  I remained seated. “Umm…that might not be a good idea.”

  Bethany just gave me that look, the one that says, If you doubt me again I’m going to punch you in the spleen.

  “Seriously, Bethany, what if I attack you? Bite you…infect you?” I paused for just the briefest moment to linger on the thought of biting her. Just a nibble on the neck. Or better yet, her tasty girl-belly. Yum, yum―and not that odd zombie yum I had become prone to. Just a sexual yum.

  She came into the cell, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me to my feet. “Better that than know you’re rotting in this room as nothing more than Godwin’s little experiment.”

  She had a point. At first I thought Godwin was observing me in order to cure the infection. Instead, he was watching to ensure the effects of the virus came to complete fruition. I was nothing more than a post-apocalyptic lab rat.

  “Bethany, this is going to happen again.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I do. I have no idea if I can keep myself from killing someone. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I won’t let you.”

  I didn’t have the heart or the nerve to tell her she might not be able to stop me. Had this not been the end of days, I could have imagined actually having a life with this beautiful woman. But, as fate would have it, it looked like I would have to dine on her succulent brain in hopes of silencing the noise that would eventually consume my sanity.

  Bethany just turned and huffed. “I’m going to say this only once. There is absolutely no hope of getting a cure for you if you’re locked away. You stay in here, and you’re done. You get out, and you might have a chance. And besides…I have a plan.”

  There was an evil twinkle in the eye of my beloved, as if she had a secret she couldn’t wait to reveal to me. She grabbed me by the hand, and we left the holding cell and made our way to and up a flight of stairs. The next level was laid out identically to the one below. There were holding cells with the same antechamber layout. It seemed the rooms even served the same purpose. We finally arrived in an exact replica of the room that had held me captive. The only difference was that locked inside the inner room was Susan and, handcuffed to a surgical table in the outer room, was Dr. Godwin.

  “Hello again, Dr. Godwin. I told you I had a nice surprise for you.” Bethany’s voice dripped cold vengeance.

  “What are you doing? Jacob is very dangerous, Bethany. You need to return him to the cell.” The doctor was near panic.

  “Oh, he’ll be going back to a cell, only it won’t be the one below us. This time Jacob will be sharing a lovely honeymoon suite with none other than your darling daughter, Susan. This way you will get to see the full effects of your virus as Jacob eats his way through to Susan’s crunchy cerebral lobes. Won’t that be fun?”

  When Bethany was finished speaking, she gestured for me to enter the room. How could I not? She had set this up perfectly. My only hope was that she had some other endgame for this plan. I really had no desire to rip into Susan, at least not at the moment.

  Susan’s eyes were ready to jettison out of their sockets with fear. Obviously, she knew how much danger she was in. She probably knew all along what I was to the doctor.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” The young girl’s voice was near breaking.

  “Don’t take any of this personally, Susan. It’s all about your father. If he tells us what we need to know, you’ll come out of this unharmed.” I tried to speak calmly. I really hated scaring her, but we had to get to Godwin. I hoped th
is was only a scare tactic.

  “Please don’t hurt the girl!” The doctor was near an emotional cliff. He only needed a slight push to fly off the edge. “Tell me what it is you want.”

  “Well, that was horribly easy, Doctor. Now, why couldn’t you have been so accommodating before?” I turned my focus to the plexiglass window. “I’ll get right to the point, Doctor. We have only two demands: The first is the cure for whatever it is your virus has done to me. The second is the way out of this facility.”

  Doctor Godwin stared as if the mere sight of me put him in some sort of trance. His jaw muscles quivered. He blinked rapidly three times. I was waiting for tears to stream down his cheeks. “The latter I will give you. The former, I cannot.”

  A deep breath was spasmodically jerked into my lungs. “What do you mean you can’t?”

  “Let me be very clear about this, Jacob. There is no cure.” The words dropped into the room like four individual bombs, their explosions knocking the wind out of me. “We intentionally did not create a cure. We knew the process had to run a complete, natural course, or it would never work. So no cure was created.” The doctor spoke slowly for added effect. Again, bombs detonated in the room.

  “But you said yourself that you and Susan were immunized!” My voice was a bit more desperate than I had hoped it would be.

  “That was an inoculation against any possible effects the device could have produced. It had nothing to do with the virus itself.” The doctor spoke calmly, ignoring my near hysteria.

  “But surely you can synthesize a cure!” Bethany chimed in with a hint of desperation.

  “Even if I could, I don’t have a sample of the virus. Without a sample, everything would be done in vain.” Godwin attempted to punctuate his point with finality.

  I knew he was lying. Not only could I see the lie written all over his face, I could see it in his daughter’s eyes. She caught me staring at her and nervously looked away.