Dead Stop

by Mark Clapham

  ‘How do we get past that?’ I hissed to Ghost Melissa. She had indicated the door we were heading towards, but had now come back to join her corpse as we—rather, I—tried not to draw the attention of the horde.

  ‘We don’t,’ Ghost Melissa said, using a normal tone of voice as only I could hear her anyway. ‘We take a vehicle from the next level down, the secure loading bay, and take the other ramp. The specimen transports are armoured, so they should smash through anything we need to get through.’

  I nodded. Ghost Melissa had had me check the pockets of her zombie self before we left the server room, and I presumed the keycard and ring of random keys were related to getting into the relevant area and stealing the vehicle we needed. I certainly didn’t want to have more of a conversation than I needed to, not with so many undead lurking nearby. Though I suppose, strictly speaking, they were going about their business and it was I who was doing the lurking.

  One of the zombies in the horde let out an exceptionally high moan, and another returned the same noise, like the worst call and response birdsong you ever heard. Zombie Melissa started to try and steer herself towards the rest of the group, and I had to drag her back on course.

  Shit, could they communicate? If so, I needed to get Zombie Melissa away from the rest before she could call for help.

  From beneath her hood, Zombie Melissa let out a low, keening moan.

  Across the car park, in the lights from the crashed cars, I could see the large group of zombies turn towards us.

  ‘Shit,’ I said out loud. There seemed little point in pretending I wasn’t there anymore.

  The horde began to move towards us, spreading out as they did so. Meanwhile, we were only halfway across the breadth of the car park. Even with their jerky, clumsy movements, some of them were going to get between me and the door I needed to reach.

  I began to shove Zombie Melissa with more urgency. We were just passing behind an abandoned sedan car when she tripped, falling clumsily sideways and taking me with her.

  I rolled on to my back, letting go of Zombie Melissa, who had ended up on her front, legs kicking aimlessly.

  It was then I saw that zombies were emerging from the shadows nearby, far closer to me than the approaching horde.

  Ghost Melissa stood there looking between me and her zombie self stuck on the floor, the handful of zombies nearby, and the larger group moving in from the end of the car park.

  The look on her transparent face said it all. We were screwed, she couldn’t see a way out in time.

  Then a bullet passed through her chest, hitting a zombie a couple of feet behind her.

  The zombie, which I hadn’t even noticed before, was knocked back. A second shot took its head clean off.

  They were followed by more shots, thin red laser lines cutting through the darkness, gunshots echoing in the large concrete box of a car park, accompanied by muffled orders and the static bark of close range radio communication.

  I squeezed myself close to the floor, and shuffled forward to see past where Zombie Melissa was lying. The other end of the car park was sufficiently far away that I could see up to about waist height from this low angle, and I could make out figures moving purposefully in the darkness, military boots and fatigued legs.

  The clean-up crew. Zombie Melissa’s stumble, which had seemed to doom us a moment ago, had just saved us from a gunshot each to the head.

  The figures were moving in on the horde at the other end of the car park, and switched to what, to my untrained ear, sounded like automatic weapons, guns that let out cacophonous short bursts of gunfire. I could see bodies dropping as the clean-up crew tore into the large group of zombies.

  I rolled over and looked around. There didn’t seem to be any shots coming down this end of the car park now.

  That was my chance. Staying low, I pulled myself up to a crouch, then dragged Zombie Melissa up on to her knees. As she made a muffled noise of what could have been complaint but probably wasn’t, I glanced up at the violence at the other end of the car park.

  The clean-up crew looked like a stereotypical SWAT team, all body armour and goggles and helmets. They were busy with the main group of zombies, but it wouldn’t take them long to finish them off. Behind the heavily armed group I could see a couple of men in suits and gas masks following, along with similarly masked men in lab coats or hazmat suits.

  It was getting crowded. Once that zombie mob was dealt with, they would no doubt sweep the area, and all it would take would be for one of the execs or scientists to glance my way as I got up and all that firepower would be aimed at me.

  I dragged Zombie Melissa to her feet and ran, half-dragging her with me, across the open space between the car and a row of vans.

  There was a zombie that had managed to stay out of the line of sight of the clean-up crew wandering around near the first van, just where I was running towards. As I pulled Zombie Melissa behind the van I let go of her, letting her stagger the rest of the way herself, and shoulder charged the other zombie.

  I crashed into it at waist level, knocking it sideways and somehow sending it flailing without losing my own footing. It keeled over with an aggrieved moan, and I scrambled away from it.

  There was only a short distance from the van we were hiding behind to the door Ghost Melissa had indicated.

  ‘Card,’ Ghost Melissa hissed. ‘We need to use the card.’

  I nodded and readied the card I had picked from Zombie Melissa’s pocket in one hand, and used the other to hold her by the wrist restraints again.

  I took a deep breath, aware that the zombie I had toppled was scraping its way towards me across the concrete floor, then pushed Zombie Melissa out into open space again.

  The card reader was to the right of the door, and as I swept the card through it I held Zombie Melissa face-first against the door, my left hand pressed into her back as she struggled.

  The card went through. Red light. Nothing.

  I glanced down at the other end of the car park. The gunfire had ceased and the SWAT brigade were having their own special kind of fun, finishing off zombies with batons as they climbed over piles of corpses.

  Then I looked at the swipe card in my hand. It was the wrong way around, magnetic strip facing out of the reader.

  I flipped it between my fingers, swiped it through the reader, and the light went green with a louder-than-I-would-like beep.

  I didn’t wait to look around and see if any of the clean-up crew had heard the noise, I shoved Zombie Melissa straight through as the door swung open, and rushed through behind her.

  THERE WAS A story to be told about the places we went through on our way to the location Gregson had marked on the map, but I wasn’t the one with the background knowledge to tell them and if Melissa was, she was keeping quiet, subdued by the presence of her zombie body stumbling along ahead of her.

  I couldn’t tell you the narrative behind what we saw down there, in the labs. I just saw the aftermath, the evidence of fallen cages, shattered glass, bullet holes in walls and blood smears on the floor.

  The clean-up crew had obviously torn through here, guns blazing, albeit via a route whereby they reached the car park we’d just left at a different entrance; thank fuck, as we’d have run straight into them otherwise. Most of the zombies we saw were dead—deader than they had been, rather—and there were neat piles of body bags set aside from some of the carnage.

  The only zombies we saw walking were still trapped in their pens or cages. There were clearly various environmental tests going on with both the dead and the undead—at one point we passed through an open room with wired-off areas of artificial grassland, under huge high-intensity lights, a cross between the FBI’s body farm where they observed decomposition in the wild, and a large scale urban dope farm.

  Within the little pens were prone bodies and wandering zombies, the smell drifting through the air conditioned space, and making me gag.

  Worse still was the specimen pool, a dank underground lake w
ith bodies floating by, only the floaters visible as the filthy water was almost opaque. I actually threw up at that point, and would have been doubled up for ages if the gantry that ran above the pool wasn’t relatively short, leading to another heavy door.

  I exited the pool room with a complete lack of caution, and I think it was only the sheer noise in the next chamber that saved me from drawing attention to us, the roar of grinding gears and the hiss of flames, accompanied by the muffled shouts of workers.

  After the dampness of the pool room, the next room was baking hot, with a foul but scorched stench in the air. Thankfully the sides of the gantry were at shoulder height, so I didn’t need to force Zombie Melissa to kneel or anything as we slowly crossed the area.

  Shadows of moving men were cast onto the ceiling above the gantry, flickering in firelight, and I glanced briefly over the inner edge of the gantry to see environment-suited men and women throwing bagged corpses into what looked like an industrial crusher, feeding into a vast incinerator.

  AFTER ALL THAT, the fact that the testing room where they stored, and presumably administered, the stabiliser looked like a torture chamber seemed relatively tame.

  It was a clean, scrubbed room with whitewashed walls, intense light and a series of medical cupboards down one wall. At the centre of the room were a row of three padded chairs, each with restraint straps dangling from them.

  After what I had just seen I was perfectly prepared to shoot any scientist or just-following-orders body disposal goon we ran into, but the room was empty. Nudging Zombie Melissa in, I holstered my pistol and locked the door behind us using one of Melissa’s keys, following her instructions.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Ghost Melissa asked. She seemed less confident, having improvised well beyond the reaches of the plan she had pitched to me in the diner.

  ‘You find the stabiliser,’ I said. ‘While I get you seated.’

  As Ghost Melissa stuck her head through the doors of cupboards and fridges, I prepared to wrangle her zombie body into one of the chairs.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EVENTUALLY I WRESTLED Zombie Melissa into one of the chairs, tied the restraints and took off the hood. She got a few good scratches in when I cut through the tag holding her wrists together, but somehow I managed to get through the experience without being bitten.

  As Zombie Melissa snarled and snapped, tied to her treatment chair, Ghost Melissa showed me where the stabiliser was in one of the medical fridges.

  It wasn’t hard to miss, a multi-pronged syringe thing with nasty coloured liquids in it.

  It matched the description Gregson had scribbled on the corner of the map.

  Gregson had also written something else in spidery handwriting: ‘Inject into neck’.

  Right then.

  ‘SORRY,’ I SAID to Ghost Melissa as I pulled Zombie Melissa’s head back by the hair. I had to grip tightly as she struggled, trying to bite my arm, but eventually I got the multi-needle to her neck and pressed the button. She bucked even more as the little needles pricked her skin and the liquid disappeared, at which point I let go and stepped out of reach as fast as I could.

  Zombie Melissa jerked back a couple of times, struggling against her restraints, fingers stretching out. Then she collapsed forward, head down, face covered by lank hair, and was still.

  I waited for a minute, watching intently.

  ‘Was that it?’ I asked, turning to Ghost Melissa.

  But she was gone.

  I was just debating whether to get in close and check if Zombie Melissa—just Melissa now, I guess—had any vital signs when she threw back her head and drew in a huge breath, followed by a violent coughing fit that propelled globs of blackened phlegm across the room, leaving thick strands dangling from the corners of her mouth. That turned into a cycle of coughs and rapid, shallow breaths, like hyperventilation or the breathing I’d seen women do on TV when giving birth.

  As she jerked back and forth in the chair, breathing rapidly, Melissa’s skin was turning bright red, her eyes open and staring into space, fingers clawing into the arm-rests of her chair.

  Melissa shook, her entire body moving in waves of fits, and the signs of illness—the yellowishness of her skin and the blackness of her extremities—seemed to be driven out by the sunburnt redness that coursed through her flesh, leaving her skin as raw and pink as new growth over a wound. Her teeth were clenched and her staring eyes began to focus into a recognisable expression, one of panic and desperation. Tears ran down her cheeks and flowed into the sweat that coursed down from her scalp, soaking her clothes.

  Then she froze, let out a slow breath as gentle as a sigh, and collapsed back into the chair, exhausted. Steam rose off her skin as the redness began to fade, and she just lay back, breathing slowly, eyes blinking out the sweat and tears.

  I stepped forward, and her gaze settled on me.

  ‘Melissa?’ I asked. Even though her ghost had gone, and presuming that she was now technically alive, I had no idea whether the spirit I had met would be reincorporated into the revived Melissa, or just banished into nothingness. Would her time as a ghost be remembered, forgotten or just erased altogether?

  ‘Yes, David, it’s me,’ she said, elated, still breathing heavily, cheeks flushed. ‘Could you...?’

  She nodded down to where one of her wrists had become twisted in the restraints.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and began to unclip the restraints, starting with the wrists, then the bands around the chest, and finally freeing her ankles. She didn’t move at first, instead rotating her feet and hands and flexing her limbs slightly, as if trying to warm up after a cramp.

  ‘Here,’ I said, helping her stand up.

  ‘How does it feel to be alive?’ I asked. Melissa was hot to the touch, even through her clothes, but I knew that we didn’t have time for her to recover. We needed to get moving.

  Melissa didn’t answer me, but instead put her free hand behind my neck, torn nails scratching a little at my collar, and pulled my head down, drawing up towards me to kiss me. There was a moment of alarm and disgust as I caught a taste of something residually foul on her breath, of old meat and rotten leaves, but as her mouth pressed against mine that brief scent of decay was replaced by a flavour that was fresh and alive, a salty tang of fresh sweat and minerals.

  Besides, the intensity of the moment, the passion behind the kiss was irresistible, and I pulled her up to me, returning the kiss, my arms around her. Holding her, the movement of her chest as she breathed and the beating of her heart so close to mine, she felt more alive than anyone, and in turn I felt more alive than I had before.

  When she withdrew from me, the longer kiss followed by a couple of quick, fleeting ones, our lips glancing against each other’s, she ended by biting my lip slightly, tugging it towards her for a moment as if not wanting to entirely let go.

  ‘Okay,’ I said as she dropped back to her own level, feet flat against the floor, head lowered slightly, perhaps in embarrassment. Her hair, still damp with sweat, smelled hot and oily. I breathed that smell in, my head resting on hers.

  ‘We still need to go,’ I said quietly.

  She nodded a couple of times, before looking up, smiling slightly. I smiled back.

  We unlocked the door to the treatment room, and moved out into the corridor, Melissa still leaning on me, but her grip loosening as she began to walk, her legs supporting her own weight again.

  As Melissa stepped away from me, walking on her own, she brushed her fingers down my sleeve before letting go, and gave me another smile.

  Then she doubled up, collapsing to the floor, curling up into a foetal position. She gave a low moan.

  I dropped into a crouch and put my arm around her once more.

  ‘Come on, let me help you,’ I said, letting her hand rest on my forearm so she could use me to push herself up to her feet. ‘It’s not surprising you’re still weak, after everything you’ve been through.’

  ‘No,’ she said, dazed as I helped her
walk, stumbling beside me. ‘It’s not weakness, it’s something else.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, but as much as I honestly did care, I was distracted. I wasn’t sure how fast the two of us could move like this if she remained so weak and unsteady on her feet, or, god forbid, got worse. While Gregson said the zombies weren’t interested in him after he took the stabiliser, and presumably Melissa would be similarly unappetising, I was still zombie bait, and would be vulnerable while I helped her walk.

  ‘It’s...’ She trailed off, and I stopped walking, looking at her. Her eyes were tear-stung and red, a look of confusion there with some other expression seemingly threatening to overwhelm her, one eyelid twitching furiously.

  ‘Hunger,’ she said with a sense of bitterness, and grief, and I could see those emotions welling in her, before being overwhelmed by the urge itself, her face setting to a more animalistic purpose. Her hold on my shoulder became a rigid grip, her free hand pulling the scarf away from my neck, and then she was pulling me down towards her again, but this time with a different, crueller passion, her mouth opening to sink her teeth into my neck, her teeth chewing deep into the flesh of my throat, choking me as I felt my windpipe crushed and torn.

  I couldn’t scream or protest as agony and shock overwhelmed me, my limbs kicking out helplessly as I tried to breathe but couldn’t, my movements clumsy and drowsy and a rush, a great rush of pain and panic and I don’t know what else causing me to slip, to lose my hold on consciousness, the whole world lolling sideways and my vision fading as she tore a chunk out of my neck and let me fall to the ground.

  I barely felt myself land, so overwhelming was the pain from the bite, but that was numbing now too, and the ceiling above was just a blur of white, and the last thing I was aware of was a sound of teeth chewing through tough meat, a deep gulp and, right at the end, a grunt of bestial satisfaction as I lost my grip on consciousness and life altogether.