Plagued: The Battle Creek Zombie Rectification Experiment

by Better Hero Army

  “The door!”

  Wendy stiffened. She thought of her mother admonishing her on a phone call that never happened. “I don’t understand. Why can’t you come home?”

  It was a fair question. That wasn’t what bothered Wendy about her mother, nor the kind of conversation they might have had if she had called her—she should have called her. No, what irritated Wendy was that she couldn’t give an answer, even though it lay on the other side of that damned door, and her mother would never understand.

  Three

  “The door, please,” the blond hunter reiterated, his tone softening.

  Wendy took deliberate, cautious steps toward it, watching the blond hunter for any change in demeanor. She wanted to stall for as long as possible, hoping someone else might come down to the kennels, might disrupt whatever plans these men had.

  “Go on,” the blond said, waving his pistol casually.

  She leaned into the door sensor. It beeped and began to blink. She put her thumb onto a fingerprint reader and it blinked yellow, then went solid green. A chime went off somewhere inside the wall, then another. She backed away and the door clacked, unlocking.

  “It’s open,” she said.

  The blond man was by her side in a heartbeat, pushing the door open as he grabbed her arm. Wendy gasped. His fingers dug in painfully in his excitement to get inside.

  The recovery room beyond looked a lot like any hospital’s step-down unit, with a single bed, all kinds of monitoring devices, and a sterile smell mixed with urine. A girl lay on the bed, strapped down, her eyes shut, her head shaved completely bald. Lesions, small cuts and abrasions, bruises, and countless small adhesive bandages and tape covered her skin. She looked as though she had survived a train wreck, been thrown through glass, dragged over gravel, and then clawed at by cats. None of that was the case, though. She was merely recovering from ten years of infection. Just five days ago, she was a wild zombie. Now she was mostly comatose, a tube down her mouth and nose, a saline drip in her arm, and wires of every kind dangling under her blanket into each of the machines encircling her—safely sound asleep. Unconscious.

  Larissa Jefferson.

  This was why Wendy hadn’t called home. Try explaining being personally responsible for the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the world without saying who she was caring for or why to a woman like her mother—relentless questions. That was Wendy’s predicament. She couldn’t even talk to Tom, Larissa’s own brother, about the girl’s care.

  The blond hunter glanced at a few of the devices, nodding approvingly. “Good, she’s stable.”

  Of course, she was stable. That was the whole point of keeping her sedated. Although twelve-years-old by physical appearances, Larissa was virtually helpless, even when conscious. Her memories and social understandings had been wiped clean by the Consumption Pathogen, leaving her vacuous—a zombie in every sense of the word.

  Wendy hated the word zombie. People used it for convenience. There really wasn’t any other easy way to identify someone who was infected with the Consumption Pathogen, though. That was the correct medical term for it—Consumption Pathogen—but most people called it Hypermax from its early days, when everyone believed the whole thing was a maxillofacial infection. How many hundred toothless zombies roamed the Plagued States thanks to that flawed science?

  Still, it was a step in the right direction. The pathogen chiefly infected the host’s salivary glands, making a bite communicable, and giving zombies the knick-name “biter.” Over time, people discovered removing the salivary glands prevented the spread of the infection to others, but finding a cure to those already turned had been challenging. Larissa was the first chronic subject to ever wholly recover from its effects, at least physically.

  “Let’s stop the infusion pump,” the blond hunter suggested, stepping to the head of the bed.

  “What?”

  “We’re waking her up.”

  “You can’t just wake her up,” Wendy objected.

  “Clinically speaking, yes I can. She’s lucid and relaxed, and breathing on her own. Look at her Spon Rate. Stop the Dexmed and extubate her.”

  Wendy straightened, staring at him. Had they gone to the same medical school? Maybe they did their residency together. It was so hectic at UCSD.

  “Look, you obviously know enough to know that’s a bad idea. She could—”

  “She won’t die, doctor, and we can’t yank her from the vent as long as you keep the Dexmed flowing. She has stable PEEP. Pulse-Ox is in the green. No reason to keep her sedated.”

  Dexmed, extubate, PEEP, Pulse-Ox, Spon Rate…he knew too many clinical terms, and would probably know why every reason she would give him to leave Larissa hooked up was just a lie. It irritated her.

  He looked at Wendy with mock curiosity. “So why have you been keeping her down?”

  Wendy scowled. “She’s still infectious,” she lied, trying to answer as quickly as possible. She didn’t want him thinking she was…thinking.

  “Then we’ll put a muzzle on her.” His expression darkened as he looked at his watch. “Now, if you don’t mind….” He grabbed the air tube right above Larissa’s mouth.

  “Wait!” Wendy moved to the side of the bed opposite the blond hunter, pushing his hand off the air tube. “Just, wait a second, would you?”

  “No. Seconds we don’t have anymore. Time’s a wasting, doctor.”

  “Fine, fine, just…let me turn off the infusion pump first.”

  Wendy pressed the power button on the infusion pump and held it until the device began beeping an alarm. A few seconds later it went silent and the screen blanked out.

  “Pull the drip line,” he insisted, waving his pistol toward Larissa’s limp hand.

  “Cotton. Tape. I need tape.” Wendy snapped her fingers, pointing toward the cabinets on the wall. The blond hunter slid open the drawer and pulled out a tape dispenser and cotton on the first try, as though he belonged in a medical facility.

  Maybe a nurse.

  “Nitrile,” Wendy said, not pointing.

  The blond hunter took several nitrile gloves from a box of disposables mounted on the wall and tossed some onto Larissa’s chest. The girl didn’t even flinch.

  Tugging on the gloves, Wendy asked, “Do you have eye protection?” She removed a pair of clear safety glasses from her inside coat pocket. She slid them on, glancing at him.

  “Just get the tube out,” he said, stepping back to the foot of the bed.

  She removed the needle from the girl’s vein and taped the cotton swab to her hand to stem the bleeding.

  Larissa’s spontaneous breath rate was good enough that she could breathe on her own. Technically, they could have used a nasal air tube on her the whole time, but Wendy wanted the safety of full mechanical ventilation on the girl in case she stopped breathing on her own for some reason. Letting the daughter of Senator Jefferson die while they tried to get the door open would not have looked good. Not now. Not so soon after Mason’s death.

  Wendy slowly turned the air tube sideways, then back the other direction, trying to dislodge the diaphragm in Larissa’s throat gently. With a sucking sound, it broke free and she pulled it out of Larissa’s throat. Saliva dripped over Larissa’s face and chest as Wendy tossed the tube to the floor. The ventilator began to hiss and beep an alarm.

  Larissa coughed repeatedly, gasping for a deep breath. Wendy turned the girl’s head, but her eyes remained shut, still unconscious. She was breathing on her own, though. There would be bruising and soreness in the pharynx and trachea—there was no way of avoiding that, and for Larissa it would be something of a new sensation.

  Pain.

  The cure had successfully reactivated Larissa’s nerve fibers in the dorsal horn so that her neurotransmitters were functioning normally and not acting like a nerve block as it usually did with infected subjects. Zombies didn’t feel pain because of it, but Larissa wasn’t a zombie anymore. Now that she was recovering, all those new, bewildering sensations a
ssailed her senses when she wasn’t sedated.

  That’s what made Wendy feel sorry for the girl more than anything. Every time they woke her, the world reared its mean and ugly head.

  “See, you turned out to be a fine doctor after all. Now let’s get her off the monitors,” the blond hunter said, pulling the oximeter clip off Larissa’s fingertip.

  Not residency. Before. But where? When?

  Wendy reached under the blanket to find the ends to a set of wires dangling from an EKG.

  “Leave the pads, just disconnect the leads.”

  Larissa began to moan while Wendy yanked at the wire disconnects. Audible alarms chirped and beeped from the devices. At first, Wendy was excited by the prospect, thinking that the alarms would alert the other two people responsible for monitoring Larissa, but she worried that no one would come. She imagined them calling the front desk, and the smoker sitting there answering the phone, pretending to be Mike. She imagined him telling Captain Palmer that Wendy was here and looking in on Larissa. She imagined him telling Gary there was nothing to worry about. That would be the end of it. Her hopes were dashed further when the hunter started pressing the power button on each device, shutting them off and cutting out the noise.

  With one hand, the hunter easily released the straps cinching Larissa to the bed. Larissa moaned again, eyes still shut. He rolled her onto her side, tucking the blankets beneath her back and legs, then rolled her again so he could lift her onto his shoulder.

  “Don’t you want a bite guard?” Wendy asked. Most hunters stuffed bite guards into the mouths of anyone suspected of carrying Hypermax.

  “What for?” He carried Larissa like she was made of feathers, hardly encumbered by the scrawny girl’s weight. He pushed the door open and stepped into the hallway, holding the door with his foot. “Come on, doctor.”

  “You’ll never get out of here,” Wendy said.

  He raised a questioning eye that made her feel unsure of her own statement.

  Four

  The smoker slid into view on a rolling chair, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Took you long enough,” he said to the blond. “I told you she’d drag her heels.”

  “Put out that goddamned cigarette before you set off the smoke alarms.”

  “I shut them down. Put the system in test mode.”

  “Put it out,” the blond snapped.

  The smoker took a deep drag and dropped the cigarette to the floor, stomping it out. “There, happy?” He breathed smoke like a lazy dragon.

  The blond sighed angrily, waving his pistol toward Wendy. “Cuff them and let’s get going.”

  The smoker stood up and dug into his cargo pocket as he approached them. Wendy did not like the idea of being handcuffed. The blond yanked the jury-rigged remote control out of his pocket, though, to Wendy’s relief. He pressed a button and waved it up and down the length of Larissa’s arms. “The girl ain’t chipped,” he said. He waved the contraption over Wendy’s left arm and it buzzed in his hand. “She’s got a class-three. Low threshold, high strength.”

  “And?”

  “It’d be better if I cut it out of her, that’s what,” the smoker said as he grabbed Wendy by the elbow.

  Wendy twisted and pulled her arm free, staring him eye-to-eye. They were the same size. Without the gun, he might still beat her pretty badly, but she grew up with brothers. She could scrap.

  “Use a cuff,” the blond snapped, obviously irritated. “Time’s a wasting.”

  The smoker grinned with his yellowed teeth, showing no sign of fear or concern. He pulled what looked like a blood pressure cuff out of a different cargo pocket and shook it open before roughly wrapping it around Wendy’s arm. It crunched and crinkled like it was filled with tin foil. Eventually he used the Velcro to cinch it tight and gave her arm a tug, pulling her ear close, saying, “You leave that on or he’ll let me cut out your chip, I guarantee it.” His breath smelled like an ashtray.

  “Hey,” the blond warned.

  The smoker let Wendy go, but not before winking. She wanted to punch him in the eye.

  “Did you get the registration?” The blond asked.

  “Yeah,” the smoker replied.

  “Did it take? You got a confirmation number, right?”

  “Yeah, I told you. Yeah.”

  The blond glared at the smoker, who sighed and pulled a folded-up piece of paper from his back pocket. “I even printed it,” the smoker said, unfolding it partly to show a legal looking form.

  The blond switched on a hand-held radio and pressed the microphone button. “We’re coming out.”

  “About damned time,” a voice squelched back at them.

  “Did you clean the cages?”

  “Yeah. Watch your step.”

  “Alright, get us out of here,” the blond said into the radio, then put it into his pocket. “Let’s move.”

  The door to the waiting room began buzzing and the smoker yanked it open, giggling at Wendy’s look of utter amazement.

  “You’re wondering how I did that, aren’t you?” the smoker asked Wendy as he crossed the waiting room to stand next to the man-trap door. Wendy followed him at gunpoint as the blond hunter came out behind her, still shouldering Larissa, who had started groaning now that the sedatives were beginning to wear off.

  “Shut up,” the blond said to his partner.

  The smoker pulled the door to the man-trap open and held it for Wendy. She couldn’t get out of the next door unless this one was closed, so she knew they didn’t care if she got ahead of them here. Outside, however, was going to be where she might be able to make her escape.

  “Spliced a wireless device into the security computer’s network drop,” the smoker said proudly.

  The guards at the main gate would be able to see her once she was past the parking area. She just had to get around the train parked out front. That goddamned train! It wasn’t that far to run.

  “I said shut up,” the blond added, giving the smoker a slight push into the man-trap. The door shut behind them. “And you,” he said to Wendy, shoving the back of her shoulder. Wendy turned and glared at him. She was getting irritated with the way these two were treating her, pushing her around like she was some kind of zombie. She wanted to punch the blond now, too.

  With her attention on the blond, she didn’t notice the smoker until he grabbed her by the wrist and stuffed a zip-tie over it, tightening it against her skin in the blink of an eye. “Whoop, I get to keep her!” The smoker held up his arm, making her own arm dangle from the zip-ties linking them together like handcuffs.

  She sighed in disgust.

  “No running away,” the blond hunter said as he put his pistol into his pocket.

  The second door clacked and the blond hunter pulled it open.

  The smoker grinned, chewing on his own laughter as he tugged her out the door. The growl of an idling diesel engine echoed loudly in the parking area beneath the EPS building. It came from the hunting rig that she hardly paid any attention to earlier.

  “Come on,” a man said from the cab of the truck. He was a leathery Mexican with streaks of silver hair under his soft, knit hat. He pushed the front door open with his foot and waved for them to hurry. He held a small laptop computer in his other hand.

  The blond hunter pointed behind the truck. “Don’t dawdle.” Several bodies lay on the ground, all wearing the typical layered, decayed clothing found on newly arriving zombies. One of the bodies was struggling to get up, but teetered on his own arm and fell onto his side, groping ahead as though his vision and other body functions were severely impaired. “They’ll be up and at ‘em in a couple minutes.”

  The smoker chuckled and yanked Wendy again, pulling her to the side of the hunting rig as he climbed up ahead of her. She could yank him back, hurl him to the ground, but then what? He’d survive, he’d still be attached to her, and there were three of them now, not two. She followed him up and into the back seat of the cabin. He pulled her along the bench seat to the far
end of the passenger side.

  “You sit there,” he said, pointing at the floorboard.

  “What?”

  There was hardly room enough to fit down between the seats.

  The smoker climbed over the seat back into the front passenger seat of the rig and settled there with his arm hanging over the back, still attached to Wendy.

  The blond hunter climbed in and rolled Larissa off of his shoulder onto the bench seat, then swiftly opened a knife. Hunched in the low cab, he stepped closer to Wendy. She held her breath, trying to retreat against the sidewall, but couldn’t move.

  “You’ll need both hands,” the blond said as he reached for her arm. With a quick jerk he cut through the zip-tie linking her to the smoker. She felt their bond slacken and her arm fell limply to her side. The blond handed the knife to the smoker.

  “What are you going to—?”

  “Sit down there,” the blond insisted, pointing into the floorboard behind the front seat. The smoker slid his seat forward a few inches, giggling again through his yellow-stained teeth. Wendy looked between the two, then at her arm. The cuff dug against her skin, so tight it was beginning to cut off circulation. She knew why, now. She used something similar to get into the EPS in the first place, back when she was wanted in connection with the investigation into the destruction of Rock Island. The RFID chip in her arm could be sensed up to ten feet away by the wands they used at the main gate, unless something interfered with it. The Senator’s son, Tom, had smuggled her into the EPS in the hatchback of his Subaru with a roll of aluminum foil wrapped around her arm several times.

  A tiny red LED that blinked sporadically was on the outside of the cuff the smoker put on her. She figured their solution was a little more advanced than Tom’s.

  The blond grabbed Wendy with both hands and pushed her into the space behind the seat. “Stop wasting time,” he growled.

  Wendy gasped and felt the sting of something hard press against her side. It was a seat controller for the back seat. She tried to wedge the bar or move her skin around it, but it dug deeper the more she squirmed, and before she could sit up, the blond shoved Larissa on top of her.