The horsemen were not those beings depicted in religious fiction. If anything, they were much worse than that. The horsemen were the sons and daughters of Adam.
23.08.19
Manchester, UK
By the time Smith got close to the exit of the hospital building there was a full-fledged battle going on outside. Army reinforcements had arrived from their forward positions around Manchester and were engaging the undead as they stormed out of the hospital’s front entrance. At least a hundred soldiers had turned up, enough to turn the tide in what would later be seen as a mere skirmish in the great battles that would erupt across the globe. To the men engaged in it though, this was utter carnage, the engagement further depleting ammunition stocks as well as sapping the courage of men who had always expected to be fighting other men.
At that moment in time, there were twenty-seven thousand infected individuals across Manchester who had yet to fall and rise. Even with the curfew, the numbers continued to grow as families, friends and loved ones continued to associate. Even with the threat of the undead, there were still people out there doing the essential jobs to keep the city viable.
Two further times, Smith had been able to send the undead on their way, the zombies seeming to act confused by what Smith represented. Renfield stuck to him like glue, not letting the Colonel out of his reach, never mind out of his sight.
“I’m not sure I want to keep him anymore,” the Voice had whispered in Smith’s head after the final encounter. “What do you think he will do when we get outside?” Smith at first didn’t know what the Voice was referring to, still confused and somewhat dazed by what was happening to him. A moment later, the answer clicked. Would Renfield want to keep the witness to his crimes around? This left Smith in a difficult predicament, Renfield most likely just using him to escape the hospital. Smith’s gun still rested on the hospital floor where he had been forced to leave it. He was defenceless in the presence of a maniac.
The question of his own broken sanity didn’t come into it.
“Let me take over,” the Voice insisted. “I can save you, I know just what to say. You just need to let me fully in, let me run the show. Just for a little while.” As difficult as it was for Smith to get a full grip on his reality, he had been resisting the influence of the Voice as best he could. Sometimes he had felt his control slip like when Patel had been killed, but as the minutes ticked by, he had felt the influence of the Voice waning.
“But you’re me,” Smith had mumbled to himself, the words unheard by the Private who was becoming more and more agitated.
“Then you won’t have a problem with it. If he shoots you, he kills me, and I have no wish to see that happen. I’m enjoying the ride too much.” Nearing the exit, he had seen the way Renfield had kept fidgeting with the gun. Smith felt he had no other real choice so he had relented and allowed the Voice to take over, although he had no idea what that even meant.
The world around him had gone dark, the sounds muffled as if spoken through a thick wall. Smith’s skin had felt cold, and the words spoken were missed on the whole, only the odd syntax breaking through the barrier that had formed. At that moment a question had come to him that had filled the recesses of his supressed mind. Was this what it was like to die?
Although no longer in full command of his senses, Smith still saw the world. He was there to witness the Voice speaking to Renfield, saw them walking outside, witnessed Renfield kill a zombie that had come out of the pits of the darkness that engulfed Smith. He was getting used to the condition now, the sounds becoming clearer, his vision stronger as he rode on the back of the body now temporarily controlled by the Voice.
Things were reversing quickly though, the Voice unable to keep full control. Although Smith didn’t understand the process, it was clear he was pushing the Voice back, regaining domination over himself, the wrongness of the situation too much for his mind to accept. It wasn’t something he was actively trying to do, more likely the natural balance re-establishing equilibrium.
“Not yet damn you,” the Voice chastised, and Smith felt himself being squashed down again, only this time by force that he had not consented to. That did it, this wasn’t what Smith had agreed to and he fought back hard against the Voice. It felt weaker, and Smith knew he could overpower it by exerting his overriding dominance.
“What did you tell him?” Smith demanded, not having heard the bargain made. Renfield didn’t react to the words, so Smith guessed he had spoken them internally.
“The Private is obsessed with death. I told him that he could be directly responsible for the murder of millions. Strangely enough he liked the idea.”
“But how?” Smith felt his jurisdiction continuing to return despite the resistance of the Voice. What would happen if the Voice tried that again though, to usurp his mind perhaps when Smith was asleep? Did it need Smith’s permission, and could he hold it off next time if the Voice tried to take control by force? What if it had the ability to adapt?
Inside Smith’s brain, the virus had destroyed and created millions of new neural connections resulting in a second personality that was now trying to gain governance. XV1 had destroyed its lethality, but not Lazarus’s ability to adapt and evolve, made worse by the fresh viral load that had been inflicted on Smith by the zombie that had bitten him. This was not the virus becoming sentient, the psychological anomaly just a by-product of the virus’s attempt to survive. To put it in layman’s terms, Smith was descending into the madness of two minds.
What was forming came from the darkest desires in Smith’s subconscious. The wicked thoughts that creep up unawares in the dead of night, the strange notions that plague us, ideas that would make others recoil in horror even though their minds are just as rebellious. The distressing memory from the past that just pops into our head for no apparent reason. It’s the thought that springs up about driving one’s car into the barrier wall when you are doing seventy on the motorway. The salacious urge that grabs us when we meet someone we find attractive. Demons from the Id, the hidden part of us that demands immediate gratification of our most hedonistic needs. All this formed itself into another mind.
For some reason, deep down under all the hopes and dreams, the newly fractured part of him felt that only Smith should have charge over who was immune to the virus, the ego swelled with its own self-importance. With possession of the last of the XV1, Smith was the determinant on who would survive this plague until more was made. There was more psychosis there though, more to the bubbling insanity. This subconscious persona could no longer abide the thought of the naturally immune existing in the world.
With Patel dead, who was there with greater knowledge of the virus than Smith and the identity that shared his skull? As far as Smith knew, only he had used the power of science to beat this thing. The interloper, born of Smith’s crassest emotions, could also not tolerate the existence of any other mind having that knowledge, jealousy churning it almost into a rage. This was why the Voice had killed Patel, taking Smith when he was at his most vulnerable.
Smith finally regained control, pushing the Voice deep down, its objections muted, its ambitions thwarted. A little bit of the Voice died at that point, but so did a bit of Smith. Perhaps they came that bit closer to being one again, but a great part of what made him human had been lost forever.
Renfield, for his part, resisted the temptation to shoot this new Colonel in the guts. The deal the Voice had offered up was too tempting, too sweet to turn down. With the bulk of the zombies now either still in the hospital or lying devastated out at the main entrance, Renfield and Smith made it back to their troops without too much trouble. A Lieutenant there who recognised Smith from a former meeting at the Fulwood Barracks was more than willing to arrange an escort for Smith.
“Private Renfield is coming with me,” Smith had informed the lieutenant. “He saved my life in there, so I want him around for my safety and the safety of the data about the cure I am developing.” The word cure rippled through the soldi
ers around them. Did the Colonel really have the key to all this? And when would they all be saved from the fate that had befallen so many?
The soldiers on the scene discovered something that they had forgotten over the last few days. Hope. It was a shame that such blissful expectations were to be shortly dashed on the rocks of the coming apocalyptic reality.
22.08.19
Washington DC, USA
When the black tendrils had begun to form around his nostrils, nobody had been able to deny that the man presently holding the office of President had no longer been fit for office. Ryan had volunteered to be locked in the room he had been sleeping in, a member of his Secret Service detail handing him a sidearm before the door was locked.
“I figure a marine would want to at least have the option.”
The President’s wife had been in hysterics and had needed to be sedated. Now the First Lady, she was unable to maintain the decorum that the position demanded, the pending loss of her husband too much for her to fathom. There was also the slightly worrying matter that she had shared the same bed with the man who was likely hours away from turning into a zombie. She had been given everything she had ever dreamed of, only for it to be snatched from her in the worst way possible.
Jessy was heartbroken, as well as scared for what this all now meant. She wasn’t aware that she had brought the virus down here. If the President was infected, then that probably meant they all were, at least sixty per cent of the people down in the bunker now displaying symptoms that could be attributable to Lazarus.
Jessy’s sore throat and runny nose had disappeared and in herself she now felt fine. It had been so easy for everyone to ignore what was now so blatantly obvious. The bunker doors were now being kept closed, not for the protection of those inside, but to stop the virus making the world above any worse, the state of the city above making the testing of the blood taken from everyone difficult to arrange. It would take time, something not everyone had, and the way people kept their distances from those around them indicated how trust was being rapidly eroded. So the bunker doors would stay locked, everyone down here with the authority to make such a decision in agreement that it was the best thing to do. If they started evacuating people, they would just be putting more aspects of the government at risk. President Ryan had already resigned himself to the fact that he would most likely have the shortest presidency in the history of the United States.
It didn’t take long for Jessy to realise she was trapped down here.
As it happened, the President wasn’t the first one to shoot himself. One of his Secret Service detail was the first individual to take their own life. Nobody had expected it, the man well liked and well respected by everyone who worked with him. But with the word that the President was now locked away, the agent had excused himself so as to apparently use the bathroom.
The agent’s name was Nicholas Godfrey, father of two young girls, husband to a wife who tolerated his strange hours but honoured and adored the way he protected the country. Standing before the rest room mirror, Nicholas looked at his troubled face and decided enough was enough. His sinuses were feeling bunged up, and the skin on his back had started to itch with an annoying relentlessness that no amount of scratching could deal with. He was probably the last person anyone would have expected to commit suicide, but he did so anyway, the neurotransmitters in his brain so out of whack he was finding it hard to keep his emotions in check. Several times over the previous hours he had almost burst out crying.
All he could picture, towards the end, were the inevitable fates of the people he loved, each meeting a brutal and vicious end. It sent him down a spiral of despair that, with an immense force of will, he’d managed to hide under his professional façade. No more. Locking the door to the toilet, he took out his gun and stripped all the bullets out of it as if to make a ritual out of the whole suicide. Examining them carefully, he picked one and concentrated on the way it shone in the fluorescent lights. It seemed flawless to him, not marred by the slightest scratch or blemish which somehow mattered in the ritual he was about to perform. He loaded the gun with this single round and stared at himself in the mirror for several seconds. This really did seem like the only option open to him.
Was there any reason for him not to do this? He couldn’t think of any, his thought processes disrupted by the virus that was manipulating his present actions. The thing that surprised him the most was how calm he felt as he placed the cold steel into his mouth, pointing the gun up into the roof of his mouth. It felt wrong against his teeth, a sudden concern striking him that he might chip something if he wasn’t careful. The veneers on his incisors had cost him thousands of dollars and it was only proper that they survive him past death.
There wasn’t much in the way of hesitation for him to pull the trigger, the bullet punching through the palate into the brain, taking the shock wave with it that decimated his humanity. The gun was flung across the room as his body slumped to the floor. Ten seconds later, there was a commotion on the other side of the bathroom door as people came to see what tragedy had occurred.
Bob Crane was the first man to break through the door, the forty-five-year-old head of the President’s protection detail. The image that greeted him filled him with despair, Nicholas a personal friend, someone who Crane had mentored for several years. The loss of such a valued colleague sent Crane a little further down the path of overwhelming despair that experiencing the apocalypse was bound to create. There was no point in even checking the man’s pulse, the brain matter that was dripping off the roof tiles showing the true fatality that had been inflicted.
The other thought that got into Crane’s head was that at least the body wouldn’t resurrect. Everyone now knew that zombies were killed by shots to the head, but it hadn’t quite filtered through to the rank and file that it was a specific part of the brain that needed to be destroyed. The reptilian complex of Nicholas’s corpse had escaped relatively unscathed, the virus working its magic as it turned the carcass into a tool for its own purpose. This one was to turn quickly.
The gathered faces at the shattered door were ushered away, and a thick sheet was produced to cover the dead body. With the shroud complete, Crane stood in the doorway and told one of the marine guards to help him move the body to somewhere that wasn’t so frequently used. One of the storage cupboards would likely have to do for the time being because at least that way the body could be hidden from everyone. They couldn’t just leave it in the open like this for everyone to see.
And who was going to clean this shit up?
Under the shroud, the eyes opened, black as the darkest of nights. The zombie sensed people nearby but was still acclimatising to its new form so it was already being carried by the time it got a full sense of itself. With what was left of its nervous system, it could feel hands holding it above the floor, its feet and armpits being used as leverage points to move it out of the restroom.
The craving for flesh was already strong, the sheet rising up as if a magic trick was being performed. The arms lifted it, dead hands clasping around Crane’s surprised and vulnerable throat. The marine dropped the feet, the zombie’s body pulling Crane to the floor with it as it was released, Crane’s hands trying to pull at the vice that was crushing his neck.
As the soldier pulled out his sidearm, the zombie formerly known as Nicholas bit down into the neck of its former mentor, tearing a huge chunk out of the jugular vein as well as damaging the carotid artery enough to cause a fatal bleed. Due to the angle, the blood shot across the room, hitting the marine in the eyes, an impressive shot aided by randomness and perhaps fate. Momentarily blinded, the marine staggered back, giving Nicholas(Z) time to push its writhing victim off its body. The zombie itself rose off the floor with the chaotic grace that only a zombie could muster. Despite the hand that pressed against the pulsing wound, the blood loss was too severe for Crane to stem, and he rapidly began to lose consciousness.
Despite still being half blinded, the marine got off
several shots before the zombie was upon it, the pistol swiped from the soldier’s hand with a blow that broke the marine’s wrist. The marine was a big man, and he tried to valiantly fight off the clawing hands that grabbed for him, his uniform ripping as the zombie propelled him fully out of the bathroom and into the well-lit corridor outside. The two impacted the wall opposite the bathroom doorway, teeth snapping in the marine’s face, mere centimetres from inflicting injury. So close were those blood stained lips that tainted phlegm splattered across the human’s face. An iron grip began to squeeze his larynx closed, the neck of a human so ridiculously vulnerable.
There were three bystanders to witness this, two armed and now aiming their weapons. So vigorous was the conflict that the marine was clearly losing, nobody felt confident they could line up a shot without hitting one of their own. It was only when the marine finally lost the battle and became overpowered by the stronger force that one of the watchers, a fellow marine, fired. Shooter one’s bullets impacting into the back of the zombie with little apparent effect. The result was not what the shooter had planned for.
Nicholas(Z) by then had its teeth firmly embedded in the cheek of the marine it was attacking, and it spun its head around, pulling the flesh away with cataclysmic force. At the same time, it pushed itself away from its prey, the claw like grip having crushed the throat that was so pliant and weak. It seemed to glare at the man shooting it, even though it had lost the gift of sight upon its death. It let go of the man it was killing, the marine falling to the floor clutching his ruined neck.
The zombie was rocked back by multiple shots, one taking it in the left eye, the shooters moving towards the zombie as it was pushed away from them by the deadly impacts. None were enough to finish the creature off, but it fell to a knee, the damage inflicted momentarily becoming too much for it. Distracted by the immediate threat, nobody noticed Crane(Z) rising up from the bathroom floor, its conversion as quick as the zombie that had created it. Nobody would ever learn why the time to resurrection differed in different deceased.
The Lazarus Strain Chronicles (Book 2): The Rise Page 40