The Survivors Book IV: Spring

by V. L. Dreyer

  "It makes sense, when you think about it," Gavin said. "We're fairly close to Wellington, but it’s also far enough away from the capital that it wouldn't be a target if we were attacked by a foreign power. It's within driving distance of the suburbs so the workers could go home at night, but also far enough out of town that you wouldn't have civvies walking past all day."

  "He says it’s bigger on the inside," Madeline said dreamily. "The facility goes way back into the hills, and deep underground." She paused and glanced at me quizzically. "What's a facility?"

  I stumbled over the answer, still struggling to make sense of her words. "It's just a general word for a place or tool that serves a purpose. Who is 'he', Maddy?"

  "The big boy," she said, looking at me like I was crazy. "He went inside. He says we'll need his key, so we should follow him."

  "The… big boy?" I echoed. I tried to keep my voice casual, but suddenly I found all the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. "I don't see anything so I'm going to have to trust you on that, kiddo. Can you show us where the big boy went?"

  "Of course," she replied. She took my hand and led me into the building. The others fell in behind us, weapons at the ready. The interior of the building was dark, and when I tried a light switch I discovered that the power was off.

  "We should have brought a portable generator with us," I said over my shoulder.

  "We can always go back and get one," Michael replied. "It's not that far."

  "No need," Maddy said in that same dreamy voice. She was very nearly in a trance, I realised suddenly. Her movements were jerky, and her eyes weren't entirely focused. She raised a hand and pointed down a long corridor. "There's a backup generator down there somewhere. He's never been there, but he saw the signs."

  "I'll go take a look," Gavin volunteered. "It would help if we could see properly."

  "Good," I replied. "Take David, Simon, and Mary with you for backup."

  Gavin pulled out a torch, and they vanished into the gloom. The rest of us pulled out our torches and resumed following Madeline. At the first junction, she turned right and led us down another long corridor without even stopping to orientate herself. This one was faintly lit by the odd cracked, filthy skylight, but it wasn't bright enough for me to put my torch away.

  Each doorway that we passed was a dark, hollow recess, like a missing tooth in the grim smile of whitewashed concrete walls. I swung my torch into each one as we passed by, and saw offices, laboratories, and even a break room or two. We travelled for nearly five minutes, working our way deeper and deeper into the facility. Eventually I realised that there were no more skylights above us, and we were probably under the hills.

  "In there," Maddy whispered, her voice disembodied in the gloom. I swung my torch towards her and saw her pointing to an office coming up on our right.

  I took a deep breath, nodded, and released her hand. "Stay here, honey. I'll go in. Where am I looking?"

  "It's around his neck," she whispered. Suddenly, she turned and looked up at me, squinting against the glare of my torch. "Don't kill him, though. If you kill him, he’ll will go away. We still need him."

  My gorge rose, and I had to force myself to swallow hard to keep my lunch down. "He's infected?"

  "Yes, and he's in there," she said, pointing at the doorway again. "We need his key—"

  "I know. I'm going," I replied, steeling myself to what I had to do. I shifted my shotgun off my shoulder into a position where I could grab it if I needed it, and walked up to the doorway. A metallic sign glinted in the beam of my torch, which told me that the office had belonged to someone named C. Russell. Someone had taped a bright yellow Post-It note beside the plaque, with a smiley face and the letters 'PhD' written in pencil. I could smell the infected before I opened the door; the stench of decay was one that I was all too familiar with. With one last deep breath of the relatively clean air outside the office, I shoved the door open and stepped inside.

  The skinny geneticist's body was familiar even in undeath. He was still wearing the same lab coat that had been a permanent fixture of his videos, though now his glasses were missing. I found them quite by accident, when I heard something crunch under my foot. I glanced down and flinched. "Damn. Sorry, Clyde."

  There was no response. Clyde's infected body was just sitting in its chair, randomly poking at the blood-splattered keyboard of a computer that hadn't functioned in years. I cringed when I realised that it had quite literally worked its fingers to the bone, presumably typing away at a dissertation that no longer mattered. It was a heart-wrenching, miserable sight, but Maddy had been clear about what I needed to do. I inched closer and reached out to grab the lanyard around Clyde's neck. On the end of it was a small plastic card, which I assumed had to be the key Maddy had mentioned.

  The infected didn't move, didn't look at me, didn't notice me at all. A second later, I was back out in the hallway, clutching my rancid prize and struggling not to throw up. I must have been pale as a ghost, because Michael took one look at me, then he grabbed the lanyard out of my hand, tossed it to Aaron, and pulled me into a hug. I clung to him and buried my face in his chest, drawing long, deep breaths of his scent to get the stink of death out of my nostrils.

  After a few seconds, I pulled back and nodded my appreciation. "It's okay. I'm all right. It's just, he's…" I hesitated, uncertain how to express my feelings. In the end, I gave up and shook my head. "We'll be back, to put him to rest once we have what we need."

  "It's okay, Miss Sandy," Maddy said, taking my hand again. "He can't feel pain anymore. He says that he's tethered to his body, but it doesn't hurt."

  I shuddered and squeezed the little girl's hand. "I always wondered whether the infected could move on, or if they were stuck here. How many… how many people do you see trapped like that, Maddy?"

  She glanced around then looked back at me and shrugged. "Only a few in here, but outside there are lots."

  "Do they all talk to you?" I asked, fighting a rising wave of horror. What she was describing was my worst fear for the victims of the plague: that they wouldn't be able to rest while their bodies still walked the earth.

  "No," she said, shaking her head. "Most of them aren't really there. They're sort of going away on their own, but it's taking a long time. But when you kill them, then they're free. They go away really fast. Not like, whoosh!" She made a gesture to illustrate her noise. "But quieter. They slowly turn see-through. What's the word?"

  "Fade?" I suggested.

  "Yes!" she exclaimed. "They fade until they're all gone. But they look happier."

  "What about Clyde?" I asked. "I mean, I understand why you saw Netty's ghost, she'd only just died. But why is Clyde still here?"

  Maddy glanced away, and tilted her head as though listening to a voice that only she could hear. "He says… he says that he's tried to go away, but something stopped him. Every time he started to go, he was pulled back. He says that he had to wait for us to get here. He doesn't know what pulled him back, he just knows that he's not allowed to leave until we're finished."

  I took a second to digest what she was telling me, then I nodded. "So what do we do next?"

  "We should go find the others," Maddy told me. "We need power to make the elevator work."

  "Okay," I agreed, nodding. "Let's go get the power working, then."

  We made it halfway back to the junction where we'd gone our separate ways when our radios crackled.

  "We've got it," Gavin said. "We found the generator, and it's just powering up. We should start seeing electricity in a few seconds."

  The fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling above us began to flicker to life. I turned to the others and started to say something, but whatever I'd been thinking was forgotten when a bulb a couple of meters in front of us exploded. I yelped and jumped back, pulling Maddy up against me to shield her from the falling glass. Once the socket shorted itself out, I looked at the others. "Everyone okay? Anyone hurt?"

  "Aside from a minor heart atta
ck?" Michael asked dryly. "Yeah, just peachy. But hey, at least we can see now."

  "What, you weren't enjoying wandering around a pitch black research lab full of zombies?" Aaron quipped. “I’m pretty sure I used to play this game when I was a teenager, but those zombies were a lot more… bitey.”

  We all laughed, though the laughter was a little strained. We hurried the rest of the way back to the intersection and waited until Gavin's group returned, then took a moment to catch our breath and relay the events of the last few minutes to one another. Once we were done, we all looked at Maddy for further instructions.

  "We need to go down," she said matter-of-factly. "Follow me, I know where to go. This way!"

  We exchanged glances, but before any of us could say anything Madeline marched off, heading back into the heart of the hills. We all fell in behind and beside her, silently following her through the passageways.

  Suddenly, she stopped and pointed. "There, that's it."

  "That's a strange-looking elevator," Simon said, frowning. "It almost looks like a freight elevator."

  "It was supposed to keep the virus out," Maddy told us solemnly. "But it didn't work."

  "Is it safe for us to be going in there?" I asked, suddenly but justifiably nervous. The plague had robbed all of us of our families, so we were entitled to be wary of disease.

  "Of course," she said. "We're immune, silly."

  "Well, that makes sense," I replied. "Stupid question, I guess."

  "It's okay, Miss Sandy." She smiled at me, then she went over to the elevator and pressed the call button. A few seconds later, the doors slid open and she led us inside. Once we were all in, I glanced at the control panel and saw that there was only one choice aside from the floor we were on, but beside it was a security lock and a keypad.

  "We have a problem," I said. "Looks like we need a number as well as the key card."

  "I know the number," Maddy said. "I'll unlock it, so we can go up and down without the card or the number. He said he'd show me how."

  She took the key card, swiped it through the security lock, then punched in a long string of numbers. I glanced at the others, uncertain what to make of Maddy's assertion, but as usual she proved to know far more than she should have. The doors swept shut, and we felt the telltale sensation of descending into the earth.

  Aaron made a surprised sound and looked at me. “I’m starting to feel like a fool for doubting her.”

  I just nodded and said nothing. A few seconds later, the doors swished open with a gust of stale, malodorous air. I shifted my shotgun around into the offensive position, and carefully led the way out into the room beyond. The lights were dim and flickering, and I saw broken glass from other bulbs that hadn't survived the shock of being re-ignited when the generator came back on, but there was enough light that I wasn't forced to rely on my torch.

  The lobby we arrived in had obviously been used as a decontamination area, with a heavy door on the other side that probably would have been air-tight if it hadn't been hanging wide open. Biohazard suits hung on hooks on the walls, beside high-pressure showers and coiled hoses that had clearly done no good.

  "He was the last one alive," Maddy said softly. "When he got sick, he decided that he wasn't going to die alone in the dark, so he put all his videos onto a… memory thing, and taped it to the door. Then he went outside to enjoy the sun while he could."

  I shuddered and swallowed a lungful of stagnant air, trying to ignore the familiar stench of decomposition. "Ugh, it smells rancid in here. From what I saw in the video, they were down here for weeks. Surely there must have been some kind of ventilation system, right?"

  "There is one," Gavin said, pointing upwards. I followed his finger and saw a small air vent on the ceiling above our heads. "it's definitely working, I can feel a breeze. It would have gone off when the power died, so it'll probably just take a little while to get going."

  "Why is there a vent in the decontamination room?" Simon asked. "They wouldn't have had time to build this just to deal with Ebola X, so it must have been built as a general-purpose facility. Why weren't they thinking about airborne pathogens?"

  "They were," Aaron said. "If they went to the effort to build a facility like this for biological research, then there will be at least two separate filtration and recycling systems, probably more. One for out here, a second for inside the facility, and one for each isolated ward. You don't spare any expense on that kind of thing."

  "So how did the pathogen get to them?" I asked, glancing back and forth between them. "That door is an airlock, and Clyde said that they were on recycled air and water, and the food was all sterilized. How did they die?"

  Without quite meaning to, I looked at Maddy for an answer. She looked back at me, but something about her expression was… wrong. I knew before she spoke that something had changed, and it had all the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end again.

  "I never did find out," she said. "Someone must have dropped a culture dish, or not quite sterilized something enough. It's too late to find out now, and I guess it doesn't really matter anymore. Not for us, anyway."

  By the time she finished speaking, everyone was staring at her with wide eyes. The voice wasn't Madeline's. Well, it was but it wasn't at the same time. I couldn't explain how I knew, but I just knew. I could feel it in my bones.

  "Clyde?" I whispered.

  Maddy gave me a lopsided smile and nodded. "She thought it would be easier if we could talk directly. I gotta tell you, it feels pretty weird. I'm not sure how long I'll be able to stay in here."

  I glanced at the others, and saw each one of them looking as disturbed as I felt. A couple of the more religiously-orientated members crossed themselves or made other signs to ward off evil. Maddy – Clyde – Madelyde ignored them. She turned and walked away, beckoning for us to follow her.

  "I guess my message made it, then?" she asked, pausing in the doorway to make sure that I was following her. I hesitated for a second, then hurried to catch up with her. Behind me, I heard Michael setting a watch near the entrance in case anything happened to us, and I was silently grateful to him for it. The others waited with him to be given instructions, with the exception of Simon; he was way too curious by nature to wait behind when there was an answer to his questions close at hand.

  "Sort of," I replied. "We got part of the message, but half of it was too degraded for us to open. The last thing we got was something about him – I mean, you – giving up on finding a cure and focusing on a vaccine made from the blood of the immune."

  "Yeah!" she exclaimed. "Pretty awesome, right? I know, I'm just that good. Man, it would have made such a great topic for my dissertation, if not for… well, you know."

  "Yeah, we know," I said. "How does it work, then?"

  "Well, the main reason that Ebola X was so devastating is because it causes irreparable damage before our bodies have a chance to learn how to fight it," she replied, folding her hands behind her back as she walked. "The only reason that you're immune and I'm not is because your body can produce antibodies straight away. Why? We don't know, it just sort of happened. Evolution, I guess."

  "Then why the zombies?" I asked. It was a question that had been bothering me for ten years, and now was the first opportunity I'd had to ask from someone that might actually know the answer.

  "Oh, that's a weird one," he replied. "The virus targets the cerebellum – the upper brain, if you like. That's responsible for thought, speech, dreams, the senses, you name it. All the higher brain function. The brainstem is responsible for movement, and the virus pretty much ignores it. I guess it's too… I don't know, chewy or something. Om nom nom, tasty soft higher brain meat, icky brain stem meat."

  "Ugh, Clyde, you're in a seven-year-old's body," I protested. "I didn't need that visual."

  "Yeah, I know, it's weird being this close to the floor," he replied with entirely too much cheer for a dead person possessing a child's body. "Anyway, you've heard the term 'brain death', I presume. C
erebral death and brain stem death are two totally different things. Under normal circumstances, a person with a dead cerebellum goes into something called a permanent vegetative state. You know, when the lights are on but nobody's home?"

  "Yeah, but these people aren’t vegetables," Simon pointed out. "They're zombies."

  "Well, that's about as far as my research went, so I can't tell you exactly what's going on," she admitted with a shrug. "I went into a persistent zombietative state about sixty days after the outbreak. How long has it been?"

  "Uh, ten years," I replied, suddenly fighting the unreasonable urge to laugh. The kid had a sense of humour that I could appreciate, even if it was a little morbid. "Closer to eleven now, I guess."

  "Oh wow," she gasped. "And you're only just finding my research now? Damn. That does change things." She paused for a second, and seemed to be listening to a voice that only she could hear. "The power's been off? Okay. My samples of the vaccine are not going to be viable anymore, so you'll need to create your own. I'll give you all my research. If you can find someone that knows anything about pharmacology, they should be able to replicate the vaccine from that."

  I breathed a sigh of relief and nodded. "We have a trained pharmacist, I'm glad to say. However, we don't have access to a lot of chemicals."

  "That's fine, he or she should be able to get a little creative with the ingredients and it'll still work," she replied. "Like I was saying before we got distracted, the biggest problem with Ebola X is that it does permanent damage before our immune systems can figure out how to produce antibodies to fight it off. So, we do this as a two-step process. The first thing we do is something called immunoglobulin therapy. That's where we take your plasma – that's the clear goop that your red and white blood cells float in – and inject it into the non-immune person. That gives them a boost of your antibodies to protect them while you move on to the second phase. Then while the live antibodies are still circulating, we inject them with a vaccine made from the dead virus. What that does is expose their immune system to the virus without actually infecting them, so their body has a chance to figure the virus out. Their body should learn to produce the antibodies on their own."