by Emma Shortt
“Where is it?” he asked. “Or maybe I should say they.”
Jackson’s jaw dropped and she gaped at him. “How did you know?”
“It’s obvious.”
She heaved Mandy and gestured forward. They walked to the door at the far end of the room and Luke took a deep breath, the smell of old lemons settling on him. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen such a lab. In the very early days scientists all over the world had searched for a cure. They’d given up after a couple of months though, mostly because they’d been eaten. But they’d tried and he remembered seeing one on TV—before it too had died. So it didn’t surprise him now to see that someone was still trying, and Sebastian was just the type to give it a go.
“Lemons,” he said and Jackson nodded.
“Zombie defense, at least for the ones that haven’t smarted up yet. It’s the citrate, like in aftershaves. How did you know they didn’t like aftershave?” she asked and he shrugged.
“I don’t remember. Someone knew and it just…” He paused. “It became a sort of fact I guess, like the heat.”
Nodding, Jackson unlocked the second door, with the same key, and pushed it open. Luke turned his head slightly from the stench, which was suddenly overpowering in such a small space, taking shallow breaths.
A hand settled on his and Jackson spoke. “Meet Two-h-ee,” she said and though he didn’t really want to, he shifted and he looked.
The zombie, a male in life, was strapped down on a long wooden table. It actually looked like a dining room table and he frowned. Clearly Sebastian had been short on supplies. The table was secured to the floor by dint of the fact that it was surrounded by concrete a good half a foot higher than the surrounding floor. This had the advantage of both stopping the zombie from lifting itself up with the table and putting him at about the right height for whatever Sebastian was up to. Thick lengths of rope were secured around its middle, legs, and arms, which were positioned outward, like some sort of sacrificial victim. Which, Luke guessed, it kind of was.
Handcuffs added another layer of security as did the metal chain links around the thighs. Yep, it was wrapped up properly all right, but Luke knew it wasn’t safe. He knew this because he and Jackson wouldn’t be here if it was.
“So,” he said, after a moment. “What has this got to do with you?” He suspected, of course, but he wanted to hear it from her.
“Well he needs help,” Jackson said, circling Two-h-ee. “Nancy won’t let him work on them in the camp. It’s too much of a risk, so he brings them here instead.”
“That’s not how one got into camp then?”
“Nope. She’s been firm on that from the very beginning.”
Luke scowled and bent down to check Two-h-ee’s handcuffs. He couldn’t help himself. The damn thing was right there, just sort of looking at them. “That’s something, at least.”
“She’s been assigning him guards to go with him and wait here while he works,” Jackson continued, “but it is not a favored job at all. The smell for one thing. He’s run through mostly everyone, and I guess he thought since I’m new and all, that I’d be willing.”
And there it was. Luke tugged on the metal rope length, holding his breath while he did so. Maybe because of the smell, maybe because he knew what she was going to say to his next question. “And are you?”
She shrugged and tugged on the rope bindings. “It sounds like important work, Luke.” She paused and pointed to Two-h-ee. “He’s looking for a cure.”
Luke laughed. It really could not be helped. “Yep, I got that, Jack. It’s kind of fucking obvious. But you know he’s in dreamland right? There is no cure. The zombies are dead. How the hell is he gonna cure that?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said. But he thinks he’s on to something. He wasn’t a regular doctor before this. He was a biochemist or something.
“Yeah well he doesn’t exactly seem like doctor material, does he? He’d have a shit bedside manner.”
“Luke.”
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Luke said, though he wasn’t, not really. “But this is totally fucked up. You’ve got a weird doctor who thinks he’s going to save the world and you’re going along with it? People tried in the beginning. Did you forget that?”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“And they failed,” Luke added. “Hoping for something like this now, it’s…” He shook his head. “It’s wrong. Some things can’t be fixed, certainly not by some guy in a half-baked lab in the middle of nowhere.”
Jackson glared. “You don’t know him.”
“And neither do you,” Luke said. “You only just met the guy. For all we know he could be a complete nut job. Something this important, Jack, I’d need to know a lot more before I can even began to hope for it.”
“There is more,” she said, waving a hand around the room. “He has all sorts of research, from the beginning, when there wasn’t time to make a proper go of it. The zombies bit too many people and then they were either turned or were eaten. There wasn’t anyone left to have a go at finding a cure.”
“Jack,” Luke said, stepping back from Two-h-ee, who had now begun to groan and snap its teeth. “That’s my entire point. There’s no one left anymore to actually cure. This,” he pointed to the zombie, watching as a rivulet of pus dripped from a wound on its head, down its cheek and into its mouth, “is dead. They’re all dead. You can’t cure dead people.”
Jackson looked up at him then, and of all things, grinned. “Well, that’s the point, Luke,” she said. “And brace yourself now. But the thing is…they’re not actually zombies.”
…
She’d never seen Luke look so uncomfortable. Throughout it all, for weeks and weeks, he’d been watchful, protective, easygoing, just about everything but this. He started at her words and ran his gun hand through his hair, the pistol pointing to the ceiling. A groan sounded and Jackson tore her gaze away to chance a quick glance at Two-h-ee. It surprised her to see that it too was looking at the pointing gun—maybe because it knew? Sebastian had said Two-h-ee was one of the “clever” zombies. The ones who had started to think. Could it recognize a gun and understand what that gun could do?
“You lost me,” Luke said slowly, pointing the gun back at Two-h-ee. It groaned and snapped its teeth. “Of course they’re zombies.”
Jackson thought about what Sebastian had told her and tried to work it through in her mind so she could explain it to Luke. Most of it was science stuff, and she knew fuck-all about that. Sebastian had gabbled on but it had got to the point where she had just nodded, feeling more and more stupid as the moments went by, but she kind of got the gist, enough to tell Luke anyway.
“No,” she said eventually weaving around the tangled thoughts, “not in the strictest sense of the word. Zombies are dead people reanimated, right? Like they die and then something wakes them back up.”
“When they were fiction, yeah, that was how it worked”
“And now they’re fact and they’re different. And we always thought, or guessed, that it was a virus. It infected them and when they bit other people it infected them and then they died. Sometimes they woke back up.”
“Yeah, because we saw it,” Luke interrupted. “They actually did die. No heartbeat, no nothing.”
“Well Sebastian says that the zombies might be reanimated but they were never dead.”
Luke shook his head. “Of course they are! Jesus, Jack. I saw people die, one after the other, and once they’re dead, they’re dead. Whether they’re still walking around now is irrelevant.”
“It’s not, though,” she insisted, trying to remember exactly what Sebastian had told her. “It’s a virus. Definitely a virus. It does something to the immune system, sends it into overdrive.”
“And kills them.”
“No. The moment it infects, it slows the heart and decreases brain activity in some areas, increasing it in others. Once the heart stops completely, and it depends on lo
ts of factors for how long that takes, people either die or they come back to life. Only changed.”
“That’s impossible,” Luke breathed. “There’s no way that,” he pointed to Two-h-ee, “is still alive.”
“But he is,” she insisted and just like when Sebastian had told her this, a queer feeling snaked through her body. The fact that the zombie was just a very sick person. A person who was riddled with a virus that had changed him. As she looked at Two-h-ee she began to wonder what his life might have been like before he changed. And that shit just did not fly, because Jackson did not think about things like that, not since the moral dilemma all those months ago. It was not the way she worked! It couldn’t be.
“Hold on a minute…we shoot them and they get back up,” Luke said. “They lose entire limbs and don’t give a fuck.”
“They don’t really feel pain and they have a highly increased rate of healing,” Jackson replied with a shrug. “So if we shoot them in certain places they can survive it…though Seb did say it’s likely those people, if they were ever to become normal again, would be damaged for life or something. But it doesn’t work that way at the moment and they can still try and eat us.”
“Serious?”
“Uh-huh.”
Silence held for a moment as they both looked at Two-h-ee. He quivered and snapped his teeth.
“Assuming I believe this,” Luke said after a moment. “Does the doctor know why they’re changing? Why they’re getting smarter?”
“He thinks it’s because the virus depresses certain parts of the brain. Kind of stops them working. But the brain is quite a clever thing. The synapses—is that the right word?—they can start moving around, regrowing and stuff. Sebastian says that you can trick the brain into doing things in one part that it used to do in another. So the part that the virus makes work better, the part that makes them fast and flexible and hungry, that’s picking up the slack.”
“But it’s not picking up the empathy is it?” Luke asked. “It’s not making them human again.”
Jackson frowned and walked across to Luke. His very blue eyes were full of confusion and maybe a little bit of anger. Her heart gave a thud and she sighed. Luke was so lovely and she was so glad he was here to share all of this with.
“No,” she said, the weight of the words heavy on her shoulders. “It doesn’t seem to be doing that yet. It makes them smart, but the things that made them human—the empathy and the feelings—they’re not back. Sebastian thinks those parts of the brain are not working at all.”
“And will they ever be?” Luke asked.
Like in the garage, when he’d just lost his bunker and he’d seemed so sad, Jackson reached out to touch him. Only this time she actually could, and she did. She pressed her hand against his chest, feeling his heart beat against her palm.
“I don’t know.”
He shook his head and grimaced, but did not pull away from her touch. Jackson got the feeling he never would.
“Then he’s looking for a cure? A way to bring them back completely, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you, Jack. What’s your part in all of this? You keep an eye on them. Protect the doctor, is that it?”
“It is.” She thought of the moment earlier when Sebastian had explained her role and how easy he’d made it all sound. Well almost all of it…
“And is that all?”
She shifted, removed her hand, and turned to look back at Two-h-ee. It was spraying pus bubbles now, little breaths that shot the pus up, though of course, gravity brought it back down and it landed on its face. Little puddles around the snarl glinted in the light and Jackson had to take a shallow breath through her nose. The smell really was atrocious. No wonder people got sick of it.
“Jack?” Luke prompted.
She knew he wasn’t going to like her next words and Jackson had to kind of gird herself to say them. “Well…I have to catch them too.”
Silence for a couple of moments and then Luke exploded. “I hope you’re fucking joking.”
“You know I don’t joke. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. Around here, the packs are destroyed pretty quickly, so you can find an odd zombie now and then. And the heat slows them down.”
He growled and stepped forward, nose scrunching. “Jesus Christ, Jack. We spent weeks trying to find our way here. To find safety. At last we have that. But the moment it lands in your lap, you throw it away again. Explain that to me please. Why would you do that? Why search for something for so long if you were only going to reject it when you had it?”
“I was searching for answers,” Jackson said “You know that. Seb can give me those answers.”
“Yes, but you don’t need to go zombie hunting to get them.”
“It’s not just that,” she said, trying to make him understand. “The moment Seb started talking I just knew this was where I was supposed to be. All the questions I’ve had. Their weird behavior? Seb can answer all of that. Yeah, he’s a bit odd, and I didn’t really get most of what he said, but if there’s any chance at all that he’s right, Luke, I have to help in whatever way I can.” She paused the rushing words as Two-h-ee gave a howl. “You understand right, Luke? How much it means to me to be able to contribute, to have a purpose. To try and help. After all,” she added, “you’re doing the exact same thing with the cars.”
“I’m fixing fucking engines, not putting on a two-man stand against the end of the world.”
“Hardly that.”
“It could all come to nothing,” he said. “But that is not the issue. Why you is what I want to know. Why not someone else? We just got here.”
“Well, because…” She frowned, trying to think about how to explain it to him. That she’d fantasized and hoped for so fucking long. That this, it was almost like a dream come true.
“Because what, Jack,” Luke said when she did not reply. “You don’t even know do you? You don’t even get it.”
“Get what?”
“The reason you’re doing this.”
“I just told you why.”
“No,” Luke roared. “Fucking hell you didn’t. Don’t get me wrong. If this is real—which I have to say I have my doubts—but if it is, I agree it’s an amazing thing and we should all help where we can. But that’s not your motivation. Not really.”
Jackson wasn’t really sure what he meant. She shook her head, both to get a grip on her thoughts and because Two-h-ee was groaning his horrible death groan.
“Then what is?” she asked. “You tell me, Luke, because I sure as hell don’t know what you’re getting at.”
Two-h-ee groaned again and Luke snapped at him, “Shut the fuck up.” Before turning to Jackson. “You’re doing this because you can’t not do it.”
“Huh?”
“This, them, the whole thing. It’s who you are now. Jackson the bad-ass, Jackson the fucking zombie slayer. I don’t think you’re actually capable of living a normal life anymore.”
She gaped. “There is no normal life anymore. Those days are gone. Gone, Luke.”
“But there is, damn it,” he insisted, and the anger in his voice was palpable. “It’s why we came south. Why you wanted it. To find that sliver of normality. That was the whole fucking reason.”
And then Jackson paused because hadn’t that thought been buzzing around constantly since she returned from the shack? Hadn’t she begun to question everything, her motivations, her plans. Everything? She thought of all the times on the road. The times she’d had to hide or run or curl up somewhere waiting for daylight. All along the aim pushing her on.
“Is it?” she whispered, finally, and firmly, admitting the truth to herself. “I don’t know, Luke. I think in the end I came south because I didn’t know what else to do. Because on that observation deck it was the only option beyond jumping, and then with Tye…it just seemed like it made sense.”
“Just like Pete,” he whispered back, and even though she didn’t really know what he meant she knew it was not a g
ood comparison. Knew that by the tone of his voice.
“Luke…” She reached out to do something, a hug, or a touch, whatever, but he pulled back, not giving her the chance.
“I don’t want you doing this, Jack,” he said, and there was a hard note in his voice she’d never heard before. “I’ll spend all my time worrying and panicking, but more than that, because my feelings aren’t important really, more than that, you’ll be putting yourself in danger again. Daily. I want you somewhere safe. I don’t want you to have to fight over and over, day after day…I want you to have some normality.”
Jackson frowned, her mind whizzing. “I thought we got past this at the stick and spit. You and me as equals, that’s how we’ve worked this.”
“The journey, yes,” he agreed. “But we’re here now and I was so happy to think that you might be able to be you again.”
“Me?” she said, confusion thrumming through her. “This is me. This has always been me.”
Luke threw his hands in the air and growled. “You without the zombies is what I mean. Just Jackson.”
Why didn’t he get it? When it was so freaking obvious to her? How could he not realize. “There is no ‘just Jackson’ anymore,” she said. “The zombies are part of everything and we can’t escape that. We can’t ever escape it.”
“Here we can,” he insisted. “For a little bit we can.”
“You might be able to, Luke. But for me? There is no escape. Why don’t you get that? There won’t ever be an escape. It’s who I am now.”
Luke shook his head, slowly now, without any of the anger—almost like it had drained from him. “I don’t believe that,” he said.
“Well, you have to,” she replied. “Because it isn’t going to change. Not now, not ever. It’ll be this way until the end.” And Two-h-ee groaned, almost punctuating her point in a way she would never have been able to.