“So do we. That’s why we want our best researchers leading the study. We need a cure. And we need a cure fast. Do you understand, Dr. Klein. We need focus. We need your undivided attention.”
After a moment, when the images of the video were not as fresh in his mind, Ray Klein said, “I understand and I accept.”
“Good, good. Everything you need to know — including everything we know — will be in your office tomorrow morning. In about two weeks, we will have both subjects of the video. We will have these videos, if they get out, deemed as hoaxes, and we will have you saving the entire human race.”
“I understand,” Ray said, but he didn’t. Not really.
“We hope you do,” the voice answered, then the call ended. Though the voice was unknown, Ray’s delirium slowly convinced him it was the voice of God, and God had just given him the permission and the directions to do what he longed to do. What he needed to do.
Later that night, Ray Klein did not sleep in his bed. He slept in an oversized winter coat on the floor of his walk-in freezer next to his frozen and deceased wife. When his body went numb, he dreamt of Jean with glowing, yellow eyes.
5
Ray’s hand shakes as he moves the needle to Jean’s temple. Right now, he would give anything to have this hand holding her picture instead of a syringe full of the Zeta virus.
But he has no choice. To stop the pain, the emotional tearing in his brain, he must try this God-given, last option.
“Ray?” Eduardo says, never calling him Dr. or Sir. He seems to be at the other end of a long and dark hallway. “Ray? Are you crying?”
He is, but he cannot wipe the tears away.
“Ray,” he says again.
Now Eduardo holds a paper in his hand, where he got it, Ray does not know. He does not look at the small, Spanish man; he only looks at his dead wife.
And Ray cannot answer. It was only a matter of time before someone outed him, he knew. After all, Eduardo Rodriguez is a smart man. The paper will have the name and a picture of 001 — the real 001.
“What does this mean?” Eduardo asks. “Diane Carver/Female/DOB - 02/03/78” he recites from the sheet.
“Never mind that,” Ray says.
“TEST SUBJECT 001,” Eduardo says. He holds up the picture of a much younger woman with a full head of blonde hair. “This isn’t 001, is it, Ray?”
“Never mind that!” Ray shouts. He turns to Eduardo. “Are you ready?”
Eduardo’s face seems to have lost all color.
“Tighten the straps,” Ray says.
“I’m afraid we can’t do this, Ray.”
Ray turns to him, a fire in his eyes. “I have no choice.” He is calm now, because he knows the inevitable will happen. The two of them are sealed off from the outside world. The only others who know about this experiment are the gruff, distorted voices of Central. Upstairs, the white lab coat wearing scientists study their apes, their rats, and their guinea pigs.
“Who is it?” Eduardo asks.
Ray doesn’t answer.
Eduardo walks closer. He has the picture in his hand. He holds it up to Jean’s face. “This is not Diane Carver. So tell me!”
Ray’s left hand seems to act on its own, striking in much the same way a vicious snake strikes its prey. This hand has found the M9.
Eduardo stops dead in his tracks, his hands up, rubber suit squeaking with the movement.
“It’s Jean,” Ray says. His voice is surprisingly strong. “My wife.”
The fire in Eduardo’s eyes seems to blaze. “Is this what you want?” he screams. He is not looking at Ray; he is looking past him. In all four corners of the room are cameras. These shiny, black eyes where faceless strangers watch their every move. “He is going to kill us all!” Then, to himself, “Please…Ay, por favor, Dios. Por favor.”
“This is what I want,” Ray says. “This is what I have to do.”
With the gun pointed toward his lab tech, he sets the syringe down, then he unzips his suit, takes his helmet off.
“What are you doing? Are you insane?” Eduardo says. “This could be catastrophic. You saw those videos, you saw what this virus does. This could end the whole world. Please, Ray. Please.”
“She’s been gone ninety-six days,” Ray says. “The worst ninety-six days of my life.” He picks up the needle and puts it back to Jean’s temple, then he presses it into her soft and rapidly decomposing skin. Beads of sweat stand out on his forehead, the visor no longer distorts these beads, or the tears rolling down his cheeks.
Eduardo makes a move, but he is too late.
All six inches of the syringe bury into Jean Klein’s brain, Ray pushes down on the plunger. The barrel full of the mucus-yellow ZETA Virus empties. It is not the muted serum, either. It is something Ray Klein made after hours, half-mad with a fully broken heart.
Something powerful. Something unnatural. Something unholy.
For a moment, no one breathes. Both watch with eyes as wide as dinner plates, even the suits who view this demented scene through the lenses of the Leering Research Facility’s security cameras.
Then, Jean Klein takes in a deep and raspy lungful of air.
6
In Eduardo Rodriguez’s haste, due to the fact Dr. Raymond Klein had gone off the deep end, he had not secured all three of the leather straps to the maximum of their ability. But Eduardo does not realize this.
And neither does Ray. Not until the dead woman on the table, who he once married surrounded by friends and family on a beach miles away from bleak Ohio, springs up and grapples him.
In Ray’s delirium, he thinks it’s a hug.
“Oh, honey!” he shouts. “I missed you.” He is crying — sobbing, in fact. His whole body shakes. Her flesh is cold enough that he feels it through his dress shirt. She grips him the way rigor mortis grips the muscles and bones of a dead body.
He rubs her bald head, feeling the X’s of the stitches, feeling the slowly-spreading warmth radiating from her reanimated brain.
She moans and groans as the serum pulses through her empty veins, making her stronger than any of them realize.
Ray pulls her close.
He has not felt this good in ninety-six days. A smile begins to take shape on his lips — a genuine smile.
“Ray!” Eduardo yells. He moves from his spot, but Ray no longer cares. Ray is on Cloud Nine. He has brought his angel back down from Heaven, and he has done what Leland Lechance, the author of Reanimation, could not do.
An alarm goes off. Red lights dance around the sterile, white lab. The noise is terrible, clashing against Ray’s heartbeat. He tries to part from Jean, but she won’t let go. She must have missed him as much as he missed her.
Eduardo jumps, knocking over a tray, sending surgical equipment everywhere.
Ray finally tears himself from his wife. His head is spinning. The alarm. The groans and guttural noises from deep inside Jean’s embalmed sternum.
She thrashes and claws at the air.
Ray turns his aim back on Eduardo.
Eduardo stops, his hands in the air. Ray will not shoot him. Ray does not have the balls. And something about Eduardo’s features says he knows Ray will not pull the trigger. But this little hiccup is enough to slow them both down, enough to distract them from the chaos in the room, and enough for Jean Klein to grab Eduardo’s arm as she flails about like a fish out of water.
He screams loud enough to drown out the sounds of the alarm. Then Ray sees red gush out from between Jean’s clamped jaw. It’s a stark contrast to the color of his white, germ suit.
Eduardo falls in a heap on the ground, holding the wound.
“No!” Ray yells at his dead wife as if she’s a puppy who’d piddled on the floor and not some abomination.
“You crazy hijo de puta!” Eduardo shouts. A mist of red dots his visor. He limps away from the table despite the wound being on his arm, and heads into the decontamination chamber. Ray puts him in the back of his mind, looks at his wife. Bits of tan
skin hang from between her teeth. Blood smears her cheeks like thick blush.
She is still beautiful.
His hands are on Jean’s shoulders, trying to hold her down. She bucks and kicks. Screeches.
“Jeany, it’s me. It’s your little Ray of sunshine. Don’t you r-remember me. Jeaaaaan.”
For the briefest of moments, Ray thinks he sees realization in those yellow eyes. But that moment passes, and realization begins to form in his own.
This is not his wife.
This is a monster.
He leans closer to her, the M9 now in his right hand. She stops her thrashing, seems to settle down.
“Do you remember when we first met? Because I do,” he says.
And her eyes narrow as if she is trying to picture the cold December evening he saw her sitting in one of C & M’s comfy chairs, a Stephen King book in hand.
“I said, ‘You like Stephen King? Wouldn’t expect a woman as beautiful as you to like that bloody stuff,’ and you said, ‘I’ve read them all.’ I sat next to you and we talked about our favorite horror books. Dracula, Frankenstein. ‘Salem’s Lot. I knew I was already in love. I just knew!” Ray has to shout these words over the blare of the alarm. “The truth is, Jean, I don’t think I can live without you. And I don’t think you can live like…like this.”
Maybe Leland Lechance was on to something.
He leans in closer, wraps his arms around her neck and back in a lover’s embrace. She smells of cold and ice, of death, of faint rot.
“Do you remember our first kiss?” he asks. “I was only expecting a peck, and you slipped your tongue into my mouth. I remember how my body tingled. How I never wanted anyone in my life as bad as I wanted you then.”
He begins to laugh, shaking more tears free from the corners of his eyes.
“I would like to kiss you one last time, Jeany.”
He leans in, her body going stiffer than before. She grunts a noise which sounds faintly like a question.
He presses his lips to her own, tasting the ice and the cold, then he presses the M9 to the back of her skull.
She does not kiss back. Jean Klein does not understand the concept of kissing any longer. She is fueled by a deep and primal hunger. The chunk of Eduardo Rodriguez’s arm was not enough.
There is no tongue with kiss, only teeth.
Ray screams, his flesh ripping, blood spurting — even this is better than being alone.
He pulls the M9’s trigger, a thunderclap over the wail of the alarm and his pained sobs.
Jean Klein dies again, but this time she does not die alone.
7
Nearly a fifteen minutes after Ray Klein killed himself and his reanimated wife by way of a bullet to both of their brains, Eduardo Rodriguez walked into the closest grocery store on his way back to his big, beautiful home in Northington. The store was named Everson’s Grocery of Woodhaven, a neighboring town. It was small, quiet, and, if Eduardo was being totally honest with himself, outdated.
Most of Leering was deserted by the time he escaped. In the event of a breach, the place was supposed to go on total lockdown, but as God would have it, Eduardo had made it out before the steel barriers sealed him in. As he had driven off, the building caught fire — the second and final phase of lockdown. He would no longer work at Leering, but for some reason that thought seemed unimportant.
Delirium had already begun to take over his brain.
He wrapped the bite wound on his arm with a scarf he’d found in the back of his BMW. Summer was technically here, but Spring’s chilly breath had not stopped blowing entirely, and after shedding his hazmat suit and donning his pea coat, making the seeping blood almost unnoticeable, he thought he might not look as ridiculous as he felt.
Eduardo kept his head low and went to the aisle containing the almost endless supply of cold medicine and first aid items. He was already burning up with a fever, and each time he cleared his throat of built-up fluid, it would come back in no less than three minutes.
Eduardo knew he was infected with the ZETA virus, yet he did not know just how infected he was. Nor did he know about Raymond Klein’s experiments with the virus, how he managed to ramp up its potency to assure his wife’s reanimation. But an infected man, a man whose life hangs by a frayed rope, does not think clearly.
And Eduardo Rodriguez was that man. All he thought of was his beautiful wife Marie and their three children — two boys and a girl, one a newborn.
He thought about them. He thought about the burning Leering Research Facility. He thought of the men from Central in their black suits, driving around in their black cars. He thought of his old friend Gage Parker who’d been infected with a variant strain of what the lab techs were calling the Mad Monkey Disease. He thought of how one of those men in their black suits visited Gage three years ago, and how Gage had disappeared, his family with him.
And the next thing Eduardo knew, he was pawing through loaves of bread, grappling gallons of milk, cartons of eggs, jars of peanut butter and jelly, stumbling through the aisles, touching anything he could to hold his weakening body up. All this time thinking of escaping, of getting far away from Ohio.
He meant to leave before those same men in their black suits could get him and Marie and his three children.
But by this time, he’d spread the amped-up version of the ZETA virus so far, it wouldn’t matter where he went. Death would always find them. The first to get infected were three women who picked up the same loaves of bread Eduardo had touched. And he’d paid with his credit card, pressing the buttons of the keypad, wiping his running nose with the back of his sleeve and smearing that snot on the same place where countless hands rest while customers wait for their total. By that time, his breath alone had infected the young cashier.
Then he left Everson’s, but the damage had already been done. For those women (two of them vegan) and that young cashier, their infected cells had already begun to mutate, and those same people along with everyone else who came in contact with whatever Eduardo Rodriguez touched, breathed or sneezed on, had an odd craving for a big, bloody steak.
As Eduardo pulled into his gated driveway, swerving like a man who’d had one too many beers, his oldest son, Eduardo Jr., ran out the front door and up to the car like he always did when his daddy came home from work. His son was young, seven this September, but he was no dummy. You could see how bad Eduardo looked from the other side of Lake Erie.
“Mom! Daddy’s sick! Quick! Mommy!” he yelled.
Now Eduardo hung out of the open driver’s side door, his head a burning dome of delirium. He thought he might puke, but managed to hold it down.
“What?” Marie said. She came out holding their newborn, her pace frantic, bare feet slapping the cobblestones. She passed the baby to her oldest son, and squatted down next to Eduardo’s BMW. “Eddy!” she squealed. “Eddy! Oh, my God, Eddy!”
Faintly, over his wife’s screams, Eduardo heard the sound of tires turning into the driveway, and his son saying, “Mommy, who are they?” Then, through the yellow film now overtaking his vision, he saw an idling black car. Two men stepped out.
One of the men raised his M9, and four shots rocked the night air all before Eduardo could wheeze, “Noooo.”
The Rodriguez family were no more.
Each shot buried into their brain and came out the other side.
“There’s another,” the man holding his smoking gun said to his partner. “Inside.”
“I’ll handle it,” the partner answered. He wore sunglasses, and walked like someone who owned the block.
A moment later came another shot, cutting the screams of Sally — Eduardo’s second oldest and only daughter — short. The man walked out of the house, blood dotting his face and glasses. “What now?” he asked.
The other man shrugged and he cleared his throat. “Wasn’t anything else in our orders,” he said. He could already feel the sickness spreading throughout his body. Soon, he would be like 001 and Eduardo.
�
��We can’t contain the disease,” Sunglasses said. “God knows how many people ol’ Eduardo here came in contact with. It won’t be as bad for them as it was him, but — ”
“Doesn’t matter anymore,” his partner said, cutting him off. He stifled a cough, bringing a hand up to his mouth. Blood shined in the palm of his hand. He was not surprised. He wiped it away on the back of his pants. “This was revenge, that’s all.”
Sunglasses nodded. His gaze turned up to the swelling, black clouds, threatening another early summer thunderstorm. “What about Miami?” he asked. “I hear the Bahamas are only about two miles off the coast. You don’t think it’ll spread that far, do you?”
“Maybe,” his partner said. “Maybe not.”
He turned and shook Sunglasses’s hand — the same hand which had been slick with his own blood not thirty seconds ago — infecting him. They both smiled, and the two of them walked down the driveway.
They did not know what the future of this world held any longer, but they knew, as Eduardo Rodriguez and the other big wigs of the now self-destructing Central HQ knew, the damage had already been done.
The End
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Want More?
Author's Note
Test Subject 001
Thank You
Jack Zombie (Book 0): Test Subject 001 Page 2