by Kody Boye
“I don’t,” Erik started, “understand.”
He was being used as a guinea pig—as an experimental lab rat into which she could inject each and every thing she wanted into him. He tried to thrash—tried to get away—but found himself only able to flounder.
“The blood is making you weak,” the doctor noted.
“The… blood?” Erik asked.
She didn’t respond. Instead, she took a few steps back toward the door before reaching for the keys she’d set down upon entering the room. “Remain in bed, Mister Roberts,” she said. “And if something happens, please… don’t hesitate to scream.”
*
Dakota tried his best to comfort Jamie as the night wore on, but little could be done to ease the man’s sorrows. Their cots pushed together, Dakota’s body spooned against Jamie’s, he kept his arm locked at Jamie’s abdomen to try and keep him from sobbing and held him like that until eventually his tears stopped. By that time, he’d fallen asleep; and by that time, Dakota was unable to contain his own tears.
By the morning, he thought, Erik will be dead.
Two people in less than two weeks.
He couldn’t believe it—refused to believe it. If any there was a time for God to intervene, it would be now.
Please, he thought once more. Help Erik. Don’t let him die. Especially not like this.
Let Erik go out a warrior’s death—not a patient’s as he lay rotting in a hospital bed. He’d done so much and gotten so little in return. Surely he deserved more. Right?
Dakota closed his eyes.
He scooted closer to Jamie, listened to the sound of his partner’s breathing, and tried to fall asleep.
Try as he may, he couldn’t.
*
The trembling staccato of his shivering breath pierced the room as his transformation continued. Cold, alone, and unable to scream due to the weakened state of his body, Erik Roberts curled his hands into fists at the thin sheet covering him and tried desperately to make sense of what was happening.
The blood, he thought.
The blood—
What exactly had Doctor Rosalita Hernandez meant? Surely she couldn’t have injected him with anything more than an experimental concoction of medications, let alone blood. Right?
But the blackness…
It’d sure looked like blood. Thick, visceral, so dark that it had overwhelmed the drugs in the intravenous drip—even now, as he lay there, struggling to remain awake for fear that if he fell asleep he would die, Erik couldn’t help but wonder if this was the end.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, opened them a short moment later.
There came a pain, then, unlike anything he had ever felt before—a pain that struck the center of his brain and branched outward like a root system spreading beneath the trunk of a tree. In its tendrils, so dark and mighty, it pierced the gray matter of his brain with thorns—thorns that, with each passing moment, pumped a sensation of agony unlike anything he had ever felt throughout the nerves in his body. It spread, slowly, from his head, down his neck, then into his spine until it flowered out along his ribcage and created tattoos of sensation upon his torso.
He tried to scream—tried, without success, to open his mouth and utter one simple cry—but realized that doing so would do nothing but wake his friends from their rightful slumber.
The doctor wouldn’t come. Her assistant wouldn’t arrive.
No.
They were convinced something greater was happening when in reality he simply felt like he was dying.
It was supposed to be peaceful, he thought. I was supposed to have fallen asleep and just let it all end.
But it hadn’t. Instead, he was dealing with the worst pain he had ever felt throughout his entire life and there was absolutely nothing he could do but attempt to ride it out.
Grinding his jaw together, Erik Roberts closed his eyes and begged to a God he had trouble believing in to offer him some form of respite.
Sadly, none came.
God, as merciful as He was, did not cleanse his pain.
He simply watched.
*
Doctor Rosalita Hernandez woke the following morning with an impending sense of dread. Sequestered, with her assistant, in a room that was not far from the makeshift laboratory they had prepared specifically for a man like Erik’s arrival, she opened her eyes to realize that the extent of her life’s work could possibly have finally paid off.
Did he survive? She wondered. Or did he perish?
There was only one way to find out.
After throwing the covers from her body and then shifting her legs over the side of the cot, Rosalita pushed herself from bed and beckoned for Lydia—who’d began to waken upon hearing Rosalita’s departure—to rise.
“Doctor Hernandez?” Lydia asked. “What’re you—”
“We must check on the patient,” the woman replied. “Bring the gun.”
Lydia hesitated—half in, half out of the bed—and watched her with cautious green eyes for several moments before obviously forcing a nod and pulling herself from bed.
After stooping at and then withdrawing the gun from the bedside table, Lydia stood, nodded, and followed Doctor Rosalita Hernandez out of the room.
Rosalita’s breath caught in her chest as she and her assistant made their way down the hall and toward the room that could potentially house humanity’s salvation. Her stomach in knots, her thoughts in overdrive, her heart flickering like a broken record within her ribcage, she tried her hardest to keep from finding hope in a situation that was very likely hopeless.
He could have expired throughout the night, her consciousness was quick to remind her. You have to remember that.
Still—there was a part of her that clung to that hope: who, like a miner clutching a priceless diamond, refused to let go. She was, undoubtedly, the poorest person in the world at that moment, and wished only for something to hold onto.
Still—she had to keep reminding herself that this was essentially a hopeless situation. While she’d done her research, compiled her studies, had hypothesized, in pure and uncertain detail, what could possibly occur, she had never been able to test her results. No. Her hope was based on speculation, her reasoning ground in science that had only been recently implemented no more than last night. If anything were to have occurred, it would have been a miracle.
With that sound logic in mind, she cycled through her keyring and approached the door that held the patient—hoping, one last time, that God was grant mercy upon her poor and unfortunate soul.
She leaned forward to peer through the window, and instantly paled.
The generator had died sometime during the night.
She could not tell whether the patient was alive or dead.
That knowledge instantly set her on edge.
“Doctor Hernandez?” Lydia asked, attempting to peer into the window. “What’s wrong?”
“The generator stopped working in the middle of the night,” she said. “I can’t determine the patient’s status.”
“Does that—”
Rosalita reached down and pried the gun from her assistant’s grasp.
“Doctor?” her assistant asked.
“Be prepared to lock me in if anything happens,” Rosalita replied.
After waiting for her assistant’s nod of understanding, the doctor reached forward, slid the key into the doorknob, and waited for a moment of inspiration to strike her before turning it.
The doorknob clicked, then twisted beneath her touch.
As she opened the door, she lifted her gun to aim it at the man whom she wasn’t sure was alive or dead and stepped forward, only pausing once to allow Lydia to close the door behind her.
“Mr. Roberts?” Doctor Hernandez asked. “Can you hear me?”
The man didn’t respond.
Lydia locked the door behind her.
Great, Rosalita thought. The man’s dead and I’m locked in the room with him.
It wa
s obvious that he’d only just recently expired, as she could smell nothing that could indicate an advanced state of decay. The fact that he wasn’t moving was somewhat of a miracle, considering what all he’d gone through, but at that moment, she didn’t care. All she knew was that she’d failed.
“Time to put you down,” she mumbled, stepping forward cautiously, intent on making absolutely no noise.
Her footfalls on the tile, though soft, sounded momentous in a room where there was absolutely no noise—in a place where death reigned supreme and where any sudden move could trigger a visceral response from the undead thing she knew now lay on the stretcher.
Just remember, she thought. It’s in a torpor state.
She swallowed the lump in her throat and stepped closer to the stretcher.
The man’s milky eyes shot open.
Rosalita gasped, raised her gun, and trained the barrel straight onto him.
She released the safety and was just about to shoot when she saw the man raise his hands.
“Don’t shoot,” Erik Roberts said.
Rosalita Hernandez kept he gun trained on the soldier as he pushed himself upright and turned his head to look at her.
His once blue eyes, now clouded with a sheen of white, looked on at her, his expression a mixture of being startled and confused. He blinked once, twice, then a third time, then made a move to step off the stretcher.
She trained her gun on him once more.
“You’re not going to shoot,” the army man said, “are you?”
“State your full name and place of birth.”
“Erik James Roberts. Rigby, Idaho.”
“What day is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What year is it?”
“2012.”
“What month?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know? I haven’t been keeping track.”
“So you’re not dead,” Rosalita said.
“Do I look like I’m dead to you?”
She didn’t respond. Rather, she scanned the room until she came across a simple handheld mirror, then grabbed it before returning to the stretcher and handing it to the seemingly-dead man. “See for yourself,” she said.
Erik Roberts took the mirror and raised it before his face.
A short moment later, he lowered it only to say, “Woah.”
“Woah is right,” Doctor Hernandez said, crossing her arms under her breasts. “As you can see, you’ve taken on one of the dominant characteristics of the undead. How you’ll progress from this point is yet to be determined.”
“Am I going to die?”
Rosalita pursed her lips and stared at the young man in front of her—trying, with every ounce of knowledge she held, to formulate an answer, though try as she may, she couldn’t. Truth of the matter was: she wasn’t sure, could not be sure unless she ran more deliberate tests on his person. She’d need blood, to start, maybe even tissue samples to determine whether or not the virus was continuing to replicate within his body. All she knew, at this point, was that the patient wasn’t dead, as morbidly fascinating as that happened to be.
“Lie down,” she said, then turned and made her way toward the door.
“What’re you doing to me?” Erik Roberts asked.
“I’m going to run some tests on you to try and determine the state of your being.”
“Can I…” He paused. She turned to face him and found a look of unsurety upon his face.
“Can you… what?” the doctor asked.
“See my friends?”
Doctor Hernandez sighed. “I suppose you may,” she said, then raised a hand to stop him from speaking further. “But only after we take the necessary samples.”
“Which are?”
“Blood and tissue.”
The man grimaced, but nodded all the same. “All right,” he said. “That sounds fair enough.”
“Good.” She approached the doorway and beckoned to her assistant to unlock it. “Lydia,” she said as the door was opened, “gather my supplies. We’re going to see just what makes Erik Roberts tick.”
“Yes ma’am,” the younger woman said, then turned and darted down the hallway.
Doctor Hernandez closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and took a deep breath.
Maybe this was the start of something new.
Maybe, just maybe, Erik Roberts was the hope for their future.
*
Erik waited in silence to ask the one question he desperately needed answered while the woman drew his blood and then excised a piece of skin from his arm. Scared, now, more than he had ever been in his life, but relieved at the same time, he fought the juxtaposing emotions as much as he could and sighed when he caught sight of hsi reflection in the mirror lying upon the gray tool table.
“Is something wrong?” Doctor Hernandez asked as she finished suturing the wound.
“How did you do it?” he replied.
“Stop the virus from progressing?” she said. “Simple: plant walker blood.”
Plant walker blood?
Had he really heard right?
Unable to know unless he asked, he cleared his throat and then said, “You’re saying that—”
“Yes, Mr. Roberts. I’m saying I’ve injected plant walker blood into your system.”
All he could do was stare.
Doctor Hernandez placed the tissue on a slider and slid it beneath a microscope a moment later, all without bothering to follow up with anything further.
“I… I don’t understand,” Erik replied. “I thought—”
“That they were mutated undead? Yes. They are.”
“Then how is it that you came up with the idea to inject their blood into an infected person.”
“The CIPHR Virus is a genius work of modern engineering,” the doctor replied, then lifted her head to look at him. “It works much in the same way HIV does—by infiltrating your system, latching on to uninfected cells, then reprogramming it to infect the cells around it. My research has also shown that it bonds to the DNA, which is why it needs a deterrent in order to keep from replicating to every cell imaginable.”
“That’s why you used the plant walker blood,” Erik said. “Because it stops it from replicating.”
“Precisely.” She turned and approached him, her dark eyes cautious as he maneuvered himself off the stretcher and onto the tiled floor below. “I assume that you are wanting to meet with your friends now?”
“If that’s all right,” Erik said.
“I see no reason to contain you. At this point, your functions are stable, and I imagine anyone here with common reasoning skills would deduce that you’re not one of the undead.”
“All I need to do is talk.”
“Precisely. Don’t be surprised at the reactions you may receive, though. You are, technically, undead, and appear to be one if only at a precursory glance.”
“I understand.”
“Good. Know that the reaction from the living is going to be completely contradictory to that of the undead. Which reminds me—” she turned to face him. “Would you be willing to help me conduct an experiment? It seems only fair that you do so considering I’ve just saved your life.”
“Anything,” Erik said.
“I’d like to release you into the wild,” the doctor said, “in order to determine how the undead will react to you.”
“What?” he asked.
Rosalita could only stare.
“You can’t be serious,” Erik continued.
“I’m definitely serious,” the woman replied. “You’re one of the undead. What’re you so afraid of?”
“Uh… getting eaten, for one.”
“And?”
“The last time I went out I almost got killed.”
“That isn’t going to happen the next time,” the doctor said, then leaned forward to look him directly in the eyes. “Look, Erik. Here’s the thing: you no longer possess a pulse, and your tissues are teeming with the plant walker strain
of the CIPHR Virus. If anything, the only danger posed to you would be that from other humans.”
“Still,” Erik sighed. “I don’t like the sound of this.”
Doctor Hernandez pressed a hand onto his shoulder. “Look,” she said. “I know you’re scared. I would be too. But this is an exciting time in modern medicine. You could not only be the cure for the entire plague, but the reason it gets wiped out. Just imagine, Erik—a soldier who cannot be detected by enemy threats. That could be you—that is, if you’d be so willing.”
He wasn’t, but in the end, he felt he didn’t necessarily have a choice.
She’d saved his life. Of course she’d expect something in return.
“All right,” Erik said, after a moment’s worth of hesitation. “I’ll do it.”
“Good.” The doctor turned as Erik began to walk toward the door. “And Erik?”
“Yes?” he asked as he reached out to twist the doorknob.
“Good luck out there. I know reactions will be mixed, but just remember—you’re alive and well. That shouldn’t change anything.”
With a nod, Erik twisted the knob and left the examination room.
Though he couldn’t wait to see Jamie, he dreaded what feelings the meeting might inspire within the man.
Would he be happy to see him alive? Or would he feel something completely different upon realizing he was now a member of the living dead?
Only one way to find out, Erik thought.
*
Dakota was awoken the following morning by a knock at the threshold.
“Jamie?” a voice asked. “Dakota?”
No, Dakota thought—at first unable, then refusing too open his eyes. It couldn’t be.
Doctor Rosalita said that he would expire within the night. It couldn’t be him, it just couldn’t. He—
“Dakota?” a voice asked once more.
When Dakota was finally able to open his eyes, he found none other than Erik standing in the threshold, looking happier and healthier than ever.
“Erik?” Dakota asked as he sat up. “You’re—”
Jamie let out a strangled sob as he opened his eyes and saw his best friend standing in the threshold before him. “Thank God,” he said, crawling out of bed and making his way toward his best friend. “You’re—”