“Good, good. What about you, Cathren?”
“I’m fine,” she said, sniffling. “Considering you took half my blood.”
“You’re strong, don’t worry. When, and if, you see me again, a long, long time from today, perhaps I will have the cure to this zombie nightmare. For now, good luck.,” Alena Portanova said, “and Godspeed to you both.”
With that, she undid their straps, picked up her briefcase, and walked away. Donovan and Catherine finished removing their bindings. By the time they sat up, Alena had vanished.
“Ah,” Egesa said, turning away from his machinery at last. “Prometheus and girlfriend, unbound. No matter. Your fate is already sealed.” Egesa waved to his thuggish assistants. “Grab them!” Then he said, “Where’s Alena?” Egesa stood for a moment. He appeared to be lost in thought. “Never mind. Let’s begin.”
The goons held Donovan by his biceps, effectively locking him in place as Egesa approached Cathren. He gripped her by her wrist and twisted her arm behind her. She struggled and squirmed, but Egesa held onto her firmly. He jammed a needle into her arm and she fell to the ground unconscious.
“Cathren!” Donovan shouted. “You bastards, I’ll kill you. Let me go!”
Donovan attempted to lift himself off the ground as he’d seen done in various spy movies, to leverage the thug on either side of him as pivot points to get up somehow in the air. Then what? Knock them out with an awesome split kick? Donovan continued to struggle, but they had him where he couldn’t do anything. No martial arts, no bar-fight head-butts.
Meanwhile, Egesa laid Cathren on one of the operating tables and strapped her in place. He even had padlocks on the straps in a Frankenstein–looking setup. Cathren was so out of it, she drooled. Egesa powered up the machine above him and selected the sawing device.
“You watch, Mr. Codell. A master at work.”
He was going to operate on her while she was still alive!
“Egesa, you can’t do that! You can’t!” Donovan hollered.
“Shut him up,” Egesa said.
One of the brutes cuffed Donovan on the side of the head. Donovan closed his eyes as the room spun briefly.
“And yes I can,” Egesa continued. “In fact it’s the only way. I must have living organs. The heart still beating, the lungs still breathing. Don’t worry, she won’t feel a thing. Not only is she sedated, but her entire muscle and nervous system has shut down. She can’t move; she can’t awaken. She couldn’t sense pain even if I did this crudely. But I’m an expert. A man of science.” With that, he switched on the tiny buzz saw and slowly lowered it towards Cathren’s chest.
The pounding and moaning from the floor below echoed dully in the room. Hordes of the undead could soon be upon them. Donovan glanced at the steel doors of the lab and then back at Egesa.
Egesa had begun his first cut. The blade had ripped open Cathren’s shirt and was now etching her skin right above the breastbone. Despite being drugged, Cathren’s body jerked as if it were connected to high-voltage wires.
“Egesa, you’re out of your fuckin’ mind!” Donovan shrieked, struggling against his captors. “You can’t do this. She’s not a corpse; she’s a living human being!”
Blood sprayed through the air as the whirling blade ate its way into her skin and muscle. Next, tiny chips of bone blew into the room like birdshot. Donovan felt ill, and he heard one of the tough guys holding him trying not to retch.
Egesa was about to slice deeper when a large boom reverberated behind the metal doors. He killed the saw and it whined slowly to a stop. Everyone stood motionless, staring at the door, the interior silent except for the gurgling of the eggquariums and the hostile banging of the heads within them. A strange yet familiar noise emanated from right outside the lab. The moaning. The shuffling. They had arrived.
Bit by bit the doors groaned, bending against the weight of the zombie army.
“This is impossible,” Egesa said. “We are safe here! We have security systems in place, yes? Failsafe redundant systems. This cannot be.”
The doors squealed, metal against metal, and started to give. One of the undead reached through the gap that now grew between the two stressed doors. With an agonized screech, one hinge burst off the left door, allowing the monster to surge into the room. The stench of rotting flesh wafted in, and most everyone present gagged.
The creature stood there, panting, eyeing the group.
And then it attacked.
Chapter 72
The men holding Donovan reflexively let go and reached for their weapons. They shot at the creature again and again, but bullets did nothing to stop the monster’s forward motion—directly toward Donovan.
Donovan grabbed a toolbox off the floor and introduced the object to the side of the zombie’s head. The thing was more decomposed than Donovan realized, and therefore, he was more successful with his attack than he’d expected. The creature’s neck snapped, its head shot across the room, and the headless body fell to the ground like a discarded hospital gown.
The second zombie entered right after and ducked beneath Donovan’s swinging toolbox. Donovan had never seen one of these bastards duck before. He didn’t have time to consider whether this was luck, a singular trait unique to this one zombie, or an indication that these things were evolving. As if exercising with a kettle bell, he swung again from the opposite side. The toolbox crushed the zombie’s thin skull and drove the clever beast to the floor.
Two dead.
Donovan stepped aside as the thing fell. One small benefit of battling the undead was that these buggers didn’t bleed. Not much blood in them meant no blood splattering all over the place during these encounters. No brain goo, either, for that matter. The undead just didn’t hold much liquid. More like thirty percent water to the humans’ seventy percent. When zombies were covered in blood, it wasn’t their own.
Zombies number three and four entered the room, moaning, groaning, shuffling, growling. They charged in rudely, no manners at all. Donovan took care of them, one by one, but they were beginning to get the upper hand.
The undead began with a slow-moving attack at first. Then, as if gaining courage in numbers or because of the crowd mentality, the assault became faster, grew more assured. Donovan beat them back as much as possible, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to endure much longer. The first monster that landed a solid bite would be the end of Donovan.
“Somebody, help! Can’t–keep–doing–this,” Donovan said, shouting out each word to accompany swings with the toolbox. “Too. Many. Of. Them!”
At last, as if waking from a trance, Egesa’s thugs joined the counterattack with Donovan. One of the goons was dragged to the floor right away, however, and was of no help. The zombies feasted on him like flies on shit. The other hooligan, with a rebel yell, grabbed a knife off the counter and slashed again and again at the undead surge.
Donovan turned back to the battle. The thug fighting alongside Donovan collapsed as five zombies fell upon him, clutching and gnawing at his arms, legs, and neck. Donovan stepped away from the doors, which were now almost completely bowed open, the weight of the undead swarm acting as a wedge. He glanced to the side and realized Egesa was still in the corner of the lab.
Egesa was once again bent over Cathren, a saw buzzing in one hand and a drill in the other. He was attempting to break through her chest to her vital organs. Donovan ran to Cathren and tackled Egesa, who was no longer protected by his bodyguards. Donovan punched the man repeatedly in the head. Egesa swiped at Donovan with the saw, cutting him slightly across his forearm.
“No, I must have the secret, the secret in her body!” Egesa yelled, swiping at Donovan again.
Donovan leaped back briefly to avoid the spinning blade, then resumed the fight. He fell onto Egesa’s back, grabbing at the tools in his hands and pulling the man away from Cathren. They both stumbled backwards, the electric devices unplugging from the stand, their wires snapping in the air. The men struggled on the ground. Egesa was built like an ox and was a
s strong as Donovan expected; but the man was also agile, which came as a surprise.
The scientist now had Donovan on his back. Egesa had found a scalpel somehow and was forcing the blade closer and closer to Donovan’s neck despite Donovan’s best efforts to hold him off.
Just then, the doors buckled, crashing to the ground and pulling most of the metal doorframe and wall with them. The twenty or so zombies at the front of the pack cascaded to the floor in a pile, like a case of spilled mannequins.
More and more of the undead swarmed into the room. The dam of the damned had busted open. They poured in, a river of death, knocking over everything in sight. In the end, even the eggquariums were toppled and smashed.
The reanimated heads wriggled along the floor like goldfish from a shattered fishbowl—or, to be more precise, like piranha. The heads breathed fine in the open air, despite years under water or in ice. They appeared capable of an amphibious existence.
“My babies. I must save them!” Egesa said, real tears filling his eyes.
He shoved Donovan aside, jumped up, and ran to the heads on the floor. Once there, he dropped to his knees, frantically trying to scoop up the thawed and angry heads, but they moved over Egesa like indignant lab rats, snarling and snapping, and digging into his flesh with their sharp, greenish teeth. Egesa squirmed on the floor, blood pouring out of his wounds, screaming and kicking.
This attracted the attention of the zombies, who joined the feeding frenzy, crashing against vats of chemicals and Tesla turbines. The combination of untamed electricity and volatile liquids caused the lab to burst into flames, as if the room had been blasted by flamethrowers.
Egesa’s chilling scream pierced the lab and then went silent.
* * *
For a moment, the zombies were distracted, but soon enough they sensed Donovan’s presence. The zombies glared up from their feasting, their faces and chests covered in slick, dark blood. Moaning, growling, they rose to begin anew their pursuit of Donovan. They left the twitching heads and the ripped-apart body of Burkhart Egesa behind. For some reason, they ignored Cathren (perhaps they sensed her not as human, but as one of them). The monsters lumbered Donovan’s way like an army of ants changing direction mid-march.
Donovan searched for a weapon. He found only a broom. He broke the brush off, leaving the wooden handle jagged and sharp. The wave of the undead fell upon him. Donovan wielded the broom handle like a staff. The first zombie took a smack to the head. For good measure, Donovan rammed the sharp end of the handle through the creature’s mouth and out its neck. That zombie was dead, this time for good. The next bastard that came rushing at Donovan was dispatched the same way.
Soon the decomposing bodies of the undead piled high. However, the zombie mound didn’t stop the rest of the zombies from pushing in, around, and over the stinking mound of their fallen compatriots. They were on Donovan like bargain shoppers at a final markdown clothes rack.
“Oh, fuck!” Donovan shouted, shuddering at the sight of them all. For a moment, he was paralyzed. His hands trembled. Sweat dripped from his forehead into his eyes. Losing concentration at being surrounded by all of the heaving, snarling bodies, Donovan was soon overpowered. He dropped his weapon to the ground. A careless zombie knocked it out of reach with one of its shuffling feet.
Donovan fell to his knees and covered his head as if under fire. His skin twitched as their cold, gasping breath scraped across it. The putrid smell of their vile, rotten flesh flooded his nose. He closed his eyes and prayed.
And like an answer to his prayer, Cathren appeared, in all her half-zombie, zombie-proof, zombie-crushing glory. There were no injuries on her body at all, her half-zombie chemical makeup had healed the cuts Egesa had made after she changed over. Then Donovan remembered Cathren’s odd reaction to drugs. The drugs Egesa had given her clearly hadn’t put her under as Egesa had expected. They had merely knocked her out for ten minutes or so.
Cathren, healed and looking stronger than ever, let out a soft whistling sound, like a gas pipe that had sprung a leak, an assassin’s determination on her face. Where her opponents were glassy-eyed, she was steely. Where they moved with slow deliberation, she moved like a Ninja master. Her skin molted, peeled, and bubbled.
“Hey, you rotting bastards,” she said, in a voice that was only part Cathren’s. “You wanna dance?” She smiled, cracked her knuckles, and assumed a Kung Fu stance, fists with palms facing up, one near her hip and the other pointed out in front of her. Her legs were tree trunks, her eyes burning stars.
In a New York minute, the attention of the undead turned away from Donovan and refocused on Cathren. Within seconds, the undead had her surrounded. Then Cathren began her assault. She took the first one out with a swift kick to his mushy face. The next one dropped after a punch to the skull. The third took three chops to the neck and a knee in the groin. More came at her, fifteen, twenty.
She destroyed three zombies in a single, impressive twirl. She kicked another corpse in the neck, another in the heart. As she fought, her long, beautiful, strawberry-blonde hair flew around her. Literally: her hair was flinging, falling, and flying everywhere, as it disengaged from her skull. She lost a few more patches here and there with each kick and punch.
She beat back the marauding hordes, one by one, ten by ten, kicking, punching, biting. However, despite her super-powerful, half-zombie state, Donovan knew it would soon be too much for her to handle. Too many zombies against one small, half-zombie girl. So he crawled his way over the stack of zombie corpses and made his way to Cathren. She stood, crouched tiger-style, in the middle of a large circle of the undead. Something out of Kill Bill, Vol. 2. She fought the zombies with everything she had.
Donovan risked his life by joining this fight club of horrors. He grabbed his girl by the hand, which promptly fell off. He snatched her other hand, which was solid and stayed intact.
“Cathren, let’s go!” he yelled. “We need to get the hell out of here. Now!”
She turned, screaming: “AAAaaaarrgh!”
Cathren cocked her fist in a martial arts pose. She was ready to dispatch Donovan as though he were just another of these sleepwalkers. She stopped, however, and then Donovan saw her face melt.
Not literally, like the faces of some of the undead. Hers melted with love and recognition.
Chapter 73
Donovan and Cathren bolted toward the exit, as the circle of zombies closed up like a giant Venus flytrap. Where the doors had been blown off earlier by the crush of the undead, the opening now stood unexpectedly devoid of any zombie presence. Donovan snatched the Flying Fox paraglider kit from the floor as they darted past, the lab behind them exploding in larger, louder, and more destructive booms.
“We have to get up to the roof,” he shouted.
They ran to the end of the hall, Cathren slowly morphing back to human the farther from the zombies they got. Her hair grew back, her hand regenerated, all her wounds healed. Donovan pulled to a stop at an oversized window. It appeared as if there was no way out going down, and no way out going up. After studying the scene for a second, Donovan noticed a small, rusty metal ladder attached to the outside of the building, just beyond the window.
Donovan glanced around and saw a number of large weights in a torn and stained cardboard box a few feet down the hall. The weights were the type used before the digital age, the largest labeled twenty kilograms—about forty-five pounds more or less. He crouched down, grabbed the weight, and lifted with his legs.
Donovan schlepped the weight over to the window. He swung it back and forth using both hands, building up momentum, like a clock pendulum. He built up speed until he released the lead weight at the window. The weight smashed through the window, shattering the glass to pieces, and taking most of the window frame with it on its descent. At that moment, what remained of the zombie lynch mob lumbered into the other end of the hall.
“Let’s get out of here!” Donovan shouted to Cathren, picking up the backpack and strapping it on.
They got up on the windowsill. Donovan reached over and pulled himself up onto the metal ladder. Then Cathren swung on, a rung below Donovan. They scrambled up to the roof, being careful not to look down. The sounds of zombie groans and growls invaded their ears from the open window casing below.
As Donovan flung himself onto the gravel and hot tar of the roof, he caught someone behind him shouting for help. Cathren’s head appeared above the edge of the roof. Donovan threw off the backpack and grabbed her hands. They both tumbled backward onto the rooftop as the moans of the undead filled the air below.
Donovan unrolled the paraglider across the sticky, flat roof and then he and Cathren strapped on the harnesses. Donovan held the controls and worked them to familiarize himself with the system while Cathren finished hooking herself into her sling in front of him.
They both had harnesses, separate from each other, but only Donovan had controls, the lines for steering and stopping.
“Quick,” he said, feeling pressure and doom. “We don’t have much time.”
The scraping and moaning of the undead climbing up the ladder assaulted their ears. Donovan searched around for something he might drop on the zombies—boiling oil would have been perfect, but this was the cleanest industrial rooftop he’d ever seen.
“You ready for your first paragliding lesson?” Donovan asked, smiling.
“Like I’ve got a choice?”
“Good. You’ll be the passenger with a front row seat. I’ll steer. But you will have to help with the takeoffs and landings.”
“Oh, boy, not again. After the demonstration of your abilities in that biplane, I’m not sure flying is your forte, baby,” Cathren said. Now she was the one smiling.
“Be that as it may,” he said. “I’m the only pilot we have. I think you’ll see things in a different light after this.”
“Maybe,” she said, chuckling.
“Well, I mean, if we don’t die first,” Donovan said.
“Is this the pep talk you give all your new students?” Cathren asked, wrinkling her nose.
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