First Interview (Necromorphosis Book 1)

by CT Grey

Almost as good as when I snuffed out someone’s life. But then again I’d drunk more than usual. Maybe it meant something, but what that something was, I couldn’t understand. But what I could comprehend was that I’d wasted precious time on filling my belly, when I should had tried my best to save those boys' lives.

  So I turned back into human form and started to frantically gather together emergency aids. But just as I was hurrying back with a small trolley full of them, I heard sporadic gunfire erupting at the corridor.

  “No!” I thought the worst had happened. But when I arrived at the scene, I saw a smoking pistol lying at the officer’s side, pointing at another corpse, this time without a head.

  The officer looked at me. “He moved.”

  “And you...”

  “I had no choice,” he said. “I had no choice.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” I said as I dropped the supplies on the floor and thought had that one been another zombie, or was he just recovering? But without voicing my concerns, I got on with the business and said, “I need to dress these wounds, okay?”

  “Okay.” The officer nodded as I took John’s hand in my own and started spraying the wound with a saline. I didn’t wait for all the grime and stuff flowing out before I started applying a bandage. The roll disappeared quickly between my fingers, and then I was ready to apply the same to John’s upper arm.

  As I slapped a roll over the wound, I saw John’s eyes roll as he fell into an unconsciousness. Knowing that I didn’t have much time, I quickly rolled a bandage around his arm and then peeled back his other sleeve to apply a drip feed. Finding a vein was a bit problematic, but luckily a minute and half later I was able to give a bag to the older officer.

  “Make sure it doesn’t fall on the floor.”

  “Patrol seven-seven-niner, this is the Central Command, over.”

  “I need to take this.” He looked into my eyes.

  “Okay.” I gave him a smile. “You do that, while I go and check Rob.” With the code words flying into the ether, I moved the first-aid stuff next to Robert and then started using the scissors to cut his overalls open. The damage the zombie had done to him was extensive, yet he wasn’t in the worst condition I’d seen in my life. Given enough time and care, he would heal completely.

  “Jane,” I heard a familiar voice behind me as I was cleaning and bandaging his second wound. Before I could turn my head, Mary squatted next to me and laid a hand on my shoulder, while I noticed in the background the rest of the staff wheeling patients back in the department. She moved her hand on my forehead and said, “My God, Jane you’re burning...”

  “I am?” I frowned at her.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “Can’t you feel it?”

  “No.” I looked at her curiously. I didn’t feel weak or anything, just slightly weird. “Are you sure?”

  Mary nodded, “Yes Jane. I’m positive.” She waved her hand towards the main department and said, “You should go to get yourself checked. I can handle this.”

  “But—”

  “No buts Jane,” the senior sister said sternly as she pried a bandage roll from my fingers. “Get yourself checked and cleaned up.”

  “But—”

  “Is there something wrong with your hearing Jane? I said go.”

  “Okay, okay.” I rolled my eyes and left Robert in her care. As I stood up and turned around I could see nurses, doctors, even patients getting back into their places. Where they had been hiding, I didn’t know, but I realised that like an act of God, I had happened to arrive in my workplace at the worst possible moment.

  “Why are you still standing there?” Mary raised her voice. “Get yourself checked.”

  I turned around and raised my hand to point towards the entrance, “There’s—”

  “Yes, yes Jane, there’s always patients coming in.”

  “No,” I shook my head. “You don’t understand. There’s a coma patient in the Ambulance.”

  Mary stood up, put her hands on her hips and said, “Jane, what is wrong with you? Can’t you understand you cannot function in your condition? Do I need to force you to get cleaned and checked, or...?”

  “Or what?”

  “Jane,” she softened her tone. “Look, I’m going to need every pair of hands to get over this catastrophic situation. You’re covered in blood, you could transmit something to a patient if you’re not cleaned up. The last thing I need is a stubborn nurse messing up on the job. So, if you aren’t going to follow my orders, I’ll have no other choice but to remove you from the hospital.”

  “Okay,” I sighed. My shoulders slumped as I turned around, and headed towards the changing room to get a shower. I had no other choice, but the problem was that she wanted me to get a full medical examination, and that, if nothing else would finally reveal to them that I wasn’t actually in the land of the living the way they understood it.

  *** Henrik ***

  I touched my forehead, and thought: My Lord. You were never in the land of the living and yet, you’re talking about it as if you were. No wonder it’s been so difficult for us to notice you in the midst of our society.

  “Jane,” I said. “I think you’re confusing some details here.”

  “What is…?” Jane frowned. “Are you talking about my cover?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “People, me… we wouldn’t have exactly thought you existed.”

  “Yes.” Jane smiled subtly, almost innocently. “I get your point. But they didn’t ever even guess who or what I represented. So I had good reasons to keep my cover going. The Damned weren’t taking over the world. And not for once did people like you, or people like Red over there, even realise how this kind of situation would blow the world of darkness into the face of humanity.” Just as I were to open my mouth she added, “And neither did I.”

  I picked up the pen and said, “I see.”

  “Is there something else you’d like to know?”

  I rolled the pen between my fingers and thought for a moment what she’d told me. The world of darkness… the Damned… the whole nine yards that we had never even thought was possible. It was heavy. But yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the bite. It scared me. Especially as I knew how damn virulent the M6 strain had turned out to be. But did it…

  “What is it?”

  “Well,” I started carefully. “You were bitten…”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. I was.”

  “So, therefore, you were infected with the virus...”

  “That is correct.” Jane nod. “Could you get to the point, please?”

  “Well…” I sighed. “The thing is… The actual thing is… that, so far, the virus contamination rate is close to one hundred per cent, after infection.”

  “True.” Jane nodded sharply. “I have seen it with my own eyes.”

  “So how come it wasn’t affecting you?”

  “Ah,” she said. “You see, it was…”

  *** Jane ***

  When the shower’s warm water fell upon me, I felt a weird sensation pulsating through my body. It was a sensation I had not felt for centuries, and it was making me feel as if I was alive. Truly alive. And I couldn’t ignore it. Not because I started shivering. Excessively. And I couldn’t put it down to exhaustion no matter how much I wanted.

  The next thing I noticed was that I was losing my sight. And it wasn’t the steam. With the every breath I took, the world around me became fuzzier and fuzzier, and soon I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face.

  Sister Mary was right, I had a fever. It was an impossibility. And before you ask why, I was asking that same thing and couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. There was none. When you’ve been undead for as long as I have, you have to understand I’d never heard of our kind catching any sort of sicknesses.

  It just didn’t happen. Vampires are one hundred per cent immune to any illnesses that your kind contract all the time. Yet it was happening to me, and for a short while, I could even feel my stone cold heart po
unding in my chest before I collapsed on the floor and lost consciousness.

  There are only a couple things I could say happened to me, and one of them was that I had finally died. But what I was experiencing didn’t feel as if I had entered into the afterlife. And if I was, then all of those people who’d come back had been lying. There was no bright light falling on my body to draw my soul to paradise. And neither did the floor underneath me crack open - to drop me back to that hellish dimension I had escaped, when I had been returned back to my transformed body.

  No, what I was experiencing was far more simplistic: I felt I was drifting through a cloud made from pure white cotton. I don’t know how long I was like that, but suddenly, I started making out shapes. What had been fuzzy clouds were now white thread patterns. It was as if someone had covered my face, my body with a cloth. And then I felt something even stranger. It was so weird. It was as if someone had hung something on my big toe, and as soon as I figured out what it was, I realised what the coldness seeping into my bones really meant.

  Bastards, I thought as I tried to sit up on a morgue slab. But what I wanted to do didn’t actually happen. My muscles didn’t seem to be taking any orders. What have they done to me?

  As I lay there feeling the coldness turning me stiffer, I understood that actually there wasn’t anything wrong with me. I just wasn’t capable of doing anything. So I fell back into my thoughts, trying to think hard what I should do. But one thing was certain: I didn’t want to face a situation where I’d see a coroner pulling the cloth off, and perform an autopsy while I was still trapped in my body.

  No, I said to myself, that’s not going to happen.

  I focused all my willpower to my right hand and tried to move my little finger. Seconds turned to minutes, and then minutes felt like hours. Slowly but surely, I regained control of my hand. With it working, I finally pulled the cloth from my face and looked around.

  The morgue was half lit, and at first I thought it was empty. As I slowly turned my head to the right I saw a long row of corpses lying next to me. And like me, many of them were moving. Some of them were already sitting up, while a few others had just managed to remove the cloth from their faces.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but the only sound that came out was a dry groan. When its echo reached my ears, I saw the others opening their mouths to produce similar kind of noises.

  But the moans didn’t go unheard, as the next thing was the morgue double doors pumped open and someone said: “Oh my God, they’re alive.”

  “What?”

  “Jim… come and take a look,” the voice said. “… at this.”

  Seconds passed and then I heard, “Jesus Christ.”

  I raised my head and saw two assistants standing at the doorway with their mouths gaping open. Then one of the sitting ones dangled his feet over the slab and hopped down, Losing his balance, he tumbled onto the floor.

  “Don’t you just stand there, Jim,” the senior assistant said. “Go and help them!”

  I tried to speak, to stop them, but all I could get out was another moan; a noise, which the others hastily repeated.

  The senior assistant stopped in the middle of the floor. “Look,” he said, looking round at us. “I know there have been problems with the system lately. So bear with us, and I… we promise we’ll be with you in a minute.”

  That minute didn’t arrive, as the moment Jim knelt next to the man on the floor, the walker sank his teeth into Jim’s arm. Jim let out an agonised scream, and tried to prise the zombie off his arm. As the zombie lifted his head and opened his mouth for another bite the senior assistant grabbed Jim’s jacket and pulled him frantically toward the door. They didn’t get far. More zombies lumbered after them.

  I felt what was going in their beastly minds. It was the same irresistible hunger that got me on my feet. At that moment the Coroner arrived at the door.

  “What the hell is going on in here?”

  “Get away from here, George,” the senior assistant yelled. “Run.”

  “Is this some sort of joke?” George blared loudly. “Is that it?”

  “No,” the senior assistant shouted as he brandished a hydraulic bone-saw front of him. “It’s not a joke. Run, George. RUN!”

  “Oh, I get it.” George put his hands on his hips as some of the dead split off from the main group and started shuffling towards him “You think I’m so senile that I’m going to run away to alert the others and fall into a surprise party. No, no. You failed. You shouldn’t have recruited …” he pointed a finger towards me as I limped towards him with my arms raised, mouth drooling. “…Jane, because otherwise I could have believed that the dead have actually started rising—”

  His words were drowned out by the screams of his two assistants falling under the mob. The Coroner’s face whitened and he backed away from the doors, letting them swing shut. As though doubting himself, I saw him peek through one of the small round windows. It was one of those rabbit-in-headlights moments as he realised it was not a ruse, but a reality, which shattered in a million pieces when the first zombie started pushing the doors open. He ran down the corridor, shouting: “The dead are walking. The dead are walking.”

  But the dead didn’t care about him giving out a warning. They steadily advanced down the corridor to catch laboratory personnel, porters, even patients and their carers when they came out to see what the ruckus was about.

  Steadily our numbers grew thin as the dead stopped to devour their victims. But I pressed on, trying to get out of there. When the armed response team would arrive to snuff out their unholy lives, I needed to be somewhere else. My aim was deeper inside the facility; inside the blood bank, where I believed that I could turn back to my former self.

  It wasn’t easy. Not with that hunger growing stronger with every step I took. I wanted to feast on the living flesh. And there were victims. Lots of easy prey. Ones I could have snuffed at a moment’s notice. A couple of times I even stopped to look at them. Luckily for them, the moment I raised my hands and stepped inside their rooms, they ran.

  Slowly but surely, I made way to the locked doors - the inner sanctum that served as a main service point for the drugs, surgical supplies, and the fridges that held the blood supplies. But as nothing is really easy in the undead life, I’d managed to lose the codes from my memory. Maybe it was the hunger. Maybe it was the virus, which had transformed me to a zombie, but I couldn’t remember them.

  I banged in any numbers and then pressed the hash key, but the lights didn’t switch from the red to the green. The machine just stubbornly blared at me - as if it was mocking my limited functions. And each and every time that happened, I ended up hitting the security glass next to it harder and harder. At the last blow, it started shattering. I stopped there and kept shifting my gaze from the keypad to the cracks and back as if I was some kind of idiot.

  Why had I not thought about that earlier?

  I locked my fingers together and smashed both fists straight at the glass. A few strikes later, I had a big enough hole for me to push an arm inside. That was a mistake. One I shouldn’t have done, as when I tried desperately to reach the green release button, something stung me in the arm.

  I looked over and saw a man holding a syringe, pumping something nasty into my veins. What a stupid move that was. Could he not understand none of those chemical agents he’d loaded in the syringe weren’t going to work on me, in my condition? But back then neither he nor I knew that. And what he’d just done just made me angrier. I grabbed his shirt and slammed his body onto the button.

  The door clonked opened and I stepped in to look the man in the eyes. And I saw something click in his mind. The man wrapped his arms around my legs and in an instant, I found myself underneath him, while he pummelled his fists into my face.

  The strikes were so hard that I almost lost my conscious, but at the same time I could feel the rage starting to boil, and when the last hit shattered my jaw, it spilled over. I just couldn’t resist any more.
I grabbed the man, pulled him closer, and then bit him in the neck. His body jerked violently as my fangs tore through his flesh.

  *** Henrik ***

  I dropped the pen and closed my eyes. “Did you…” I said aloud. “Did you understand that by doing so you were transmitting the virus?”

  I sensed her moving, picking up her cigarette case and then scratching a light at the end of the smoke, while I pictured the tiny viruses travelling through the poor man’s veins, rapidly multiplying. There was nothing his white cells could do when the blood turned to a soup of conquering fluid, which would eventually turn the host organism into a ravenous, mindless beast.

  We had seen it in our own experiments.

  The host would have forty eight hours maximum to resist the virus, while in most cases the weakened immune systems would yield in under twelve. The death of a normal person happened usually far sooner; under half that time from the moment the virus was contracted. But with her, God only knows what sort of mix-up the virus would mutate to, when it’d steal the genetic material from a super-human … even if she were merely a half-dead.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t say I was caring about anything other than myself. Comprehensive thoughts weren’t exactly happening, if you know what I mean.”

  I nodded casually. It kind of made sense what she was saying, but maybe it was because I couldn’t comprehend how she didn’t follow the pattern that set the other zombies to do exactly one thing – eat. “So are you saying that you were able to resist the hunger?”

  “Yes,” she said without any hesitation or confusion lingering in her voice.

  I opened my eyes and saw Jane’s expressionless face as she said, “I believe I was able to do that because there was a fight going on inside me. Both viruses were battling for control, but what set me apart was the mutagenic vampire virus. It had taken a hold in every cell centuries ago and the newcomer was just an invasive intruder.”