First Interview (Necromorphosis Book 1)

by CT Grey

  I kept quiet and waited patiently for them to tell me what this was all about. And eventually, after five, ten minutes of Sergeant Red frantic pacing up and down the room, he finally broke up to my satisfaction. “Sir,” he said. “You have seen those things on the outside, and I have been listening to her story, and I swear, to me she strikes as a fellow warrior. An asset that you cannot—”

  “She’s a killer, Sergeant Red. A stone-cold killer.”

  “No Henrik,” Jane said. “I’m not. But they are…” She stretched her arm and pointed towards the base entrance. “… and there’s big difference between me and them.”

  “Really?” I asked as I tapped in a code in, to launch a scene on the screen, where she was sucking the life from that skinhead woman in her arms. Neither of them looked at it, and nobody commented. What had happened at the front of our base couldn’t be denied. She had taken a life without even regretting it.

  “If you are quite finished,” she said sternly. “Then maybe you could learn—”

  “All right.” I clicked the pen as a mark for the transcribers to continue. “Tell me.”

  *** Jane ***

  Seeing the naked woman eating the guy and realising how much damage I’d done, I knew there wasn’t much of the old me left inside. It had gone down the drain and I had become the very thing I’d always despised. A mindless killer. And I knew I couldn’t go on like that, because the part of me that remained was fighting an uphill battle.

  I just couldn’t let it win.

  The zombie in me had to go, and somehow I realised I would have to give my resident vampire virus a fighting chance to win the battle. But it wasn’t as simple as that, as in order to save whatever was left of my humanity, I couldn’t kill any more. Not unless the opportunity presented itself, and that wasn’t what I wanted. If I succumbed to that, I was certain the zombification would finish the necromorphosis and turn me completely into one of them.

  So I left the victim and the walker behind me, and pumped open another door, before I went down the corridor, looking at the walls, placards, and people screaming and waving their hands behind security glasses like some kind of a village idiot. It was almost as if I was hoping to convince them I was one of them. What most of them were saying, I couldn’t tell, as my brain wasn’t functioning properly. However, what it was processing, was pure instinct - a deeply rooted feeling in my backbone – as it guided me down the corridors to one door that felt so familiar.

  Of course, it was locked, but clever me – learning from my past mistakes – didn’t stop there. I started smashing at the narrow strip of glass with my bare knuckles. Blow after blow landed before the glass finally gave in, making me lurch as my hand shot through the hole. I let it hang through the other side of the opening and turned as I heard moaning. A small group of zombies were pummelling at a metal door. What was surprising was that they were pounding it in similar fashion as I had done to the security glass, smashing at it with their fists. That door also felt very familiar, although not as familiar as the room I was breaking into.

  Moments later, I opened the door to discover it was only a dressing room. The senior nurses' one. And there I realised why the room behind it had felt so alluring. It was because it had a shower. The place where I’d finally died.

  Why I had gone there? I didn’t know.

  So I took a step back and let the door slam shut, before I turned around and headed towards the polished metal door. Its surface was dented and smudged with all sorts of fluids the zombies had been spilling all around the place. But as I looked at it, I knew why it had appeared so familiar, and that was because it not only was the main laboratory, but it was also the hospital main storage unit.

  It was the one place I’d sought out since I’d first touched my bare feet onto the morgue floor tiles.

  I opened my mouth to shout orders, but what came out was a groaning screech that caused other zombies to reply. Not only in my vicinity, as I’d managed to get myself to the front, but also much farther away. Although the reaction was interesting, it wasn’t as interesting as the muffled sounds coming from the other side. Groans echoed back, the noises stopped dead. And in that moment I didn’t need to be a Nobel Prize winner to realise what the zombies were really after.

  So I wrapped my torn and bloody fingers around the handle and pushed down.

  The door swung open, revealing a couple of white coats building a barricade.

  We looked each other for moment in stunned silence, before one opened his mouth: “You said you locked it!” The other one was already backing away from the hungry zombies that were rushing in. And in the middle of them, I was standing like the damn queen of the dead.

  “Don’t you just stand there,” someone shouted from inside. “Run!”

  “Yeah, run,” I tried to say but it came out as an ominous moan. Run before it’s too late and you end up being one of them. The dead crashed through the makeshift barricade and caught one of them. Even though they weren’t as fast as the living, they’d one advantage. They never stopped. But I did, when I found the first refrigeration unit.

  Its cold light fell upon me as I eyed the treasure: bag upon bag of life-giving blood. There was more than I could devour in one year. I grabbed the nearest one and bit through its plastic skin. The blood spilled in my mouth, down my chin and onto my bare chest as if I was Elisabeth Bathory.

  Maybe in that moment I didn’t care about what it looked like. Who was there watching us? The living? No. They were too busy trying to stay alive, to care about a strange one among the others.

  I so much wanted to tell those who were still alive that they were having a bad dream because the dead weren’t supposed to be alive. That they certainly weren’t meant to be walking and they were not meant to devour the living. It was an impossibility, because the dead were meant to lay still, unmoving and having no interest in this life once they’d passed over.

  But they hadn’t. None of them were as they were supposed to be because the facts were facts, and the menace spreading around one of their precious hospitals was pure hell on Earth; something that only an artist could have pulled out of their imagination. Yet, it was happening. It was reality. It was cold, hard facts and there was no escape. Or maybe there was, but the majority of people couldn’t figure it out, because it was already too late to understand what was really going on.

  *** Henrik ***

  “But you are wrong,” I snapped at her furiously. “When they first arrived in large numbers in the public places, we were trying to do something. We were—”

  “Oh yes,” she nodded. “I have no doubt about that.”

  *** Jane ***

  I don’t know how many bags I’d consumed, when my ears started registering the popping sounds of submachine guns. All I could say it was a lot as the front of my body was almost completely drenched with red, and inside I felt much, much better.

  But the hunger was still there. Much quieter than at the moment I’d opened my eyes, or even started hearing. And what I was now hearing were screams mixed with shouts, shots, and even explosions coming from somewhere above. There was no doubt in my mind that the walking nightmares, who’d spread around the basement areas, had reached higher levels, and soon, if the Lord were willing, they’d be heading to the other side - to enjoy the afterlife. But I couldn’t count on that.

  No, because when I turned around I saw that the world was in more trouble than I would like to admit. A few of the victims I could see were already in an early state of zombification. One was lying on the floor, completely still, while a few others were sweating heavily in some kind of coma.

  Even though I recognised what was going to happen, not for one moment did the thought cross my mind that I should start slaughtering them. Not, because somewhere in the deepest corner of my mind, I was panicking. I just couldn’t be standing there, drinking endlessly and hoping that some sort of miracle would happen.

  No, I had to make it on my own.

  It was my duty; nobody
else. I had to get out from this mess, and I couldn’t count on the Authorities offering me any sort of vaccination; quite the opposite, as they certainly would try to put me down. As soon as I realised that, I did head towards the door, but I didn’t get too far before I understood that my current state of mind wasn’t going to last forever. At least, not long enough to give a fighting chance to the ancient vampire virus of mine.

  So I rushed back in and grabbed as many bags as I could, before going out the same way I had come in. At the corridor, I saw some of the walkers were moving towards the fighting, while couple of others were just finishing their first meal. I couldn’t go out through the front or even the backdoor, but use a hazy inclination about the emergency escape plan I had scouted before I’d accepted to take a senior sister role in the Chelsea and Westminster A&E.

  The problem was, I couldn’t remember it exactly. The only thing I could remember was that it was somewhere in a hot, noisy and dusty place. But the thing is I was in the middle of a hospital, where such places were as uncommon as the dead that were now walking in its corridors.

  Think, I said to myself.

  It didn’t work. Not straightaway, anyway. However, what worked was listening to my instincts that said to hide in the darkest, farthest corner as soon as possible. So I headed down the corridor, away from the noises, from the dead, but the further I went, the more evidence I saw of the walkers. They were mindlessly, chaotically, searching the hospital for anything living. They didn’t spare closets, half-lit corridors, unused storage rooms, anything. But in a way, by following their tracks, I ended up in that noisy, dusty and very hot place that served as the hospital boiler room.

  It was a large place: massive boilers pumping out their heat, and long tunnels stretching under the hospital, kilometres after kilometres of pipes, cables and pressure valves mixed up with huge pressure tanks and beeping, blinking equipment. It was everything you didn’t need if you were in my condition. You could almost say they were there to taunt my inability to comprehend, as I tried to find my way through the maze with only a quarter of my brain left.

  Can you believe that?

  *** Henrik ***

  I looked at Jane, her head hung low, blue smoke curling towards the ceiling from an almost completely burned-out cigarette, and I said, “I can imagine the place, but why did you find it so confusing?”

  Jane shifted back in her chair and pulled out another smoke from her silvery case before she said, “Because to zombies that place is interesting. The whole underbelly of the hospital is full of noises, lights, moving shadows; things that will keep their attention occupied. And believe me, sometimes they get stuck…”

  *** Jane ***

  I had probably just entered the room and started to traverse it, when I noticed a movement from the corner of my eye. It was one of the walkers, stuck by his hand between the steam pipes. It was groaning and gurgling manically as it tried to free itself from the trap that would had burned any normal human horribly.

  When I moved closer, it stopped, raised his head up and sniffed the air sharply. The zombie opened its mouth to growl, before it turned around and tried to grab me. I took a hasty step backwards and watched it trying to push its arms, legs and eventually its whole head between two insulated pipes. It didn’t care that they were blocking it. And there was no reaction, when it finally pushed its head between the stripped clean steam pipes to get its burned skin peeling off as it tried to follow its frantically waving arm.

  There was no humanity left in it; just pure hunger-fuelled anger.

  I not only realised that I couldn’t go past it, but I also understood that those ghouls had started to smell the change in me. I wasn’t one of the humans, but I wasn’t one of them either. I was simply something strange. A threat … or was I?

  By following its head movements, its desperate attempts, I could see it was trying to catch my chest. I looked down without understanding what was there it so desperately wanted, but I could swear it was not necessarily my flesh, my still heart, as to him I was an undead. Just one, strange person among the others.

  And there were others.

  Ones who had trapped themselves, and the ones searching every single little thing that moved or hissed. I moved carefully between them, never really understanding that when they got a whiff of me, they started to seek me out. It was almost as if I was their alpha leader… but I wasn’t. I couldn’t be.

  I didn’t want to be their leader.

  All I wanted was to get back to my older self and be the vampire, who had seen every major event since the beginning of the Little Ice Age. And I had seen a lot. But this was something else. It felt so chaotic. So evil. And all so sudden.

  But the zombies didn’t just try finding me, they also tried to communicate with me. There were hisses, groans, clicks, gurgles, barks and even droning as they followed me from the boiler room to the tunnels – to the Underworld of London.

  *** Henrik ***

  I returned to my telepresence cocoon, leaving the hologram to perceive an image of me, and pulled a control panel at front of me to tap in the keywords: Underworld and London. The machine crunched for a moment, and then displayed too many connections for me to follow. I grabbed the info and moved the data to another panel for Harry’s team to handle. Then I said, “You make it sounds as if there’s more to it than we might even currently know.”

  Jane nodded, subtle grin spreading across her face. “Yes, darling. You could put it that way if it pleases you. But the Underworld is not what you think it is.”

  *** Jane ***

  The Underworld, you might be thinking, is hidden deep. And the one I was heading into counted everything that people had built since they started to carve the underbelly of the Roman settlement Londinium. It wasn’t just the old sewers, or the tube tunnels, or their access tunnels, but I was heading to the very heart of it, as far away from the sunlight as I could get.

  They followed me.

  At first it was just two and then it became five, seven, eleven, before suddenly there were twenty of them. The reanimated corpses were coming from everywhere. Sometimes they were trapped in an odd corner; sometimes they were standing behind the pillars, or lying face down in the stream. And not all of them were fresh, some of them were quite horribly decomposed.

  Nevertheless, they were almost all moving.

  Sooner than I’d realised, a couple of hundred of them lurched after me. Maybe the ones that’d followed me from the hospital weren’t among them, but their faces turned to me as I passed. Unwillingly, I made them move and follow me down into the old tunnels, rooms and halls.

  We went inside Mother Earth like they had never done before. But when I hit the ancient subways, everything stopped. I turned around and realised they weren’t following me anymore. I couldn’t even hear them. I looked at the dust-laden, old Victorian-era station, which was going to serve as my home for the foreseeable future.

  *** Henrik ***

  “So you had no idea why they stopped following you, or did you?” I asked.

  Jane looked away, almost as if she hiding something before she said, “Maybe in the darkest corner of my mind I knew what I was doing.” Then she flicked her eyes on me. “But I was never ever going to allow it to take control of me.”

  “This station.” I poked the pad with a pen, making the projection of the London underground to enlarge in the mirror screen every time. “This Victorian-era station.”

  “Come on Mister Jackson,” she said. “Get it out. Ask.”

  “Was it part of your domain?”

  “And that’s the question?” She laughed. “Was it part of my domain?” She raised a hand and gestured me to come closer. “Do you really want to know?”

  <> “Yes.”

  “Henrik.” She took a drag from her smoke and blew it in my face, “In your dreams.” Then she crossed her arms and gestured with her head for Sergeant Red to come closer. “I’m feeling a bit tired, so would you be a gentleman and escort me back to m
y cell, please?”

  “Wait…”

  Jane stood up as Sergeant Red moved the chair away, and said, “Nap time, darling. You want me to look beautiful, don’t you?”

  << Let her go. We need to talk. >>

  I closed the cap on my pen and said, “Very well, Mrs McGriffin. Is two hours enough for you?”

  She smiled and headed towards the door, gently purring, “Yes, my love.”

  I couldn’t move my eyes from her figure, from those smooth curves, and the moves that spoke about the history of aristocracy. There was no denying that she might even have been part of the Establishment at one point of time, although something in back of my mind said that English monarchy might not have been the only one, during those centuries she’d lived on this planet. Nevertheless, I was certain that if we looked it up, her particular lineage could be found from the Agency archives.

  Then she was gone, leaving me sitting stupidly in the room with Harry’s message floating at the middle of the room, saying: << Are you coming or not? >>

  I sighed, peeled off the neuro helmet and stepped out of the telepresence cocoon.

  The C&C Centre had quieted down, and although the main screen was still showing, from multiple angles, neighbourhoods around the Central London under a zombie onslaught, there was no panic among the operators. In fact, everything was rolling under its own weight; on half strength among the manned stations. It was almost as if the whole base population had sighed in a relief and got on with the business as if it was just another day.