by Steven Booth
CRYSTAL PALACE, LEVEL 6
They did not speak as the elevator slowly descended. The stainless steel walls seemed to close around her body like a fist. Miller could feel herself growing more unstable and tense. She followed Sheppard through what now felt increasingly more like a prison hospital than a military base. Her memories of this floor were uniformly terrible. She had blisteringly quick visions of being strapped to a gurney, drugged and helpless, and left to the insane whim of Colonel Sanchez. Fear slammed into Miller with the force of a semi truck. She recalled standing against an army of the undead with nothing but a machete. She wondered what the hell she was doing back here, asking to meet a new kind of zombie in the flesh. The mere thought of the confrontation made her legs wobble.
As Miller walked, vague sounds entered her mind. Not sounds exactly, but murmuring voices that seemed to seep through the walls. Sheppard seemed unconcerned. Perhaps he didn’t hear them, or maybe he just didn’t care to listen. In fact, Miller couldn’t tell if what she heard was real or just an auditory hallucination, or perhaps some new kind of telepathy. The macabre, hushed vocalizations felt like musical undertones that lay just below their footsteps, behind the soft whoosh of air conditioning, above the music of computers, hidden in the closing and opening of metal doors and the constant murmuring of polite conversation. Miller worked to block them out. That now familiar PTSD feeling washed over her body again and again, like waves of freezing water. She again wondered about her sanity. Perhaps it was more fragile that she’d ever realized. She said nothing to Sheppard because she did not want to discuss it yet.
The elevator went down, and so did her mood. The air chilled further, making the hair on her arms ripple. Miller felt hungry again, though logically she should have felt satiated. Perhaps it was the blood she had just given.
Perhaps it was where they were headed.
The isolation room was in the basement of Crystal Palace, down in the impacted bowels of the place, with a pervasive smell of decomposition hanging in the air. For some reason, Miller had Vincent Price’s voice going through her head. This was a horror show. Hell, for all she knew, they had dancing zombies down here too. Why not?
Sheppard led Miller into a darkened observation room. Two bored technicians sat at a desk, monitoring some equipment. One was male and wore thick glasses, the other was female and round as a bear cub. They were playing cards, using toothpicks as coins, but when Sheppard entered, they snapped to attention and saluted. Sheppard returned the salute smartly.
The technicians relaxed, but exchanged looks when they spotted Miller. The chubby female stepped forward. “Sir, this area is restricted. Unauthorized personnel can’t be in here.”
“Marquez,” snapped Sheppard, “I appreciate you adhering to regulations, but Sheriff Miller has been cleared. As you were.”
The technicians sat down reluctantly and resumed their card game. Miller hesitated before walking deeper into the room. She felt light-headed and dizzy. Her mind kept fixating on biting down into a blood rare cheeseburger. Or maybe it wasn’t a cheeseburger. Miller licked her lips. She wanted to ask for some water but held back. Sheppard was clearly gathering his thoughts and she wanted him to be dead honest. The room felt colder than upstairs, but the others didn’t seem to mind. Miller wondered if that was just her mind playing tricks again.
Sheppard had a clipboard in his hand. He was going over some notes. Miller’s attention was gradually pulled elsewhere. She looked around to take it all in. The most prominent feature in the room was a large, thick window set into the wall to her right. It reminded her of the Outer Bay wing of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a spot she and Terrill Lee had visited maybe four or five years back: a dark room, a thick window, and a bluish-white lit space containing numerous colorful and interesting specimens.
Christ!
Instead of fish swimming in broad, graceful circles, there was an ambulant zombie in the isolation room. He moved around clumsily behind the glass. He stopped. He seemed to be looking right at her.
Miller held herself together. Her muscles tightened as if to keep her soul contained within her own flesh and blood. She felt like she wanted to fly into pieces and float away.
The zombie subject appeared calm. He was male, about six feet tall, and in pretty good condition considering he was no longer alive. He had all his limbs and didn’t have any major wounds or other obvious trauma. On the other hand, he was pretty badly decomposed, so Miller guessed that he had been dead for a couple of weeks at least. He was wearing a set of red scrubs that reminded her of a prison uniform.
It was a prison uniform.
She could see Nye County Men’s Correctional Facility and a long number stenciled on the cheap red shirt. And then she went somewhere behind the creature’s eyes… She was inside the prison, not as Sheriff Penny Miller, but as an inmate wearing that red jump suit. She grunted and ran over to the walls as sullen guards walked towards her, keys jingling, eyes cold and uncaring. The armed men reached for her. And then the image blurred and became tangled with her memories and emotions. Somehow Sheppard and Scratch were there too, standing in that room, all broken and bleeding and dead, their arms reaching out, bared teeth biting down hard on her flesh. Terrill Lee was there, with half of his head gone. He held her arms down at her sides so that the others could easily feed. Miller tried to scream. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe…
Miller looked back at the two guards playing cards. They were ignoring her. She stared at Sheppard. He was still going through his notes. The humans seemed completely unaware of her vision. Miller walked closer to the window.
The lone zombie stood in the middle of the isolation room, staring forward. His skin tone was greenish and bruised and his legs and arms appeared to be stiffening up. His jaw hung loosely open, and Miller could hear a soft uhh-huuhhnn sound, a real sound, probably coming through hidden speakers set deep into the walls. What was he thinking? What had he done that had eventually brought him to this ugly fate?
Miller was surprised to find herself thinking of this particular zombie as he, not it. That idea was in itself disturbing. She tried not to picture what it was like for him, being still conscious while locked in that nightmare of a body. She found herself imagining the transformation. She could feel the pain of the wound, the curious cold numbness that followed. The fear as her heartbeat slowed and then thudded even more slowly and then finally stopped altogether. The utter terror of waking up again, a shadow of her former self, only to find her body dead but her animal self alive and famished; her humanity stripped from her, only a savage hunger left to replace it. This was hell on earth. How could she know that? How could she feel it so completely? Miller clutched her stomach. Dear God…
Sheppard cleared his throat and Miller jumped. He was almost through his notes. Behind them, the two card players put down their hands and leaned together to have a whispered conversation. The female giggled at a joke.
Miller turned back to the window. Her instinct was to go up to the glass and get a closer look at the captive zombie. She restrained herself and organized her thoughts. Before closing the gap, she turned to Sheppard and put her hand on his arm.
“Please tell me you didn’t do this to him, Karl. Jesus on French toast, he’s not a volunteer or anything, is he?”
Sheppard shook his head. He set the note pad down on a metal tray. “This one is what we refer to as wild caught.”
“Should I be bothered by the fact that you make that distinction?”
Sheppard shrugged. He wasn’t quite meeting her eyes. Miller was beginning to become irritated with his vagueness—in all the time she had known him, he had always been very precise, sometimes overly so. Now he was acting like a man with something to hide. In her experience, men with something to hide got people killed.
Miller walked away from the window to observe the zombie prisoner from a distance. Something about his bearing and attitude felt different. He appeared steadier and less enraged than all the others she had s
een. Perhaps he was heavily drugged—if that was even possible. Maybe Sheppard was working on some kind of calming agent, but if so then why bother? They could never be trained, or allowed to continue to exist. Zombies killed people and ate them in order to stay alive themselves. That one fact would never change.
Miller studied the man. The feeling of being at the zoo was overwhelming. The creature on the other side of the glass was simultaneously familiar and completely alien. It wasn’t fuzzy and appealing like a captive tiger or a chimp; it was just flat out terrifying. This experience was more like going into an arachnid house and finding a black widow the size of a compact car. There was death on the hoof, standing right before her eyes. Every instinct she had said to kill it and run. Staying in close proximity to something that deadly seemed irrational and foolish and the weird situation made Miller’s flesh crawl.
“Does he have a name?”
Sheppard consulted a chart. “John Roscoe. He was serving eight to twenty five for robbery and aggravated assault.”
“Guess that turned into a life sentence,” Miller said, mostly to herself. She turned to Sheppard with a dark frown. “And you’re telling me that he’s still alive in there?”
“He is alive, but only in a manner of speaking, Penny. He is not human, if that’s what you mean. Parts of his limbic system are still functioning, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to balance, walk, navigate, and so on. In the ones we’ve autopsied, the hippocampus was still functioning, but the amygdala…”
“Hold on,” said Miller. “The one’s you’ve autopsied? You mean you cut them up while they were still conscious?”
“As I said, I wouldn’t call that consciousness in our sense of the word.”
“Are you seriously splitting hairs about this? A few minutes ago you were telling me that they were alive in a dead body. It’s a yes or no question, Captain Sheppard. Now look at me and be honest, are they alive in there or not?”
The two playing cards stopped whispering. They got up and tried their best to look both busy and deaf at the same time. They didn’t want to hear this conversation.
Sheppard looked right at Miller, but then his eyes slid away. “It’s not that simple. We don’t know enough about how the living human brain works to be able to say exactly what is going on inside of a zombie. We had to find out. PET scan, EEG, fMRI, we threw everything we had at this. It was a full-on attempt to understand what was happening to them and why, and what they might be evolving into as the infection spreads.”
“Spare me all the mad scientist rationalizations.”
Sheppard sighed. “As I was saying, their amygdala is suppressed, meaning they probably aren’t experiencing what we’d think of as emotions, but we can’t say for certain that they don’t feel physical pain, especially since too many of their systems are involved in somatosensory…”
“Okay, just stop. I appreciate you inundating me with a lot of technical jargon and expecting me to understand all this. I know you like to sound smart and all, but since it didn’t work for Terrill Lee during all those years we had together, it probably won’t sink into my head today.”
At the mention of Terrill Lee’s name, Sheppard blanched visibly. Sadness seemed to wash over him. He sat down in a white plastic chair and rubbed his hands together. Miller could feel his grief in her own gut, and her own emotional response brought tears to her eyes. Maybe someday she’d tell him that she’d shot Terrill Lee herself, but not right now. She looked away then back again. Sheppard had recovered his composure.
“Try talking to me like I’m just a small town Sheriff, Karl. Are they awake?”
“For all intents and purposes, yes. They are awake.”
“Are they intelligent?”
“Inconclusive, but seems quite unlikely. We really haven’t devised a zombie IQ test yet. This is all very new stuff.”
John, the zombie in the prison uniform, turned in a tight circle while staring down at the floor. He looked like a child who was bored and looking around for something to play with.
Miller closed her eyes. “Are they self aware?”
Sheppard shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Not as far as we can tell. Their proprioception is functioning, but we haven’t seen any signs of overt body awareness, which is why you can shoot them and they don’t react.”
“That wasn’t the question. Do they know they were once people?”
“I don’t know, Penny. I really don’t,” Sheppard said. “Look, I’ve only been able to get good data from them since Colorado, which you know as well as anyone wasn’t that long ago. I’m doing my best. I am not the smartest person working on this, believe me, I am just the one with the most hands-on experience. I am a man who has been involved since the beginning, the only one still alive. This is enormously complex.”
“I’m asking a question.”
“And I understand your concerns, but there are so many things we just don’t understand yet.”
Miller opened her mouth to ask him about the pens of what appeared to be zombies, but the door opened before she could say anything else. Sheppard got to his feet. A new technician came into the room, a tall blond man with a buzz cut. He seemed startled to find Miller in the room. He looked around, and when he spotted Sheppard, came to attention and saluted. Sheppard saluted back.
“Report.”
The buzz-cut technician came close to Sheppard. He leaned in and began whispering. Miller focused her hearing. She heard the words “neuropsin” and “toxicity,” but the rest was just a bunch of medical jargon, none of it made sense anyway. Miller lost interest after the first minute or so. She took several deep breaths to calm down and then went over to the window to get a better look at John the zombie.
“Unhh… hunhh…”
John was standing in one place, swaying back and forth slightly, moaning. As Miller came closer to the window, the zombie turned toward her and approached the glass, its tongue lolling in its mouth like that of a golden retriever, slobber and all. He moved closer and closer, almost as if curious. The proximity of the zombie gave her the chills again, even though Miller knew she was safe on this side of the observation portal. She also knew how to kill one with her bare hands, but the idea that someone was home in there made the idea of doing that a tad more difficult to rationalize.
“Can he see me?” Miller whispered. She barely knew she’d spoken. Her comment also wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. No one answered.
John walked directly into the window. He immediately bounced back off its hard surface, but he didn’t fall or appear to become disoriented. John started scratching at the acrylic with yellowing nails. Miller watched as bits of his decomposed skin slipped off the ends of his fingers and stuck to the surface of the window. A bruised, soft area of skin on the side of his face slipped a bit. His eyes were pleading, or perhaps struggling to communicate.
The room went quiet. Miller looked around. She saw that everyone was observing her interacting with the zombie.
Sheppard turned to the technicians. “Are you recording this?”
“Yes, sir.”
Miller looked at the faces of Sheppard and the technicians. “Should I be worried about something?”
“Penny,” Sheppard said cautiously. “Do me a favor. Stand over to the left of the window. Don’t move too suddenly. I want to see if the subject responds to you.”
“John,” insisted Penny. Her head spun and her gorge rose a bit. She was so very hungry and tired and frightened deep inside. She heard her own words as if someone else were answering Sheppard. She swallowed dryly. “His name was John.”
“Yes, of course.” Sheppard said. He smiled weakly. “To the left, please.”
Miller took a step to the left.
John the zombie followed.
The technicians murmured, but studiously kept their voices just below her threshold of hearing. Miller briefly wished she had her superpowers back so she could hear what the hell they were saying, though she might not have understood anyway
. Something was up. They were leaving her in the dark. Nevertheless, she had a pretty good idea that John wasn’t supposed to be following her back and forth like a three year old ready to play hide and seek.
“Now to the right,” said Sheppard. He barely hid the excitement in his voice.
“What is this, the Hokey Pokey?” Miller took two steps to the right.
John stayed right with her. The technicians buzzed like a hive of hornets. Miller felt dizzy again, scared, so hungry. The odd and unfamiliar versions of those sensations came and went, as did her sense of self.
“Penny, would now you step back from the window, please?”
Miller shook her head to clear it. “How far?”
“Come stand next to me.”
Miller walked over to Sheppard.
John the zombie lost interest. He sagged and turned in a slow circle, then went back to standing in the middle of the room, swaying slightly. His tongue crawled back into his mouth like a small grey lizard. He closed his teeth. The sound came again, unhhhh hunhhh…
Sheppard seemed thrilled. “You didn’t do anything in particular to try to attract its attention, did you?”
“No,” Miller said. She felt uneasy and suddenly exhausted. “I’ve never seen a zombie who didn’t track someone. He must be starved. Besides, it’s just a piece of glass. That never stopped them from trying to turn me into a ham sandwich before.”
Sheppard stepped closer. He touched her arm. “You don’t understand. His side of the window is mirrored! He can’t see, hear, or smell you, but he knew you were there. Go stand next to the window again.”
Miller fought the uncomfortable feeling growing in the pit of her stomach. She went back to the glass. When Miller came within about ten feet of the zombie, it picked up its head again and came back towards the observation portal. Miller wondered if Sheppard was overreacting. Zombies thought of humans as food, plain and simple. Another part of her knew it was more than that, a kind of living hell inside, but Miller didn’t really want to know that fact. She felt a mental circuit heating up to overload.