Permanent Ink: Deadwalkers (Zombie Outbreak)

by RWK Clark

  “Thank you,” she replied, the relief in her voice evident. “And Roy, if you find anything unusual will you introduce it to some biologic? I want to know how it reacts to life in general.”

  “Already thought of,” he replied as he began to tear the package open.

  Diana turned to go. “I’m heading back to my patient, so just page me when and if you find anything, okay?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  With that, Diana Moss left the lab and headed back to the ICU as quickly as her feet, and the elevator, would carry her.

  Chapter 9

  The afternoon had come and gone, and now it was fast approaching evening.

  Paige Daugherty reached up with a flat palm and slapped the button on the garage wall. Slowly the garage door began to open once again. She didn’t remember how it got closed, or even coming through it when she did. Heck, she didn’t even know her name.

  She began to lurch toward the still-opening door, one shoe off and one shoe on. Paige was torn up, both literally and figuratively. Brian and Kathy had managed to put her through the ringer, but as soon as she went through her transformation and began fighting back, the two of them eased up. She decided it was time to leave. She was hungry, and it almost felt as if the hunger wouldn’t wait.

  As she walked she stepped in the congealed blood on the floor with her bare foot, and each step after that managed to leave a clear bloody footprint. Paige took no notice of any of that; not the jelly-like blood between her toes, not the metallic scent of it, nothing. All she could smell was fresh, wholesome blood, and it seemed that the aroma of it was surrounding her.

  Once she was out in the late evening setting sun she raised her head to the sky and attempted to look into the sun itself. It seemed so easy; she didn’t flinch or squint at all. It seemed that her eyes were able to handle its brightness without a problem, even though she couldn’t really see anything very clearly at all.

  Paige could hear the voices and laughter of children, and her mouth began to water. She looked around once again, but she could see no one. Even though she was quite literally dead, it seemed she was still able to think fairly well. She thought of her home and decided that was where she would go. She would have something to drink, some icy water, and then she would go back out and find where the laughter was coming from.

  She began to lurch once again, heading determinedly in the direction of her house. Suddenly, from behind her, she heard a throaty growl, and she stopped long enough to turn and see what it was. There were Kathy and Brian, and they were both following her. It seemed like they thought it was best to start moving as well.

  Paige tried her front door, but it wouldn’t open. Of course, she had locked it when she left, and now she had neither purse nor keys. She remembered none of this, but that didn’t stop her progress. With a single swing of her wrist she broke the window which ran alongside the door. Then, as easily as could be she reached through it and unlocked the door. Brian and Kathy got to her step just as she entered, and they joined her.

  There were only two things she was aware of: her insatiable hunger and the incessant thirst. She would tend to the hunger in a bit, but at that moment the only thing she could think of was water. Paige struggled to the kitchen with both of the Olsons on her heels. All three of them grunted and groaned as if pained and exhausted, but they felt none of that.

  Paige’s coordination was basically gone, with the exception of her ability to walk. Her eyesight was gloomy and shadowy, but she could make out the dish drainer and just barely recognize a large plastic tumbler, which she had just placed there that morning. She reached out for it, but was having a heck of a time getting her hand to go where she wanted it to. She swung it back and forth in her efforts, knocking things here and there and sending them flying.

  Finally, she got her hand on the tumbler, which had fallen over on its side noisily. With one hand steadying herself with the kitchen counter she staggered along it, and when she got to the sink she clumsily turned on the cold water full blast. Once she was able to line up the glass with the water she quickly filled it and put it to her face, splashing herself sloppily as she did so.

  For the most part, Paige got a pretty hefty drink. She started to attempt to refill the vessel, but Brian suddenly snatched the tumbler from her hand, and now he, too, filled it with the water, which continued to pour from the tap. Kathy was behind them both, growling loudly and with anger; she was also terribly thirsty.

  “Paige!”

  The voice came from behind them all. Brian and Kathy, who had been fighting over the empty glass by that point, dropped it to the floor and tried to turn to see who was there. Paige, on the other hand, turned surprisingly fast, and with sudden grace.

  It was Max Fisher, a neighbor man whom Paige had been sleeping with for the last six months. As soon as she saw him a smile came to her face. The other two didn’t miss a beat; they started to head for the shocked man right away.

  “No!” Paige suddenly gurgled in a lousy attempt to scream. “Mine!”

  She tried to grab hold of Brian by the shoulder, but the boy was far stronger, and he flung her easily to the floor. Max stepped forward protectively, but the move was out of sheer habit. He knew something was very wrong in Paige Daugherty’s house. As soon as he stepped forward he changed his mind and went into reverse. His backside hit the edge of the dining room table.

  He tried to maneuver around the solid oak piece, but there was little room along either side for a man to fit through. Brian reached him first, and he was quickly joined by his mother. Both of them took Max to the floor easily and began to tear into him with wet, terrible noises.

  The last thing Max registered was Paige, crawling almost lazily, up the middle and between the two who were already ravaging him. She looked at him, her smile bloody and dead. He knew she was preparing to join them, and his head couldn’t wrap around what was happening.

  “Max,” she purred in her hoarse voice, “Mine…”

  CHAPTER 10

  Dr. Kyle Hilliard left Melanie Casperson’s room in the ICU with much apprehension; he just didn’t feel confident that her mother would obey his instructions to stay back from the child’s bedside.

  But regardless of that fact, he had to go about his own work, so he did so praying that the woman would do as he asked.

  Now he needed to go to the nurses’ station; there he would see how the girl’s vitals had been since his last order, which consisted of her being hooked up to automatic monitors for her vitals, because he didn’t trust her in the state she was in to allow the nurses to conduct regular checks. The last actual reported check which he had been aware of had been bad: a barely audible heartbeat, no detectible pulse, and extremely shallow respiration. According to the numbers, the girl should be dead.

  But it was directly after that check that she had attacked Julie Yates, biting the woman so viciously.

  He approached the station and beckoned to a nurse named Candace Reilly. She was at the end of the station typing something furiously on her computer keyboard, and she had a sick look on her face. Hilliard felt instant concern, and fear put a metallic taste in his mouth.

  “Candace, how are the Casperson girl’s vitals?” he asked.

  The nurse’s eyes shifted. “Um, I’m afraid to go in, but I last checked them about ten minutes ago.” She fished a scrap of paper out of her smock pocket, then smirked and tossed the blank scrap onto the desktop. “Nothing. She is flat on everything. Guess I don’t need a piece of paper to tell you that.”

  “I think I should go in and get her visitors,” he said thoughtfully. “I can pronounce her, and they can begin to say their goodbyes.”

  Candace shook her head. “No, you can’t. She was wide awake the entire time I was checking the machine, Doctor.”

  Hilliard glanced over his shoulder. “Listen, I’ve been so busy I still need to check on Julie Yates. I want you to keep an eye on the girl’s room. Call me immediately if anything is going on, and I will go
in there as soon as I am done with Julie. Then I’m going to see if the girl is possibly deceased, and we just missed it. This has been crazy from the start.”

  “I can tell you that Julie is in the same state, Doctor,” Candace said as she clamped her eyes shut, as though holding back tears.

  “What do you mean?”

  Candace shrugged, and tears escaped down her cheeks. “They no sooner had her in a room to be stitched up than she became extremely combative. She was attempting to bite the nurses, and she had to be restrained also. As far as I know she wasn’t able to actually hurt anyone, but everyone is afraid to proceed. We were just waiting for you to be finished to find out what you wanted us to do.”

  “What room is she in?” he asked.

  Candace glanced down the hallway. “572.”

  Kyle Hilliard didn’t miss a beat. He muttered a thank you to the frightened young nurse and left right away in the direction of the room Julie Yates was in. As he approached he saw two other nurses standing outside the door talking. One was in tears, her shoulders heaving from her crying. Hilliard could also hear a terrible yelling from inside the room which sounded far more animal than human.

  “What’s going on with Nurse Yates?” he asked as he approached.

  The nurse with a calmer demeanor spoke first. “She is restrained, and we tried to sedate her, but it had no effect, Doctor.”

  “What did she do to warrant these decisions?”

  The nurse, whose tag read ‘Carla Bond, RN’, continued. “We were attempting to give her a local. At first she was cooperative, but then she seemed to pass out. I thought it was from the local, you know, that maybe the needle, or the pain from it. I even thought that perhaps she was just in some kind of shock from the confrontation with the patient who bit her, but…” Her voice trailed off.

  Hilliard pressed Carla Bond. “And?”

  “Well, all of a sudden her eyes opened up and she started to kick and fight.”

  The second nurse, Denise Fletcher, blew her nose on a tissue which she had pulled out of her smock. “She was strong, so strong,” she said. “I took hold of her wrists, and she began to try to bite me. I struggled and fought back while Carla strapped her legs, but she was wearing me out.”

  “Did she manage to hurt you at all? Even the slightest scratch?” he asked.

  Denise shook her head. “Nothing. But her eyes, they were so blank, almost like it wasn’t Julie in there at all.”

  The screaming from the other side of the door had subsided while Hilliard and the two nurses spoke. Her presence even slipped their mind a bit, when suddenly the curtain over the window to the room, which blocked the view from the hallway, was thrown open, and Julie Yates stood pounding violently on the thick glass. Spittle flew from her mouth and splattered against the window as she screamed.

  Hilliard and the nurses both jumped back, startled. He took one look at Julie and his heart sank. She was a purplish-gray in color, with dark circles under her eyes. Milky, cataract-type clouds were forming over her eyes, and Kyle Hilliard thought he could almost see her veins through the flesh on her face.

  As a doctor, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the woman was dead.

  He flew forward and grabbed hold of the door handle, then leaned backward with all his weight to keep it closed. “Call for help!” he told the nurses. “We need security to bring a master key to this room right away!”

  Denise Fletcher was gone in a flash, while Carla Bond came forward to help him in holding the door closed. As soon as Julie Yates saw them she seemed to figure out what they were doing, and she disappeared behind the door. Within seconds she began to pull violently on the door, trying her best and giving it her all to get out of the room.

  “Hurry!” Hilliard yelled at Fletcher at the top of his lungs. He turned to Carla. “We can’t let her get out of this room!”

  But both of them could tell by her strength alone that there may very well be nothing they could do about it at all.

  ∞

  Dr. Diane Moss dropped off the pen in the hospital lab and then made a beeline for the staff lounge on the first floor. She needed to call her answering service and get any messages. It was late Saturday, and she was pretty sure she would be back in the office by tomorrow. At least, she would if they could narrow down the cause of Melanie Casperson’s illness.

  When she was finished with her calls she proceeded to the cafeteria. She hadn’t thought about food once all day, and it was typical that as soon as she had a free second she would suddenly be ravenous. Dr. Moss thought that a nice, decked-out salad sounded like a gourmet meal right at that moment.

  With her salad in hand she made her way to a table in the corner of the nearly-empty cafeteria. Once she had put dressing on her greens she began to eat, and only then did she let her mind wander back to the Casperson case. She had never heard of such a crazy thing as pen ink infecting a human being, but she knew that with all the insane things going on in the world she shouldn’t be surprised by anything anymore.

  Suddenly, Dr. Moss’s own children came to her mind. She had two: a son named Todd who was a junior in high school, and Emma, a freshman. Her heart began to pound hard when she thought of them. It wasn’t Todd she was worried about; he was a jock with nothing more on his mind than football and girls. But Emma was the artistic one, the one who was always keeping her eye out for creative new supplies and art equipment.

  Diana had made them both get their own supplies that year.

  She dropped her fork and dialed Emma’s cell phone; her daughter answered on the second ring.

  “’Hello?”

  Diana breathed a sigh of relief. “Emma, are you feeling okay?”

  “Mom?” the girl replied. “Of course I am. What’s up?”

  “Listen, when you went for your supplies did you happen to buy one of those Lumiosa pens?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah!” her daughters voice got excited. “Those are so cool! I haven’t used it yet, though. I’m waiting for classes to start. Those things are expensive. Did you know - …”

  Diana was sitting up straight in her chair now, feeling a mix of massive relief and terrible tension. “Yes, they’re expensive,” she replied. “Listen to me, there is some bad news about the pens. They are making kids very, very sick. I want you to throw it away, do you hear me?”

  “What? Throw it away?”

  Now she began to get frustrated. She hated when her children argued with her. “Yes, Emma! Throw it away now! Do as I say, and I’ll explain when I get home!”

  Emma was quiet for a moment. “Okay, okay. I’ll throw it away.”

  Diana let out another sigh of relief. “I’ll give you the money you spent on it, okay? Listen, I love you very much.”

  “I love you too, Mom.”

  She disconnected from Emma and picked up her fork just as her pager went off. She glanced down to see that it was from the lab, and immediately she began to tremble. Why was she so nervous? Regardless of what was going on, they would be able to fix it. She glanced at her watch and found herself surprised; it had only been just over four hours since she dropped the pen off to Roy Fitch.

  Diana gave up on her salad and put her tray on the conveyor belt which led to the dishwashing area. She then began to walk to the elevator; she thought about calling Roy, but then thought better of it. She would be there in less than a minute; it could wait that long.

  The ride down to the basement took only a couple of minutes, and soon she was walking through the lab door.

  “Hey, Roy,” she said. “So, I take it you have something for me?”

  He looked up, and the first thing Diana noticed was how serious his face was. Roy glanced quickly around the lab, and when he saw that two other workers were present he snatched up a thin manila folder and gestured with his thumb.

  “How about we talk in my office?” he asked.

  Diana’s smile fled from her face. “Sure,” she replied, following his lead.

  Once inside he shut the
door, then turned to her. “Yes, I found something, and it wasn’t hard to pinpoint.”

  She sat in a cushioned chair across from his desk, which he was making his way to. “What do you have, Roy?”

  “I’m not sure, but I can tell you that it’s not good.” The man sat down and put the folder on the blotter in front of him. “The pen’s ink is comprised of a chemical I have personally neither encountered nor heard of. While I can’t say for sure, I am willing to bet that it is this chemical that gives the ink its three-dimensional appearance.”

  Diana knit her brow. “And that is bad how?”

  Roy shrugged his shoulders. “Well, that’s not bad, in and of itself. It’s what happened when I introduced it to both human blood and tissue that I consider bad.”

  Now Diana Moss felt her blood run cold, and goosebumps rose on her flesh. “Just lay it on the line, Roy. If the problem is serious enough we need to get on a solution right away, and I am convinced that it is, from what I am seeing in my patient.”

  “First, I introduced a human blood sample,” he continued. “My own, to be exact. Immediately it began to… kill… the sample. Now, bleach will do that, as you know, so I didn’t freak out too much. But then I introduced a skin sample, and a pretty significant one at that.”

  “Hopefully not one of your own?”

  He held up a bandaged finger. “Once I observed how it treated the blood I didn’t think twice.”

  She continued to stare at him. “So?”

  “Not only did it cause immediate severe damage to the tissue, it began to bond to it almost right away.” He paused and began to fidget. “It ‘died’, I guess you could say, but then it sort of… came back to life. The issue here is that the tissue was literally dead; there was nothing good, or really living, left in it.”

  Diana just stared at him and let his words sink in. She turned what he had just told her over and over in her mind, but she could make no sense of anything he said. Roy watched her, waiting for her to say something, but when it became apparent that she was at a loss, he continued once again.