by Parker, Des
“Oh Child, you are so naïve. I’ve been doing a lot of reading since our last meeting and I discovered the most extraordinary fact.”
“Vampire boobs sag like potato sacks and your face cracks every time you shit?”
Leticia ignored the comment; she knew something that would wipe that smile off Caroline’s face.
“Oh you are so funny, like a bad joke that hangs around long past its use-by date until it is nothing more than an embarrassment with appalling fashion sense.”
She moved closer, Caroline blocked her way. Dick leaned back against a bookcase and was fantasizing about Leticia and how lovely it would feel to be enveloped by her.
Leticia tilted her head, knowingly, and smiled again.
“Did you know that vampires are the one supernatural creature capable of the most extraordinary regenerative powers? I know this – I looked it up. And do you know what this means?”
Caroline sneered, “You need a facelift every five minutes?”
“No child, it means that, given time, our bodies can adapt to anything - even mohair.”
In a flash, Leticia leapt forward. Caroline put her hands up to shield herself and Leticia grabbed her wrists like a vice.
Leticia’s hands start to blister and smoke, but she held on, her face contorting as she fought off the explosive reaction from the mohair and held her ground, her arms and body shuddering violently with the strain.
“What the -” Caroline whispered as she looked down at Leticia’s hands and realised they were healing immediately and Leticia’s shuddering subsided. A grin of triumph appeared on the vampire’s face.
“Oh my God,” Caroline whispered in shock as Leticia dropped her grip on Caroline’s wrist and grabbed her hair, dragging her roughly, in close.
Leticia’s tongue played over her fangs and she leaned in close to Caroline’s neck, even as Caroline struggled, without success. “Dick – help me,” Caroline shrieked.
Dick ignored her and smiled to himself, watching with comical disinterest.
Leticia’s fangs closed in as Caroline’s eyes went white with fear, but instead of biting her, Leticia ran her tongue up Caroline’s neck and locked eyes with her.
“Oh don’t worry child, I’m not going to bite you – not yet. No, I’m going to bite your boyfriend first and then the two of us are going to feast on you, savouring every last drop until you are nothing but a rotting husk on the floor.”
With that, Leticia tossed Caroline aside, smashing her against the small games table.
As Caroline slid to the floor, dazed, Leticia slithered up to Dick, coiling around him like a dark, satanic fog, her hands playing through his hair and down over his chest.
He looked back at her, his eyes lost inside her.
She licked his neck and bared her fangs, savouring the moment.
There was a tap on her shoulder. She turned and met a wooden chair in the face.
“Adapt to that, Bat-bitch,” Caroline spat as the chair splintered and smashed Leticia against a bookcase.
Caroline found herself holding a splintered arm of the chair.
Before Leticia could recover, Caroline found a use for that splintered wooden arm, burying it inside a book on a shelf behind Leticia, passing through the vampire’s heart on the way.
The smile fell from Leticia’s face as her skin began to melt and collapse in on itself. With her strength failing, Leticia tried to remove the makeshift stake, but her body no longer had the power.
Caroline moved close to the dying vampire, “You know the irony of it all? I don’t even know if I want him anymore. He’s a bit of a dick.”
With a dying rasp, Leticia whispered, “Then why try to stop me?”
“Because, I didn’t want you to get him either. Let’s face it, deep down, we’re all bitches when it comes to men.”
Leticia half-smiled and turned to dust, the smile fading as her skeleton collapsed, disappearing into a pile of dust on the floor, leaving the arm of a chair dangling from the bookcase.
In the corner, Dick shook his head and scratched his nuts. “What did I miss?”
Chapter 36
The Quantum Leap
“Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed.”
“That’d be a pretty cool way to boot up the generators. Shame we don’t have a reactor,” Scott responded as he activated the primary circuits.
“Can we get one?” Yonny asked.
“I’ll put in for a grant,” Scott replied as they stood at the console and aligned the quantum flux generators to the accelerator coils.
There was a knock at the door.
“Do you think that’s a zombie?” Yonny asked as he opened the panel and connected two wires with chewing gun and a band-aid.
Scott put down his screwdriver and wandered over to the steel door. “They don’t generally knock.”
He opened the door and Simon stood in the doorway. “Hi – can I have that tea now?” Simon asked as he turned away, leaned over, and propelled an unconscious Nick through the door.
“Is that a zombie?” Scott asked.
“Yes, this is Nick, the Lord of the Zombies.”
“Is he?”
Simon contemplated for a moment as he looked over at Nick, now lying unconscious against a metal filing cabinet to his right. “Well, he would be if there were any zombies around. But I’m pretty sure there aren’t any left.”
“Well, can’t we just leave him outside then? He’d make a great doormat. The goats would love him.” Scott suggested.
Simon made sure Nick was not moving before turning around, “No, he’s their leader and, if he’s in here, then any stragglers won’t have anyone to follow, so, they’ll just wander off. And besides, no matter what he’s done, he’s still my mate, and I can’t just give him to the goats.”
“They won’t see it that way. They’re vicious little bastards when they want to be.”
Simon conceded the point. His balls were still aching.
“Does that mean we don’t get to power up the accelerator? I was really hoping to have a play,” Yonny asked from the far side of the room.
“No, we still have to proceed as planned. There may not be any zombies here, but there’ll still be plenty out in the world,” Scott replied.
Simon was confused. “What do you mean by power up the accelerator and have a play? What are you doing in here that is so important?”
Scott smiled and his enthusiasm came back to the surface. He started to speak animatedly, rushing his words together and losing Simon in his wake. “Well, see, we think we can set up an inverse-variant field that will neutralise the zomboid-mutant gene pool and reimage the underlying cellular substrata.”
Simon felt like he needed a supercar to catch up. “You wanna what?”
Yonny jumped in, just as fast and flabbergasting. “We think we can reverse the mutating algorithm; all we need is a clean, pre-contraction template.”
“Sorry, I’m still on page one.” Simon replied.
Scott looked at him and tried to sound less intelligent than he really was, in an attempt to break hours of complex theorem into something a monkey might follow. “We think we can cure the mutations and restore everything to its original state.”
“Yes,” Yonny added, “we just need a normal pre-mutation human to kick-start the process.”
Before Simon could ask any further, Caroline and Dick emerged from the corridor.
“Hi,” Dick said with a goofy grin, “What’s going down?”
“Where have you been? We got separated back there.”
“We ran into an old friend,” Caroline replied.
“Yeah, big red dress, big red lips, great big -”
“Teeth,” Caroline interrupted.
“And fantastic jugs,” Dick added. Caroline elbowed him.
“The vampires were here?’ Simon asked, looking past them into the corridor.
“Just one of them – the one with the big -,” Dick added as Caroline interrupted him once mor
e.
“And I stuck a stake between them, so she won’t be coming back.” Caroline smiled, a vicious and triumphant smirk curling at the edge of her mouth.
“What a waste,” Dick added.
“So, now what?” Caroline asked. “And what the hell is he doing here?” she added, noticing Nick, unconscious, across the room.
“Not a helluva lot, by the looks of it,” Dick chimed in.
Simon glanced across at Nick. “I’m keeping the Lord of the Zombies here, isolated, so he can’t lead any more attacks against us.”
“Just keep him away from me,” Dick said. “I seem to have some performance issues at the moment.”
“Maybe you should take some Viagra,” Yonny suggested. “Scott gets it all the time - I don’t know what he does with it.”
Scott spluttered and went bright red, “I, um, use it to keep the carrots hard in the greenhouse.”
“Right,” Simon said, uncertainty in his voice, before turning back to Dick. “What does it matter? He’s not a threat to any of us – hang on, where are your underpants?”
“That’s a bit personal,” Scott interjected as he continued fiddling with buttons on the console.
“He’s a porn star, he’s used to it,” Simon replied.
Dick smiled meekly, “I sort of lost them in the battle.”
“You didn’t get bitten did you?” Scott asked.
“No,” Dick replied.
“More’s the pity,” Caroline added under her breath.
“Well, I think we’re ready,” Scott said brightly as he finished fiddling with the console.
“Ready for what?” Caroline asked, a hint of suspicion in her voice.
“To save the world.” Yonny said as he disappeared behind the console and popped up again with a wire, which he looked at curiously, showed to Scott, who motioned abruptly for him to put it back where he found it.
“And how do we do that?” Caroline asked.
“With that,” Scott indicated the far side of the room.
For the first time, Caroline and Dick took a good long look at the room they had entered. It was about the size of a generous lounge room, with solid metal walls, lined with electronic readouts and consoles, and those old-fashioned reel-to-reel computer decks about the size of small cupboards that once populated old science fiction television shows.
Scott and Yonny were standing at a waist high console, covered with buttons, dials, and readouts and, on the top edge of the console, sat a bobble-head doll of Einstein, complete with a tiny lab coat and vertical hair. Just behind them, and slightly offset, was a doorway; a small kitchenette visible beyond.
Against the wall, opposite the console, were some metal filing cabinets where Nick was propped up, still unconscious.
But the most impressive thing in the room, which really should have been the first thing described, was the massive riveted metal chamber, shaped like a massive hollow brass lemon standing on its end and about the size of a small bathroom. This was the chamber Simon thought looked like an old-fashioned diving bell.
There were small portholes in the sides of the chamber, just above a collection of dials, readouts, and buttons. On the front face of the chamber was a heavy iron door, opened outwards, which stretched from the floor line to just above a tall man’s height.
The whole construction looked solid enough to hold in an angry rhino; the chamber itself could probably have fitted one comfortably.
“Cool as fuck,” Dick said. “That is some serious bit of hardware.”
Caroline was unimpressed. “What the hell is that? It looks like something out of a crappy science-fiction movie.”
Scott was taken aback, “Well, I mean we did have to scratch build it, but what she lacks in prettiness, she makes up for in performance.”
“Yeah – she’s a real goer,” Yonny added with a naughty grin.
Caroline just rolled her eyes. “What is it with men and their toys? Why does everything have to be compared to girls? Seriously, you guys need to get a life.”
“So what is it?” Simon asked.
“It’s a quantum accelerating Neutrino generator,” Scott beamed proudly.
“See, I told you it was cool,” Dick said, running his hands over the curves.
“Do you have to do that?” Caroline asked, her tone clearly not broaching any argument.
“Hey – what can I say? I like curves.” He walked back over to her taking a sly glance at her curves.
“So how will this save the world?” Simon asked.
Scott shuffled uncomfortably, he and Yonny looked at each other, then looked at Simon, then looked back at each other.
“Well - we create a retroactive viral event that self-replicates, adhering to the sub-cellular messaging enzymes of every living thing on Earth. This way the virus rapidly disperses across the species and instantaneously rewrites the rogue mutant strain to restore previous cellular settings and -.”
Yonny interrupted, a guarded enthusiasm in his voice. “And here’s the really clever bit, we can spread this retroactive DNA coding via an electronically generated carrier medium so we don’t even have to leave the lab.”
Simon looked back and forth at the two scientist, his brain trying to keep up but in the end, it went for a strong drink and told Simon to wake in it the morning.
“Sorry I don’t follow.”
“We find a clean skin, someone not affected by the zomboid mutation and we infect the entire planet with their DNA.”
A terrible thought kicked the inside of Simon’s head. “And how exactly do you do that?”
“Well, we need someone to enter the chamber,” Scott said, just a little too sheepishly as he and Yonny stared straight back at Simon.
Simon finally understood why the two scientists were so keen on keeping him around.
“You want me to go in there.”
Yonny swallowed and Scott spoke up, “Um – yes. We needed a volunteer.”
“Well there’s two of you, couldn’t one of you do it?”
Scott thought for a moment and raised a finger in triumph, as a thought arrived that he could use to hide what he was actually thinking. It wasn’t the best thought, but it would have to do, because he didn’t want to have to explain to the guinea pig why the guinea pig was the guinea pig.
“We need to stay here to monitor the reaction”
Yonny piped in to add a few cents worth, “And push buttons.”
“Yes – and push buttons,” Scott looked over at his fellow white-coater, nodded, and smiled. A team effort was working and the guinea pig wouldn’t suspect a thing.
“And make tea,” Yonny added. And then the whole charade collapsed.
Simon now understood, “It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”
Scott tried to reassure Simon by being brutally honest. Obviously, he had a limited understanding of human psychology. “Um – yes.” He smiled hopefully.
Simon just pitied him. “Don’t smile, it only makes it worse.”
“Oh,” Scott replied, duly chastised.
“It’s only probably dangerous,” Yonny countered. “Yes – only probably with no certainty of actual, and statistically speaking, on a bell curve, taking into account every possible variable –“
“I could die,” Simon finished the sentence.
“Um – yes.”
“Probably,” Scott added, helpfully.
“Still, someone has to go first – would you like a cup of tea before you go?” Yonny still maintained a bright, cheery outlook as he left the room to make some tea; Simon really wanted to punch him.
“So what does this thing actually do to me?” Simon needed to know exactly what was about to ‘probably’ kill him. After all, things had been trying to kill him all day so this was really no different. He thought it might help him cope if he knew how it would kill him, although the thought didn’t really make him feel any better.
“As we said, it’s a sort of quantum accelerator,” Scott added, before running over to a cont
rol panel on the chamber and fiddling some dials with schoolboy glee. The acceleration chamber made a few whirring noises and its internal lights dimmed and brightened in response.
Scott nodded with satisfaction and returned to the main console.
“We break your clean DNA into an electronic base code and tie it to a neutrino carrier wave which penetrates everything. The Quantum chamber leaps these particles into a matter state beyond the physical, projecting them planet-wide and -”
“I’ve seen the TV series,” Simon interrupted.
“There’s a TV series?” Yonny piped up as he re-entered the room with a tea tray.
“Don’t ask me, I haven’t watched TV since high school,” Scott replied.
Yonny was genuinely annoyed, “Who stole our idea? That’s very rude. It’s not like there’s a zombie apocalypse every day you know. We worked on this for years.”
Simon was confused, “The apocalypse only happened two days ago.”
“Yes but we built this years ago – we’ve been trying to find a use for it.”
“You built a quantum accelerator and you didn’t have a use for it?”
Scott seemed affronted by the question. “Well no; we figured we could experiment around a bit and see what popped up.”
“You realise you could have caused the zombie apocalypse?”
Yonny plopped the tray on the console, poured himself a tea and dunked a biscuit.
“Oh no, that was a particle wave emanating from the gamma sector of deep space. It struck Earth about seven-thirty in the morning, two days ago.”
“How do even you know that?” Simon replied, his anger rising.
Yonny looked at Scott and they both regarded Simon as if he were a smudge on their windscreen. “Jodrell Bank told us just before they went offline and had each other for breakfast.”
Simon gave up. This conversation was going nowhere, but it had given him hope.
“Look, if this is a quantum leap accelerator, then all I do is step into it. I will awake in the past, facing a mirror image that is not my own, able to change the past for the better and help humanity avert the zombie apocalypse.”
“Ah – no,” Scott said. “You will actually be pulverised into atoms.”