Death Plague [Four Zombie Novels]

by Ian Woodhead

  The man’s fists trembled. Joseph decided that this would be an opportune time to allow one of his disarming smiles to brighten his face. “Relax, Rossini, you know I’m only playing with you.” He smartly spun around and walked towards the outside window, happy that the fucker had been put back in his place.

  His time to die wouldn’t be that long now, a few days, if that. As soon as Rossini’s usefulness was at an end, there’d be no delay. No rotating drum for him though, the best he’d get was a bullet in the head, followed by feeding to the dead. It’s all he deserved. Apart from the two men slowly being lowered to their death, Joseph found the glorification of death most inane and bothersome. Rossini’s TV programs served as the sweet to the savoury dish of keeping the population under control. Pretty soon, the man’s pride and joy would be as irrelevant as Rossini himself. It amazed Joseph that the man behind him hadn’t realized that yet.

  Stability was yet to return to the streets below. He watched a young couple race across the road, followed by a stray dead thing. Although he’d closed up all the reality fractures, not all of the off-world individuals had been dealt with, both human and dead. By the end of the night, that little matter should be close to finishing, at least with the dead. As for their visitors, well, they’d just have to adapt to their new life.

  His only concern now was this damn regression. Nobody had been able to give him any satisfactory explanation as to why the tablets were failing to work on a minority of people, or why that minority was slowly growing.

  The comments made by Natalie bothered him. They bothered him a lot. Sure, she knew as much about the regression as the rest of the inner core, it was just that her tone suggested that the traitorous bitch knew a little more than he did. He turned away from the window, wondering if he should have allowed Rossini to hang her from that metal drum as well.

  One of the victims’ hands had slipped down. His body convulsed as two of the dead things fought to bite out chunks of bloodied meat from his dangling limb. Rossini shook his head in annoyance when a dead thing fastened onto the man’s wrist. His teeth clamped tight as the inside of the pit as well as two of the cameras were doused in blood.

  “Damn it,” muttered Rossini, “change to the next feed, you fucking retards.”

  Rossini’s anxiety over Joseph’s last comment had apparently been forgotten, not that Joseph minded. Another casual remark regarding the fat clown’s mortality would soon bring back the man’s unease. “If you have quite finished, we do have important work to do.”

  It did occur to Joseph that Rossini’s involvement with the crucial work still to be done was, at best, minimal. Hell, the idiot’s only participation so far had been to hold a couple of test tubes for him. Any of Joseph’s many assistants would be able to do that. The truth was obvious; he still needed to keep a very close eye on the devious snake. Despite his rather average intelligence quota, many people had made the mistake of underestimating Rossini. He wasn’t going to be another one.

  Another camera zoomed in on Reuben’s weeping eyes. Joseph’s heart lifted at the sight of the man’s large tears rolling down his cheeks. Revenge really was the greatest medicine there was.

  “Two more minutes, Joseph, please? I need to see him die first. Look!” He pointed. “There he goes, he’s just given up. He’s lost his will to live. That relaxing of the muscles, coupling with the vacant smile, is an obvious sign that he’s getting himself ready to meet his maker. Trust me, I’ve seen this action so many times before.”

  He sounded like a kid asking to stay up to watch TV for a few more minutes. Joseph smirked to himself. Rossini had never shown this side of his personality before. Sure, Joseph had suspected the man really did get off on all of this cruelty, but he’d been very careful not to let the insanity rise to the surface.

  He walked over to Rossini, having difficulty reining in his emotions. He’d just had the most incredible idea. He was annoyed that he hadn’t thought of this brilliant scheme until now. “How many are watching, right this minute?”

  The big man gazed down at the corner of the screen. “The count had dropped off a little. The thrill seekers are still hanging on, waiting for the man to drop his arms, but we’ve lost a percentage because he’s already given up on life.” Rossini shook his head and sighed heavily when the man did drop both his arms. “And there goes the ratings. I doubt that we’ll see those numbers again, it’s such a shame.”

  “My original question was how many tuned in? I want the exact amount.”

  “Our highest figure was just over half a million. That’s ninety percent of our population, although that figure could be higher. We lost a few of our inhabitants during your Shift testing and it doesn’t take the streetscreen viewing into consideration.”

  “You do know there is potential to increase your ratings to billions. Once the convergence is over and the other worlds are under our control, it won’t take much technical wizardry to beam your shows to the other worlds. Just think of the ratings then, Rossini!”

  “But they’re not even human,” he replied. “How can pale shadows even appreciate my work of art?”

  Joseph hadn’t expected that response. Did Rossini really believe the propaganda that Joseph had hastily assembled once the news had broken about the first visit from Source World? Even back then, before their visitor’s plague fucked up most of their planet, Joseph had no wish to watch any of his personnel disappear through the gate, never to be seen again.

  The situation became ever more urgent when they found the gate that led to Food World. All those vast stretches of unspoiled land, basking under blue clouds and hot sun, was enough to tempt even the most devoted of guards.

  His ridiculous story of telling the travellers that they were about to enter a demon dimension populated by shape-changing monsters had scared the crap out of his intrepid explorers. Not that their reaction had surprised him; his soldiers were picked for their bulk and unswerving loyalty. They weren’t supposed to have too many brain cells. Rossini though, well … he’d thought the man had a bit more brains than his soldiers. It looked like he’d been wrong on that as well.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Joseph replied, looking disgusted.

  His loathing of his companion’s ignorance vanished when the alarms in Government House begin to blare through the building. He ran over to the doorway and cursed as the security door slammed down, trapping them inside.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Rossini left the console, now showing a dozen screens of static, and joined Joseph at the door. “Get this fucking thing open. I need out, right now.”

  The years fell off Rossini’s face, regressing him back to that of a small child. Joseph saw a terrified kid, pleading with his dad to check under the bed for monsters. He pushed that image away, not needing any irrelevant thoughts cluttering up valuable processing space. He spun around, wishing he could delete Rossini as well. The man was destined to be a nuisance until Joseph could figure out how the defense systems had been tripped.

  The override had better work. A bead of sweat dripped down his forehead; he angrily wiped it away and forced himself to calm down. Unlike the fat fool behind him, trying to open the door, he could solve this simple problem through rational thought. He reached the main console and slowly typed in his personal code sequence, allowing the briefest of smiles to play across his face as nine images of the most important areas of Government House replaced the static. All he saw was more sheep-like behavior from the other members of the staff polluting the visible portions of the interior. He flicked his gaze from one monitor to the next until he stopped at the screen showing the secondary auxiliary generator. “That sly bitch,” he muttered. The panels of instruments that controlled the environment systems for the entire building were now just a collection of melted wiring, twisted metal, and a lot of broken bodies. There had been eight personnel in there overseeing the running of the systems. Not one of them had survived.

  “Was it a bomb?”

  Joseph nodded,
not even bothering to supply a sarcastic answer. “It looks like our Natalie had more than one trick up her sleeve.”

  “It’s getting colder in here.”

  “What do you expect, Rossini? The environment controls are fucked. What do you want me to do, get you a fucking blanket?”

  “No, you don’t understand. What about the experiment? You’re the one who said that your equipment needed to stay fucking warm!”

  Frantic movement on the screen to his left caught Joseph’s attention. The canteen two floors above them had just erupted into frenzy at the sudden appearance of two dead things crawling out from under one of the tables. The panicking staff all ran over to the main doors. Joseph winced as one middle-aged man tripped and several screaming women trampled over his body in their desperate attempt to flee. The fat bastard was right. The cold temperature had reactivated his equipment. The holes into the other two worlds were reopening. Oh, this was not good.

  “This is a fucking disaster, Joseph!”

  He switched his attention back to the canteen, fascinated by how the staff were reacting to their new occupants. His saw that the dead things weren’t as clumsy as the ones he’d experienced before. They certainly had no sense of urgency in their movements, yet they weren’t all heading as one group straight into the middle of their food.

  “Why don’t they fight back?” gasped Rossini. He stabbed his finger on the left of the screen. “There’s a whole tray of sharp knives there. Fuck, how stupid are they? Hell, I could take them out with a fork.”

  The zombies started to fan out, creating a single advancing line. Their terrified victims, pressed up against the door, screamed as the dead things reached them. They abruptly changed from lumbering and slow as the zombies lunged at the humans. Joseph saw a ravaged dead thing of questionable gender sink its teeth into the cheek of a young blonde woman, then release her and take out a chunk of flesh from another woman’s thigh. The other dead things were employing the same tactic, merely wounding their victims instead of devouring them.

  “Look at them go, it’s a feeding frenzy in there.”

  Joseph shook his head. “No, they’re working to increase their number, to gain strength in numbers, attempting to ensure their survival. It’s just astonishing; I’ve never seen this behavior before.” He looked closely at the corpses. Judging from their condition, these things had been dead a long time. He’d put money on the fact that these could even be remnants from the original infestation on Source World. Their abnormal behavior worried him. Could they be learning how to hunt like a pack of predators? He shivered to himself. He fucking hoped not.

  “They all acted like frightened lambs! The fuckers all deserved to die, none of them had a backbone. If I had been in there though, oh, things would have been so different. The dead things wouldn’t have stood a chance,” Rossini boasted.

  The scene had quietened down. The zombies had now bitten every one of the people in that room, and thanks to them bunching up it had only taken them a few seconds. Rossini was right though, they had acted like complete idiots. Then again, Joseph had expected this. Despite the world they all lived in, the fear overloaded their systems, effectively shutting them down and blocking out any instinct to survive.

  Rossini should have known this would happen as well, considering he was supposed to be a master of understanding the heightened emotions of his fellow humans.

  “We’d better arm ourselves,” muttered Joseph, “they’ll be arriving in here shortly.”

  “Here.”

  His colleague handed Joseph a broken chair leg. He wasn’t surprised to see that Rossini had found himself a lump of metal piping. “Wait, I think you can do the braining, Rossini. It’s what you’ll be best at.” He gave him back the chair leg. “Here, you’re going to have to protect me, anyway. I still have to find a way to get those doors open.”

  “Make it quick,” Rossini growled. He stepped forward and swung the wooden weapon into a shimmering figure appearing directly in front of them. The chair leg connected and a wet meaty sound echoed through the room. The sudden movement impressed Joseph; perhaps he’d been a little premature in judging Rossini. The fallen shape of a gaunt woman, who looked like she had died in her mid-twenties, stared back at him with her dead-fish eyes.

  He’d been right. Those people in the canteen would have had nothing to worry about if Rossini had been in there with them. Joseph jumped as the big man ran forward and pushed the splintered end of the leg through the skull of another zombie that scrambled out from behind a computer terminal on the other side of the room.

  There was no sign of the child now. Rossini had been given his role and he was revelling in it. Like an oiled machine, he attacked them and put the things out of action with the minimum of effort. Joseph returned to the console and attempted to shut out everything but the matter at hand, not allowing the distractions behind him to interrupt his processing.

  He gazed at the multiple monitors, each one now showing no humans left breathing, before returning to the monitor showing the blasted console room. She had done a thorough job in disabling the whole of the internal systems; every door must have been triggered and locked. Joseph turned around, smiling. The woman wouldn’t have locked every door.

  Rossini hadn’t noticed him grinning like a loon. The chair leg, now coated with a thick layer of black goo, was stuck in the head of a shrivelled-up old man. He had found a glass paperweight and had already stopped a young girl wearing the remains of a frayed yellow dress.

  The big man’s grin did unnerve him just for a second, until Joseph realized that, like him, he’d found his focus. Joseph’s fingers played the console like a concert pianist reciting a piece of music. The answer was right in front of him, all Joseph needed to do was to allow his mind to readjust, to switch from administrator to scientist.

  “Welcome back, my old friend,” he said, grinning while equations rolled out in front of him, giving him the answer to their dilemma in seconds. “Rossini, how many are in the room?” Joseph heard a single sickening thud.

  “None now.”

  “Then brace yourself, the lights are about to go out.” He didn’t give the man time to reply. Joseph fed in the last of the number sequence and the power in the entire building died. The overhead lights went out, plunging them into complete darkness.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “A system reset. Stop talking and listen. You can’t see them but you’ll hear their groans.” All Joseph could hear was the sound of his colleague’s panicking breathing. Was Rossini scared of the dark? Oh, this would be another valuable fault that he could file away. Joseph started to count; it would take a while for the systems to realign. He wasn’t too sure how long though, this had never been performed before.

  “Hurry up!” hissed Rossini.

  Joseph didn’t reply, as his ears picked up a wet sound coming from the other side of the room. They had company. He turned around, keeping one hand on the console. “Rossini,” he whispered, “there’s one of them in here, with us. I’m going to reach out and touch your shoulder so you know where I am.”

  His colleague’s breathing quickened. Joseph slowly swung his other arm around until it connected with material. “There you go.”

  “I can’t feel it.”

  Joseph jerked his arm back and fell backwards when he realized what he’d just touched. Harsh bright light dazzled him and he watched as Rossini spun around and slammed the paper weight into the face of a fresh dead guard.

  “It almost had both of us.” Rossini pulled Joseph back onto his feet. “Has that worked?”

  Joseph kicked the dead guard and spat at it. “I couldn’t even smell you. That was too fucking close.” He slammed his hand down on the door release, nodding in satisfaction as the two doors quietly slid open. “We’d better get this mess sorted out, Rossini.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  His nostrils quivered at the familiar scent of his wife’s favorite perfume. Tony frowned. There was a hint o
f another smell as well, like sour sweat. It didn’t take him long to realize it came from his own body. Tony opened his eyes and stared at the living room ceiling. This position could only mean that he was lying on their table.

  The light dimmed when Ellen leaned over his prone body.

  “Welcome back to the land of the living, dear husband,” she said. “It’s been two days since you left for work.” Ellen chuckled. “I think that your lunch might be a little cold.”

  He shifted his head to the side and saw another shadow just beyond his vision. As he tried to sit up, Tony found a strap over his neck. “What the fuck is happening here?” He struggled, finding his arms and legs were strapped down as well.

  “They found you on Food- World, my darling husband. You were mumbling incoherently while rolling about in your own shit. Luckily for you, my soldiers found you before the dead things did. They also knew how important you were to me so they didn’t take you back to either Joseph or Rossini.”

  Had the shock registered on his face? It must have; how could he have been so unaware just how deep her involvement with the elite really was. Ellen coughed and she fumbled in her pocket, bringing out three pure white tablets and pushing them into her mouth. Now he saw Ellen hadn’t noticed his shock. Her body had gone beyond needing the usual amount of medication.

  While she busied herself with swallowing the pills, Tony tried to remember what had happened to him on that other world. Only fragments pushed through the fog. After watching Rossini’s fat face mash into a sea of pink, he remembered waking up inside a large mill, the sound of heavy machinery filling his ears. He then caught the words of two people talking. Tony had crept under the nearest machine and listened as one of the men explained how they were tainting the food meant to be shipped to this world with the bodies of their dead. Tony bit his bottom lip trying to remember what else. Nothing appeared though, no matter how hard he forced it.