“Hey, babe. How are you feeling?” He did his best to hide his worry and sadness, but could tell she saw through it.
She smiled and her bottom lip cracked and bled. “I’m good. Today is a good day.”
She was a terrible liar. He dipped a paper towel in the pitcher of water on her tray and dabbed at the wound.
How would he ever live without her?
“Excuse me.” A young, female nurse interrupted to take Allison’s vitals. “How is your pain?” she asked and checked the IV
A tear dripped from the corner of Allison’s eye to the pillowcase. “8.” Pain was rated on a ten scale, ten being the worst.
The nurse rolled down the stack of blankets and lifted Allison’s gown. She palpated her distended stomach and Allison winced.
“It’s a good day, huh?” Zach couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let him help her.
The nurse lifted the catheter bag full of dark urine from the hanger on the side of Allison’s bed and marked it with a marker. “Dr. Nixon authorized additional morphine in your IV if you need help with the pain.”
Morphine.
Zach held back the tears. Morphine was the gateway to palliative care, a humane way to let a terminal patient die without suffering. Nixon hadn’t said it had gotten this bad.
“I can wait,” Allison said. She held up the red call button. “I know how to find you if I need to.” She smiled a fake strong smile Zach knew well.
Zach stood and kissed her forehead, the salt of fevered sweat coating his lips. He wanted to tell her to take what she needed. To close her eyes forever if she felt it was time, but he didn’t mean it. She was losing her fight and when he should be accepting her fate, he was thinking only about the virus and how it could bring her back.
6.
Miranda’s apartment was much less grand than the rental listing had advertised. She pulled the dust-covered sheets off of the outdated furniture and went into a sneezing and coughing fit that persisted until her ribs hurt.
Nothing about the place felt like home.
Iris said she hadn’t been upstairs in years. It didn’t look like anyone had.
The threadbare carpet provided little comfort and as she walked through the narrow living room, she wished she had slippers. She dropped her duffel bag on the couch and dust sprang from the Velour cushions.
The mirrored wall with faux, veneer arches gave the illusion of size in a funhouse way Miranda found disorienting. She took a long look at the reflection of her road-weary self, her eyes still swollen from crying and said, “You’re doing the right thing.” It was either take the Nixon Center job or run back to Scott who lived in their home as if nothing bad had happened. She needed to stop thinking about him, but already the memories intruded on her fresh start.
She set the stack of papers that Iris had given her on the orange kitchen counter and found a pen in her duffel bag. The lease agreement was standard, the three month term a trial. She signed the bottom and flipped to the information page she could only half-complete. Next of kin: none. Marital status. The “D” was still hard to write. Nothing forced her to answer these personal questions, but she thought of what Iris and others had alluded to. What if she did go missing? The ridiculous idea was only a distant possibility, but she couldn’t get the women on the posters out of her head. She set her pen on the Emergency contact line and debated who would come. Scott. For her, it was only ever Scott. There was no ignoring him, no forgetting him, and no running away from him. She wrote his name and number down and expected Iris would never have to use it.
* * * * *
Zach convinced himself that everything Nixon had him doing was for Allison, but with each step further down the rabbit hole, he wondered. The desperation and the pleas of the laboring girl still hadn’t left him. They probably never would. He went into the operating room where Ben and an unknown anesthetist were already waiting.
This was his worst fear.
The sterile surgical suite was a windowless prison of stainless steel and crude medical instruments. An infected adult male lay sedated and restrained on the operating table. Clumps of his unwashed hair were missing and gashes covered his graying face. Thin lips peeled away from a set of chipped and decaying teeth and he smelled like rotten meat.
One of the infected Nixon talked about.
Zach couldn’t decide if he thought it was more or less revolting than the stillborn infant. He couldn’t shake off the chills.
Nixon scrubbed his hands with Betadine soap and Ben helped him with his gloves. “You have to understand the virus to appreciate the experiment’s intricacies, to control the infection and be safe from it. In the lab you asked me if the virus had a cure.” Nixon pulled aside the blue surgical lap drape and revealed the infected’s pallid, shaved, and decaying male genitalia. “The simple answer is no.” He motioned for Zach to stand next to him.
You can do this. He willed his feet to move. The smell was even worse up close.
Zach folded his arms over his stomach, quickly putting them down at his sides when Nixon glared at him.
Ben pulled apart several paper envelopes and arranged a set of freshly sterilized tools on the tray to Nixon’s left.
Nixon rearranged the implements and scowled at Ben. “Martin, how are we doing?”
A dark curl sprang from beneath the young anesthetist paper cap. “Almost there, sir.” He piggybacked a small bag of sedative to the already running IV and adjusted the flow. “The second bag is up.”
Ben readied a glass slide next to the microscope and set a cryogenic storage tank at Nixon’s feet.
“If he wakes up,” Nixon said to Zach, “don’t get anywhere near his mouth. Don’t let him scratch you. Don’t let him bleed into a cut, or a sore, or your eyes. One bite, a single blood transfer between him and you, and you’re infected. Do you understand?”
Zach nodded.
“Are you all set here, sir?” Martin asked.
“Yes, please sedate the next one. This shouldn’t take long.”
Nixon unsheathed a syringe and worked the needle into the infected’s swollen testicle. Zach started to sweat and he took a deep breath.
“You all right?” Ben’s paper mask muffled his voice.
Zach swallowed, his mouth too dry for it to matter. “I’m fine. Good.” He told himself he’d harden to the clinical side just like he had to combat.
Nixon withdrew a small amount of sperm and put a drop on the slide for microscopic examination. “Good. Very, very good.” He deposited the remainder of the specimen into the cryogenic storage tank and handed the syringe to Ben. “Great motility with this one. The hormones are working.”
Another dot to connect. The realization of what he’d seen struck him. An infant born of a live mother inseminated with the sperm of an infected father.
“You’re starting to get the bigger picture,” Nixon said. “I won’t insult you by pretending the experiment is victimless, but what we’re doing here will save lives. Far more than it will cost.” He applied pressure to the oozing pinhead wound. “The cure for the virus, the missing link to the cancer therapy that Allison needs, lies in the stem cells of the unborn hybrids. A variant gene lacking a section called CRA-3 is vital. The infection spreads quickly. The virus replicates and invades healthy cells until all of them are infected and the patient is turned. The only way to stop it is to implant resistant cells, CRA-3-deficient ones, which prevents that. The human body is a self-preserving machine and once the deficient cells are introduced, they will reproduce and eradicate the virus before it ever gets full blown.”
“What about the women you’re making pregnant?” Zach asked. “What about their babies?”
Nixon looked at him crossly and he regretted speaking out. “Not a single one of the hybrids has lived and none of them yielded the gene variant we need. You’ll see to it the mothers are treated properly.”
Zach hadn’t signed on as a prison guard, but didn’t dare say it.
A loud grunt pierce
d the pensive silence.
Like the rat in the lab, the infected was coming around unexpectedly fast.
“Ben, get Martin.” Nixon remained calm as he issued the urgent order.
The zombie’s milky white eyes popped open and it gnashed its teeth, barely missing Zach’s arm.
Zach jerked backward and reached for his concealed pistol.
“Don’t!” Nixon held up his hand.
The undead railed against the restraints shaking the table so hard that had it not been bolted to the floor, its thrashing would have toppled it.
Nixon drew up a syringe of sedative. “Zach, don’t let him get loose.”
How on Earth did he expect him to stop it?
Zach holstered his pistol, held his breath, and bore down on the infected’s chest with all of his weight. Don’t get bit. His heart raced. His fingertips sank into its gelatinous arm all the way to the bone and he shuddered.
Nixon administered the drug and the man immediately went limp.
Zach let up slowly, adrenaline rushing through him. The slick of decomposed tissue on his hands made him want to rush to the sink, but he knew it wasn’t over.
Martin threw the O.R. room door open and rushed in.
“I got it,” Nixon said. “He’s down for now, but they’re too much of a risk on this sedative. One minute they’re out, the next they’re ready to go. Ben, tighten the restraints.”
Ben tightened the right wrist by one notch of the leather belt. “Zach, get the other one.”
“It’s their metabolism, sir.” Martin adjusted his slipping cap. “The longer we keep them, their rate speeds up. I’m trying to keep up with the changes.”
Zach wondered how long, exactly, the infected patients had been there.
“Get that wrist,” Ben said.
Zach pulled the metal tongue from the leather strap, worried that in the split second between tight and tighter the man would regain consciousness and attack.
Nixon paced, his hands clasped behind his back and a familiar change came over him. “If we can’t rely on the drugs,” he mumbled quietly, “we’ll have to make him less dangerous.”
Zach had seen this particular expression once before when Nixon ripped the mutilated rat in two. It was frame of reference enough to know that something very bad was about to happen.
Nixon pulled open the drawer of sterile processing packages and sorted through them.
“Sir, is there something I can help you find?” Ben asked.
Nixon didn’t acknowledge him.
“Sir, can I help you find something?”
Nixon held up a clear blue envelope. “No, I found it.”
“All due respect, Dr. Nixon, this isn’t the way to handle things.” Ben stepped between him and the infected, posturing protectively. The tension increased tenfold. Nixon opened a second drawer and pulled out a pair of chainmail gloves. “Sir, I don’t believe you want to do this.”
Zach watched wide-eyed and noted Ben’s escalating panic. He’d have asked what Nixon was planning, if he didn’t already know. The instrument in Nixon’s hand was the exact one the oral surgeon used to pull out his wisdom teeth.
“Ben, get out of my way.”
Ben held his position.
“I’m not going to ask again.” Nixon shoved Ben to the side and into Zach.
Zach caught Ben before he hit the floor and wondered what the right thing was to say or do. The hint of madness in Nixon’s eyes made it clear he was not in a frame of mind for conflict. “What the hell am I supposed to do?” he whispered.
“I honestly don’t know or care. Figure it out. He’s all yours,” Ben stormed out of the room and bad became worse.
“Should I go after him?” Zach asked.
Nixon put a wedge under the infected’s neck and secured its head, tilted back, with a leather strap to the table. “Should you go after him? Do you think I want to be alone in here? No. You’re going to help me. See those syringes over there on the tray? They’re loaded. If he so much as twitches, you hit him with one, more than one if you have to, and it doesn’t matter where, just that you do it fast.”
Forced into compliance, Zach picked up one of the syringes to avoid even a second’s delay.
Nixon gripped the first of the infected’s teeth with the pliers and pulled. He twisted and wiggled the tooth until it released from the jaw with a crack. A thick string of yellow-green syrup dangled from the root and a clump of congealed, black blood filled the dental vacancy. Nixon put the tooth in a plastic container and continued removing the others in turn. He smiled as he worked, looked smugly satisfied as if he’d gotten some kind of payback. “Looks like blended food for you from now on.”
It never occurred to Zach that the infected had to eat. Cannibals, that’s what Nixon had called them. Bile rose up the back of his throat. “What do you feed them?”
“This is a hospital, Zach, with no shortage of available flesh.”
“You’re feeding them patients?” Zach tried not to look appalled.
“Not whole patients, usually, unless they’ve signed their bodies over for research, and not live ones. Never live ones. They need warm flesh to live or at least they prefer it to be warm.” He tossed another tooth in the bin. “We amputate for medical reasons, replace organs etcetera, and we feed them the old parts, heated and treated with a kind of vitamin that tricks them into thinking its live tissue. So far, they haven’t caught on and it keeps them going so, no harm no foul.” He sealed the container of teeth and dropped them in a biohazard bag before putting them in his lab coat pocket.
No harm.
Nixon said it with such conviction there was no way he didn’t believe it.
7.
The morning breeze blew through the screen door. The Strandville mountain air was fresher than it ever was in the city. Miranda tucked the cuffs of her blue uniform pants into her boots, laced up, and startled when Iris knocked.
It only took her one day to re-learn the stairs she hadn’t been up in years.
“Good morning.” Coffee splashed from the mug in her shaking hand.
Coffee. As of 4 a.m. when Miranda woke up to work out, the coffee pot was her most missed convenience. She opened the door and helped the elderly landlady inside.
“I didn’t wake you up going out for my run this morning, did I?” Running was an old habit she was easing back into. Five miles a day—rain, snow, or shine.
“No, dear. Insomnia.” Iris whispered it like a confession and handed Miranda the mug. “I wasn’t sure if you took cream or sugar.”
“Neither, thank you.” The coffee smelled bitter, but was hot and strong. And probably the reason Iris couldn’t sleep. The first sip turned Miranda’s tongue into fleshy sandpaper. She sucked in air to cool off her mouth and grabbed her uniform shirt off the back of the kitchen chair.
Iris’s expression changed the minute she put it on.
A woman working a security detail was surely against her antiquated way of thinking.
“It’s my first day of work,” Miranda said, breaking the ice. “Nixon Center Security.” The stiff embroidered badge scratching her chest through her tee shirt probably already told Iris that.
“The job you came for?”
An awkward silence filled the space between them and Iris stared ahead, despondent.
“I hate to be rude, Iris and I really appreciate the coffee, but I need to get going. I’m due in at 7:30.”
Iris started to say something, but stopped as if keeping some terrible secret. She wiped a tear from her eye and sighed. “Is there anything I can say that would change your mind?”
* * * * *
A couple of hours earlier, Zach would have believed that no one could be worse to spend time with than Nixon. He would have been wrong.
Max Reid was every ex-convict stereotype Zach’s mind could conjure. His close-cropped hair did nothing to conceal the black ink tattoo of a pistol and a silencer extending from behind his ear to the base of his skull. One of dozens of
homemade-looking tattoos supporting the assumption that the guy was a criminal. Ropes of toned muscle strained the fabric of his short-sleeved uniform shirt and at six feet, four inches tall, a good eight inches taller than Zach, Reid’s formidable presence intimidated.
Ex-military. Ex-convict. Nixon covered his bases.
“Hey, Keller, you know the difference between a soldier and a murderer?”
Zach inventoried the ink on Reid’s neck and arms--a confederate flag, a Bowie knife, skulls, a grenade, and a crucifix--and decided that no matter what Reid’s answer was, he wouldn’t argue. He adjusted his holstered pistol to validate that he was a man with options.
Reid forced his arm across the doorway of the small kitchenette and blocked Zach from entering. He stared intensely and cracked a malice-laden grin. “I asked you a question.”
Zach stood strong. “I don’t know. What’s the difference between a soldier and a murderer?” He tried not to act annoyed and expected the next words out of Reid’s mouth to be incredibly stupid.
“Nothing.”
He was right.
Reid’s thinly veiled attempt at comparing the two of them was both insulting and wrong. Zach held his tongue, but if he had any doubts about Reid’s jaded past, this “first day in the prison yard” mentality put them to rest.
Reid leaned into the jamb, his muscles flexing, and waited for a response. After a minute of not getting one, he took his arm away and grinned. “Nixon tells me you’re the new zoo keeper.”
“Excuse me?” Zach’s head ached, he guessed from the rise in his blood pressure he attributed to Reid.
“The Ids. Nixon says you want to know what they eat. He says to let you feed them.”
“Ids?”
“ Ids. You know, ‘infecteds’. Nixon hates it when you call them zombies.” Reid raised the lid of a small chest freezer and withdrew a large, red bag labeled ‘biohazard’. “This is where we keep the parts.” He took a hunk of disarticulated leg, a length that extended from knee to foot, from the bag. “They like their meat warm.”
CURE (A Strandville Zombie Novel) Page 3