Zombified 1: The Bitten

by Elena Snowfield

  Chapter Two

  Miranda

  THE GENTLE CLINK of tiny glass vials soothed Miranda like faint wind chimes as she labeled and sorted hundreds of samples into plastic trays. She always felt just a little more calm seeing the body's messy secretions-saliva, blood, spinal fluid-arranged in clean rows, each with a name and number like a protective badge.

  Somewhere in the cabinets and incubators stacked with thousands of little droplets from thousands of people, hid an important clue. These were samples of the infected and of the healthy, those that had been Taken and those that had, so far, been spared. Whatever mysterious force that caused that difference had to be hidden somewhere in these vials.

  Glancing up at the scrap of paper pinned to the top of the scheduling whiteboard, Miranda intoned its message to herself for the millionth time: "There's a cure for everything." Though she had repeated the lab's motto to herself so many times it had almost become meaningless, it brought her a renewed sense of motivation after last night. After all, Icarus Labs, nestled humbly in the rainy forests of Oregon, had become the focus of America's hopes-perhaps even the world's-on finding a cure for the terrifying sickness that had decimated the human population in a few short years.

  A voice almost as thin as the glass bottles clinked behind her. "Miranda?" She did not even need to turn around to recognize it.

  "Hello, Dr. Turner."

  The voice laughed with a soft whistle. "Always so formal. You know you can just call me Vince."

  Shrugging, Miranda stopped sorting the vials. "I know. It's just habit."

  Turning her head towards him, she tried to fit the sound of the word "Vince" to the man. Few pairings were as mismatched in her mind. While his name had a robustness that fluctuated between her idea of coarse toughness or refined Victorian elegance, the man himself was plain in every regard. His face that was neither ugly nor handsome was framed by hair that was neither too dark nor too light. He was neither too tall nor too short, neither too bulky nor too thin. Except for his name, Vincent Turner was exactly ordinary.

  "How are the samples going?" He smiled with too much enthusiasm.

  "They're going well. How can I help you... Vince?" Miranda wanted to cut short any small talk and be left alone to her internal reverie.

  "Ah, well, I could use your help with Mrs. J. You think you'd be up for that?"

  Suppressing a cringe, Miranda nodded. "Yeah, sure. Let me, uh, get to a good stopping place here, and then I'll meet you down there."

  "Okay." Vince hovered for a moment, lifted a hand as if about to say more, then dropped it and walked away.

  After carefully storing the unsorted vials back in the freezer, Miranda clenched her fists by her side and strode down the hallway. Through the windows of each door she passed were rows of technicians, stooped over microscopes. The lab had never been as full as it had been since the outbreak, as every available person with the slightest bit of scientific training was enlisted to help search through samples. Even old storage shelves had been converted into makeshift lab table, lined with clunky old microscopes commandeered from high school classrooms.

  But it was in the basement of this lab where the most important research was happening-and where Miranda most dreaded going. She fixed her gaze at the basement elevator's heavily secured door as she approached, feeling both uncontrollably magnetized and repelled by its vivid, fresh-blood red paint. It unlocked with a smooth swoosh as she held her clearance card up to the scanner.

  At the bottom of the short elevator ride was a small gray room lined only with rows of full-body Hazmat suits, like empty shells of human bodies. After suiting up, she passed through an airtight decontamination chamber, where she stood like a bulky scarecrow as nozzles in the wall doused her suit in a sterilizing spray.

  When the toxins were finally finished and dried with a burst of air, the automatic door slid open and Miranda stepped into the part of the lab that she and her colleagues had given the euphemistic name "The Patients' Rooms." It was better than calling it what it actually looked like-a maximum security prison.

  Built with most of the initial burst of funding they had received after the outbreak, The Patients' Rooms was designed as an observatory and quarantine for living infected people. The space spread out in a circle with a single lab bench in the middle. It was ringed with narrow rooms that opened into the center space with doors made entirely of bulletproof plexiglass. Each room was barely larger than a closet, furnished only with a mattress and a stainless steel toilet that melded into the wall. Pneumatic tubes connected the inside of each room with a cubby next to each door, so that food could be passed through without opening the door.

  Everything was built sealed and airtight. Miranda tried not to think about the tiny emergency vent in the ceiling of each room, nor the little red emergency button on each door's control panel, nor what would happen if she pushed that button and every gasp of air in the room was instantly sucked up through the little vent...

  Vince was waiting for her outside the only room that was currently occupied. Subject J-4206, nicknamed Mrs. J, sat on her mattress, staring at the wall. When she had arrived, freshly infected and still lucid, she would tell Miranda stories about her grandchildren and the family barbeque parties she and her husband used to throw before he died of cancer. Apparently, her husband had even been a former subject at Icarus Labs, when it had still been a cancer research center.

  Now, after only two weeks, she could not even speak. Her crisply permed hair was snarled and bald in patches where she had yanked out chunks.

  As Miranda slowly approached the door, she could see angry gashes on Mrs. J's forearms where she had scratched herself.

  Somehow, the sight called to mind the conversation Miranda had had with Mrs. J when admitting her. When Miranda had thanked her for volunteering to be studied, the old woman had only smiled with the softness and sadness of a distant cloud and replied, "I never thought I'd be thankful for my Harry's cancer. But if he were here now, if he saw me like this..." She had shut her eyes, slow tears following the deep rivulets of her skin.

  The memory jabbed Miranda's chest and stuttered her breathing, but she forced it away through sheer professionalism.

  Perhaps sensing her discomfort anyway, Vince smiled in a way that probably meant to be encouraging, but resulted in a creepy grimace through the light of his Hazmat helmet.

  "She has deteriorated quickly," he said through the helmet's speaker. "Unfortunately, we already need another lumbar puncture. We'll probably have to sedate her first." Brow wrinkled in concern, he studied Miranda's reaction. "Are you going to be okay doing this?"

  Keeping her voice flat, and thankful for the distortion of the speaker, Miranda only said, "Yes."

  As she prepared the needles at the lab bench, Miranda glanced at Mrs. J sitting in her sterile prison room, her humanity fading under the bright fluorescent lighting.

  This can't be the way to treat people, Miranda thought, an internal monologue she had been having more frequently with herself in recent months. Quarantine isn't enough. Not anymore.

  She ran through her sighting of Luke the night before, scrutinizing each movement in the clarity of this clean environment. The moment of recognition on his face, which she had tried to excuse as a hopeful hallucination on her part, blazed through her mind again in full detail.

  Luke isn't gone yet.

  "Ready?" Vince interrupted her thoughts, but not before a decision steeled her body with certainty.

  "Ready." Turning to Mrs. J's cell, sedative in hand, Miranda looped over and over one thought.

  There's a cure for everything, and I'm going to find it in Luke.