by Lucas Cole
Resurrection Planet:
A Zombie Sci-Fi Adventure
By
Lucas Cole
Resurrection Planet:
A Zombie Sci-Fi Adventure
(Original Title: “Resurrection Planet”)
Copyright 2011 by Lucas Cole
Published by Master Key Press
All Rights Reserved
“Thy dead men shall live,
together with my dead body shall they arise.”
-Isaiah 26:19
Table of Contents
Chapter I: Metamorphosis
Chapter II: Postmortem
Chapter III: Sojourn
Chapter IV: Contact
Chapter V: Treason
Chapter VI: Revelation
Chapter VII: Viral
Chapter VIII: Mutation
Chapter IX: Fallout
Chapter X:Spangler
Chapter XI: Backpack
Chapter XII: Subterranean
Chapter XIII: Origins
Chapter XIV: Peter
Chapter XV: Camp
Chapter XVI:Weed
Chapter XVII: Coalition
Chapter XVIII: Reunion
Chapter XIX: Abduction
Chapter XX: Gauntlet
Chapter XXI: Ambush
Chapter XXII: Ambition
Afterword
CHAPTER I
Metamorphosis
Beauty and horror. In my life and, especially in my line of work, they coexist. They always have.
I have an early childhood memory of reaching out to feed a small white dove just before a magnificent hawk swooped silently from the sky and snatched the dove from my hand. That terrible, fierce, beautiful hawk snuffed out the dove’s life and splattered me with blood and feathers. After that, it took my parents several years before they could get me near the raptor’s cage at the zoo or to have anything to do with birds in general. My parents always felt it was that experience which led me to my present, violent occupation, but I’ll leave that to the shrinks.
A more recent memory involves admiring the strangeness and beauty of an alien landscape, just before a battle ensued that left Imperial Marines’ innards, torsos, and miscellaneous body parts strewn across the formerly beautiful field. Officers, me included, were required to triage the survivors and terminate (the military’s pretty jargon for “kill”) those who would not make the trip back to our HQ (or those who might make it, but would draw too many resources from our dwindling supplies). I left the Imperial Marine Force behind, but not my occupation. I just do it for more money, now.
I appreciate beauty when I have the time. Horror, I deal with…and I can inflict horror of my own when it is called for. So, tales of ghouls and armies of the dead I will face with resolution.
But I thought I could at least disembark the damn ship before encountering the unholy mix of fair and foul again.
The beauty? Sybaris—the desert planet—greets us with something remarkable: rain. Scattered drops fall onto the soft desert crust and kick up little puffs of dust. Then the rain begins in earnest, pelting the ground and raising a fine mist. The downpour makes a drumming sound against the Province’s hull behind me and the planet surface, fantastically, comes alive.
And the horror? Oh, it’s there—and we recognize each other immediately, instinctively, like old, familiar foes, though I’ve never been here before.
Fifty yards ahead, water cascades down the white beetle-back shape of Station A. The station’s platform is crowded with men who have come out to see us arrive…or to watch the rain…or both. Off to the side, someone—or something—escapes the rain by climbing up onto the station platform where it is dry, but the men of the station don’t seem to notice him. Their eyes, understandably, follow Carly, then the rare downpour…but always, their gazes drift back to Carly.
Carly, Navarro, and Gershom are on the Province’s disembarkation ramp ahead of me where they stand, gaping in awe at the rain’s effects. They have no clue about what we face. Not yet.
My attention swings back to the human shape that has just accessed the platform. He doesn’t look quite right: he drags his feet when he walks, his clothes hang in tatters, and he looks bent and stiff. Steam rises from where the rain has struck his head and neck. He seems to be looking directly back at me.
Even now, no one else sees him. Not with the attractive form of Carly in plain view, her wet ship passenger’s clothing pasted to her lithe figure.
The odd-looking man on the platform makes no threatening gesture; he seems to be motionless, hardly breathing. What is happening around me finally captures my full attention, though. For a moment, beauty wins out. Sybaris is putting on quite a display.
The sand darkens and softens into mush and clusters of cactus-like plants and small wiry bushes erupt through the dirt. One of the bushes forms small buds that burst into tiny star-shaped leaves and gaily-colored blooms. Scaly insects squirm onto the surface and scamper frantically across the sodden earth, the insects perhaps desperately seeking mates and a quick coupling before it’s too late.
The transformation of the desert from dead to living is overwhelming.
Dr. Carly Sims, the botanist among us, yanks the bags from her assistant. “Over the side! C’mon.” Before her assistant, Navarro, can respond, Carly is over the rail and landing knee-deep in mud. She pulls her foot out with a sucking sound and struggles forward. “Hurry, before the rain ends.”
Navarro joins her and plunges down nearly to his thighs. “I’m sinking!”
“You’ll be fine.”
I notice she doesn’t call upon Gershom standing alone over there, communing, no doubt, with this unpredictable world on some kind of spiritual level—a level, naturally, denied to us common sinners. I glance at the Station, but it’s hard to see more than a few feet ahead now.
A centipede crawls toward Navarro, bumps into his leg—eliciting a shriek from the high-strung assistant—and then the bug hurriedly changes direction.
A whirring insect with bulbous eyes and wispy wings lands on my arm. The bug observes me studiously with its reflective eyes and then buzzes away into the soggy air.
Carly moves about like a maniac, clutching at the writhing, crawling denizens of the wet ground. “I’m supposed to code these things, start a DNA catalogue. Basically barcode everything I can. The whole damn planet. Ridiculous.” She grunts with the effort of plowing through the mud and plucking up plants, all the while her clothes are soaked to her attractive form.
I squint through the rain and see the crowd of men at the station platform appreciating the show. For the moment, no sight of the odd-appearing man in tattered clothes.
Gershom, despite being sodden himself, watches the desert’s metamorphosis from the ramp with intense interest.
But the show is over in moments, the rain ceasing as quickly as it came, the pools of jiggling, flopping, and squirming fauna retreating into the sand at an amazing speed. In a moment, the insects and crustaceans have burrowed their ways into the sand to leave behind only the intersecting trails and tracks of tiny pods and claws on the surface.
“Over. Already.” Carly straightens, one hand clutching her back from the strain of fighting the mud for its prizes.
“Welcome to Sybaris,” the ship’s captain calls down. “This place is unnatural. Accursed.”
I look back at the obese, foul-tempered Captain Oster and at the Provincial behind him. “When was the last recorded rain?”
“Two years ago. Last time I made landfall.”
Every time Oster’s ship lands—it rains. In effect, the Provincial is seeding the immediate atmosphere with moisture, pulling it from orbit. Interesting.
“About that crate,” Oster says. “You need to—.”
>
“Move that crate a foot in any direction and poof—no more Provincial. I already told you that, Captain Oster.” I turn my back on him…and on his muttered curses. The crate I had brought aboard the Provincial armed itself the moment the ship set down on Sybaris.
“Got some good stuff,” Carly says, pulling her boots up from the drying surface. She hands the bag to me and allows me to help her clamber up onto the walkway. “I’d like to meet the official in Rome that assigned me this little task.”
I smile to myself while we both help Navarro pull free from the already drying sand. “I’m sure you’ll get a chance to meet him.” I turn my attention back to the platform. “But right now, it’s time to meet our hosts.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing, I guess.” But trust your instinct, I remind myself. And trust your fear; it’s there for a reason. And then I spot him again: the thing that does not belong in the picture. None of the station workers have noticed him yet…but they will.
The misshapen man still seems to be immobile, watching us. Like a friggin’ zombie.
Despite the novelty of the rain-induced changes, Carly is still the main attraction. An athletic beauty, not typical of a research scientist. She brushes the rain from her face and probably causes heart palpitations among those watching her every move.
“Truly,” Gershom, still marveling at the Sybaris rain-show, says. “I am a stranger in a strange land.” We all turn to him and he smiles. “We are all strangers, are we not, Mr. Crisp?”
“You’re correct. Some more than others.” Six months and I hardly know this man.
Carly—I know quite well. Intimately, you might say. Carly and I provided each other a much-needed companionship—stemming the fierce loneliness that attacks space travelers and sometimes bends their minds into neuroses and worse. Gershom did not approve. Navarro, I believe, nurses a jealousy and therefore, an intense dislike, toward me.
I see a couple of the station women among the crowd and I can understand why Carly would excite attention. Life on a mining facility can be rough on looks.
Still unnoticed by the welcome party, the lone figure that had caught my eye finally moves, approaches from the side of the landing platform. His gait is odd, a jerky uncoordinated motion. His one-piece station uniform is stained and ragged.
With a man allowed to present himself thus, the station manager must be really slacking. Poor station discipline. Keeping a wary eye on this man in rags, I move closer to the platform. The man looks bad, sickly, like a chronically ill patient. I hope he’s not catching.
Following my gaze, the welcome committee finally stops gawking at Carly and notices the strange-appearing man. Someone calls out a single word. “Deadhead!”
Like cats in a bath, the people in the crowd scramble and stumble over each other to get away.
The man in rags gets within a few more feet of me and leans forward, his gnarled hand reaching toward me—and that’s as close as he gets.
The top of his head explodes into a bloody mist.
The explosion plasters Carly and me with wet chunks of gray, white, and red matter. Some of it drips down my lip—and I wonder stupidly, maybe a little in shock—did it get into my mouth? Don’t swallow, I tell myself, which of course is exactly what I do. I wonder if I’ve just eaten a bit of this poor guy’s brain tissue. Carly is screaming, but she doesn’t look hurt, just horrified. She gasps for air and clutches at me.
A man carrying a large smoking air pistol presses through the crowd. He glances at me and then a takes a longer look at Carly. He returns his attention to the corpse lying at his feet. “Poor old Abe,” the man says.
Captain Oster pushes his enormous bulk beside me for a better look. “I heard about these fellers. Didn’t believe it. A zombie.”
Carly clings to me, her voice quavering. “Let’s get back on the trawler.”
I reach my arm around her in what I hope is a comforting gesture, but my gaze is fixed on the corpse, his face grinning in death, dark blood oozing from his ruptured skull onto the station platform. The blood should be red, arterial, but it is black, almost clotting. His eyes are glazed over already, rheumy, as if with large cataracts. He’s staring at my bag, as if determined to take it.
Various comments issue from the crowd as they huddle around us to peer down at the body.
“Looks like Abe. Abe Fillmore.”
“He was the transport supervisor, wasn’t he? Worked right here.”
The man with the gun asks me, “You okay?” Despite the firearm in his hand, this guy looks cerebral, with a high forehead and large cranium.
I wipe my mouth with my free hand. “No. I’m not okay. This man you just killed—I believe he was reaching for my luggage when you blew his head off.”
“Your luggage, huh?” He nods. “Perhaps. That was Abe’s job, helping new arrivals with their luggage. Before he went stale.”
“Went stale?”
“Before he joined the deadheads. He was a little slow in life. Becoming one of them didn’t seem to speed up his mental processes any.”
Carly is wide-eyed and yanking my sleeve. “Let’s get back on the trawler. EMC won’t blame any of us.”
I squeeze her arm. Hard. Pain and confusion flash across her face, the fear momentarily neutralized. “Easy does it. We’re okay.”
“You can’t leave,” the man with the gun says. “The Provincial takes a good six weeks to re-equip and, besides that, its trajectory would be off. Am I correct, Captain Oster?”
“Yeah, but I don’t like it any.” He inspects the landscape. “Any more of those creatures about?”
“A few, I’m afraid. Just don’t wander far from the station.”
The man holsters his pistol and crouches over the body. “That shouldn’t have happened. All that muck. Abe should’ve been dry.” He stands again and extends his hand to me as if we were meeting at a social function. “Unfortunate beginnings…but nevertheless, welcome to Sybaris. This is Station A. I’m Owen Todd, the SM.”
I reach out and shake, leaving a smear of Abe’s blood and brains on the hand of his killer.
“Damn,” Todd says, wiping the muck onto his overall. “Now, I’ve got to go into decon too.”
With my left hand, I gingerly pull my credentials from my pocket and show them to Todd.
“Cassius Marcus Ronald Crisp,” he reads. “Facilitator for Elemental Mining Corporation. I see. All the way from New Rome?”
“They’re worried about the ore. Production is virtually nil, lately.”
“We can talk about that later.” He motions to someone. “We’ve got to get clean.” To us: “Strip down, then stay where you are. We’ll be wrapped for transport to the decon tanks.”
“Here? Now?” Carly is shocked.
But Todd has already started undressing. He waves at the men hovering around us. “Disperse. Get back to your jobs. Loiterers can help dispose of Abe.” The men and women, grumbling, some of the men casting last looks at Carly, turn away and file back into the station.
Gershom, just beyond the platform where Abe lies, kneels in the sand. “I don’t understand. It is for men to die but once…and then the judgment.” He reaches out his hand toward the ruined skull. “The second death comes later, for the damned.”
“Don’t touch him,” Todd orders. It is a command, laced with a dangerous tone.
Gershom slowly raises his eyes. “You do not have authority over me.”
“I am the station manager and I—”
“I am not on your station.”
Todd, now totally naked but seemingly uncaring about his appearance, bends to pick up his holster and gun. “True. But Abe is. If you touch him against my orders, I will shoot you.”
Men pushing three gurneys sense the standoff and stop a few paces away.
“Our rides are here,” I say.
His attention on Abe, Gershom moves his hand closer to the bleeding skull, but stops an inch from making contact. Gershom speaks several phrases sof
tly, then stands and faces Todd. “Very well, station manager.” He steps onto the platform, and then passes between us and through the station entrance.
“Leave your things,” Todd says. “Your contaminated clothes will be burned. The luggage will be disinfected. The gurneys will get us to decon without contaminating the station.”
Naked (my belt buckle smuggled in the clasp of my hand), we each climb aboard a gurney and our attendants begin to pull a canister lid over each of us. Where I go, that belt buckle goes, a little memento of my IMF days. Before the canister slips over me, I hear Todd ask, “What was all that mumbling he made over Abe?”
“It sounded like prayers for the dead. In three languages—I believe I recognized Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. He’s a priest of some sort or maybe a rabbi. Maybe a prophet. Calls himself a ‘direct descendent of the one hundred and forty-four thousand,’ whatever that means.” But I do have a notion of what it means; I just didn’t feel like getting into a religious discussion.
“What are you talking—?”
But the canister snaps shut over me and I am entombed atop my gurney. My body is rocked back and forth as I’m wheeled to decon—a decontamination facility, I suspect. The gentle rocking motion moves my head side-to-side, as if I were shaking my head in self-disapproval, judging myself and finding myself lacking. But why judge myself when there was a priest nearby to do that for me? A high priest who has come to the end of the universe to bless a living corpse.
Go to Beginning
CHAPTER II
Postmortem
Todd is kind enough to use the decon chamber next door, while Carly and I, stripped down to our skins, shower together. Actually, it’s not so much getting a shower as it is being hosed, fumigated, and steam-cleaned. When we are not being blasted by vapor, we are being covered with more antiseptic, antiviral, and antifungal foam and then the rinses begin again.