The Zombie Theories (Book 2): Conspiracy Theory

by Rich Restucci

  I’ve also been playing backgammon, chess, checkers, and some game where I move stones back and forth across this wooden board. Again, I usually play with Lynch, and he beats me at everything every time. Bastard isn’t just a living weapon with lightning fast reflexes and a snippy attitude, he’s damn smart. He doesn’t read my journal anymore, so I can give the prick a compliment without his head getting all big.

  I’ve been exploring the facility, which everyone calls Area 8, and as I’ve said, it’s big. Two hundred and eight steps from my room to the elevators, and there are more rooms past mine. The gym is on level three with the hospital. Levels one and two are administration, with offices, barracks, cafeteria, and storage. Level three has a few offices, and tons of medical equipment in addition to the workout stuff. There’s also a small firing range and training areas. They have all kinds of guns, and this is just what’s for the range. Absolutely everyone is armed, and there’s supposed to be an armory someplace on this level, but I don’t know where it is. I got to pop off a bunch of rounds to keep me frosty. I like the M16s they have here, and they also have HK416s. The Brass (important people like Generals, and doctors from USAMRIID) all have personal guards with FNP90s, which are these little submachine guns, and I got to shoot one of those too. I prefer my old M4 to all of them.

  Level four is laboratories and weapons storage, with some kind of satellite-tracking facility. I haven’t been up to the surface, Lynch says I can’t, I could get a hang nail or something.

  My explorations are accompanied, but the only place I haven’t been allowed to go other than the surface is Level Six. You need special clearance for that, and Lynch won’t tell me what’s down there. Level Six has its own elevator. That makes me nervous, I don’t know why. There are no guards on the bank of six elevators that ferry people up and down to all the other floors, but the lift down to six has its own guard shack. Not just guards, but a small structure that you have to pass through just to get to the lift.

  There are three hundred people down here, and Lynch says that the facility in the mountain above is just as big. He also told me that other than the occasional stray zombie, there hasn’t been an attack on the base since the beginning of all of this. Most of these people, other than the soldiers, haven’t even seen any infected. They’ve been closed off down here for a year.

  They know their families are dead, the country is dead, and the world is dead. They got to watch it in high definition during the first few weeks of the plague. I’ve spoken to some of them, and they’re mostly friendly, but standoffish. I played a game of chess with a lab guy named Frank at three this morning. He kicked my ass too.

  I can’t roam freely, and there’s still a pair of guards outside my room, but I can come and go as I please as long as the gun-toting guards or Lynch come with. Hose B hasn’t come back as one of my door guards, but I did see him working on the Universal at the gym. He gave me death eyes.

  I haven’t seen doctor dick since I bit him though. Lynch said he’s fine. They watched him for a while, ran some tests, and then let him out of quarantine. I hope they took his spinal fluid and eye juice too. Prick.

  Yeah, so that’s that. You’ve got the general layout of the facility, and my role here as guinea pig. You’ve figured out that Lynch is not my favorite person, even though he did save my life from a freaked-out Jose. You know my friends are all far away. That pretty much sums it up. I did get some shoes too. A pair of combat boots, and a pair of cross trainers.

  I know what you’re thinking: “Where are my damn zombies? This is a zombie story right? Not a stupid tale of some guy getting experimented on? I did not pick up this tattered and yellowed (and probably blood-spattered) journal to read about a government stooge with his lab rat reject. I want the living dead.”

  Well, you’ve got them incoming. There will be zombies a plenty in the next chapter, I’m just too tired from running and dodging and shooting and being thirsty to write anymore. Besides, backstory is vital. It is critical, need-to-know information in order for you to make a rational, informed decision on whether or not to chuck this notebook in the fire to keep you warm.

  Don’t. Not yet. Unless you’re really cold.

  Oh, and I got socks.

  Zombies, Zombies Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink

  I want a beer. Most times when I’m really thirsty, I want a soft drink or water, but damn a beer sounds good. Not one of those Yuppie micro brews, or foreign heavy beer. I want a mass-produced, ice cold, fizzy, American brew.

  But water would do.

  I’m hoping the fact that I’m thirsty and have no access to liquid has dawned on you. How, you are obviously demanding, how is it possible that you are thirsty, when you currently reside in a facility designed to withstand a nuclear holocaust, stocked with food and drink a-plenty? You even told us there was a gym for Christ’s sake!”

  Let me tell you how fast everything can go to shit: Seconds.

  I was in the gym you were just thinking about, playing a game of two on two. Lynch was on the other team, and I was finally, finally beating him. I was with Tim, he was some type of satellite technician who never, ever took off his ID badge, even when he was playing hoops. Lynch was with some Air Force Chief Master Sergeant named Brick. I don’t know if that was his first or last name, everybody called him Chief Brick. Game was to twenty one, (gotta win by two), and we were up nineteen to eight. Nineteen to eight, and I was on fire. Couldn’t miss.

  So Lynch calls a time out for a piss break and goes to the can. I’m sitting there bullshitting with Tim and Brick, my guard, (I called this one Stoic, after that Viking King in How to Train Your Dragon), not talking at all. My guards never talked to me, they were probably ordered not to. So I grab a towel and I’m guzzling some of my Gatorade when these two guys walk into the gym from the open door behind the tiny bleachers sixty feet away. We all turned to look, not even breaking our conversation. It was just two guys, walking toward us. Stoic just turned back and looked at us, not giving them a second thought. None of us did.

  Brick had been talking about Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson, and how that was possibly the best rivalry in all of pro hoops. I disagreed and said that the Bird/Dr. J. games were better. Tim says, “Yeah, but Kareem had that sky hook,” and he proceeds to do one. The ball goes thump and sticks between the rim and the backboard. Stuck. Brick and I start giving Tim shit, I even caught Stoic with a half-smile.

  So we’re standing under the ball, looking up at it, me telling Tim that he jammed it so he should jump for it, when we hear a scuffle. The three of us turned around to see the two guys that had come in tearing into Stoic, who never even fired a round. His Adam’s apple was gone, a gaping hole into his throat spurting and gushing his life away. One of the things is making this awful crunching sound as it crushes Stoic’s larynx cartilage between its molars like a fist full of Fritos. Stoic never made a sound, but the tearing and ripping of his flesh giving way will haunt me forever and I’ve seen some shit. I could see he was trying to scream, but there was nothing left of his throat to make anything other than gurgling noises and coughing sounds as his lungs tried to expel the blood that was undoubtedly flooding them.

  Tim didn’t move, the shock of the moment overcoming him, but Brick and I moved to the bench to get weapons. I grabbed Tim’s M9, and Brick grabbed his. Two shots rang out before I could even raise my weapon, and in my head I was praising Brick for gunning down the two stiffs who had fallen to the ground. Perfect head shots. Brick, however, was looking at me, his weapon pointed somewhere in the vicinity of the basketball court.

  “We’re in it now,” Lynch said, the smoke from his M9 wafting into my nostrils. As my nasal passages were assaulted by the stench of newly fired pistol, my auditory senses came under attack from that same alarm klaxon that you’ve heard in every B movie ever made that had an alarm klaxon. And that shit didn’t stop for nine hours.

  I looked at the door that the screams were now coming through, “What the fuck does that mean?” />
  “The alarm means a perimeter breach,” Brick said checking his M9 magazine. “The screams are an indication of a more imminent danger.”

  Lynch nodded. “Or the alarm could mean an escape.”

  “An escape?”

  He looked at me. “What are you a parrot? Yeah, an escape.”

  Tim and Brick looked at each other, then at Lynch. “You mean a prisoner escape?”

  “Well, kinda. There are almost two hundred infected caged on Level Six.” He said it like we were all morons for not figuring that out.”

  Boom. There it was. Shockingly, the people in charge thought they were intelligent and could contain hundreds of carriers of the worst plague in human history inside a secure facility. Not three days ago I had asked about infected attacks on this structure, and had been told those attacks had been nonexistent. Which means there were no infected in the vicinity. Which means they had to import the fuckers here and stick them downstairs.

  “You knew! You fucking knew those things were here and didn’t do shit about it?”

  “Of course I knew. I thought it was stupid same as you, but what could I do? Dude, I’m not a soldier, I’m not a lab guy. I do what needs to be done. I get called in when nobody else can do the job. You and me? We just happened on each other back in Tennessee, and I knew how important you were immediately. The instant I found out you survived a bite, no one else on earth mattered, and I wouldn’t have just died, but killed to protect you. I don’t give a shit if I’m an asshole. I always do the job, and that’s why I’m so awesome. Now let’s book.” Book. He had used book like I would. Sanctimonious dickweed. He moved toward Stoic’s non-moving form, while looking at the door that the screams were coming from.

  This guy. I had a weapon, and I was half tempted to shoot him in the back of the head. Two things kept me from doing it: Number one; he was the best guy to save my ass in this particular predicament. Number two; the second I raised the weapon, he would use his Jedi-ninja powers to spin and shoot the gun out of my hand, probably blowing off my trigger finger in the process just to teach me a lesson. We both knew he wouldn’t kill me, but my fingers are important to me, and as I didn’t want to be lunch, I followed him.

  Still in his shorts and a tank top, Lynch pulled a combat knife from who knows where (I still wonder if it smelled like poo) and plunged it into Stoic’s open eye. For shits and giggles, he stabbed up under the dead man’s chin as well, burying the knife to the hilt. Lynch retrieved Stoic’s HK416 and checked the magazine.

  We all looked through the aluminum bleachers toward the far door at a woman in a lab coat who came into the room screaming. She was running full out, and we saw why in the next moment. Two Runners slammed into the open doorway rocking the door, and with no hesitation sprinted after the still screaming, hysterical woman. She ran straight at us, her eyes growing wide and throwing her hands up, “Don’t!”

  I had no idea what the hell she was talking about until I saw Lynch aiming the assault rifle at her. Two shots in rapid succession and the woman jerked, her hands coming to her chest.

  She stopped, but she didn’t fall. She moved her hands up and down her body as confused as I was. She turned and looked at the two Runners, one with a hole in her head, and the other struggling to breathe with a portion of his right lung splayed out on the concrete behind him. He looked at us, eyes full of rage and not a little sadness. That look made me think back to the first time I was bitten, when I thought about swallowing a bullet. What if these things are still you, but something has taken over and you’re trapped inside looking out while your body commits the most heinous acts possible?

  The thing tried to stand and growl, but only succeeded in gurgling and blowing a blood bubble from his right nostril. It still scratched and clawed its way in our direction, its life’s blood pumping from the high chest wound in thick crimson torrents.

  “You,” Lynch said pointing to the woman, “come here now. Keep your weapons on her,” he told Brick and I. She came to us heaving, wringing her hands and crying slightly.

  The spook grabbed his black bag from the bottom bleacher and pulled a suppressed Sig P226. He slung the HK416 and then pulled another suppressed Sig. He handed one to me and told me to give Tim his M9 back, which I did. “Watch her,” he said and sprinted to the open door. He took a quick peek out the door and closed it hastily. It was a steel door with a window laced with chicken wire. It had a push bar on this side, and was not unlike any gym door you’ve ever seen.

  I asked the woman her name and through the tears she said it was Sara. Her lab coat was spattered with blood and I asked her if she had been bitten or scratched. Suddenly very aware of the infected blood on her, she peeled that coat off with lightning speed. She looked herself over, and then looked at me, terrified.

  “I need to check,” I told her, and she nodded. “I’m sorry, but you have to take your shirt off.” She did, and I told her to lift her arms up and checked her for bites. She was wearing white pants, and there was no blood on them other than on her left knee. She rolled her pant leg up and I could see she wasn’t bitten.

  “She OK?” demanded Lynch as he returned.

  “At least for now. I didn’t see any bites or scratches.”

  “We’ll check more later. I hate to be cliché, but let’s move. They’ll be in here in a few minutes.” Fists on the door he just closed accentuated his statement. He thumbed toward the door, “See?” The window was packed with faces, all of them looking at us like we were tasty morsels just out of reach.

  Which was kind of true. The out of reach part. I’m not going to speak on the tasty thing.

  We moved to the double doors on the side of the gym that empties into the hospital wing. Lynch stopped us at the doors, then looked Sara up and down like she was a new tool. “Hang on,” he opened his black bag again, fishing in it for a quick moment. “Do not fire unless you absolutely have to. This isn’t suppressed, and you will call every dead bastard down on us if you shoot.” He handed an M9 to Sara. “Then there’s the fact that I don’t want to be shot.”

  “I… I don’t,” she stammered.

  He raised his eyebrows. “You want me to take it back?”

  “No,” she said quickly.

  “Only if they get past us then. Last resort.”

  She nodded, and he opened the door, sweeping left and right. That damned alarm was loud. WAH! WAH! WAH! The hospital wing didn’t have the alarm piped through as loudly, but it was still there. There were also panicked people everywhere. The long corridor was filled with doctors, patients, and some military looking for something to shoot. It wasn’t chaos, but it was getting there, and I had seen this before.

  So had Lynch. He shook his head and sighed, “Everybody shut the fuck up!” It was like he flipped a switch. If it weren’t for that damned klaxon, you could have heard a pin drop. All the folks in the corridor looked at him. “We need to fortify this wing pronto. There are infected at the far door in the gym. It will not hold forever.”

  He started giving orders, and people started following them like he was the President. There were maybe forty people here, and half of them pushed every single piece of furniture toward the double doors, which one of the soldiers had secured with a serious electrical cable. The problem was that this was also a push-bar door, and the bar was on the other side. The door couldn’t be locked other than in the open position either.

  He had the other half of his little army start stockpiling all the food and water they could, but he kept the five of us together, and he said in a low voice pointing at me, “This man lives. I don’t give a shit about anything else, but he lives, is that understood?” Tim and Brick looked at each other, but all of them nodded and I felt like a dick.

  “We need to lock down the eastern elevators.” Lynch grabbed two guys in scrubs. “Come with us.” The seven of us ran down the corridor, and I looked into some of the other rooms as we did. Many of the people in the beds would not be able to run. We reached another door, and this l
ead to the section of the hospital where my room was. It was locked and the guard let us through. We ran down the corridor again, but it was shorter, only three rooms on each side. I must have been a high roller, because all the other rooms were still empty. They all had those windows and hermetic doors too. We got to the end of the hall, and another guard let us through, staying on the hospital side of the door.

  We were in a small elevator lobby, corridors going to the left and right and hooking around corners. Lynch checked one corner and Brick and I checked the other. There was nothing we could see.

  The spook looked at the stainless steel doors to the lift. “We need to use this elevator to get to the surface.”

  One of the guys in scrubs looked incredulous. “What about all the people in the hospital area? Why are they gathering food and water if we’re leaving?”

  Lynch was looking at the illuminated floor indicators above the elevator doors. The white light had been stuck on five, but it blinked out. “Back up,” he said and raised the HK416. We lifted our weapons too. “Solid firing line, nobody in front of anybody else, Sara, you fire if you have to.” The two guys without guns (which was weird, because everybody carried a weapon down here, even the guy who pushed the mop), backed up so they were on the side of us. The light over level four came and went, and Lynch knocked on the window to the door back into the hospital wing. The guard looked through the window, and Lynch told him to open the door. He did.