Wild Strawberry: Book 3 Ascent

by Trevor Donnelly

  Danniella nodded. The scientist made her feel uneasy, but at the same time a chill ran down her spine as she considered how dependent on him she was for survival.

  Danniella considered the severed head of her former boss. It was still shaking and snarling. Its eyes turned to hers and she saw the unmistakable hunger that characterised the undead.

  “Here’s the problem,” the scientist continued, choosing to ignore the fear and disgust that Danniella couldn’t hide, “the signal-” he touched his headphones with his pale fingertips, “is helping the nanites keep my brain working. But it’s not perfect, my brain is dying piece by piece. Right now I’m in control, but my hold is slipping. I’m a man with a taint of zombie. If I become a zombie with a taint of man, you, and any other survivors in London are fucked. If the hunger becomes my overriding desire and my reasoning power just gives me the ability to figure out how to get at the living, then it’s game over.”

  “One day at a time,” said Danniella with a sad smile, “it’s all we can do. I’m a biologist, I know next to nothing about radio waves. Without your knowledge, we’re all fucked. Don’t give up.”

  “OK, but you need to be careful. From now on you’ve got to chain me to the table, so you can get to safety if I turn.”

  “You kinky devil! I might have known you’d be into that kind of stuff.”

  The scientist tried to smile, but his face was so pale and his eyes so glassy the effect was hideous.

  Danniella flinched, and the scientist once more caught the distaste in her eyes. They looked at each other, embarrassed by a social situation that nothing in their previous lives could have prepared them for.

  The scientist smiled a genuine, though no less disturbing, smile. “They don’t mention how to deal with your revulsion when speaking to a zombie in Debretts Guide to Etiquette.”

  Danniella breathed out, unaware that she had been holding her breath. “No, we’ll have to think about that for the new edition.”

  “It’s almost a shame that they no longer publish The Sun, I could write to the problem page.”

  Danniella smiled too as the scientist continued, “Dear Deirdre, the last man on earth happens to be a zombie, he’s starting to go off, and he’s developing an unpredictable temper.”

  Danniella forced a laugh, “That’s not funny.”

  “It truly isn’t, but laughter may just be our last defence.”

  “To be fair, I’d prefer a chainsaw.”

  “I’d go old school: a samurai sword.”

  “Or a machine-gun.”

  “Speaking of guns,” the scientist’s face was suddenly serious, “I wonder what’s become of our military friends.”

  “They went out and didn’t come back.” Danniella was grim-faced as she spoke, “I’m sad to say I don’t think there’s any mystery as to their fate.”

  Danniella had never felt easy in the presence of the soldiers: she had never forgiven them for Tina’s ruthless dispatch. However, the realisation that they had gone triggered the now familiar sense of grief and loss that felt like a weight in the pit of her stomach.

  “It’s a shame though,” said the scientist thoughtfully, “if we work out the signal to neutralise the nanites we could have done with some muscle to help us set up a transmitter.”

  Danniella wanted to object to the scientist viewing the young soldiers’ deaths purely in such pragmatic terms, rather than as a tragic loss of human life. She wanted to object, but couldn’t: she couldn’t help feeling the same.

  She was genuinely sad that the soldiers were almost certainly dead, but the research and any chance to fix the apocalyptic mess that she had created was all paramount.

  * * *

  Days and weeks of painstaking research began. They had plenty of samples of infected tissue from the many bodies that lay around the complex.

  They had moved all the corpses to the refrigeration units. One of the most unpleasant discoveries was that the nanites continued to work even after the corpse was no longer viable. Once the brain had been badly damaged the pattern of a healthy brain could not be re-established, but brain cells were still being produced. Although this resulted in a fairly random mess of mush inside the heads of most destroyed zombies, it was theoretically possible that a zombie that had been ‘killed’ could heal its horribly damaged brain and reanimate once again.

  “The only way to be certain is to destroy the connection between the brain and the rest of the central nervous system.” The scientist rubbed his fingers over his head, his face was no longer familiar to the touch of his numb hands.

  “The only way is to switch off the nanites.”

  “They were supposed to have been designed to have a terminator switch, as a fail-safe against any unwanted side-effects. I’ve read Professor North’s notes: the idiot thought that the terminator switch hade made them too vulnerable. They’d been switching themselves off when someone’s mobile phone went off. So he’d told his sponsors that he had recalibrated the switch, but instead crudely removed it. It should still be buried in the artificial DNA, but finding the frequency and the signal will be a challenge.

  One side effect of the nanites working in the scientist’s brain was that he did not sleep. However, he was much more productive while Danniella was awake and working with him. He needed help to focus, and would start to stare into space for hours at a time when left to his own devices.

  One night Danniella went off to bed, leaving the scientist seemingly staring at a sample of brain tissue, but clearly looking straight through it. When she woke up six hours later he was still in exactly the same position.

  “Have you been staring at that all night?”

  The scientist looked shocked, caught out. “No, no. I’ve been busy, you know…”

  He also started to make simple mistakes in calculations, and Danniella had to check his entire output.

  Neither was comfortable speaking about it, but they both realised that the scientist’s brain was deteriorating. When Danniella suggested scanning his brain to see how long he was likely to have left he shook his head. “It’s a waste of our time; while I’m still able to work you need me to be working, not sitting around for half a day in the scanner.”

  As his concentration, memory, and ability to reason gradually declined he started going up to the surface more and more. His usefulness in the lab was reduced, but he could still get fuel for the generator and stock up on food for Danniella. He insisted being literally ‘chained to his desk’ while he was in the lab in case his iPod failed. Danniella would unchain him so he could go out twice a day, and was always relieved when he was safely locked up again.

  She felt the risk was worth taking as he would bring back not just basic rations but anything she wanted. Once he had taken a breadmaker from a department store, and then gathered flour and yeast, so she could have fresh bread every morning. He found caviar and truffles, pickled walnuts and olives. She feasted every evening, and worked to save the world every day.

  In scavenging for supplies among the wreckage that had once been London, the scientist would sometimes bring back clothes for them both in a variety of styles from top designers. Danniella was particularly delighted with a red leather jacket.

  “If we ever get back to the Bunker,” she said wistfully, “Summer would love this.”

  “We’re not far from working this out.” The scientist put a cold hand on Danniella’s shoulder: “We’ll get Summer her jacket.”

  * * *

  The research went better than they had expected. They pinpointed the frequency, and they found the signals that disrupted the work of the nanites, and were close to finding the terminator wavelength.

  “Once we find the signal, what then? Do we carry around a speaker to switch the zombies off, street by street?” The scientist stroked his tattered brow, “And when I say ‘we’ I mean ‘you’ as the signal will finish me off.”

  “We can get you earphones or something,” Danniella said uncertainly, “it won’t come to th
at.”

  “Danniella, I’m dying by inches; if our work is done, I’ll be glad to go.”

  “OK, but here’s my thought. The Bunker where I spent the last few months is an old Cold War installation: it has its own radio station, and broadcasting equipment. We can mount some speakers on a car to get there and once we plug in the code we can transmit for miles. I don’t know how far we can broadcast the signal but we can clear the area, regroup the survivors and work out how we can broadcast further.”

  Life was strangely fulfilling in the days that followed. Danniella was doing what she was trained to do: researching nanotechnology.

  Her companion was unnerving, and slowly starting to decay, but he was a scientist, and the conversation was stimulating.

  To make matters better, and if truth be told it made matters much better, the scientist was able bring back food from the surface.

  If it had not been for the guilt that all this was her fault, these would have been great times. She thought that these halcyon days were too good to last.

  She was right.

  * * *

  The scientist had been feeling his mind slipping away: like a slowly melting ice-cap he was losing his mind piece by piece.

  He pondered if he had been controlling its loss somehow. He had forgotten his name long ago, but since that had not been essential for his work, he considered that he might have let it go deliberately. He couldn’t remember if he had been married or not. He wasn’t even sure of his sexuality. He wore a golden band on his ring finger, but that could have been exchanged with a male or female partner. His sexual urges had been altered by death, or so he assumed, as he couldn’t remember how things had been before.

  He found Danniella attractive, but he felt there was something missing from the chemistry between them. It could simply be that she was alive while he was dead, or it could be that he usually preferred men.

  Did he have children? Surely he would remember that?

  If all this had gone, how come he had still remembered so much of his scientific training?

  Sometimes he wanted to tear off his headphones and slip into a permanent state of unknowing. But if he could do something useful with his increasingly miserable existence he wanted to try to carry on doing it.

  Then one day he was leaning over the table, peering through a microscope at the effects of the latest test signal on a sample of nanites. As he turned from the microscope the leads to his headphones snagged on the equipment, and they snapped out of their socket on the iPod.

  “Shit!” The scientist scrabbled to reconnect the lead, but the mp3 player had auto-stopped, and before he had a chance to switch ‘play’ he felt reality slip away. He was gone.

  * * *

  The scientist opened his eyes slowly. There was a dull, pounding ache in his head, and a sickening metallic taste in his mouth. He struggled to focus, his vision blurred.

  On the wall facing him he saw the words: ‘Combination = 1984. Done it. U work out how 2 broadcast 2 the world. Try Bunker - map in my notes.’

  In the corner of the room he saw Daniella, her back to him, her lab coat covered in blood.

  “Dan!” he called, shocked to hear how dry his vocal chords had become.

  She turned to face him.

  Her blonde hair had been plastered to the side of her face by dried blood. Her throat had been totally ripped out, the flesh torn away from her chin to the top of her rib cage, which was visible through the ragged wound.

  “No, no, no, no. I am so sorry!” the scientist wanted to cry, but his tear ducts had dried up.

  “Why didn’t you take the earphones for yourself?” He scientist wondered if it had been kindness or selfishness that made Danniella put the earphones back on him rather than use them herself.

  He released himself and looked at Danniella’s notes. She described not only the last, and successful experiments, but also what had happened after he had been disconnected from the signal that had been allowing him to keep his mind.

  Doctor X bit me today. He disconnected his earphones and went for me. It was quite a struggle. But we are so near the end; I am sure that if I stay focused I can finish the research and cure myself.

  There followed pages of technical information about frequencies and receptors. The pages were splashed with blood. The notes ended with:

  Eureka! I’ve found it at last! I’ve got the signal that should work.

  The codes to fire up the signal are on Doctor X’s desk; the desk he is currently chained to! I just hope I find them without too much trouble. Then I should be able to cure my own infection, and get ready to broadcast it to the world.

  Happily.

  Ever.

  After.

  Danniella had attempted to find the codes on his desk; the last piece of the puzzle to be put in place, but somehow the scientist had got to her first. His hands had been cuffed and locked with a combination padlock, but he had managed to get his teeth to her throat.

  She hadn’t made a choice between using the iPod on him or herself; she had wanted to save both of them. And failed.

  * * *

  The scientist made several copies of the research: on paper, on disc, and on memory stick. He would drop them off in labelled airtight boxes at several key spots along the way. If he didn’t make it, he hoped one of these “messages in bottles” would be found.

  He put the leather jacket for Summer in a bag. He considered wearing it, but suspected he was beginning to smell of rotten meat.

  An umbrella, taken from a roadside stall, kept the rain and sun off his decaying flesh. He did not want to speed up the rot; he had to make it as far as Rochester in one piece.

  He tried car doors till he found one open with keys in the ignition.

  Driving did not come easily. He was delighted that he could remember the mechanics of it, but his coordination was deteriorating. He crawled along at between five and ten miles an hour, but he still scraped the side of the car along walls and parked vehicles.

  He fumbled with the gears, crunching them at every change, and several times he hit the accelerator when he had meant to brake and the brake when he had meant to accelerate.

  There had to be several changes of cars; he smashed them repeatedly till they started to smoke, and then he abandoned them and walked till he found another suitable ride.

  Eventually he arrived at a crumbling fence. He had reached the Bunker.

  Chapter Ten

  Those who Remained

  It was clear that Max had felt that researching the cause and potential cure of the zombie virus would be an unbeatable trump card that would get him out of all difficult situations and guarantee him special privileges.

  “Elsbeth,” he spoke in a wheedling voice, “you understand how important my work is here?”

  “Yes, of course, you have mentioned it just once or twice.”

  “Well it is also highly stressful – responsibility for the survival of the entire human race weighs heavily on my shoulders.” He rubbed his shoulders to emphasise the point. “The pressure really builds up, you know?”

  “OK, I get it,” said Elsbeth, “life sucks after the Apocalypse.”

  “Yes, but it would be possible for you to help relieve some of the tension…”

  Before he could continue Elsbeth exploded in laughter and ran out.

  Five minutes later she was telling Jim in a hushed voice about the conversation.

  “He might not have been trying to have sex with you,” Jim ventured without conviction.

  “I almost could have been tempted – it’s been a long time…” intimated Elsbeth in a conspiratorial whisper, “but there’s nothing like a bit of romance…”

  Jim finished her sentence, “…and that was nothing like a bit of romance.”

  Elsbeth laughed. “Just a little romance would go a long way.”

  Jim found himself looking Elsbeth in the eye.

  She was around ten years older than him. Before the Apocalypse she had set up a gym in
one of the bedrooms of her house, and had used the gyms in the Bunker more than anyone else. She was a few pounds overweight, but to Jim’s view it made her pleasantly curvy. His eyes left hers for a moment to glance at her cleavage.

  Their eyes locked again, their breathing synchronised, and steadily growing faster.

  They had both lost their partners in the Apocalypse, and neither of them had ever considered finding anyone again.

  They moved closer, until their noses were almost touching.

  “I don’t know what this is,” Elsbeth whispered, her mouth close to Jim’s, “and I don’t want to make any plans about the future, but right now, I want you.”

  They kissed.

  Even with his wife whom he had loved, he had never felt this kind of intensity: they kissed so hard it hurt, their mouths mashing together, lips brusing with passion.

  Elsbeth took half a step back and ripped off Jim’s shirt. He grabbed her by the shoulders and tore off her blouse, buttons raining on the floor.

  Elsbeth had read about this sort of passion, and seen it in films, but before the Apocalypse she had always been too reserved, too concerned about destroying good clothes. Now she welcomed the bite of fabric tearing against her skin in a frantic quest to become naked.

  Jim forced her to the floor, and awkwardly pulled off her jeans. Then he gripped her knickers in his fist and tore them. Her bra was pushed up over her breasts, and his mouth found one nipple then the other.

  Before long they were both stripped, exploring each other with urgency. By the time he finally entered her they were delirious with joy.

  It had been so long, that they were both shaking with pleasure and excitement.

  Elsbeth had never had sex with anyone who had not been a boyfriend or husband, and a small part of her felt guilty for having sex with a man she had no intention of becoming committed to, but ultimately she felt that this was the most profound sex she had ever experienced.