by Unknown
He’d checked up on her a few times—whenever that tell-tale tingle on the back of his neck made itself known—and he’d always arrived just in time. When she was a student at Carnegie Mellon attending a mixer, he’d arrived just in time to see a young man add something to her drink.
Adam hadn’t seen Elizabeth as the grown woman she was, because in his eyes, she was still very much the small, helpless, big-eyed child with no one in the world but him.
That was a murder that he carried no guilt for and when he thought about it even now, it gave him a sense of satisfaction. A job well done.
His fingers curled into fists. No one would hurt Elizabeth. She was the last and he wouldn’t fail.
He thought about her again. She’d seemed so different than all of the others.
Flashes hit him hard and fast. If he’d been human, they’d have been called “migraines.” But he was just a monster who inflicted pain, he wasn’t supposed to feel it.
She was in a lab with John Fucking Polidori.
Adam snarled past the discomfort, the electricity crackling around his head like lightning. He forced himself to be calm. She was safe with Polidori, at least from his fucking leech teeth. The burns on his arms would make sure of that. Even with all the distance between them, the lightning would find him and turn him to ash if he tried to drain Elizabeth.
But that wasn’t the only danger.
He could see the paths unfolding before them, and perhaps that was his purview as a monster and not a man, but if she chose to continue what she was doing, Elizabeth Wollstonecraft could unleash an armageddon unlike anything this world had ever seen.
She and Polidori were meddling where mortals ought not to trespass.
Adam himself was evidence of such things.
For a moment, he considered sitting back in the bowels of the castle and letting the world spin as it would. After all, why did it fall to him to save the dumb, lumbering, cruel beasts from themselves? They’d never done anything for him.
The world would be a much more beautiful place, the planet so healthy and green, if the talking apes who liked to play God were obliterated. No more hunts, no more fear, no more war. No more starving children. No more torture. No more oil spills, or whole species of animals wiped from the face of the planet that was meant to nurture them.
None except one, the parasite known as man.
But he couldn’t get the memory of little Elizabeth out of his head. The way she’d turned to him for safety and comfort without hesitation. Without fear.
She wasn’t a child anymore; she was a woman grown who made her own choices. She didn’t need a champion or a defender.
Goddamn it.
It was the small things that did him in. The helpless things. The pitiful things.
He sighed. Adam could never turn away a stray—and that’s what she was, a stray trying to make her way in a world of those who belonged.
Alone.
He knew what it was be alone. To be lost and searching for something.
The human race was lucky he was bound to this particular human. For her, he would save them. For her, he would change the tide.
All because of the kindness she’d shown him once, a very long time ago, when in her moment of grief, a child could’ve forced his hand. A child could’ve forced him to give his gift and raise the dead.
Instead, she hadn’t asked him for anything but the comfort of his arms around her while she cried.
Yes, for that, he’d save the goddamn world.
Lightning flashed and crackled, tearing through his body and bringing with it images of exactly where she was.
The island was beautiful, but the signage on the impossibly high stone walls, the electrified razor wire behind it was not.
Bureau 7.
He’d be walking into the lion’s den. They were chief on the list of those who hunted him, who wanted the secrets of his flesh. Who thought nothing of taking what they wanted. He’d killed more than one of their bounty hunters.
That extra sense told him she was on the isle of Kythnos. If the wind was with him, he’d make it in less than a day. That would be cutting it close.
If the wind was against him, it would take two.
Perhaps he’d leave it up to the great mother, if she wanted to shake off the human parasites like fleas?
Part of him still wanted to give this choice over to a higher power. He wished he believed in that, but he didn’t. He’d seen no evidence of the divine in all his long years. Only the earth beneath his feet, the sky overhead, and man, a talking ape throwing his own shit at the wall in the dark.
Adam needed to gather his supplies, mostly making the boat ready for human occupation. He didn’t need the creature comforts, but Elizabeth might. She’d need a new identity as well, because if this went down like he feared, she’d be number one on Bureau 7’s shitlist. He wasn’t going to go to all this trouble to stop the apocalypse just so they could decide she was a liability and take her out.
Adam put in a call to his employer, leaving a message that he would be gone for several days for a family emergency and proceeded to outfit the boat. The sooner he could set sail, the better. He wouldn’t wait for the tide.
As soon as he’d gathered what he needed aboard the No Stars, he started the engine on the oceanvolt, an electric and solar powered generator that harnessed the energy he created sailing—just enough to propel him out into the open sea and then he’d be using wind power all the way.
He wondered if she’d remember him, because it seemed through all these long years, he’d never stopped thinking about her.
Adam was sure, if she remembered him at all, it would be gray and fuzzy. Perhaps she’d already dismissed it as a dream.
Or a nightmare.
Those had a way of coming true.
Because it occurred to him that this was a ploy, a plot to get him to Kythnos. Polidori knew what 7 wanted from him and he could’ve filled Elizabeth’s head with all kinds of nonsense.
The monster Polidori spoke of in his ever so reassuring tones might not have even registered as the same one who’d held her hand as a child.
Not that it mattered.
He was going.
Soon, Bureau 7 would have more on their plate than they were prepared to manage, he was sure.
A zombie apocalypse would put a strain on anyone’s resources.
3
T hings that Dr. Elizabeth Wollstonecraft was prepared for while conducting an autopsy: strange sounds, strange smells, odd variations in what people think the human body should look like, and all the nitty gritty parts of being human—including bowel and bladder evacuation upon death.
Those things had never affected her.
The corpse on the table in front of her was something different, mainly because of the erection.
Most death erections were caused by a violent death that damaged major blood vessels causing priapism—the most common of these to cause the condition being hanging or strangulation. Her John Doe shouldn’t have been subjected to either.
She’d been led to believe that it was the injection of PrPM3.
Elizabeth examined his throat and found ligature marks.
What the actual hell was going on?
Polidori leaned over his work and moved quickly, scraping under the John Doe’s fingernails, drawing a blood sample and preparing the bone saw. “We need to get a look at his brain as soon as we can.”
“Wait, he’s been strangled. He was murdered,” Elizabeth said.
“Was he?” Polidori looked as if he already knew that.
“Just tell me what’s going on. Stop with the surprises. I can’t do my job effectively without all the facts.” Elizabeth gripped the side of the table, the cool metal grounding her and reminding her to breathe.
“Get a load of his Angel Lust.” He nodded to the erection.
“Yes, I saw that. That’s why I was checking for ligature marks, and I found them,” Elizabeth said, exasperated.
; The hand on the table jerked.
Elizabeth wasn’t fazed. While muscle movement after death was rare, it wasn’t unheard of. Neither was the sudden vocalization. The long, dry, death rattle that was simply air leaving the lungs.
What was unheard of, however, was when she pressed the scalpel to his chest, his eyes opened and he grabbed her wrist.
Elizabeth wasn’t ashamed to admit that she almost shit her pants.
She shrieked and Polidori grabbed him, pried his fingers from around her wrist, breaking them as he did so.
PrPM3 had done something to this man, something that made him not living and not dead.
His eyes were all white, yet not sightless. They tracked her. His jaw creaked and cracked as it separated, much like a snake’s as he dove for her arm. Venom dripped from newly sharp teeth—he had a mouth like a buzz saw.
“Elizabeth, if you’d please exit using strategy A, I’ll follow. The manacles will hold him until we’re free.”
As he spoke, the manacles in question clamped around his wrists and ankles, even his neck. The dead man turned his head at an unnatural angle to look at her. There was a rage in his unseeing eyes, something dark and unholy.
Fear knotted around her, and she found herself frozen to the spot.
This, what they’d made, it was wrong. “The phenobarbital,” she began.
“You have to understand, we need to study these specimens in real time. I thought you understood that now.”
“Goddamn it, Polidori.”
“I thought we agreed I didn’t need to read you any more nursey rhymes? Now, please. Do as I’ve asked. This one is stronger than we anticipated, and the manacles won’t hold him long.”
She pressed her lips together and looked between the escape and Polidori. “I won’t leave you alone with him.”
“Oh, my dear, I’m dead. He can’t hurt me. But you… he could hurt you very much. He’s obviously venomous, but I don’t know if he’s infectious. I don’t believe that’s how you imagined the end of your day.”
He was right. She did as he asked, trying not to think about what else he hadn’t told her or what other horrors awaited them. Elizabeth could do that later. Right now, she needed to get herself to safety, to the room beyond this containment unit.
They’d known what they’d done, what was going to happen. It was why the transport team had left so quickly. They’d dropped their parcels and evacuated the island like it was…
She got herself on the other side and, as soon as she was secure, Polidori released the thing.
He broke through the manacles as if they were nothing more than paper.
Jesus, it was strong. She wondered if the containment unit would be able to hold him. She ran back over all the exit routes from the installation, the safe houses and hiding places they’d shown her on the tour.
This was all supposed to be worst case scenario, something that happened due to forces beyond their control—not something they’d engineered on purpose.
She cringed at her own naiveté. Had she ever really believed such a thing? Deep down in the dark places of her heart where only truth could breathe?
No.
Now was the time for protocol.
She watched as it ignored Polidori, as if he was inconsequential to the thing. It followed in her steps, like a dog sniffing out her trail, and tracked her to the door. It dropped to all fours and licked the floor, venom and spittle pooling at the corners of its mouth. It gnawed on the doorframe with those horrible nightmare teeth. Not getting the result it wanted, it lifted its nose to the air, scenting.
Polidori eased his way around the room, edging toward the door. Waiting for it to explore some other avenue.
It seemed like hours they stood there, frozen. In reality, she knew it had only been seconds. Her fingernails had cut half-moon wounds into her palms and, when Polidori moved toward the exit, she held her breath.
His fingerprint opened the door and suddenly, the creature turned its head and darted for him, moving faster than she thought possible.
Her idea of what a reanimated corpse could do had been shaped by Hollywood, and this was a thousand times more awful. It seemed as if he was more sentient than she would’ve thought, with deductive reasoning.
The idea of a mindless hungry automaton was terrible, but put human cunning behind it with only a primal need to feed, and the possibilities were the stuff of nightmares.
It knew she was there. It still had no interest in Polidori, only that his fingerprint could open the door.
John made it into the decontamination sally port and, after he’d been rendered safe, he stepped through to the observation room where she waited.
With dawning horror, she watched as the creature put his finger up to the door as Polidori had, mimicking his actions to open the door. He splayed one hand on the window while he pressed the buttons with his other.
“He’s trying to talk!” John exclaimed.
Elizabeth fumbled with the controls on the comm and set it to record. This would all be transmitted back to the Bureau 7 mainframe for study and observation.
Proof, really.
His voice echoed with a death rattle, long drawn out exhales of what had to be putrid breath from dead lungs.
What he said made it all the more horrible.
“Help me,” he hissed in that singular voice. “Help me.”
“You know there’s no help for him, right?” John looked at her.
“Of course there is. It’s a one-two shot to the back of the head.”
He laughed. “I’m glad you’re not on about putting him down humanely. I don’t know that anyone should get that close.”
“I don’t know that it would work.” She wasn’t sure if it was fear or bile crawling up the back of her throat. “And a bullet to the cerebellum is pretty humane.”
He pressed himself more fully against the glass, his dead, white eyes fixed on her. They seemed to bore under her clothes, under her skin, and deep into the meat—meat he wanted to mash between those awful jaws.
As they watched, he began to bash his head against the door with all the supernatural strength in his reanimated body.
Smash after smash against the door bloodied his head. There was an audible crack to his skull, but it didn’t stop him. He licked at the gore on the window, devouring those bits of himself with a manic glee. All the while, he continued to watch Elizabeth.
She could practically feel his teeth tearing into her.
And he smiled. He grinned, a stretched maw, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking.
For all she knew, maybe he did.
“What’s going on with the other subjects? Were they all injected with PrPM3 before transport?” Elizabeth tried to pull up the vid feeds on the comm.
“No, only three of them. They were part of another study at the installation in Athens. Or that’s what it’s showing in the file.”
“So can we pull up the vids of what happened on transport? Why was this man killed?”
Polidori began typing, entered his clearance code and the vids from the transport came up. They showed nothing out of the ordinary until she saw a woman she recognized from her case files.
“Oh my god, stop it. Stop it there!” She pointed at the screen. “Zoom in on her. Dressed like security detail, but look, just there at the back of her neck.”
“Fuck,” Polidori hissed. “If that tattoo is any indication, she’s X.”
X was a group of paranormal militants that wanted to lift the veil, wanted to stop hiding in the shadows. They wanted to bring all of their kind out into the light so to speak.
That would induce a mass panic and anarchy that the world wouldn’t survive. At least, not the world of humans.
Leaving a vacuum for the paranormals to step in and take over. Humans would be used as slaves and livestock—the various secret organizations who worked within this world to protect humankind fought a constant battle.
They continued the playback and watched as
the woman injected their test subject with something and then broke his neck with a quick snap. She looked up at the camera and smiled before injecting three other subjects.
She’d still be in containment with them.
How many others had she injected? What was that shit?
“Damn it,” she growled.
“We have to get a sample,” John said what they were both thinking. “I’ll go back in. He’s not going to hurt me.”
“I’m going to call security and let them know we have a breach.”
“Let me get the sample first. Whatever this stuff was, we need to know. If we call for a lockdown, we’ll never know, but that crap will still be out there, a ticking bomb.”
“You’re right.” Elizabeth scrubbed a hand over her face and sighed. “Okay, so you’re going back in. What can I do?”
“There’s a secret compartment behind the cabinet.” Polidori pointed. “Open it.”
“Can’t you?” She narrowed her eyes.
“There’s a weapon in there that will key to your biometrics. You need to open it so it will key to you. I don’t need it. I have my own weapons.” He clicked his teeth together to accentuate his meaning.
He stood precariously close to the entrance, and there was something about the situation that felt wrong, but against her better judgement, she opened the panel.
Instead of the weapon he’d promised, a hidden door opened revealing a secret room, and from what she could see of it from the outside, it looked to be a panic room.
Polidori was abandoning her.
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth. If you’ll recall, I tried to talk you out of coming in today.” Polidori gave her a smile that was more pity than anything.
“So you’re part of this? Part of X?” She refused to acknowledge the panic rising in her chest.
“No, not at all. I’m part of Team John. See, your monster is coming. I can’t be here when he arrives. It would probably be better for all involved if you never met him.” He shrugged. “This way, the rest of us have a fighting chance.”