Primus Unleashed

by Amber Wyatt

  After the briefing to the Lazarus officers was finished and Shepard and Vockler had disappeared back to their troops Taylor pawed at Indika’s sleeve and beckoned him to stay in the boardroom.

  “It’s important, Doctor Indika,” Taylor jerked his moist hand back from Indika’s arm when he saw the disgusted expression on the Director’s face, “I promise, you will be very interested in this, just give me two minutes.”

  Indika hesitated for just a fraction of a second and Taylor quickly grabbed the opportunity to show him his laptop screen.

  “It’s Qureshi, sir, our main bounty hunter who supplies us with infected specimens,” Taylor started flipping through photo after photo, showing closeup shots of the infected specimens housed in the cages under the laboratory. “All of his infected specimens show bruising and abrasions around the wrists where they have been restrained. None of the others do, only his, and based on what you just said… that they don’t bruise or heal or scar I think … well, I think Qureshi’s zombies were restrained before they were infected.”

  Indika’s sneer of disdain had been replaced by a look of surprised understanding, and then a severe frown as he pulled the laptop away from Taylor and intensely scrutinized image after image.

  “Even the ones we have been testing for the effects of impact and blunt force trauma, sir. I mean sometimes their bones break, but they never bruise. Never.” Taylor did not feel the need to inform Indika that occasionally he strung up his own pet zombie girlfriend up to the newly fitted bolt in his ceiling and used her as a punchbag when he had had a stressful day at work.

  “Also, Doctor, you mentioned that typical identifiers of infected are pre-infection, defensive wounds to the hands and arms as the victims tried to fend off their infected attackers,” Taylor wiped his suddenly sweaty brow as he realized that Indika was had stopped scrolling and was looking at a closeup photo of specimen 47, formerly the tax attorney, bondage aficionado and all round jerkwad known as Pham, who had a clear bite mark on his forearm. Fortunately, on that day Taylor had not fastened the restraints on Pham tight enough to cause any bruising. “None of Qureshi’s infected have defensive wounds, they all have bite marks on the face or chest…”

  “Because their hands were bound behind them when they were bitten,” the IDRC director finished Taylor’s sentence for him. Indika held up a finger for silence as he mulled over a few possible scenarios, before rapidly reaching the most logical conclusion. “Qureshi has a captive infected,” he pursed his lips thoughtfully, “a goose that lays golden eggs. He kidnaps these men from somewhere, some show clear bruising to the face, indicating a pre-infection struggle, then he ties them up, has them bitten by his pet infected, and then, after they transform into zombies, he delivers them to us to collect his bounty.”

  Taylor’s triumphant smile faltered slightly, he had hoped to present the theory himself, but Indika’s quick mind had leaped ahead of him. “So, I was correct to bring this to your attention, sir?”

  “Absolutely, yes!” Taylor shrank under Indika’s ferocious scowl. “This man Qureshi has obviously been clever, and has so far picked victims who have not been missed. But this state of affairs cannot continue indefinitely. It is only a matter of time until he picks the wrong victim, or someone notices one of these men going missing. We cannot risk any attention whatsoever being drawn towards our activities here at the IDRC. Especially the use of live humans under Project Lazarus,” Indika stood and started pacing around the boardroom. “I will not allow our work here to be jeopardized by the greed of a common criminal and murderer.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “You have done very well, Taylor, to bring this to my attention. Very well indeed. We should probably look at promoting you at your next annual assessment.” Indika beamed kindly. “It’s getting late, why don’t you go home for the day. Don’t worry, leave this matter with me to sort out.”

  Taylor needed no further encouragement. He rushed downstairs, signed out of the lab and drove his Camaro into Fort Lauderdale’s evening traffic, singing along to the radio and feeling on top of the world. It was not often that he got to impress Indika and he hoped to ride that goodwill for a while. And he was up for promotion! Thirty-five minutes later he was walking through his front door and ordering a pizza delivery on the phone as he pulled the key out and closed the door behind him.

  “Hi Honey, I’m home,” he shouted, and giggled to himself, “sorry I’m late, we had a meeting and it went on for ages.”

  There was no answer from Lan. She was hanging where he had left her, legs spread-eagled and upside down. Her body was covered with slogans and insults that Taylor had written on her pale skin with a permanent marker. The scars under the breasts had opened up again and were seeping, but Taylor hardly noticed any more. The bag over her head twitched slightly, but otherwise there was no movement. Taylor raised his hand high and slapped her as hard as he could between her legs, and the zombie dutifully growled around its gag and bucked against its restraints. He looked at his watch. Thirty minutes until the pizza arrived. Maybe he had time for a quick session? It was an evening to celebrate after all.

  After Taylor had left the boardroom, Indika sat for a while thinking, before making a call on his cell phone. “Hello Major Shepard? Indika here. Could I trouble you to come back up to the boardroom? It appears that a problem has arisen which will require your men and your particular skillset to solve. Yes, two minutes is fine, thank you.” Indika smiled, looking at the walnut tabletop at something only he could see. “What is it about? I need to discuss with you how we are going to deal with our good friend Mr. Qureshi.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Bad Company

  Hana leaned back in the chair, wrapped her hands around yet another mug of steaming hot cocoa, and looked at the pile of supplies she had spent the morning stacking in the corner of the store. Her thoughts, unsurprisingly, drifted back to the telephone call from the previous day, replaying the conversation over again in her head. In fact ever since that call, other than for a few hours when she had dropped off into a deep and dreamless sleep, she had been unable to think of anything other than the mysterious stranger and the implications of his bizarre contract with her idiot of a husband. Hana had been incredulous at first, and then she had laughed at the man on the other end of the phone. “Say that again. What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to help me get into the Quarantine Zone and take me zombie hunting,” the man calmly repeated. “To be precise not just me; myself and a group of ah, shall we say, interested parties. There will be a total of five of us in the party, including myself.”

  “You are crazy. Totally crazy,” she said flatly. “Nobody comes into the zone. It’s illegal as hell, there are thousands of soldiers guarding the border, once you get in you can never get out, and oh, in case you forgot, there’s a fucking zombie plague in here!”

  “I am coming into the zone,” the man said firmly, “and unless you want the world to start asking what happened to your husband, you will help me.”

  Hana had momentarily forgotten the prelude to the conversation, overwhelmed by the absurdity of the man’s request, but now that she was reminded of the thinly veiled threat to reveal her secret, a sensation of sickening dread wrapped its frozen tentacles around her heart.

  “Okay,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “So you want to come into the zone and I am going to help you.”

  “That’s much better.” She could hear the man’s smile over the phone line. “Now here’s what…”

  “YAAAAAAH!” Hana screamed in terror, flinching and leaping up in the air as she turned and caught sight of Hugh standing right behind her. “Don’t creep up on me, asshole!” she bellowed at him, her disheveled hair hanging over wild eyes. “How the fuck do you keep coming in here without the bell going off?”

  Hugh thought she looked more beautiful than ever. The forgotten phone at her side warbled with an unintelligible query and Hana quickly put it back to her ear.
/>   “I’m sorry,” Hana brushed back her hair with her other hand, “someone just walked in. Can you call me back later?”

  “Ah, the very handsome Mr. Willis no doubt? Get rid of him. I’ll call back in an hour.”

  She hung up the phone and glared at Hugh furiously. Hana had no idea what the stranger was talking about. Hugh is not ‘very handsome’ at all. He is very annoying. Hugh returned her look blandly and slurped an unconcerned mouthful of soda through a straw.

  He swallowed and raised a paper bag in one hand. “Souvlaki? I got one chicken and one lamb, so you can choose which one you want.” He put the bag on the desk and took another pull on his straw. “So,” he flashed a blinding grin at her. “Who wants to come into the zone?”

  Hana thought for a moment and then just gave up with a sigh. I might as well tell him. I’m probably going to need to ask for his help to get everything ready anyway. “You’ve probably heard of him,” she answered. “Philip Behnke.”

  Hugh started laughing but when he saw that she was serious, his grin faded and a thoughtful, serious expression spread across his face. “Why the hell would one of the richest men in the world want to come here?”

  Philip Behnke had made his first million dollars by the age of nineteen. A genius at coding and design, he had emigrated from Stuttgart, in southern Germany, to California and spent the next two decades flipping one tech company after another to ever hungrier investors and venture capitalists. Forbes magazine had confirmed his status as the youngest entrepreneur ever to go from zero to a billion dollars. It was the archetypal rags to riches story, but for Behnke the fairy tale still lacked the requisite happy ending.

  Shorter than his peers at school, he had been the stereotypical, skinny nerd, and his formative years had left him with an inferiority complex, which the adult billionaire was still fighting to overcome. Handicapped by a sociopathic lack of interest in anyone other than himself, a latent streak of cruelty and a devastating lack of charisma, Philip had made few friends through the course of his career. His lack of popularity had gone from being a secret, private shame to an undisguised longing, and from there, to an overriding obsession for public approval and adulation.

  In order to pursue his quest, Behnke’s first decision was to separate himself completely from the management of his group of companies, and focus on a personal, physical transformation. This comprised targeted liposuction, hair implants to counteract his early-onset, male-pattern baldness, a punishing gym regimen and a nine-month course of anabolic steroids. He had emerged from his self-enforced metamorphosis with impressive pecs, biceps, broad shoulders, a bulging stomach which no amount of crunches had been able to flatten, incipient gynecomastia, angry swathes of rampant acne across his back and shoulders, and near constant, 24-hour flatulence from his diet of protein shakes, boiled eggs, chicken breasts and broccoli.

  Behnke’s announcement that he had also been training in Muay Thai and wanted to become a professional MMA fighter had been met with both derisory hilarity and some curious, if cautious support. But any optimistic hopes were quickly dashed after the resounding disaster of his first competitive bout in Las Vegas, when ‘Krazy Ivan’ Safonov took less than thirteen seconds to demolish Behnke’s MMA dreams, his twice-modified Beverly Hills nose and his twenty thousand-dollar, perfect white teeth.

  Three nights later, licking his wounds at a wine-tasting mixer at a private room in the Bellagio overlooking the hotel’s fountains, teeth repaired and bruises blossoming colorfully, fate had seated Behnke at a table next to a morose looking Englishman who attracted his curiosity primarily because he looked even more depressed than Behnke himself. From his unfocused eyes and disheveled clothing, he had also clearly been drinking long before the event had even started.

  His name was Mark Wilkins, according to the little name badge that he and everyone else was wearing to help break the ice, although Wilkins’s badge did not list any company underneath his name. Everyone else at the table was following the directions of the nasal Bostonian sommelier as he extoled the virtues of the various bottles of 2007 Bordeaux in front of them. They carefully eyed the color, sniffed the bouquet, delicately sipped and swilled the wine, and wrote down notes next to each of the bottles in the catalogue in front of them. Wilkins, sweating and ruddy faced, ignored their disapproving glares, gulped down the six sample glasses in front of him and gestured drunkenly at one of the waiters to refill them.

  “Which one would you like to try again, sir? The Chateau Quinault? Perhaps the Troplong Mondot?”

  “All of them,” he snapped angrily, “free-flow, that’s what the advert said. So fill ’em up.”

  The waiter stiffened almost imperceptibly and the professional smile froze for just a moment. “Of course, sir. Just one moment please.”

  “What are you looking at? See something you like?” Wilkins leered groggily at the stunning, blonde Czech lady next to him. Behnke, sitting on his other side, might as well have been invisible. It was understandable. She was worth looking at, and the blond Englishman’s drunken focus had been transfixed by her spectacular, augmented cleavage since the beginning of the evening. Her husband, the rotund CEO of a software company from Palo Alto, ignored his trophy wife completely. He had recognized Behnke immediately, without needing to read his name-tag, and had spent the last forty minutes unsuccessfully trying to draw him into a conversation about investment opportunities. “Christ on a crutch,” Wilkins looked around and noticed Behnke’s face for the first time. “What happened to your face? You look like you’ve just boxed ten rounds with King Kong.”

  Behnke was about to snap back a biting retort and then to his own surprise, he found himself smothering a laugh that bubbled up from out of nowhere. He wondered if it was because of the extremely high dosage of Targin he was taking for his swollen nose. A part of him was pleasantly horrified at how candidly he decided to answer the question. “I was…” Behnke smiled wryly, “I suppose I always have been, looking for an adventure. Not just any adventure,” he clarified. “The adventure of a lifetime.”

  The other man’s inebriated good cheer evaporated in an instant, and he looked deep into Behnke’s eyes with piercing intensity. “That’s funny,” Wilkins said in a voice which indicated that he did not find it very funny at all. “Because I’m on the adventure of a lifetime, and I would do anything not to be.” Then he returned his attention to the wine glasses in front of him as the waiter appeared with a bottle of the wine being sampled. “Go on sunshine, fill it to the top. No mucking around with half a glass, you’ll just be wasting your time going back and forth filling them up again.”

  For Wilkins, the rest of the night disappeared into a drunken haze with nothing registering on his conscious memory until he woke up from a dreamless sleep the next day, and groggily realized that he must have somehow managed to get back to his hotel room before passing out. To his surprise he felt much better than he had expected to, bearing in mind that he had been drinking almost constantly for 48 hours. Wilkins sleepily surmised that the only reason he did not feel too hungover was because he was probably still drunk.

  He laid there on the sofa feeling himself slowly come back to full wakefulness, letting the sounds of the day sink into his fuzzy mind, and the soft sunlight warm his eyelids. Gradually a number of things began to filter through to his dehydrated brain that something was not quite right. Firstly, his bladder was about to explode and he really needed to get up and find a toilet. Secondly why was he on a sofa and not in his bed? Thirdly his hotel room did not have a sofa. And lastly, he was not alone in the room.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he opened his eyes and squinted accusingly at the man drinking orange juice and leafing through papers at a table across the room. “Where am I?”

  “Oh God, not again.” Behnke gave him an exasperated look. “We already had this conversation several times this morning. Drink that water, take some more aspirin and see if you can stay awake this time. I’ll order some coffee.” Behnke’s newly repaired te
eth were aching and he was running short on patience.

  Wilkins looked at the side table and saw a waiting bottle of mineral water and a scattering of aspirin. That’s right. He vaguely remembered waking at some stage, gulping down half a liter of water and taking some of the pills before. No wonder he wasn’t feeling too bad. With the exception of his painfully engorged bladder.

  “Philip,” he mumbled, as he chewed the pills to make them easier to swallow. “That’s your name.” Fragments of conversation from the night before were coming back to him now. “You’re looking for an adventure.”

  “Yes I am, Mr. Wilkins,” Behnke waved one of the photocopied sheets at him by way of illustration, “and you have provided me with exactly what I am looking for.”

  “Hey those are my papers!”

  “Yes they are. And as we agreed last night, we are going to go into the quarantine zone together, you and I.” Behnke grinned a manic grin that sent a shudder through Wilkins and made him wish that he had another drink to hand.

  Wilkins looked at the thick bundle of papers that Behnke was reading, and sighed deeply. Those damn things had cast a shadow over him his entire life. The letters had been in his family for generations, and the originals were securely locked in a safe in his grandfather’s attic back in England.

  In the late autumn of 1876, a sealed and waxed packet of papers from the Americas arrived in Cornwall, England, at the house of Solomon Cope, a successful steam engineer still grieving for his younger brother, who had disappeared at sea five years previously, when his ship the Ken Bartlett went missing, presumed lost with all hands in one of the many treacherous storms common to the tropics. If Solomon was astonished to find that the packet contained a letter from his brother, Paul, third mate on the missing whaling ship, then his astonishment only grew when he read the contents of the letter. The very first line of the letter warned that what followed would seem to be the ravings of a madman and indeed implored his brother not to dismiss the contents as such.