Primus Unleashed

by Amber Wyatt

  Ha! In your dreams, buddy. The feeling is NOT mutual, Hana smiled to herself. She genuinely liked him as a friend, and appreciated his good humor and support, but nothing more. As for being physically attracted to him? Ridiculous! She was most definitely not interested in him with his strong, rough mechanic’s hands and his broad shoulders, and his irrepressible, cocky smile. Hana certainly had no desire to become the latest trophy on what was undoubtedly a long and sleazy list of conquests. Still, she had to admit, he is very nice to look at. It won’t be that much of a hardship, having him around. She smiled as she remembered Hugh’s laughing face as he had joked with her that this would be their first date. Why am I smiling? He’s not even funny. But the smile did not leave her face.

  Hana stretched her hands above her head and twisted her slender frame left and right, sighing with relief as her back cracked with a satisfying pop. Then she bent back over her laptop to finish the last two slides of her presentation. During her time in the bunker Hana had spent dozens of hours analyzing every available video of zombie attacks in painstaking detail. In doing so, she had come up with her own set of observations on their behavior and abilities, and she intended to include these as part of her presentation to the group. It was not only because Behnke was paying her for her professional expertise, but selfishly she figured that the better briefed the entire group was, the better her own personal chances would be of surviving this whole insane expedition.

  Finally, the presentation was finished. Hana switched off the lights, set the alarm and locked up the shop for the night. The heavy key stuck for a second until she twisted forcefully and the solid bolt locked into place with a meaty clunk. Her truck was parked in the street out the front. She hopped into the cab, but paused, an uneasy feeling in her gut, to take one last look at the front of the shop.

  Tomorrow they would finish up their last preparations, load the vehicles and drive north to meet Behnke and his team. Hana smiled thinly as she suddenly put her finger on what was troubling her. Maybe it was because she had been blackmailed into joining the expedition, and had not gone through the decision-making process herself, but she realized that she was unable to even hazard a guess as to how the next few days were going to play out. Would it be a successful job, for which she would be well paid? Or was the whole idea doomed to be a catastrophic and fatal nightmare for her and for the entire group?

  “Is this a huge mistake?” she whispered out loud. There was no answer except for the silent street and the buzz of distant traffic. Hana smiled and shook her head.

  She switched on the engine, checked her rear-view mirror and drove off, still deep in thought. Unusually Takumi came to her mind for the first time in several weeks. She had never really thought about whether she would release him one day, or whether he deserved to die down there by himself. If she had ever thought about the question, Hana had simply assumed that she would just leave him down there unless a day came along when she changed her mind. But if she were to die in the next few days, then that choice would forever be taken away. She wondered if she should consider some kind of insurance policy to tell someone about her idiot husband down in his bunker?

  Screw him. If it wasn’t for him agreeing to this stupid contract with Behnke, I wouldn’t even be going on this crazy expedition. Hana snorted and put him out of her mind. It was a far better use of her time to focus on surviving this trip instead. Her thoughts returned to the videos of the zombies and the black night she had run three blocks shooting at them as they chased her. She was far better trained and prepared now. But those things could move fast. A lot faster than most outsiders could imagine. Hana wondered how many of the safari group were as prepared for the expedition as she was.

  She wondered how many of them would die in the next few days.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Zoupie

  Several miles to the north of the city center, the streetlamps of the suburbs gradually died out until the pitch black of the unseasonably cloudy night was relieved only by the glaring lights of the highway heading towards the border of the quarantine zone. Then, branching off from the highway towards the left, the access road blazed as straight as a laser across the black emptiness towards the IDRC compound. The double fences and the secure perimeter road were well lit, but the huge, windowless monolith enclosed within them squatted like a giant, black shadow rising up menacingly against the overcast night sky.

  Security patrols in vehicles roamed the outer perimeter at random intervals, but within the featureless building it was completely silent, as was normal when the complex shut down for the night. Unblinking cameras monitored empty corridors and the human prisoners sleeping in their cells. Without any stimulus, the herds of infected stood motionless and unbreathing, waiting like statues in their secure pens far below the empty laboratories. Only one man was at work, still in his office long after midnight; the director of the IDRC.

  Similar to Hana, Indika was also obsessed with studying the behavior and abilities of the infected. However, unlike her, he had not been limited to grainy CCTV videos from the Internet. He had the luxury of a well-funded research facility in which he could test his theories upon large numbers of actual infected. And Indika’s researchers had made full use of their test subjects, setting up scenario after scenario between the infected and their prey, and then analyzing the data produced afterwards.

  So far, the IDRC researchers had come up with many of the same observations as Hana. The infected were significantly more dangerous in larger numbers, as if they received a boost to their abilities from some unseen source, simply from being close to one another. The more of them there were in a group meant that they moved faster, were more decisive, were more deadly. The increase in their abilities was not permanent however, and depended totally upon the infected individual being in close proximity to the others. Once isolated from the group, a lone infected would revert once more to its original slow speed.

  In a similar way, physical proximity, not just to one another, but also to their prey, seemed to have a significant, galvanizing effect on the infected. The closer they were to uninfected humans, the faster they moved. Indeed, because of the initial, sluggish approach of the infected, the majority of their victims were taken by surprise by their deceptive acceleration, which culminated in a lightning quick lunge at their prey.

  With free access to a population of infected and the ability to observe first-hand the infection taking root in their victims, Indika was much further ahead in accurately documenting the rules governing their capabilities. For example, he had very clear evidence that the number of individuals involved also seemed to have a third disturbing effect; the speed at which the infection took hold.

  The more individuals that were present during an attack, whether infected attacker, human victim, or a mixture of both, significantly increased the speed at which, once bitten, the victims turned into infected themselves. Whereas a single human, bitten by a single infected, usually took agonizing hours to complete their transformation, in large crowds this could sometimes happen within seconds. In addition, they had also noted that deep bites caused faster transformations than shallow ones. Multiple bites caused faster infections than a single bite. And a victim who was not just bitten, but actually killed by an infected, could reanimate almost instantly.

  Something that Indika could not understand, though, was that the abilities of some infected specimens differed significantly to others. Some individuals were faster and stronger, yet when they bit and infected human prey, the newly infected specimens were slower and weaker, as if their abilities were somehow diluted. This hypothesis appeared to be confirmed, when those newly infected individuals bit and infected what Indika termed the next generation. These new infected were then noticeably even slower and weaker still, although there was definitely a point, after two or three generations, at which the degradation in physical abilities bottomed out, no matter how many further ‘generations’ he pushed his experiments.

  Yet for all that h
e knew what the infected were capable of, what frustrated Indika and kept him up late in his office night after night, was that he could not understand what drove the infection to propagate in such an inefficient manner. Parasites, viruses and infections had, throughout their evolutionary history, developed multiple, complex lifecycles that often transited through a number of host species, such as mosquitoes, flies, pigs, and rats, before ending up in humans.

  Indika thought that if he could just identify the lifecycle of this infection it would aid greatly in understanding the virus itself, or at least the mechanism by which it functioned. And that would be the first step in progressing towards some type of cure. He had tried many times to formulate some kind of logical theory to explain the Lyssavirus, but he had always come up short, grasping in frustration at a solution that hung tantalizingly just out of reach.

  For the past week he had been focusing his efforts on conducting experiments to try to understand the basis for the highly aggressive attack reflex present in all of the infected. Indika still could not understand the driving motivation behind it. Clearly the way that the infection propagated itself was through human hosts attacking and infecting other humans. Yet the infected showed little regard for the survival of their potential hosts. In fact, what happened in reality was often the opposite, with many victims being killed outright.

  Their attacks had much more in common with predators driven by hunger to attack their prey. They did not stop attacking after their target was infected, they stopped only when the victim either escaped or was dead; which made no sense for the theory that they were seeking new hosts to infect. But what was equally puzzling, once their victims were dead, they stopped almost immediately and had no interest in ingesting of the flesh of their prey, which thus made nonsense of a theory based upon predation.

  The abilities of the infected also seemed to defy any logical explanation. The conscious and autonomic mental functions required to balance, walk, run, identify prey and engage in a lethal attack all required highly evolved brain function. Yet comprehensive scanning still revealed no indication at all of any thinking process within the infected, let alone any ability to communicate amongst themselves. In nature all predators, even solo predators, were able to identify and communicate with each other. However, far from communicating, the infected specimens in the IDRC seemed totally oblivious to the existence of each other.

  Indika sat back in his chair finally, frustrated, rubbing his eyes which were dry and tired from staring at his screen all night. He turned off the laptop and slumped back for a while, looking at the photo of his family on the desk in front of him. It was time to call it a night. He would continue again first thing in the morning.

  The problem, he realized, was that he was restricted to researching only those specific infected specimens which he presently held in his laboratory. Given that the level of infected abilities seemed to be diluted through each successive generation of victims, Indika suspected that he currently held a population of what were significantly low-level individuals; diluted through at least three or four generations, probably more. If there was such a thing as a ‘thinking’ infected, his theory required it to be several levels higher than any that had been seen so far. In fact, it was quite possible that those he had mentally termed ‘high-level’ infected, had been killed off at the very beginning of the outbreak years ago. Either that, another chilling thought occurred to him, or they were sufficiently intelligent to have avoided detection, even after all these years.

  What Indika really needed was some way of observing the infected in their natural habitat, if such a thing could be said to exist. He needed raw data of how they interacted with each other outside of his laboratory. There was a limit to the real-world conditions that he could recreate here in his labs. Indika needed a zombie expert; a naturalist or zoologist who had studied and understood them.

  Perhaps if Qureshi had not turned out to be a fraud, he could have been consulted as an expert of sorts. But otherwise it seemed that the only people keen enough to try and get close to the infected had also turned out, unsurprisingly, to be lacking in both intelligence and an aptitude for survival. Fortunately, there was an ample supply of adventurers with a poorly developed instinct for self-preservation, who continued to find zombies an endless source of fascination. Their video footage, usually recovered posthumously, supplied regular opportunities to observe how the infected interacted with prey out in the real world.

  As Indika turned off his lights and locked his office in the IDRC, in the suburbs on the other side of Fort Lauderdale, a young teenager named Liam hummed happily as he fed the last seam of his zombie suit into the sewing machine and pressed his foot down on the pedal. The machine dutifully chattered away, attaching the long zipper to the rear opening of the suit. Liam’s costume hobby had long since outgrown the small bedroom in which he had lived since the age of three, and he had taken over his mother’s basement as his de facto office and workshop.

  He snipped off the last threads with satisfaction, and hung up his latest creation on a mannequin to see if it needed any last alterations by hand. Although he was well practiced now, this latest suit had taken the longest to complete, as he relied on his mother to ferry him back and forth to the crafts shops where he bought his fabrics and supplies.

  Other zombie enthusiasts used the terms costumes and suits interchangeably, but for Liam it was always a suit. Because in his mind, he was not playing at dressing up in ‘costumes’; his designs were for serious research purposes. However he had to confess, that even though he despised the other zombie groupies and cosplayers around the world, he still enjoyed the adoration and fanatical following he received on Zoupie.net and other fan-sites, as the only zombie imitator (again he was very specific that he was an imitator, and not a cosplayer) who actually lived in the Zombie Zone itself. That’s right. In the actual double Z, with genuine, real live zombies as his neighbors.

  When not working on his suits, Liam posted daily updates on the latest zombie action in the zone and answered fan mail, which included far too many offers of marriage for his seventeen-year old mind to comfortably appreciate; although there had been that one email with attached photos from a stripper in Tacoma that he had saved, and occasionally looked at wistfully.

  His passion was his personal philosophy of harmonious human/undead coexistence, which had garnered him no small amount of global ridicule, but at the same time just as many positive comments. Liam believed that the undead humans (he only ever used this term to refer to them, never the word ‘zombie’ as he believed it to be too commercial) were simply a new type of animal which, through study and analysis, could be understood and hence their behavior manipulated. In Liam’s ideal future society, live humans and undead humans would not be locked in conflict but would live together in holistic harmony.

  His theories had been received with ‘no comment’ speculation from both academics and the government, and with wild adulation from his fans. Online he had already been named “The Zombie Whisperer”, which he had to admit had much more of a ring to it than UIE, Undead Interaction Expert, the title he had given himself. Liam’s original philosophy had been simple. If you walked, talked, looked like and smelled like an undead human, other undead humans would accept you as one of their own. An online cosplay journalist had written up Liam and his theory in a surprisingly well thought out article only a month previously, although under the unfortunately populist byline of “Don’t Fear The Zombie, Be The Zombie!”

  The suit was the ultimate test model of his six-month project. Everyone knew that the undead of the Lyssavirus did not resemble the classic zombies of the traditional, horror genre in any way. They did not decompose, and other than obvious physical injuries, resembled normal humans in all respects. But Liam had had a moment’s epiphany while castigating an online fan group that dressed up as cinematic, horror zombies. In order to infiltrate the undead, he did not have to look like them at all, he simply had to not look alive. And what better
way to appear lifeless than to dress up as a classic, rotting zombie? And thus the idea had been born, to create suits resembling decomposing corpses complete with rotting meat.

  His detractors argued that his suits looked and smelled nothing like the Lyssavirus undead. Liam rolled his eyes and replied ad nauseam that he was not trying to simulate them. He only needed for them not to recognize him as live prey, and so he had recreated visual identifiers of decomposition and masked his own live scent with something more overpowering. Using remote cameras, he had set up and filmed several experiments near known, undead danger areas. He had captured footage of undead humans walking straight past his prototype suits, ignoring them in favor of the various bait items he had also set up.

  Following online comments and feedback, the bait items had started off as a variety of live and dead animals, purchased from his local pet store. But after realizing that the undead were completely uninterested in animals, Liam had replaced them with electronic alarms that he named ‘squealers’, that either flashed lights or made noise or did both. In the last few experiments he had leashed live animals to posts, hidden inside the latest versions of his ‘dead’ suits and had watched with thrilled satisfaction as the undead ignored them and lumbered straight past to tear into the panicking animals thrashing around inside uncamouflaged suits that looked exactly like moving, human-shapes.

  Liam’s research, avidly followed by fans and monitored dispassionately by government agencies, showed that the undead had no magical sixth sense that could see through walls, and were still dependent upon the physical integrity of their sensory organs. If a zombie still had eyes and ears, it was much more effective at tracking prey than a zombie without them. The attachment to the suit of dead or rotting meat more than 48 hours old also seemed to act as a mask behind which the undead were unable to detect the scent of live bait. Interestingly enough, the undead seemed completely uninterested in the bait animals once they had escaped from the suits. It seemed to follow therefore that they were attracted only by the initial human shape of the suit.