by Oliver Atlas
The Sheriff won’t answer any questions. He won’t even speak. He points his big flashlight down one corridor, then the next, and finally toward one of the thick prison doors. The next thing I know we’re locked in a nearly lightless cell, ten by ten of cold cement, the Sheriff’s footsteps fading. The room has no windows, only the narrow slat in the door and a small vent on the walls near the ceiling. Both emit the faintest gray. Milly plunks down and merges with the blackness. She’s already shivering.
I sit and put my arm around her. “Okay,” I say, surprising myself by how calm I sound. “How about a little illumination.”
She sighs deeply. “I’m sorry, Blake. I was stupid . . . stupid! I . . . well, I’ve heard the rumors about Hercules Sanchez and thought maybe Jenny and Yaverts would be the ticket to seeing if the rumors were true. But I never thought we’d actually see anything. I was only looking for clues!
“What are you talking about?”
“Listen, Blake. The doctor, the orderly—that man they were working on. What did you notice?”
“Not much. The man looked pretty cut up. The doctor looked like he knew what he was doing.”
“Did you notice the man’s chest?” Milly must turn to face me. I can’t see her, but I can feel her breath on my neck. She tenses. “He wasn’t breathing.”
I give a skeptical chuckle. “Doctors don’t spend that kind of time treating dead men.” But then my heart freezes.
Milly is way ahead of me. “They do in Oregon,” she says, slipping her arm around my back. “That man was a Sleeper. We walked right in on a highly illegal procedure—the kind the Sheriff’s under investigation for, the kind my agency does not tolerate.”
“A Sleeper? Listen, Milly,” I say, dryly. “Let me tell you something. My master’s was in Peaceful Communications with an emphasis in Music Therapy. If this all involves anything about biology, necrology, legalese, or politicking, you’re going to have to spell it out for me.”
For a few seconds, Milly doesn’t answer. “‘Peaceful Communications’?” she says at last. There is either a hint of tease or of despair in her voice. Maybe both.
“Now’s not the time,” I say, feeling weary.
“Okay. Sorry. A Sleeper is a brand new carrier, a person infected through a zombie attack but not to the point of death. About two hours after exposure, their body will fall into a coma-like gestation. Check their pulse and breathing and they’ll seem dead. But approximately four hours later, they will wake up as living dead. Only . . . ”
“Only what?”
Milly’s arm on my back has gone stiff. Her whole body is suddenly tense. “Only . . . have you ever heard of Screamers?”
I snort. “Sure. The urban legend of the dreaded ‘swift and silent zombie’.”
“Yeah. Well, they’re real. Screamers exist. About one in a hundred Sleepers wakes up as a Screamer. No sound. And fast as a wolf.”
I try to suppress my doubt. “And the other ninety-nine?”
“Normal, run-of-the-mill dead-heads.”
“So, what does this have to do with our Sleeper back there?”
We’ve already been speaking softly, but now Milly whispers in my ear. “There’s been a spike of Screamer reports in the Territory. ODOZ has confirmed several sightings. I read a report hypothesizing that someone has found a way to treat Sleepers, upping the odds they’ll turn into Screamers. Hercules Sanchez—the Sheriff—is one of the prime suspects.”
I slip my arm from Milly’s shoulder and pivot to face her dark silhouette. “Wait a second. So you knew about all this and used Jenny as an excuse to see Sanchez? That’s what you were thinking all along? Even back at the train station? So why me? Just a buffer to make sure if you overplayed your hand with Yaverts he’d have somebody else to shoot?”
“Blake!” Milly grabs my hand and squeezes. “Not everything is so either-or. I wanted to make sure Jenny was okay. I wanted to investigate the Sheriff. When the two converged, I had to jump on the chance. But I would never use anyone. I’d rather—”
“Hail to the Sleep for he’s asleep and he needs hailing!”
The same caterwauling scream that taunted Josie erupts in the silence.
“Tanner,” I whisper, remembering.
“All hail the Prime Suspect! All hail the Grand Experimenter! Behold, the Experimenter cometh! He cometh with wrath in his hands!”
Footsteps now fill the gaps between screams. They draw closer. Someone is coming.
“The Sheriff?” I ask.
“Who else?” whispers Milly. “I have a plan. I think I know how we can get out of here.” She squeezes my hand again, hard. “Trust me.” She drops my hand and rustles at her dress. I hear the sching of steel and a sharp glint suddenly catches the room’s scant light.
The footsteps are upon us. At least three people. They stop at the door.
Without warning, a flashlight beams through the slat.
“Well, well. Ms. Ruse,” says the Sheriff. “Maybe you forgot: I’m paid to read people. Your hands appear to be in the position of someone holding a weapon. Very resourceful for a scientist, but it would be best to remember you are, in fact, a scientist, not a commando. It would also be best to remember I’m accustomed to dealing with real commandos and desperadoes, people with minds and hands a lot more devious than yours. So unless you’d like to get yourself and Mr. Prose shot, please toss whatever you’ve got over to the foot of the door.”
“This isn’t necessary, Sheriff,” says Milly, showing the knife. “I have no interest in reporting your experiments.”
She tosses the weapon across the cell and I wonder if I can cover that ground in the instant it would take them to open the door.
The Sheriff chuckles grimly. “Oh, I’m sure you won’t report anything to anyone—not, at least, until you’re out of my dungeon.”
“No,” insists Milly, shaking her head. “I never have to tell anyone. Even after we’re out. Especially after we’re out.”
“Very wise,” says the Sheriff. “Very wise. Now listen: we’re going to open the door, and I’ll ask you, for your own sakes, not to move. One bullet in there will ricochet enough to shred you both.”
“Why not shoot us, Sheriff?” I say, tired of playing around. “If you don’t mean to trust us, what’s the point of keeping us alive?”
“Great question, son,” he says, cranking open the door.
Two glaring lights suddenly blind us. I can’t see the knife even if I was feeling stupid enough to try for it. Two men heft a body into the room and set it gently down. They retreat and the door slams. Our chance to escape has come and gone.
The Sheriff’s at the slat again, his flashlight shining up onto his face as though he’s going to tell us a ghost story. “You were saying, Mr Prose? Oh yeah. I remember. ‘What’s the point of keeping you alive?’ Well, let me put it to you this way: what’s the point of keeping anybody alive?”
The flashlight clicks off, our cell goes dark, the Sheriff’s footsteps fall away.
In front of us rests the black log of the body.
“Is that the?—” I find that my back is suddenly pressed against the cell’s icy far wall.
“Yes,” says Milly, finding my hand. “That’s the Sleeper.”
Chapter Seven
Sleepers Awake
The next minute is the longest and quietest of my life.
I don’t know about Milly, but I’m certainly savoring our predicament. Locked up five feet from a Sleeper, a.k.a., a human body about to morph into a flesh-rending, brain-slurping beast. Oh boy.
“Wow,” I whisper at last. “Isn’t this a little too sadistic, even for the Territory?”
Milly’s teeth are chattering. “Not really. We’re loose ends. Sanchez can clean us up and produce new experimental material all at once.”
“‘Experimental material’? That’s us, right?”
“Pretty soon, unless we think of something.”
“How long do we have?”
Milly’s grip is
an icy vice. “We’re already well into the four hour gestation period. It must have taken some time to get the body down here and prepped, then there’s the procedure time, then there’s the time we’ve been waiting, I’d guess we have half an hour left at best. Hold on . . . . ”
She lets go of my hand, I hear a rustling of fabric, and a moment later a bright LED light blips on. Milly’s face is now all I can see in the gloom. Her eyes and hair are washed a ghostly white. She gives me a brave smile, but she can’t shake the fear around the corner of her eyes.
“You really are lovely,” I say before thinking.
Her smile changes, just for an instant, to one of genuine pleasure. “Thank you.”
Part of me still wants to chew her out for being nosy and sneaky and manipulative. Part of me wants to accuse her and have her wriggle under the weight of my distrust and anger. But the wiser part of me knows that if I let myself get really upset it would only be because of the old adage, ‘we despise in others what we most loathe in ourselves.’ And if I have any claim to maturity, it’s that I know how sneaky and manipulative I can be. “Where did you have that?” I ask, taking the LED from her. It’s a flat clip-on book light.
“Why else would I wear a dress?” she snorts. “I have so much survival gear sown into the hem, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“You had a light, you had a knife. What else do you . . . the knife!” Although I’ve been subconsciously afraid to do it until now, I thrust the light out toward the body. “I don’t think they took it.”
“No,” says Milly, rising to her knees. “I don’t think they did either. But if not . . . it’s under him.”
“Okay,” I say, straining to sound as calm as I wish I felt. “We roll him over and take it. There’s no risk in that, right? He’ll wake when he wakes.”
Milly shakes her head, frowning. “From what I’ve read, there’s a window toward waking—say five to ten minutes—when moving or touching a body too much can wake it prematurely.”
“We’ve got to try something. What about hogtying it? We can use my shirt and vest, my belt, my pants. We can rip off part of your dress . . . ”
Still shaking her head, Milly cups the side of my face gently. I think she thinks we’re about to die. I think she might kiss me. “We need the knife,” she says. “We need to drive it into his temple.”
The feeling of her hands near my own temples takes on a new weight.
I nod.
Together, we crawl the few long feet toward the Sleeper.
The body looks clean. The man’s face is broad, windburned, with a flat nose and thick, cracked lips. His hair is a thinning brown, his forehead is creased with worry lines. He looks completely human. He looks at peace . . . not festering with devilish fever.
“Blake,” says Milly, nudging me. “We need the knife.”
Handing the light to her, I stretch out over the body and feel for the knife at the base of the door. Nothing. I take a deep breath.
“What if he wakes up?” I ask. “What’s our plan?”
Milly stares. She hadn’t thought ahead, but now she bites at her lip. “Here’s our plan. If he wakes, you start kicking him in the head. But don’t get bitten. When he gets up, I’ll start strobing the light to confuse him, then you grab the knife and stab him in the base of the skull or the center of the temple. The eye would probably work too.”
“You know, Milly,” I say, suddenly angry and sad all at once. “I didn’t come out here to kill zombies. I didn’t come out here to save little girls or meddle with badass bounty hunters. I didn’t come out here to get duped into being some beautiful scientist’s bohunk human shield. I came out here to join my brother and to see Portland. All I want to do is work in his tea shop and write music. I don’t need to fix the world. I don’t need to control other people. I don’t need cheap thrills or false hopes. I want a garden and a guitar and maybe a girl to spend the rest of my life with.”
My jaw clops shut. I’m immediately self-conscious, feeling more wordy, whiney, and sentimental than I’d like.
Milly is staring at me again, although this time with a shrewd, hurt scrutiny. “Wow. That’s so bold, Blake, so novel. You want to go live in peace and harmony. And I suppose saving little girls doesn’t really have anything to do with that? All it takes is making it to Portland. Because I suppose Portland is just like you: it has no wrong in it, no fault lines or decay.” Milly shakes her head. “Sounds familiar,” she mutters. “Self-righteous religiosity is self-righteous religiosity by any other name. So you might as well be a Rubie, Blake. You might as well piss people off by wearing that cross. You don’t have to hold to a dogma to live as though life is some big mess that could be fixed if only you were in charge. You don’t have to beat people with a book to express that you think they’re a bunch of immoral idiots who would straighten up if only they knew what you know. I get it. No problem.”
“Milly—”
“No, I get it. Songs are only worth singing and girls are only worth knowing if they click into your own tired white-picket fantasy, disguised as it may be under its self-obsessed smokescreen of pseudo-sophisticated complication. And then there’s me—some woman who doesn’t know how to live in pure binaries, someone who doesn’t know how to separate what she wants from who she is. I guess I can’t be trusted because I trusted you to give me the benefit of the doubt and you didn’t. What does that say about my judgement? What does that say about my character? I suppose if we get out of here—and that, by the way, is looking doubtful—you’re going to give me a lecture instead of a kiss. I suppose you’re going to help me understand how womanish passions led me to mistake my raw attraction to you for a mutual interest in trying to do something good. Or no, sorry—how my manipulative wile has preyed upon your selfless goodwill.”
“Yeah, well . . . ” I’m already grunting as my left hand pushes the body at its hip while my right hand fishes under its backside. “That was quite . . . a rant. I’m sorry you . . . feel that way. And I’m sorry . . . for saying you were . . . lovely. Here it is.”
Milly’s face is torn between my petulant attack-apology and the fact that her knife is now in my hand. She swallows her hurt and excitement, pins the reading light on the neckline of her dress, and takes the knife. “I hope Jenny’s all right,” she says, meeting my gaze for a moment. “Now, roll his head to the side, please.”
Since I don’t want my hand by a mouth that could come snapping to life at any time, I cup the top of his head, grabbing hair, and twist. Milly scoots forward, knife at ready. The blade is about six inches long. It should go through one side and out the other.
“Shouldn’t he look worse, Milly? This guy looks like he’s plain old dead. Or asleep.”
“There are sometimes no real signs of atrophy or gestation. It’s all happening in the brain. The rest of the organs are pretty much irrelevant at this point.”
“What is happening?” I say, realizing even as I do that I’m stalling, and I’m not sure why.
“It’s complicated,” she says, leaning over the body to get her weight into a thrust. “It depends on whether it’s turning into a typical dead-head or a Screamer. Or something else.”
“Best case scenario?”
“For us?” Milly shrugs. “Best case is it’s a dead-head. That means most of its frontal lobe is shutting down and its amygdala is taking over. In cartoon neuro-necrology, its brain is converting from human to crocodile—only a crocodile that is perpetually ravenous, tormented, threatened, and furious all at once. Can you hold a little more still?”
My hands are shaking.
And why shouldn’t they be? I’m holding a man. We’re about to drive a blade into his brain. But he’s dead. Med students do it everyday. No—I’m holding a hatching demon crocodile who used to be a man. The only thing we can do is what we’re about to do. There is no other way.
Milly has measured up her stroke. She’s ready.
I let go of the man’s head. “Here,” I say, holding out my hand. �
��Let me do it.”
“No,” she says. “Blake, you’re stalling. We have to do this now. I don’t care what weird idealistic hang-ups you have about killing the dead or rescuing little girls. You’ve got the right to be a numbskull. But I’m going to put a knife through this thing—with or without you.”
“No,” I echo her, putting steel in my voice. “You’re not. Milly, you’ve got to trust me. I think we need to wait.”
“Why?” she bristles. “Why should we wait?”
I turn my palms up, pleading. “I can’t tell you why.”
“I can,” interjects a gruff, groggy voice. “You should wait ‘cause I ain’t no damn dead-head.”
Chapter Eight
Allies
And with that, the man sits up with a groan.
“Sweet Mary,” he yelps, as though we’d just pulled a handful of his ample chest hair. “What an f’n migraine.” He grabs his head with one hand and shields his eyes with the other. “Turn off that blasted spotlight, will ya? Least you can do after nearly murdering me.”
The man, we soon learn, is named Buzz Dingini, a balloon pilot who was shot down not far north of New Pokey.
“Probably one of the Duchess’s ilk,” he says, a wince in every word. “Hoping to shoot us down and scavenge our equipment. Sweet little bastards. Even though they know we’ve got heat-tracking missiles aboard, they keep trying. We always destroy everything of value before we land, but, yeah, they keep trying. Poor little f-r’s.”
“What happened next, Buzz?” says Milly.
The man’s dark silhouette straightens. He rubs his head. “I’m sorry, Ms. I’d better keep my mouth shut until I figure out where I am, who you are, what’s going on—all that. My work is sort of, well, classified.”
“That’s fine, Buzz,” says a voice from the door grate, which causes us all a start. “Go ahead and tell our friends here what happened. Then we’ll get you out of there and cleaned up.”