Dead Science: A Zombie Anthology Read online

  "So," Claudia asked him, "what are you going to try?" Her work was done, but he knew she got a rush from watching scenes from the past unfold in front of her. She loved knowing that, despite the best efforts of two centuries of censors from the previous regime, science always found a way to discover the truth. And this was the oldest body they'd been able to activate so far.

  "I think I'll wind back to about a year before he was frozen. He was young enough that he would have led an active life, and that might tell us a little about the way people lived back then. We have an idea, of course, but it's like a skeleton---maybe this guy will help us put some of the meat back on the bones." He pressed the back button, keeping his finger on it to speed the rewind process, and marveled at the fact that the highest expression of human technology was operated by buttons, while any household gizmo was, in the worst of cases, voice-activated. The button would never break down and damage the specimen.

  He let go, and the image stabilized, the numbers at the bottom indicating he'd gone to four hundred and thirty days before the freezing---a little over a year. Close enough. It stopped just after a sleep period: this was an automatic calibration in the system that allowed them to go through each day in the subject's memory individually.

  They joined their subject just as his eyes opened to a darkened room. From here on out, they would be able to see on the monitor in front of them what their subject saw until he went back to sleep. Experience told them they'd soon get used to the subject's blinking.

  They watched as the memories took them out of bed and into a shower cubicle. Jack pressed the forward button lightly. Some things hadn't changed all that much. Then they followed his progress with interest as he had breakfast.

  "That's bacon," Jack informed her, "from a pig!" He grinned as she shuddered. Score one for him.

  But they both winced when he sat in his car. They knew personal automobiles of the twentieth century had contributed to the eco-wars of the twenty-first. But the memories, oblivious of the consequences of their owner's actions, continued, bringing them, eventually, to a squat building of mirrored glass set between a well-manicured lawn and a small copse of trees.

  "I'll give you three guesses as to what kind of building that is," Jack said.

  Claudia studied it a few moments then said, "I only need one. Set outside like that in a natural grove, it must be a wildlife study station. Or maybe an atmospheric research lab."

  Jack chuckled. "It's an office building."

  "Government workers used to have offices like that one? It's a paradise." She looked around at their dank underground lab.

  Now he laughed openly. "Not a government office. A private company." He could feel excitement mounting. "This is the first time we've gotten the memories of an office worker! For some reason, the people who chose to be frozen were usually more artistic types."

  They watched, fascinated, as their first-person view went into a large chamber that contained only a desk, a couple of chairs and an unbelievably archaic computer. They laughed as the user typed in his commands and printed---in hard copy made of actual paper!---five pages full of numbers, which he proceeded to pore over for fifteen minutes after doing so. Then, pausing only long enough to say a couple of words to a woman seated at another desk outside his chamber, he moved to another room.

  This room contained a table made of some dark, polished material, which Jack gleefully informed Claudia was wood, surrounded by comfortable-looking chairs. The room was larger than the previous one, and about half the chairs were occupied.

  Jack watched in fascination as their host threw the pile of paper onto the table and a heated discussion, accompanied with much silent arm-waving and red faces, ensued.

  He turned to her. "Claudia, you absolutely have to find a way to get us sound on these recordings. Do you have any idea the kind of valuable data we're probably missing here?"

  "We're working on it. Give us some time."

  "Hurry up." This time, his tone held more pleading than banter.

  * * * *

  Claudia rubbed her eyes. She was exhausted, but not entirely unhappy. After nearly two weeks of fiddling with the connections and the translation of electric currents back into real memories, they'd finally managed to make sound a viable alternative. And she was glad they had; Jack's good-natured ribbing was gradually becoming more impatient, like a child who quickly bores of a toy and demands the new, improved version. He'd certainly be delighted with this news, and she was weighing the fact he wanted this done as soon as possible against the bugs that still had to be worked out.

  They'd realized long before that experimenting on frozen bodies wasn't going to get them anywhere and that they needed a live subject. The techniques for working on living people without damaging them had existed for hundreds of years; it was easy to measure the activity levels when different parts of the brain were actually in use. The big difficulty came in isolating aural memories from visual ones in order to ascertain which part of the brain they had to stimulate to obtain sound memories.

  The breakthrough came when someone suggested using the Timing Chimes. Claudia had shuddered just to hear the words spoken, but immediately found herself remembering mealtimes under the old regime. The Timing Chimes had regulated every aspect of life under the junta, and no one over the age of twenty would have forgotten what each and every chime meant. Whether it meant that one should go to dinner, or get up for work or school, or go to bed, no one would forget the Chimes.

  So they simply called up the old audio files from the network, hooked one of the lab assistants to the scanner and played the files one after another. Sure enough, a small area on the display lit up with every single Chime. They'd soon figured out a way to plug the leads in in such a way as to be able to obtain the output.

  "So," Jack Amon said as he walked into the lab and interrupted her reverie, "have you got my soundtrack yet?"

  Uh oh, she thought. She would, ideally, have needed another pair of weeks. But she couldn't lie to Jack. He was paying for all the research, after all. "Yes. We haven't managed to get the memories to synchronize yet, which means you won't get the sound in sync with the images on the first run-through, but you will get sound, and we can line everything up for the deep study."

  A surprised look crossed his face. "Wow, that was quick." He grinned. "Great work!" Then he stopped, noticing the look on her face. "Is there a problem?"

  "Not really. It's just that I'd like to have a little more time to perfect the process. You see, we found something we weren't expecting and I want to make certain the process we created won't damage the specimens."

  "Unexpected? What happened?"

  "Nothing serious: the aural memories are based in the medulla oblongata, which we'd never suspected. It's a part of the brain normally used to control things like heart rate and blood pressure---you know, automatic things that keep you alive---so we're getting a lot more twitching and even ruptured some blood vessels. Not pretty, and we've had to tie the specimens down."

  "Is there any reason to believe this would interfere with the memory scanning process?"

  "Not really, but this is cutting edge research. I'm not certain what might happen if we keep pumping electricity into the medulla. If enough blood vessels pop in the brain during the process, we might not be able to complete the scan."

  Jack thought about it for a few moments, eagerness to get his data clearly battling with the natural caution that stemmed from the need to preserve such a precious resource.

  "All right," he said. "Have the techs wire all the bodies for sound, but we'll go slowly. You can have one of the ones we've already mined for images to test on. That way, even if something goes wrong, we'll only lose the sound recording, something we don't have right now, anyway."

  She nodded, relieved. While she would have waited before inserting the leads into the rest of the corpses, at least this way, they would have something of a safety net.

  * * * *

  "We've got them locked in the
machine room!" The voice that came over the intercom crackled with static. The leader of the security team seemed calm as he gave the report, but the tension inside the control room would have needed a cleaver to cut through it.

  The attack had not come as a surprise---even ten years after the fall of the junta, there were still people who believed that only under strict government supervision could society actually function. They'd sometimes form associations with names like "The Sword of the People" or "The Army of the Common Man" and moved against any organization that went contrary to their way of life. Their scope went from protests and boycotts to violent intervention. A research lab with a stated mission to regain a past the communist dictatorship had spent centuries trying to erase was a natural target.

  The security team had been prepared, and while they hadn't been able to completely beat back the unexpectedly large attack force, they managed to keep them out of the more sensitive areas. After police backup arrived, they'd contained the incursion in the machine room.

  Claudia, Jack and all the assistants crowded around the vidscreen, which had been partitioned into four feeds. The first showed the police cordon in the corridor outside the concrete wall and steel door of the machine room. The other three showed the interior of the room, in which nearly fifteen men and women, unmasked and unarmored, but armed with repeating sonic rifles, milled about. One of them, obviously the leader, seemed to be giving an impassioned speech.

  "I wish we could hear what he was saying," Claudia said.

  "Now you know how I feel," Jack replied with a smile. They'd only gotten the first fifty bodies hooked up to the sound system a couple of days before, and progress with the test case was proceeding agonizingly slowly. This attack would only delay things further. He turned to the tech manager, Joaquin Gutierrez. "More importantly, is there anything inside that room that could impair the functioning of our facility?"

  "Not permanently. The only piece of important equipment is the generator. We generate our own power because the grid is too unreliable. If they take that down, it might take us an hour or so to get the lights back on, but that should be all. Water will also take a little while to return."

  "Good," Jack said. He turned back to Claudia, who was pointing with horror at the vidscreen.

  The harangue had ended and the assailants had spread out among the machines in the chamber. They were sticking small slabs of material onto everything that looked remotely mechanical.

  "Explosives!" Jack hissed.

  "And an EMP bomb. A small one, though," the tech added.

  Everything seemed to happen at once. The lights in the control room surged to a high, nearly painful shine that lasted less than a second as the vidscreens turned to static. Then the lights went off completely.

  An instant later, they heard a muffled roar and the room shook slightly.

  * * * *

  Flashlight beams darted across the walls of the darkened hallway. Oskar was very unhappy to be there, but logic had finally overcome his protests. He was one of the few people in the control room who would be able to tell if the computer systems had been damaged by the power surge after the EMP blast.

  He'd argued they should postpone the inspection until the lights were back, but Jack cut off the argument instantly. They couldn't afford to suffer even more damage when the notoriously unreliable power grid was wired in, so if there was any way to buffer the computers, it needed to be done now.

  Seeing that that road was a dead end, Oskar tried to convince Jack they should send in the tech manager. After all, the man was responsible for the electric connections. That one fell on even stonier ground. The tech manager was needed to switch over to grid power as soon as possible. Besides, they'd lost contact with the security team when the EMP went off, and the tech team had to find out if they were all right.

  All of which left Oskar and two of his engineers walking along a dank, darkened corridor, jumping at every sound, and praying to whatever god they believed in that none of the terrorists had survived to give them a nasty shock. The shadows from their beams danced over every available surface, creating movement where none existed.

  It took them only three minutes to reach the nearest extraction room, a small chamber containing nothing but a metal slab for the specimen, a small desk, a chair and the tall shelf that held the computer. Oskar went straight towards the mainframe.

  What he found amazed him to the point that at first he thought it was a trick of the lighting, some shadow cast by the flashlight onto the surface of the computer. But he soon realized that while the shadows danced and weaved, these markings stood perfectly still.

  "I can't believe it," he whispered.

  One of the other techs looked up from the desk. "What's up?"

  "Look at this," Oskar said.

  The other man moved towards the console and peered where Oskar shone the flashlight. "What the heck?" he said, and then, after thinking about it for a moment, asked, "What kind of pulse bomb did they use? I've never seen this kind of damage before."

  Oskar knew the other man was right. Normally, when an EMP bomb was set off, electronic equipment would be useless but visibly undamaged. The console was damaged, however: streaks of soot ran out of the all the orifices and the components visible from outside were fused beyond repair. "Not the bomb at all. The power surge that came afterwards. The pulse must have pushed the generator into overdrive before frying it. And with all our installations unshielded, I'd be surprised if anything survived. These people knew what they were doing."

  The second tech, a young woman with short blonde hair, had remained apart from the conversation as she went through some papers on the desk. Oskar had completely forgotten about her and he jumped when she spoke.

  "Where's the body?" she said.

  "What?"

  "According to these records" ---she held up a sheaf of hardcopy--- "there should be a body in here. On that slab."

  Oskar looked where she pointed and saw the slab was empty. He was ready to dismiss it as someone else's problem even after he realized some of the leads that had been plugged into the body were damaged, as if forcefully torn out. But just when he was about to turn back to the destroyed mainframe, he noticed that the leads, before being torn out, had been fused. The surge had gone through them and melted them down.

  "Oh no," he turned to the techs. "If that surge went through all the bodies in the storage facility, it will have melted their brains. We'll lose all of them. Jack will have me killed. A decade of research, ruined!"

  Gesturing for them to follow, he ran into the corridor, moving as quickly as he could through the treacherous darkness. He was out of shape. The female tech passed him easily and the other guy was only behind because he'd run into some obstacle in the dark. They reached the door of the storage chamber. It was ajar.

  The girl ran straight in. Oskar, a couple of seconds behind, saw the illumination from her flashlight suddenly jerk wildly around and heard the beginning of a scream, which cut off in a gurgle. The situation inside must have been worse than he realized.

  He turned to enter the room. "What's up? Tell me what . . ." The words died on his lips as, from the darkness beside the doorway, a hand reached out and took hold of his throat. Cold, unnaturally strong fingers curled around his neck, got a good grip, and dug deeply into his skin. Then, a sharp, tearing yank.

  Oskar stood in surprise as the flashlight fell to the floor with a clatter and a dance of shadows on the far wall. Warm fluid spilled onto the front of his shirt. He knelt down.

  Darkness.

  * * * *

  Jack looked up. Frantic knocking came from the door of the control chamber. He moved to open it.

  One of Oskar's techs stumbled into the room. In the flickering lamplight, it was hard to tell, but it seemed that his shirt was covered with some dark stain.

  "What's wrong?" Claudia asked him. She stood to get a better look.

  But the man just turned around, bolted the door, then sat heavily on the chair she'
d vacated and put his head in his hands. He sobbed, hyperventilating.

  "You need to tell us what's happening," Jack insisted. "We need to know what's going on!"

  "Dead," the tech said. "They're dead." A sudden fit of sobbing overcame him and he stopped. He composed himself slightly, tried to continue. "They killed them."

  Jack paled, and took the man---more a kid than a man---by the shoulders and shook him. "Look at me. Listen. I need you to focus. Tell us what happened out there."

  "I don't know. I saw Oskar fighting with someone, a pale guy. Shaved head. I couldn't see too well, it was dark. They tore Oskar's throat out." He sniffled. "Look at me!" the tech screeched. "I'm covered in blood!" He tore at his shirt, ripping it to shreds.

  "Who was it? Was it the terrorists?" Jack was horrified: they were completely unprepared to fight off a terrorist attack. There were no weapons in the control room.

  "I don't know. I don't think so. This guy had a shaved head. He was naked."

  Suddenly, loud banging came from the door. Another barrage shook the metallic door in its hinges.

  The tech screamed and threw himself into the corner farthest from the doorway. Jack just shook his head. Unless the terrorists had more explosives with them, that door would hold.

  "Who is it?" he called.