Dead Science: A Zombie Anthology Page 9

  The woman shrieked and tried to get up, but couldn't. Richard noticed the tears filling her eyes. She shook her head back and forth, but he didn't care. Instead he thought of how plump and juicy she looked

  His face and torso covered in newborn blood, he turned toward her.

  Stepping the three feet to her bedside, he reached out and grabbed her face with his bloodied hands. She was still screaming, her mouth open, her tongue flapping around.

  Richard reached in and grabbed her tongue; the woman's screaming abruptly stopped.

  With the strength of the dead, Richard yanked her tongue out of her mouth, blood shooting out like a small fountain. While the woman tried to scream in agony and fear, she gagged on the blood. Richard ignored her for a moment, chewing on the tongue like it was a delicacy. The soft, slippery skin slid down his throat like tripe and in his dead brain he realized he liked the tongue, but then was curious for more, so he pushed her down on the bed. While his left hand held her forehead down, the woman's arms thrashing about in agony, he went for her right eyeball. He placed two fingers on either side of the orb and slid them in. When they were in deep, he flicked them upward. The eye popped out like a marble in a hole and he brought it to his mouth. Small threads of flesh and nerves drooped from the bottom of the eye and when Richard had separated it enough from the socket, they snapped.

  He popped the orb into his mouth and chewed, a small amount of eye juice slipping out of the corner of his mouth. If he could describe the sensation of that pop when he bit down it would be like eating a whole cherry tomato or a large grape.

  Enjoying the taste, he went in for the next eye, but just before he did, three security guards arrived at the doorway, guns drawn.

  Behind the men, a charge nurse screamed at the men to just shoot.

  Each man fired three rounds into Richard and the dead security guard, but nothing seemed to work. It was Richard who turned first, and as the three men stared at the abomination in front of them, one guard turned and ran.

  The two remaining guards fired again and again and Richard's torso swayed with each round. Then he charged the first man and when the man tried to escape, he backed into his partner. Richard grabbed the man by the curly black hair on the top of his head, and yanked back, exposing the neck.

  Scarlet teeth flashed in the light of the room and then the guard screamed as a three-inch piece of his jugular was torn free. Blood shot to the ceiling and trickled back to the floor and the guard was dead in seconds. The second guard fired again, three bullets hitting Richard in the arm, leg and one grazing his forehead. Then the first security guard awoke from death and was on his comrade in seconds.

  The hospital room was in shambles; blood coated it like someone had entered it with a garden hose and just sprayed red everywhere.

  While all this was going on, the hospital staff had just stood in the hallway, transfixed. Easy pickings for later.

  By this time the woman was dead, and the doctor was twitching on the floor. Richard fed on the guard he'd grabbed by the hair and his stomach was becoming bloated as he packed more and more meat into it. It was only a matter of time before it simply ruptured.

  As the minutes passed, the woman finally awoke and her lone eye began to twitch, flicking back and forth in the remaining socket. Richard smiled at the birth of their sister. With a garbled moan the doctor slowly rose, missing pieces of his face, neck and arms, plus a hunk from his leg.

  There were now three security guards in the small room, and as the one Richard held reanimated, he let the man go. The woman slid off the bed and took a moment to pick up a small arm lying on the floor. She began chewing it, the small, fragile bones crunching in her mouth. If she had any qualms about eating her baby she gave no sign. Her missing tongue was forgotten. She had nothing to say anyway.

  With the six zombies standing around, hungry, Richard turned and stepped into the hallway.

  The staff screamed in panic and a few bolted while others tried to get the nearby patients to safety. With five ghouls behind him, Richard reached out and grabbed a nurse as she ran by him screaming. With her blonde hair in his hand, he twisted his arm and tossed her to the dead doctor. With a gleam in his dead eyes, the doctor immediately dove in and ripped off the nurse's nose with his clean white teeth. She screamed and begged for mercy, but would receive none.

  Richard began walking down the hallway on the prowl for more food. The rooms were lined with expectant mothers, and down the hall, after a set of double glass doors, the nursery waited for eager parents to visit their newborn treasures.

  It would be a good feast, one any zombie would be proud of.

  And best of all, there was enough food for everyone. No one would go hungry today.

  When Richard was halfway down the hallway with the once-pregnant woman and the original security guard behind him, the police arrived. Five cops in blue uniforms and weapons drawn charged into the hallway.

  They took one look at Richard, the woman and the guard. Then they looked at the three zombies in front of them and the three behind them feeding on hospital staff, and began shooting, cutting into the ghouls like targets at the firing range.

  With the zombies taking each shot easily, they soon reached the policemen who tried to fight back.

  It didn't take long for the unprepared police officers to become zombie chow and soon enough they joined the ranks of the dead.

  Richard was still first and the rest followed him.

  In no time, the rest of the floor was being eaten, killed, and then reanimated. After that hour had passed they entered the south stairwell and went upstairs and downstairs, swarming through the hospital and killing everyone they found. Patients who were laid up in bed, some from operations, cancer, or broken legs were all easy targets, trapped in their beds while the ghouls ripped them apart.

  Some escaped, but not many.

  No one understood what was happening and expected the authorities to arrive and save the day, but none came. The first five police officers probably had never managed to get a call back to dispatch and warn others what was happening.

  The hospital, once a place of healing, was now nothing but death, and as the day passed to night in the small rural hospital in the middle of nowhere and everywhere, more and more people joined the ranks of the dead.

  With darkness falling across the parking lot and the street lamps flickering on, the first shambling bodies emerged into the crisp, night air. Richard was in the lead, still naked and covered in gore. His upper torso was riddled with bullet holes and his stomach was extended to the point of popping like an overfilled balloon.

  Behind him, the once-pregnant woman walked, the doctor beside her. Security guards were behind them and the rest of the hospital staff followed. Patients hobbled out on crutches and some with walkers. The ones with broken legs crawled on the ground, the last in line.

  Richard stopped when he reached the front of the hospital, then turned and stood in the middle of the street, swaying back and forth, a rush of serenity suddenly covering him.

  Ahead, about a quarter mile away, stood the city, filled with lights from a hundred buildings, looking like the stars had fallen to earth, a blanket of shimmering light that was like a beacon to his dead brain.

  Richard took one step forward and then another down the middle of the street, while behind him his army of the undead slowly followed.

  The hospital was just the beginning.

  Soon the city would know the gentle caress of death and, after that, the entire state, and perhaps in time . . . the world.

  The night had just begun and either way it didn't matter.

  For you see, the dead have all the time in the world.

  * * * *

  Spark of Life

  by

  Gina Ranalli

  It had begun like it often does---small animals growing increasingly larger as the experiments went on. Guinea pigs to rabbits, to cats and dogs, chimps and finally---lastly---humans.

  Her employe
r, Dr. Nora Fox, considered herself pro-life. With a background in forensic science, she unfortunately had spent much of her life studying the dead---the senselessly murdered, the lost of the Earth. Often John and Jane Does and it was these people that she became most interested in. Who were they? Why had they met their ends in such violent, grisly fashions?

  Fox was standing over one of them now---a young woman of about twenty-five. The Jane Doe had been bludgeoned to death, half of her face battered beyond recognition, the skull caved in on the left side.

  "Doctor?"

  Fox looked up from the cadaver and blinked twice at her. "Yes, Joanne?"

  "The syringe is ready."

  Mouth curling up in a half-smile, Fox said, "Excellent." She took the syringe and turned back to the Jane Doe. The blue of the eight electrodes stuck to the woman's shaved head seemed especially bright against the marbled alabaster skin.

  "I have a good feeling about this one, Joanne," Fox said as she placed the full syringe on the silver tray beside the table. From a box, she pulled out two latex gloves and slipped them on while glancing at the beeping monitor. Eight wires snaked from behind the monitor to the electrodes on the J.D. "A very good feeling indeed."

  She didn't reply, turning her attention to a computer on the other side of the cadaver and tapping a few numbers on the keyboard.

  "We're finally going to revolutionize the field of law enforcement, Joanne," the doctor continued. "Getting an image of the last things this woman saw before she was killed could potentially take hundreds---maybe thousands---of murderers off the streets. Facial recognition software has grown by leaps and bounds even in the last five years."

  Still, Joanne made no response, engrossed in what she was doing. Besides, she'd heard it all before countless times. She'd been working with Dr. Fox for the better part of a decade and though they'd managed to get brain activity out of dozens of corpses---even a few shadowy images on the I.C.D.P---they'd never gotten anything usable in terms of finding anything even remotely identifiable. Just blurs, usually in black and white. Certainly never the face of an UnSub. Joanne wished she could feel as confidant as Fox did but she'd learned long ago not to get her hopes up anymore. Her position and the doctor's experiments had once excited and thrilled her but now . . . now it was just a job, and she was beginning to wonder how long it would last, given that their funding was close to running out. There was only so much patience to go around among the mysterious sponsors of what Doctor Fox called the Image Retrieval Project.

  "Ready?" Fox asked, the tip of the needle hovering above the cadaver's iris. Fox held the syringe in one hand and peeled back Jane Doe's eyelid with the other.

  A couple more keystrokes and Joanne replied, "Ready, Doctor."

  The needle slid into the Doe's pupil, deeper and deeper until the brain had been penetrated.

  Fox depressed the plunger; it made a whispered hissing sound.

  Once the pale orange fluid had left the syringe, the doctor removed the needle and quickly went about the standard task of taping the eyelid down, holding her hand out to Joanne who already had the medical tape ready.

  Tape in hand, Fox looked back down at the J.D. and paused, her brow furrowing. She leaned in closer, studying the punctured eye. Without looking up, she said, "I.C.D.P. reading, please."

  Joanne checked the equipment. "Everything's normal, Doctor."

  "Curious," Dr. Fox said quietly. "The pupil is dilated."

  "Possible reaction to the Arbacell?"

  "If it is, I've never seen anything like it." The doctor leaned further over the cadaver and pulled back the corpse's other eyelid, not an easy feat since the damage to the head had swollen the entire left side of the face. Just as she bent forward for a better view, the I.C.D.P. began to beep.

  She looked up with surprise.

  Joanne spun to face the machine, tapping the keyboard frantically. "Brain activity, Doctor."

  Still leaning over the body, Fox asked, "Any images?"

  Another tap and Joanne gasped as she stared at the monitor.

  "Well?" Dr. Fox demanded, sounding impatient.

  Stepping aside in order to give the doctor a clear view of the monitor, Joanne wasn't sure if she was going to throw up or faint. Maybe both.

  On the monitor, the picture was the clearest they'd ever gotten off a test subject. Slightly blurry, as though taken by a camera with a thin sheet of cotton over the lens, but still perfectly recognizable, Doctor Fox stared out of the monitor, her image captured as the last thing the Jane Doe had seen.

  Both women gaped at the screen for a long moment before slowly turning their attention back to the cadaver.

  On the table, the Jane Doe looked up at them with her one good eye and as the two women watched, the milky covering over that eye dissipated, like evaporating fog, revealing a bright crystalline blue.

  The eye blinked and Joanne twitched, a small squeak of surprise escaping her throat.

  "This is impossible," Dr. Fox whispered. "Impossible."

  On the gurney, the corpse's lips quivered, as though it was trying to speak but had forgotten how or why it would want to do such a thing.

  Shivering, Joanne stood frozen and did not move when the doctor took a step forward, leaning over the Jane Doe and lifting the eyelid further, carefully peering at the shrinking pupil.

  "Why would a small increase of ten CCs cause such a drastic reaction?" the doctor murmured, her surprise abruptly replaced with fascination. "It makes no sense."

  Joanne had no answer for her, didn't want to think about an answer. Instinctively, she knew something was wrong.

  Very wrong.

  "Perhaps there was already some unknown chemical lingering in the brain that interacted with---"

  Doctor Fox was abruptly cut off when the Jane Doe's hand shot up, grabbing the doctor's wrist and yanking it away from her face.

  Fox cried out in alarm, but made no attempt to pull away.

  Instantly terrified, Joanne stumbled backward into the computer table. "She's alive!"

  "Don't be ridiculous," Fox replied. "We've simply awakened the part of the brain controlling motor skills, no different than if we'd been pumping the cadaver full of electricity. Though, I must admit, to the best of my knowledge this is completely unheard of. What is the I.C.D.P. reading?"

  Joanne could not believe the calmness with which the doctor spoke.

  The woman was a consummate professional, but this . . .

  "Joanne!" Dr. Fox barked. "Snap out of it. We need to know exactly what happened here. Now, please, the I.C.D.P. reading."

  Still holding Fox's wrist, the Jane Doe used her grip as leverage, simultaneously pulling the doctor off balance and pulling her own body up into a sitting position.

  Fox's eyes went wide, her mouth opening into a shocked "O." Joanne finally saw fear in her boss's face. Unfortunately, the doctor's reaction time was too slow as the J.D. opened her mouth wide and sank her teeth into Fox's cheek, ripping out a chuck of flesh the size of a silver dollar.

  Both women screamed in unison as blood cascaded down Fox's face. She struggled to get free, attempting to wrench herself away, but the corpse held fast, holding the doctor in place, chewing and swallowing and already moving in for a second bite, this time aiming for the doctor's exposed throat.

  The Jane Doe reached up with her free hand and buried it in Fox's hair, pulling the doctor even closer. Even as the side of her throat was being torn from her body, the doctor's pleading, terrified eyes rolled towards Joanne and she managed a single desperate word: "Help."

  But Joanne couldn't help. She was rooted to the floor, trembling, feeling her mind snap as though it were a rubber band stretched far beyond its limits.

  It wasn't until the corpse released the doctor's body and let it fall lifelessly to the floor that Joanne finally took her eyes off the dead girl's face and let her gaze drift down to Dr. Fox.

  So much blood. Spurting. Pooling on the linoleum floor, running like angry little rivers along the edges of
the tiles.

  Numbly, Joanne was aware she might faint, and she might have if at that moment the Jane Doe hadn't made a low grunting sound that jerked her attention away from the growing crimson puddle.

  The corpse swung her legs over the side of the gurney, oblivious to the fact she was tethered to machines by wires. She seemed to want to get up, her good eye now on Joanne, the lower half of her face smeared with Dr. Fox's blood.

  Joanne remained transfixed. There was a word for this, wasn't there?

  Some silly, monster-movie type nonsense. What was it?

  Jane Doe clumsily slid herself off the gurney and stood, weaving drunkenly for a few seconds before starting towards Joanne. She tripped over the doctor's corpse, but somehow managed to maintain her balance, reaching a pasty grayish hand towards Joanne.

  It was the sight of that hand waving in the air before her that Joanne's memory banks finally released the word she'd been searching for: zombie.

  This thing standing before her, this murdering abomination, was an honest-to-God, flesh-eating zombie.

  Joanne almost laughed then.

  Almost.

  It was the touch of ice-cold fingertips brushing against her chin that prevented it.

  She screamed again, stumbling backwards into the equipment, more falling than retreating, and for one horrifying second she thought she was going to hit the floor. But at the last possible instant she grabbed hold of the table, steadied herself and then she was turned around, her back to the approaching corpse, aiming herself haphazardly towards the door.

  Behind her, the zombie grunted---to Joanne's ears it sounded like a noise of displeasure and for some insane reason this gave her a spark of hope.

  Forty more feet and she'd be at the door, out of there, away from danger.

  She covered the distance in what felt like slow motion, her pinned-back hair suddenly falling loose over her forehead, somewhat obscuring her vision. She realized she was still screaming, hadn't stopped screaming since the fingers on her chin and maybe she would never stop.