The Zombie Letters (2 page)

This book is dedicated to my grandmother, Janet Amos.

Hello again . . . welcome back.

Kick off your shoes and leave your good feelings at the door.

Sit and stay awhile. Put the coffee on.

Let’s go to the dark place one last time.

PROLOGUE

I

T
he large door hissed open to let the man inside. He was a General . . . and quite the decorated one. He extended a hand to the man they brought in that morning. The new guest stayed seated, not returning the handshake. The General politely smiled and placed his hand back into his pocket. “Darin Miles, right?”

              “Yes, sir . . . that’s me,” the seated man said. He sat with his back slumped and his head pointed toward the floor. He looked like a defeated man. A ruined one. God knew what his eyes had seen. What kinds of things he had been through. He spoke slowly and without any kind of readable tone. The dry, spent and worn-out husk of a man named Darin Miles sounded dry and hoarse . . . his eyes halfway open and his breathing shallow. “Forgive me for not getting up. I haven’t sat in a chair for almost a year.  I’ve inherited a beautiful lack of social skills, but I am ready to get to work. Take me to your on-site disease center. Colonel Andrus told me you had one and that I would be working with your men. I don’t believe in wasting time. So . . . if you could . . . get the fuck on with it. Sir.”

              “You will brief us first,” the General said as calmly as he could. “I understand that all of your boss’s notes are intact, as well as the records you kept in your facility. I know you’re anxious to get cracking, but what is more important to us right now is getting a brief from you. Your living area will be visited daily, as many days as it takes, by a member of our personnel. She will dictate everything you say. You tell us everything as clearly as you can and we will give you access to anything you need. We do want to find a cure just as much as you do, Darin. But . . . if I may be harsh for a moment . . . you are not the only brilliant man in the world. Our people are capable of floating the boat until you get to run the lab. You
are
valuable and I thank God you’re here . . . your statement will be as effective as your presence. Now, please . . . what do you have?”

              Darin sighed deeply, motioning for a glass of water from the cooler in the corner. The General gave it to him. Darin drank it slowly, staring at the cup with such a lost expression on his face. It was heartbreaking. The General felt a swell of sadness for him, despite the business at hand. After a short trance at the cold water in the little paper cup, Darin Miles spoke again. “I have Nathaniel’s emails to me, as well as Brian O’Reilly. I have Brian’s medical records. I can supply them to you anytime you need it. You can trace everything back to us with those materials.”

              “Thanks, Darin. I know you have been through a lot. I can’t possibly imagine. Give your statement. Stay calm and focused. Take as long as it needs to be to make it concise and correct. We will build a report with all of this and you can review the brass in the report personally. We will end this with you here. I promise.”

II

NATHANIEL WINTERS EMAIL

RECIPIENT: UNSENT

SECURITY CLEARANCE ‘A’ ONLY

CLASSIFIED

---------------------

            
 
My fellow Americans,

I never believed in any of this before.              

Fate. That golden treasure so easy to define, yet impossible to understand in its totality. Do we all have fates? I don’t know. Probably not, now that the thought has crossed my mind. Most of us end up losers . . . pumping fuel, eating shitty gas station food, living in crowded cities in dingy apartments, subscribing to Netflix and playing video games to pass the time. Some of us end up homeless, divorced and/or childless. That’s actually sort of a negative-fate, isn’t it? I truly believe it that way now that I have actually given it some serious thought. Never thought about fate before. I was an in-the-moment guy. I guess I realized that a destiny is not given to everybody. Some destinies are not always grand, either.

              I don’t want to pull out all of the stops yet. I have time. Not much, but enough to finish this before my writing is of no use to you. I’m tired and I need sleep. By the end of the week, you will know anyway. I am sending this to the people I know will tell the world the truth. I assume that when it happens, you will no doubt have many questions. Hopefully these letters will answer most of them. The million dollar question . . . I would give my soul for an answer to that one. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, right?

              Good goddamn intentions.

              No matter the objective, we can all start to smell the asphalt after awhile and there is nothing we can do to stop it. My road to hell became yours and for that, I have shut myself in here. I cannot bear to hear one scream out of agony or fear. They are screams that I have caused. They are ones I cannot undo.

              Christ, what a cowardly way to go out. Holed up under my rock that was once a temple to my greatness. It was a tome of my opportunities. A Stonehenge, a pyramid carved out of my intellect. Years from now, it will be regarded as a tomb. Hell, it’s a tomb
now.
This place, once filled with lives bustling down its hallways and souls scurrying about their daily business is now only inhabited by echoes. The soft clicking of the keyboard sounds like the personification of doom clicking its teeth together in delight. Its belly is ravenous as it prepares to eat me alive. After all I have done . . . after all the advancements we human beings made, it has come to this. I am actually frightened of how I will be viewed in the future. If mankind survives. Pretty pathetic. Here I am, the man solely responsible for what could be the extinction of the human race and here I am, worried that I will either be seen as a monster or a martyr. No. Martyr is a bad word. Martyrs die for a good cause. Or at least a cause that is noble to them. They die to shift the paradigm. I am no John the Baptist. I am no Ghandi. I am no Mother Teresa. I am no Jesus Christ.

              I
am
doom. I am destruction. I am the end . . . and there’s nothing I can do about it.

              Help me.

              My mind is sharp and my body strong for now. Strange thoughts pop into my head lately. Disturbing and confusing things. Four days ago, I was walking my dog though the Anderson Hall recreational park area. Just enjoying the day. Brucie, my boxer, was doing his usual sniffing every blade of grass on the planet. You know how dogs do as they seem to globally position latitude and longitude coordinates just to take a shit? As I was waiting for Brucie to do his apparently serious and technical business, I saw a beautiful young woman about ten yards from me . . . sitting on the grass with a white terrier by her side. The dog was wagging its tail happily, watching some of the boys from Deruldo Hall play tennis. I felt an urge . . . an incredibly strong one I cannot explain. My mouth dried up and head hurt. I closed my eyes when dizziness set in and imagined myself running up to the little terrier, slicing it open from throat to nuts with my pocket knife and making the young woman eat its guts. I almost
saw
myself from within the black curtain of my closed eyelids. I saw myself forcing her jaw open and stuffing the dog’s intestines into her mouth.

              I smiled.

              I actually
smiled.

             
I couldn’t believe what I was thinking. After a minute, the world stopped spinning and the headache subsided quickly, but that strange feeling in the pit of my sto
mach stayed right where it was
. I ran inside and found the closest bathroom I could get to. My stomach was in fiery knots. My ears were ringing, but it felt good somehow. I swear it felt like I’d just had an orgasm. It was the same exact feeling. I felt a slight sting in my right thigh and upon examining myself in the bathroom stall, I noticed that I had been bleeding. I stood there in a stupor with poor Brucie collared to a tree outside.

              My pocket knife. It was usually clipped to my belt. Now it was loose and open in my pocket, scraping against my thigh. I carry an old stiletto spring-assist knife. It has one hell of a spring action on it and has a safety switch like those old switchblades. Those things don’t just come undone in your pocket. I had been touching it. That sinking feeling in my stomach . . . sick, yet somehow quenched and satisfied, was the blood that I could taste. That’s where the loop-de-loop in my stomach was coming from. I was swallowing blood. Looking at myself in the mirror, I noticed that I had sliced my own tongue with that knife. I don’t remember it happening and thank god no one saw me. The straight, thin line of blood on my tongue wasn’t deep enough to merit a hospital visit, but it was deep enough to lance enough blood to swallow and get queasy. I think that was the point in which I knew something had happened, but I still didn’t know to what extent. I was most certainly concerned, but it was yesterday morning that proved to me that a terrible mistake had been made.

              The thought I had about the woman and her dog frightened me. I’d never had a vision so violent. So vile. Shit . . . I don’t even watch violent movies. They are unrealistic and I hate guns. Yours truly didn’t even read comic books as a kid. Most of my time was either spent in church, school or in my room studying. For a kid comic-book age to skip two grades and test out for a third, Spiderman kind of takes a back burner. I was a  . . . remarkable . . . child.

              I worked at the Anderson Hall Medical Research Center on the Iowa State University campus. I have been in this field almost fifteen years and already had a spotless reputation when the university called to tell me about some state-of-the-art research center they were building. Apparently, I was at the top of a very short list of possible directors for the project. I accepted the position without a moment’s hesitation. My handpicked team and I took up residency at the university as senior advisors. It was pretty cool being a forty-four year old man getting college credit on top of the doctorate I already had. Two years ago, we pioneered the technology used rejuvenate human cells. Last year, we cured our first stage-one cancer patient. A mouse named Hunter. Not surgically removed it, but fucking
cured
it. Eight months ago, all of our work came to beautiful fruition.

              Humans age. Certain diseases come hand-in-hand with that, due to the aging process. Liver spots, varicose veins, dementia, bone density loss, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. I theorized that all of these effects were caused essentially by faulty mitochondria . . . the cell’s power plant, basically. That was the theory . . . a theory of mine mostly dismissed by anybody with a license to run a practice. They all ended up being wrong. I was right.

              Through our research, my team and I discovered the solution. It is a rare chemical
only natural to one place o
n
Earth, undiscovered until only about six years ago. This naturally-occurring chemical was found to activate genes that trigger what I call ‘mitochondrial biogenesis.’ Mitochondrial biogenesis is the specific reformulation of
new
mitochondria. The stuff we found, too long to name here, was brought here and studied extensively after it was discovered inside a plant believed to have been extinct since the cretaceous period. The team that initially studied the material from these plants found nothing. I took a stab at it myself and found out that traces of PQP (abbreviation of another horribly long word) inside the plant were the same types found in human breast milk. There are some other plant species that have a lesser version of PQP too. This was a very odd version of it. See, PQP is a reproductive enzyme . . . a rare one that only humans, apes and certain plant species have. That enzyme is incredibly weak and difficult to study, given its fragile makeup. However, I was able to successfully synthesize it. That meant that we could produce it in any quantity we wanted, at any concentration we wanted.