Undead Rain (Book 3): Lightning (Fighting the Living Dead) (6 page)

He paused to look out of his window. Sunlight streamed into the office, brightening the pale blue wall behind him. “How can we be sure until we administer it to a patient? If I don’t get results soon, I’ll lose my funding for this project and they’ll put me to work on something else. I’m making a breakthrough here, but Akers can’t see it because she’s too busy attending board meetings and making decisions that she has no right to make.”

Leaning in closer to the camera, he lowered his voice. “I’m going to inject myself with the serum today. Akers needs to be shown that it’s perfectly harmless in humans. Once she realizes that, we can move the project forward. It’s been delayed enough as it is.” He reached forward, and the video ended.

Doctor Colbert used the mouse to bring up another video. This one was recorded in a bedroom. Vess was sitting at the edge of the bed, dressed only in boxers, looking like he had a bad case of the flu. His eyes were bloodshot, his face drawn and tired. When he spoke, he sounded like his sinuses were blocked. “I made a mistake. I didn’t realize I was coming down with the flu when I injected the serum. It’s been going around the facility, so I should have been more wary of the possibility that I’d caught it. If it wasn’t for Akers and her deadlines, I’d have waited.” He looked angrily at the camera.

“I think the serum is reacting with the flu virus. The vascularity in my arms is very pronounced.” He raised his arm to show the camera that the veins beneath the skin in his arm were dark and prominent.

“This has nothing to do with the serum,” he said. “I’m having a bad reaction to it because of the flu, not because the serum itself is harmful in any way. Akers won’t believe that, of course. She’ll try to stop my funding. Well, she can fuck off. Everybody can just fuck off.” He got off the bed and stormed across the room, beyond the view of the camera. I heard something smash. Vess appeared again a moment later with bloody grazes on his fist. “It’s just the flu,” he said before switching off the camera.

“Wow,” Sam said. “It looks like this dude fucked up big time.”

Colbert looked at each of us. “Do you want to see the rest?”

“We know how this one ends,” Sam said.

“We still want to see some more,” I told her. I had been led to believe that the zombie virus had been developed in a government lab, but now it looked like a harmless serum had reacted with the flu virus in the outside world. There wasn’t some diabolical government plot to create monsters; the whole thing had just been a huge mistake.

Doctor Colbert brought up another video and pressed play. This one was filmed in the bedroom again. Vess looked bleary-eyed as he looked into the camera. Only his face and the collar of his shirt were visible. “I went out tonight. I don’t know why. I still feel ill, and I’ve not returned to work yet. But I remember thinking I needed to get some fresh air, and see other people.” He paused and looked down for a moment before facing the camera again. “That’s the last thing I remember. I must have blacked out. I don’t know where I went, or how I got back home. But something has happened.” He moved the camera back, revealing that his shirt was covered with blood. “I don’t think it’s mine,” he said. “I can’t remember what I’ve done.” The video ended.

“There’s one more,” Colbert said. “Vess came back here, saying he needed to be treated in our hospital. After he explained that he had injected himself with the serum he had developed for the treatment of CJD, he was taken to the hospital wing to be monitored.

“What we saw alarmed us. Vess was showing signs of paranoia, loss of cognitive function, and violent tendencies. He had been away from here for a week, mingling with the general population. If the virus in his system was contagious, we had no hope for containment. We had no idea where he had been during that week, and Vess was in no condition to tell us.

“The virus in his body was previously unknown, so we took a video record of his deterioration.” She pressed play on another video. Vess was in a hospital bed, surrounded by doctors, nurses, and scientists. His eyes were yellow, his skin pale. The veins in his neck and face were clearly visible. He was writhing in the bed as if in pain, sweat covering his face.

A voice off-camera said, “Video record of patient Doctor Marcus Vess. The patient is exhibiting signs of rage and paranoia. Treatment will involve…” The voice stopped as Vess grabbed the arm of a nurse and bit into her flesh. She screamed, trying to pull away. Everyone in the room moved forward to restrain Vess, but he released the nurse and turned his attention to one of the doctors, grabbing the man’s lapels to pull him down and clamp his mouth around his neck.

The man behind the camera must have rushed in to help, knocking the camera to the floor as he moved past it. The picture fell from the scene on bed and showed only the tiled floor while screams and shouts could be heard in the room.

Doctor Colbert turned off the video. “I’m sure you can guess the rest. The virus began to spread around the building. We tried to contain it, but every time we thought we had it under control, we were wrong. At the same time, we began receiving reports of infected persons in the general population outside the building, in the local community. A team was dispatched to Vess’s house. Some of his neighbors were missing. He had done a good job of spreading the virus before coming back to us.”

“So he was patient zero,” I said.

She nodded. “Yes, he is.”

“Is?” Sam asked. “Don’t tell me that fucker is still alive.”

She looked at him and nodded. “He’s still alive,” she said. “I think he’s in the air vents.”

T
he walkie-talkie crackled
. Tanya said, “Alex, we have a problem.”

I pressed the button. “What is it?”

“About two dozen zombies have just wandered onto your floor from the stairs. They’re hanging around by the elevators. Some of them are coming down the corridor outside the offices.”

“We’re going to get trapped in here,” I told the others. “They could be wandering around out there for days. That’s time we don’t have.”

“Let’s go kick some ass,” Sam said.

I contacted Tanya again. “We need a clear escape route off this floor.”

“Hold on, we’ll check the cameras.” The walkie-talkie went quiet for a minute. I could hear shuffling sounds beyond the door.

I turned the walkie-talkie’s volume down. No need to advertise our presence in here.

“It doesn’t look good,” Tanya said. “There are nasties by the elevator and on the stairs. I can’t see a way off that floor that doesn’t involve running into a lot of zombies.”

Johnny’s voice cut in. “Wait a minute. Alex, there’s another set of stairs on the other side of the building. I think it’s an emergency exit.” I heard papers being moved as he checked the maps. “Yeah, it runs all the way down to the first floor.”

“Are there any cameras in there?” I asked. “I’d like to know what’s there before we go running into it.”

“No cameras,” Johnny said.

While the conversation was going on, Jax had opened up her map and laid it on Vess’s desk. She ran her finger along the corridors and rooms until she found the emergency stairs that Johnny was talking about. “We need to get past the elevators and into this corridor here,” she said, tracing her finger along the route we were going to have to take.

“We’re going to have to fight our way through,” I said. “We don’t have a choice.” I looked at Doctor Colbert. “You’re going to need a weapon.”

She shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“You can’t stay here. There are zombies right outside that door.”

As if to prove my point, a thud sounded against the wood. They had heard us.

“It was always just a matter of time,” Colbert said. “Everyone else has been killed. I was just waiting for my turn.”

“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “We can escape.”

Another thud shook the door.

“Escape to where?” she asked. “I know what’s happened to the world beyond these walls. It’s no better than in here. Everyone I’ve ever known is dead. Even if we get past those monsters outside the door, there’s a much worse monster hunting us down. Vess will catch us sooner or later.”

“I’m not leaving you here,” I said, grabbing her arm and pulling her to her feet. I couldn’t open that door knowing that the zombies would come into the office and find Doctor Colbert. Every fiber of my being told me that I had to deny those creatures the life of a human being, even if that person wanted to die. The zombie apocalypse was a war of attrition; for every human we lost, they gained another monster. I wouldn’t let Lisa Colbert become one of them.

I grabbed her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “If you won’t fight, then at least run.”

She nodded, seemingly surprised by my determination to keep her alive.

“Are we ready, man?” Sam asked. He held the MP5 steady, muzzle pointed at the closed door.

The zombies began to pound on the door with their fists.

“How much ammo do you have left?” I asked Sam.

“It’s getting low. But we need to shoot our way out of here.”

I nodded.

Jax opened the door. The zombies in the corridor fought to come inside, to taste our flesh.

The sound of the MP5 was loud in the small office but not as deafening as it had been in the elevator. As Sam delivered headshot after headshot, the nasties dropped to the floor and lay there in rotting heaps of mottled blue flesh.

Sam ran forward, stepped over the carcasses, and began firing down the corridor toward the elevators. We followed, Doctor Colbert allowing me to drag her along by the hand.

At the far end of the corridor, a horde of nasties began shambling in our direction. Sam shot three of them, and they fell quickly as their brains were destroyed, but then the MP5 made an empty clicking noise. “Fuck!” Sam shouted.

“We need to turn right by the elevators,” Jax said as we moved forward.

I had to let go of Colbert’s hand as we got near the nasties so that I could use both hands to wield the bat. To my relief, she stayed close behind me. I had been afraid that she might just stand where she was, refusing to move, but she seemed to have decided to live a little longer.

I swung the bat at the head of the closest zombie, a man in a white lab coat whose face was hanging off his skull loosely, chewed and torn. His head caved in with a sickening crack as the bat smashed through bone and brain.

Jax and Sam were likewise swinging their bats, clearing a path past the nasties.

A blonde woman in a black blouse and skirt lunged at me, teeth bared. I pushed her back with the tip of the bat before swinging it into her head as hard as I could. Her skull cracked open, spilling liquid and brains as she fell to the floor.

“Oh, my God, that was Linda,” Colbert said, her hand flying to her mouth and her eyes wide.

We fought our way around the corner and into the corridor that led away from the elevators to the part of the building where we would find the emergency stairs.

The corridor was clear. We ran.

The zombies followed at their deathly pace, a collective moan rising from them as if they were pleading with us to come back and let them eat us.

We reached a closed, locked, metal and glass door. Jax used her access card to open it and we slipped through. The door closed behind us. The zombies pressed themselves against the glass in vain, watching us with their hateful yellow eyes as we walked away.

I noticed a camera on the wall at the end of the corridor. “Can you see where we are?” I asked into the walkie-talkie.

Johnny answered. “Yeah, it looks clear. The door to the stairs should be on your left.”

We found it. The door was a regular door with a sign that showed a stickman going down a flight of stairs beneath the words EMERGENCY EXIT.

“What’s the fourth floor like now?” I asked Johnny.

“Still a whole lot of nastiness going on at the elevators.”

“What’s in the corridor directly below us? If we take these stairs down to the fourth floor, where will we come out?”

“Let me just check that.” There was a pause while he checked the map. “Looks like labs. Most of the fourth floor consists of labs.”

“Can you check the area where the emergency stairs come out on that level? Assuming the stairs and elevators are in the same relative positions as they are on this floor, we should be far enough away from the elevators to avoid attracting the attention of the nasties there.”

Johnny said, “Tanya, can you find a camera for this corridor here?” I assumed he was showing her the map. A few seconds later, he said to me, “The corridor looks okay.”

“Is there a locked access door between the elevators and the emergency stairs on that floor, the same as there is on this one?” I looked along the corridor at the zombies still trying to reach us by pressing themselves against the metal and glass door.

“Yeah, looks like it.”

“I have an idea,” I said to Jax, Sam, and Colbert.

I opened the door to the emergency stairs. The stairs were made of steel and led down to the fourth floor as well as up to the roof. We descended them slowly, wary of any movement below us. But the stairs seemed deserted. When we opened the fourth floor door, it revealed a corridor identical to the one we had just left. Except the doors here were all digitally locked and led to labs. Through the glass panels in the doors, I could see white-tiled rooms containing various machines, steel worktables, and glass cabinets full of chemicals.

Through the access door halfway along the corridor, I could see the pack of zombies at the elevators, still feeding from the dead bodies of the security guards.

I removed my backpack and found the waterproof matches I had brought from Apocalypse Island. “This should make them move,” I said. “And they can’t come this way because of that door.” I struck a match and reached up toward the ceiling where a sprinkler sensor was located.

An alarm sounded and a red light above the emergency exit door came on. The sprinklers went into action, raining water down on us from the ceiling.

When the water hit the zombies, they left their feast and shuffled through a set of swinging doors that led to the main stairs.

“I don’t understand,” Doctor Colbert said, watching them through the glass door. “What’s happening?”

“They hate water,” I replied, putting the matches into the pocket of my jeans. “I think it’s something to do with the virus trying to keep the host body from rotting quicker. When it rains, the zombies seek shelter.”

“So they have a weakness,” she whispered, almost to herself.

When the area was clear, we opened the access door and walked along the corridor, through the spray of water, to the elevators. The bodies of the security guards had almost been picked clean, their bones clearly visible. I had been right; the spines had been ripped out and were missing. The chill that ran through my body had nothing to do with the coldness of the water that was raining down on us.

We found the lab that Hart had told us contained the H1NZ1 at the end of the corridor. Sam opened the door with his access card and we went inside.

The lab was large, clinically clean, and smelled strongly of bleach. The white tiles and stainless steel surfaces shone beneath the overhead lights. The sprinklers weren’t on in here; the system was smart enough to know that the “fire” was in the fourth floor corridor. The alarm was still ringing outside, but with the door closed, it sounded far away.

I turned to Doctor Colbert. “Do you know where the H1NZ1 is kept?”

She nodded. “In the supply room there.” She pointed to a doorway that led into a smaller room of shelves stacked with plastic containers and cardboard boxes. “I don’t understand. What are you doing here, and what do you want with the H1NZ1?”

“We’re from Site Alpha One,” I said as we went to the supply room. “We’ve come to collect the H1NZ1 because the scientists there need it.”

“Site Alpha One is still in operation?” she asked. “Being on an island they would have more chance of survival, but there was a cross-contamination of both sites because staff moved between them as required. When we lost contact with them, we thought the site had been overrun.”

“They had problems,” I said, “but the building is secure.”

“And the labs are still running?” she asked.

“Yes. That’s why they want the H1NZ1; the scientists at Alpha One have worked out a way to make an antivirus from it.”

We entered the room and Colbert went to a shelf that held hundreds of small metallic boxes. “It’s in here,” she said. “Each box holds a single vial.” As we began loading them into our backpacks, she said, “That means they’ve been working on the problem all this time. At Site Alpha One, I mean. We thought that after the vaccine failed to work properly, and the zombies and hybrids took over this building, that was the end of everything. I had no idea they had developed an antivirus.”

“Yeah, apparently they have,” I said, stuffing handfuls of the metallic boxes into my pack. They were light enough that I could hardly tell they had anything inside. “But we need to get this stuff to them so they can produce it.”

Tears appeared in her eyes. “I thought everything had been destroyed. I thought that all of our work had ended. I was waiting to die and all this time, Alpha One was still operational and working on a solution. Do you people work for the security firm?”

Sam grunted and then said, “No, we don’t work for those fuckers at all.”

Colbert looked confused. “I don’t understand. You’re doing this for them but you don’t work for them?”

“We were coerced into coming here,” Jax said. She had filled her pack and slung it over her shoulder. “If we don’t get these chemicals back to Alpha One, we’re all going to become hybrids.”

Colbert looked shocked. “They let you get bitten?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Worse than that, man. They injected us with the fucking virus.”

“Oh, my God,” she said with a tremor in her voice. “You’re not ill so you must have been injected with the pure strain. What color was it? It’s very important that you remember.”

“It was pale blue,” I said.

“When were you injected?”

“A few hours ago,” I said.

She nodded. “We must get these vials to Site Alpha One immediately.”

“They’re sending a chopper to pick us up the day after tomorrow,” Jax said.

Colbert shook her head. “No, that’s much too late. We need to go now.”

“We can’t,” I said. “They won’t be back here until 1300 hours on Tuesday. We can’t change that.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she protested. “You’ve been injected with the pure strain. You don’t have that much time.”

“Look, lady,” Sam said, “We know it takes four days to turn into a hybrid. They gave us the pure blue shit so that we won’t get sick in the meantime. It’s all under control.”

She marched out of the supply room and into the lab, leaning on the edge of a steel table as if to steady herself. “Listen to me very closely. Please. The people at Alpha One don’t know what an injection of the pure strain does. We hypothesized that a vaccinated person who received a dose of the pure version of the virus would turn into a Type 3 in four days. It was all theory.”

“Type 3?” Jax asked.

“Yes, Type 3.” Colbert went to a whiteboard on the wall, picked up a marker and wrote “Type 1” near the top. Below that, she wrote “Type 2”, and below that “Type 3”.

“What you call a hybrid is a Type 3,” she said, pointing at the bottom of the board. She wrote the word “vaccine” next to Type 3.

Pointing to the middle of the board, where she had written Type 2, she said, “The Type 2 is the undead zombie.” She wrote the words “No vaccine” and “bite”.

“When we were still in contact with Site Alpha One, we had a joint project to produce a pure strain of the virus. This is not the serum that Vess injected into himself; it’s the result of that serum combining with the H1N1 flu virus that was already present in his body. We wanted to be able to produce the pure virus so that we could study it and look for a way to kill it.