Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues

Chapter 25

I finally forced myself to shower and change into the t-shirt and sweat pants that had been left for me, knowing that if I didn’t, McKinney would come back and do it for me, in as horrible and humiliating a way as possible. After that I slept for awhile—no idea how long—and woke up at the sound of the door opening. I didn’t move except to open my eyes and see a guard step in and set a tray down on the floor. I stayed where I was on the bed until he left and closed the door, and only then kicked the blanket off to see what had been left for me.

The tray was a plastic cafeteria tray that looked like it had been purchased at a public school garage sale. For that matter the food looked like it as well—rubbery pizza, lukewarm chocolate milk, and green beans swimming in an oily liquid dotted with something that was probably supposed to be bacon or ham. And—to my utter shock—brains as well. Two neat slices, like a couple of pieces of pound cake. I gave them a dubious sniff, but as far as I could tell they were the real thing.

I attended to some necessary bodily functions, then picked up the tray and brought it over to the narrow bed since I didn’t feel like sitting on the floor to eat.

I ate everything, including the nasty green beans, since I figured my parasite needed to save its efforts for other stuff instead of having to give me a boost because I was malnourished.

The door opened as soon as I took my last bite, confirming my suspicion that I was under constant surveillance. McKinney stood in the doorway with two other guards behind him. I couldn’t tell if they were the same ones who’d watched me get strip-searched earlier. They all looked the same to me. I need to pay attention to this stuff though, I told myself. If I ever got the chance to make a break for it, knowing the number of people I was up against would prove pretty darn useful.

“Let’s go,” he snapped.

I stood up, silently followed him out. I got a good hard look at the guards and did my best to memorize details about them. One had acne scars and a sharp cleft in his chin. The other had oddly perfect eyebrows, and I suspected that he had them shaped.

I wasn’t at NuQuesCor. That much I could figure out. Even with the smell of new paint, it was tough to disguise the fact that this was an old building. It also didn’t feel like it was very big. The hallway ended at a heavy door about thirty feet to my right, dead-ended at about the same distance to my left, and I thought I counted eight doors along its length. Not that I had much time to count, since we were only going across the hall.

McKinney gestured me in to the open door across from mine. I entered to see…a completely empty room. White walls and tile floors, with the same faint new paint smell over old grime. And only one coat of paint to judge by the thinner patches where nebulous patterns of graffiti peeked through. Another bathroom, this time with outlines of urinals on the wall—which reinforced my suspicion that this had once been a public place. There was no toilet, shower, or bed in here. Instead, one wall was almost completely filled with a big-ass window. They weren’t even bothering with two-way mirrors or any shit like that. Nope, apparently these people couldn’t care less that I knew they were watching. I glanced around, unsurprised to see surveillance cameras in every corner of the room. Whatever was about to happen, they intended to record it thoroughly.

Behind the window was a small room—a former office, perhaps?—with two long tables covered in computer equipment. Two men in guard outfits sat at one table, eyes shifting between their monitors and me. Behind the other stood two people. I didn’t recognize the first one, a stocky middle-aged man wearing a dark blue suit and a dubious expression.

But I recognized the other, even though we’d never officially met.

“Hi, Doctor Charish,” I said, giving her a tight smile as I fought to hold onto my ragged composure. “Did you kill Sofia?” Sure, McKinney might have been able to go straight from the failed ambush to Sofia’s house, but it made more sense that he had someone else working with him that night.

Dr. Charish leaned forward and touched a button in front of her. “Why, yes. Yes, I did.” Her voice came from a speaker above the window, yet I could also hear it, muffled, through the glass. That glass was thick, but it wasn’t bulletproof-thick. Was it thick enough to keep out a pissed-off zombie? I sure as hell wanted to find out.

“Why? Because she was playing both sides and working with Kang?” I shook my head, baffled. That didn’t make any sense.

The woman smiled. “No. Although, yes, she was indeed briefly involved in a rather pathetic series of talks with Kang regarding her pseudo-brain formulation. She always was too altruistic for her own good. But that, of course, ended when Kang died.”

Sudden understanding swept through me. Now Sofia’s reactions over at Marcus’s house made sense. Sofia had no intention of giving Pietro a monopoly on the fake brains, so she approached Kang to let him know he wouldn’t be cut out. But then Kang was killed, and not long after that it looked as if Zeke—a zombie—had tried to sneak into the lab. No wonder she was freaking out, thinking she was at the heart of some sort of conflict between zombie factions. I was beginning to wonder whether there really were any zombie “factions” at all, at least not in the way that Pietro made it out to be. Perhaps Kang had been the de facto “leader” of the zombies who bought brains from him, but there was no way he had as much influence and power as Pietro.

“So why kill her?” I asked.

“Sofia suspected that I had a pet project of my own.” She made a sweeping gesture around her. “And I knew that once she heard you’d been attacked, she’d go tattling to Pietro.” She nodded toward McKinney. “That being said, we need to get started.”

Still baffled and off-balance, I turned as another man walked in. The two guards left, leaving just me, McKinney, and this new guy in the room. The exiting guards pulled the door closed, and a shiver ran over me as I heard it lock from the outside.

The newcomer looked like he was in his late twenties, blond and blue-eyed, with a short haircut and muscular build to match the other guards here. He had on a simple white t-shirt and grey sweat pants like mine—though obviously much bigger—and he held himself so stiffly that I had a feeling he was holding down fear by the sheer force of his will. Fear of me? What the hell was going on?

I jerked as a beep sounded in the room. “Now recording contagion series one point one,” Dr. Charish said.

“Angel, this is Philip,” McKinney said. “He volunteered for this study.

Baffled and wary, I gave Philip an awkward wave. “Um, hey, Philip.”

He gave me a tight smile and short nod in response.

“And now, Angel, if you would be so kind,” McKinney said, “please turn Philip here into a zombie.”

I could only blink at him stupidly for several seconds. “Wait, what?” I said once I found my voice. “I can’t do that! I’ve never done that before!”

“I suggest you figure out how,” McKinney said, tone mild.

I looked in horror to Philip. “You volunteered for this? To become a zombie?”

He lifted his chin. “I’m a volunteer for the enhanced soldier protocol.”

“Enhanced soldier…” Suddenly I understood—at least part of it. They want to make zombie soldiers. This has nothing to do with zombies vs. zombies. It probably never did, or at least certainly not to the degree that we all thought. Dr. Kristi Charish had taken this whole thing to another level entirely. Well, that explained the whole secret lab thing and the team of mercenary guard types. Zombie soldiers…? Would the government be interested in something like that? Probably. Or maybe a private contractor like those Halliburton people in Iraq. I peered at the man in the suit behind the glass. He looked soulless enough to be either government or corporate.

But they haven’t fully committed, I thought as I looked at the slight frown on the man’s face and the tension on Dr. Charish’s. Not yet. They want some proof that this is real and that it’ll work. That explained why this whole scenario seemed rather low-budget. Why sink a bunch of money into a project that sounded like a shitty late night movie? No, Dr. Charish had to prove she wasn’t giving her sponsors a line of bullshit. She needed to show them what a zombie could do, show them that more could be made.

And that was why they now needed a real, live, fully functioning zombie. Me.

I looked at McKinney. A hint of a smirk curved his mouth, and I abruptly realized that he had recognized me when I went to the lab to pretend to apply for a job. Anger at myself swept over me. I thought I’d been so damn clever. They needed a zombie, and I’d been the logical choice since I’d been doing my best to become a pain in their ass.

Didn’t matter. I had no intention of doing what these assholes wanted. I turned to the window. “Y’all are completely fucking batshit insane,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest defiantly. “No. I won’t do it.”

McKinney shrugged. “I rather expected you would say that.”

And with that he pulled his pistol and fired two rounds into Philip’s chest.

The sound of the bullets slammed through the room while I cried out in horror. Philip staggered back, then slid down the wall, gasping for breath as he clutched at his chest.

“It’s simple, Angel,” McKinney said. “Turn him into a zombie, or he dies.”

“You fucker,” I breathed, moving to Philip on shaking legs. Dropping to my knees beside him, I struggled to remember what Kang and Marcus had said about how zombies were made. A simple bite isn’t enough. There’s some mauling involved. So…what the hell does that mean? Do I simply bite him and keep biting him until he’s a zombie?

Philip’s eyes met mine. “Do it,” he gasped. “Please.”

I felt strangely ridiculous and self-conscious doing this with all these people watching, especially knowing that the whole thing was being recorded, monitored, videotaped, and anything else that could be done. Talk about the ultimate performance anxiety.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, then pulled his shirt aside at the collar, leaned over, and bit down hard on the junction of his shoulder and neck. He stiffened as I increased the pressure. I tasted blood, and nausea rose at what I was doing…

But only for an instant. Hunger abruptly surged, but far different from what I was used to. This hunger urged me to bite harder, to rip the flesh away. I dimly felt him struggling against me, but I was strong—far stronger than he was, and I held him pinned down while I literally mauled his neck and chest, tearing the shirt away, biting and ripping until even the gunshot wounds were lost in the damage and resulting gore. Yet I didn’t feel any sort of urge to get at his brains, only the overwhelming need to mangle him as much as possible.

And then as soon as it had started, the urge was gone. Philip lay still on the floor in front of me, blood flowing from a dozen wounds, though so sluggishly that I knew it would be over for him soon.

“God damn,” I heard McKinney mutter.

“Brains,” I rasped through the blood and flesh in my mouth. I turned and spat a gobbet of who-knew-what onto the floor. “He needs brains right now,” I said, louder. I heard the door open and close, but I didn’t take my eyes away from the bloodied man in front of me. A second later something cool and slippery was pressed into my hand. I didn’t need to look down to see what it was. Right now my parasite was working overtime, doing what needed to be done. I was a passenger in my own body at this point.

I put a large hunk of brain into my mouth, then leaned over Philip and started biting him again—but this time not trying to damage him. Somehow I knew what was going on—now I was transferring the necessary proteins over to Philip along with the colonizing spores, using the previous wounds as pathways. I felt like a mother bird, chewing the brains up to mush then spitting them out into Philip’s body. A part of me knew how unbelievably disgusting this was, but I kept going, chewing, biting, spitting.

Philip took a sudden gurgling breath, and I paused. The bites were starting to close up. I shifted to where I was sitting against the wall and pulled Philip to me, cradling him against me. Now I began to feed the brains to him directly, placing small hunks into his mouth. He shuddered as the first piece hit his tongue, but then his own newfound instinct took over and he swallowed it down. I continued to feed him, watching as the wounds healed before my eyes like some sort of time-lapse film.

His eyes blearily opened after the last bite. “Now you gotta sleep,” I told him, or rather, my parasite told me to tell him. Because that was how it worked, I instinctively knew now. Infect the new zombie, feed it, then let it sleep while the parasite does its thing and gets all happy and settled in its new home.

An oddly content smile curved his mouth, then his eyes drifted closed again. He leaned his head against my shoulder and slept like that while I held him, the two of us surrounded by a pool of his blood.

I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew someone was trying to pull Philip from my grasp. I jerked awake and clutched him tightly to me.

“No,” I gasped. “Get away. He needs to stay with me.”

The guard didn’t release Philip’s arm. This was the one with the too-perfect eyebrows. “I need to take him. Get him checked out.”

“He’s fine!” I insisted, curling my lip. “They can check him out right here.”

His eyes hardened. “That’s not going to happen.” He tried again to pull Philip’s limp body from me, and I let out a growl—a deep throbbing sound I had no idea I could make.

The guard dropped Philip’s hand and jumped back, but then his mouth tightened into a thin line and he pulled a Taser from his belt. Ah, shit, this is gonna suck. Marcus had once described being tasered—which he’d had to experience in order to carry one on duty. His words: “That shit fucking hurts. If anyone ever tells you to comply or be tasered, you’d better fucking comply!”

But I wouldn’t…couldn’t…comply with this. All I knew was that Philip needed to stay with me a while longer.

I squeezed my eyes shut and braced myself for the feel of the metal probes shooting into my skin, but before the guard could fire, Dr. Charish’s voice came over the speaker. “Stand down. Leave the subject as he is. We’ll come in to get our samples.”

Relieved, I opened my eyes and resisted the urge to stick my tongue out at the guard with the Taser. He looked more than willing to “accidentally” tase me. However, he stepped back, eyeing me with undisguised distaste. For the first time I realized that Philip and I weren’t exactly a pleasant sight. None of the blood had been cleaned up, and it was starting to congeal to a sticky mess. I swiped at my face with the back of one hand, grimacing as a thick smear of drying blood came away with it. I definitely looked like a monster now, I was sure of it.

Dr. Charish entered, flanked by two more guards. I quickly catalogued them—one had gorgeous blue eyes, and the other had a nose that had clearly been broken a few times.

“Angel, that was absolutely amazing,” she said, eyes shining with a fervor that seemed obscene considering the level of gore present in the room. “The way the parasite works is a study in brilliance. This…this is the work of a lifetime.” She dropped to a crouch beside me, ignoring the fuck off, bitch look I gave her. “I need to get samples from you both now.” She tilted her head. “Tell me, is your reluctance to let Philip go driven by the parasite? Does it feel like an instinctive need, or do you simply not want to be left alone in here?”

“Get the fuck away from us, you psycho bitch,” I snarled.

She reached a hand to Philip, then had to backpedal as I took a swing at her. “Fascinating,” she said with a breathless chuckle. “An attachment between parent and child would explain a great deal, such as why Marcus is so taken with you.”

I set Philip down and leaped over him in an explosive move that could only be accomplished with zombie super speed, and in the next breath I was on Dr. Charish with my hands around her throat.

Aaaaanndd…the next breath after that, I learned just how much it hurt to be tasered.

An eternity or so later the searing pain stopped. I moaned on the floor, distantly aware of a guard helping Dr. Charish to her feet. Shivers of pain echoed through my body, and I could still feel two sharp points where the probes had embedded themselves into my lower back.

“Angel, please,” Dr. Charish said, coughing a bit as she straightened her clothing. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

I let out a dry laugh. “A bit late for that, don’t you think?” Before I could think about it too much I grabbed the two wires and yanked the probes out of my skin. Pain flared briefly, but thankfully settled within a couple of seconds as my parasite worked to repair the damage. That’s a good little parasite, I silently crooned. Too bad a mild jab of hunger came along with the decrease in pain.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” I said as I crabbed my way back toward Philip. “Why’d you have Ed kill those other zombies? Why not kidnap them the way you did me?”

“I had to prove my research had merit before I could get investors to commit the sort of risk and resources that holding a live specimen would entail,” she explained. “And, if you must know, I had actually intended to have Ed obtain a live zombie for us. But he inexplicably decided to drop out of sight before I could do so.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You called in the anonymous tip about him being the serial killer.”

“Yes. I couldn’t be sure what he was up to, and it was necessary to keep him out of the way. But, in all fairness, he was the serial killer,” she pointed out. “Now hold still while I get samples from both of you.” She cocked her head and gave me a thin smile. “Unless you enjoyed the Taser?”

I grudgingly extended my arm.

“You regrew the bodies from the heads he gave you,” I said.

“Just the one so far,” she corrected absently as she slid the needle into my vein and carefully drew the syringe until it was full of blood. “It takes an enormous amount of brains—and time—for the parasite to regenerate that much tissue.” She pulled the needle free and stuck a piece of gauze on the puncture site.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “You just did the one, but you didn’t have enough real brains, so you tried to use Sofia’s fake brains,” I said. “But something went wrong. That’s why Zeke looked so old and why he died when he fell.”

She let out a soft sigh as she repeated the blood-drawing routine on Philip. “That’s right. It mutated the parasite to where it couldn’t survive. The subject would have died soon even if he hadn’t fallen. But I’ve since modified the brain substitute formula to remove the chance of that sort of mutation happening again.”

“Zeke was trying to escape, wasn’t he?”

Her lips pressed together in annoyance. “Yes, which is why I’ve completely changed the protocols.”

Ha! I was right! Not that it made any difference at this point. But, still, Ha! I was right! “And what happened to the real Norman Kearny?”

She gave me a blank look. “Who…? Oh, right, the janitor. Quite dead and disposed of. Unfortunately for him he was the one person in our personnel files who was the right age to take the fall, so to speak, for the dead zombie, and who likely wouldn’t be missed.” She shrugged. “We didn’t have time to make up a whole new personnel record. Easiest to simply do a bit of identity-switching.”

Well, that explained why the guy at the lab had said there was an opening in the custodial department when I’d pretended to apply for a job. Poor Norman. The really shitty part was that he died for no reason since we figured it out anyway because of the wristwatch.

“At any rate,” she continued, “despite the problems, the regrowth of the zombie was enough to prove that the program had potential.”

“You used Ed,” I said. “You convinced him his parents had been killed by zombies so that he would start hunting them. You didn’t want to get your hands dirty hunting down zombies on your own.” I curled my lip in my best contemptuous sneer.

“Angel, I’m not much bigger than you. I don’t have the brawn, so I had to use the brains.” She tapped the side of her head. “Besides,” she said with a shrug, “it wasn’t a total lie. His dad was killed by a zombie.”

“Yeah yeah, I know,” I retorted. “Pietro was banging Ed’s mom, his dad found out, shot her, and then Pietro killed his dad. Then, since you worked with his mom, you had access to her notes and research.”

Dr. Charish sat back and regarded me with something that almost—almost—looked like respect. “My goodness. Marcus said you were clever. Perhaps I was wrong about why he wanted a relationship with you.”

Right then I silently vowed that at some point I would slug this bitch in the face, hard.

She spread her hands. “Anyway, yes, I approached Pietro and told him what I knew, convinced him that I wanted to continue Dr. Quinn’s research. I could see the greater potential even if he could not.” Her smile was chock-full of self-satisfaction. “Then I bided my time, waiting for the breakthrough that would make my plan possible.”

“Sofia’s artificial brains,” I said.

“Did you know Pietro paid for her entire education?” Dr. Charish asked. “Sofia had an interest in medicine, but he convinced her to go into neurobiology. Supported her the whole way, while making sure she specialized in fields that would benefit him.”

Okay, that was more than a little manipulative, but I already knew that about Pietro. “And you hired her to make sure you could keep an eye on her and what she was doing.”

“Of course,” she said. “And with Pietro’s blessing as well, since it kept her close.” She chuckled. “That made things much easier all around, since it can be unwise to cross that man.”

“I can’t wait to see what Pietro’s going to do to you,” I said.

She lifted an eyebrow at me. “Do to me? For what?”

“For crossing him,” I said. “He told me he’d never allow any of the zombies under his protection to be harmed in any sort of research.”

“Angel, I didn’t cross him.” She leaned in close and smirked. “He simply made an exception in your case.”

She chuckled at the stunned look on my face. “Can you blame him?” she asked with a tilt of her head. “He’s been grooming Marcus for bigger and better things for a long time now, and it didn’t take much persuasion on my part to convince him that the last thing he wanted was to see Marcus hooked up with barely literate trash.”

I felt as if a fist had closed around my chest. She stood and raked her gaze over me. “Let’s get you cleaned up and fed, shall we?” she said with a bright smile. “We need you at your best!”

With that she left the room, leaving me to stew in my hate and fear.