Death and Biker Gangs (2 page)

I hadn’t been too thrilled to hear that the good doctor was bringing the dead dude down to the medical center, but you learn to shrug things off after the endtimes get going. Once the sun went away and revenants started walking around, stuff like stitching up a man’s ass while sharing a room with a dead person seemed almost passé.

I gotta say, whoever designed this apocalypse should get some extra points for variety. No, it’s not enough that the initial meteor shower wrecked our infrastructure, leaving us huddled in refugee camps, largely cut off from the rest of the country and the world while trying to figure out what to do next. No, we had flesh-eating revenants running around, too, and better yet, in some cases they were our 
roommates.

I concentrated on my handful of sutures, which would probably have gotten me kicked out of Suturing School, if such a thing existed. Tony edged closer to the curtain, presumably looking around it to see what was up with Harrison. “So you’re treating a guy while there’s a decomposing corpse in the room?” he asked. “That seems…unhygienic.”

This would all be much funnier if the whole cultural fascination with the undead hadn’t been at the height of its popularity when the end came. Yeah, it’s ironic; of all the possible ways the end could come, we got 
zombies.
 Seriously, what the hell? Approximately one percent of the population—the zombie fanatics—were probably feverish with joy, assuming they hadn’t been vaporized by the meteors or devoured by the objects of their desire.

What a way to go.

 “Vibeke hasn’t touched him,” Doctor Samuels said, “and I doubt his cooties are going to jump all the way across the room.”

I think I really started accepting that the world as we knew it had irrevocably changed when seasoned medical professionals began calling the undead virus 
cooties.

“Besides, if my theory is correct, the cooties won’t make a difference at all.” The doctor sounded like he was sitting down, probably with clipboard in-hand. The research never stopped.

Tony ambled back over as I finished up the stitches. “How’s that look?” I asked.

He tilted his head. “Messy.”

Well, that’s what they got for deciding my long-ago stint as an EMT meant I was qualified to actually treat people. When we first arrived at the camp, I’d been sent right up to Doctor Samuels, where I promptly received a crash course in suturing, pushing antibiotics, and bone-setting—all typical medical problems when the endtimes arrive and zombies pay social calls—but that didn’t mean I was any good at it. I poked at the wound and decided the handful of stitches, while ugly, would probably hold. 

I got started on the more familiar task of bandaging. “What’s going to happen to him?”

Tony shrugged. “Hammond will probably try to be civilized and ask him some questions. He bitches about those bikers every damn day…” 

Tony had been assigned to outgoing patrols, and thus wound up hanging around the general and getting all sorts of semi-juicy information. He never seemed to mind sharing it, either.

Bandaging completed, I stripped off my gloves and set them down on the table next to the sleeping patient. “What’s this theory you were talking about, Doc?” I asked.

Something rustled on the other side of the room. “Come on over and have a look,” Doctor Samuels said. “He’s waking up.”

Tony and I exchanged glances, then made a beeline for the curtain.

Doctor Samuels was indeed seated in his chair, gazing morosely over his clipboard at the squirming dead man in the bed. 
Waking up 
meant 
reanimating.

The corpse’s mouth moved, almost curving up into a smile. His lower jaw moved up and down, slowly at first, then faster, his teeth clacking together audibly. I’ll say this about the undead: they have outstanding jaw strength. No wonder so many people turned up with entire chunks of flesh missing—these guys really bit down.

Doctor Samuels looked at his watch. “Approximate time of reanimation…five-fifteen. Fingers twitch first, then mouth…” He scribbled away on his clipboard. “If he follows the typical pattern, he’ll open his eyes next…”

Harrison opened his eyes. The corneas had clouded over, and they shifted slowly from side to side, not focusing on anything in particular. A few up close and personal experiences with the undead had led me to steer clear of them, but watching it actually happen was sort of fascinating.

And gross.

“Ugh,” I said.

Harrison twisted his head around to look at me, his neck creaking loudly. I cringed away from the unfocused stare; the zombie leer has never failed to make my skin crawl. The living dead don’t look much like people up close, at least not people you’d want to associate with. From a distance, the better-preserved ones can pass as sick or feeble survivors, but once you look at them in the face…well, there’s nothing human left in that ravenous stare, or in the hollowed-out cheeks or constantly moving jaws. 

“Reacts to sound,” Doctor Samuels said. “But we’d figured that out already. Still not sure if they see us or just sense us.”

“So you guys experiment on zombies often?” Tony asked. “Is this what you do all day, Vibby?”

“Don’t call me
Vibby.
”

Harrison’s arms and legs moved slowly up and down. Tony and I both reached for our respective firearms—I carried around a pistol from the Korean War, or so he’d told me—but Doctor Samuels held up a hand to stop us. “Vibeke deals with the living. But she’s got a strong stomach, so I figured she wouldn’t mind if I used her exam room.”

“You know she barfed on the first zombie she saw, right?”

I stomped on Tony’s foot. “Dude.”

“But she hasn’t barfed since, correct?”

“Actually—”

“Tony,” I said warningly. He sent me one of his patented devilish grins, but fortunately didn’t elaborate further on my stomach issues. I’d actually managed to develop something of a reputation as a hardass around camp, much to my surprise, and I preferred to keep it that way. 

Harrison decided he’d listened to enough of our chatter and tried to sit up. This in itself was inadvertently pathetic; the sheet was tucked in tightly around him, and he kept lurching up against it, unable to break loose. I almost smiled. “Give me some advance notice next time, Doc, and I’ll short-sheet it.”

Doctor Samuels nodded, evidently finding the show fascinating. “Repetitive motions…he will probably continue to jerk against the sheet until he frees himself.”

Maybe Harrison just found us really, really irritating. If some mad scientist in a stained lab coat was observing 
me 
after I just woke up, I might try to bite his face off, too. What if the zombie apocalypse could be cured by a decent cup of coffee?

Tony unholstered his pistol, but didn’t take aim just yet. “So, Doc…this is what you do?”

“Yes.” The doctor sounded distracted, his gaze entirely focused on Harrison. “The nurses and medics can handle most of the cases here. That frees up the rest of us for research.”

He put a pretty good spin on it. In actuality, Elderwood Community College didn’t have any medical facilities beyond the one we presently occupied, so things like invasive surgeries and chemotherapy were out of the question. One of the doctors had miraculously removed an appendix shortly after we’d arrived in camp, but aside from that, we were largely limited to things we could physically treat without cutting someone open.

“Can’t wait to tell Dax about this,” Tony murmured.

I was pretty sure he didn’t mean that. Dax had toughened up considerably since we’d met weeks ago in my magazine’s office, but he probably wasn’t equipped to hear about reanimation and the creepy jerking motions that came with it.

Hell, I probably wasn’t equipped for it either, but all I’d felt for weeks was a sort of numbness. I could look a reanimating corpse and think 
that’s just awful, 
but the sheer horror didn’t touch me. Not entirely.

Maybe I was still in some sort of shock.

Harrison wrenched an arm free, jerking the sheet up with it. He lurched upright, his spine straightening out with a sickening crunch. A few seconds later, his head snapped around to stare at us, and his neck made a similar crunching noise. 

I pulled out my pistol, thumbed off the safety, and pointed the thing at Harrison’s head. “Doc…”

“Reflexes kick on quite suddenly. No wonder Imelda got bitten.” Doctor Samuels hadn’t moved, which indicated nerves of steel or—more likely—some kind of paralyzing brain fart. “Back away slowly. Let’s see how long it takes him to reach us.”

My 
I’m in control 
façade started slipping. “Doc, this seems like a bad idea.”

“I second that notion,” Tony said.

Harrison twisted to the side and rolled right off the bed. He hit the floor with a dull 
thud
, and Tony switched off his pistol’s safety. I beckoned to the doctor with my free hand. “Time to move. They bite ankles, you know.”

Harrison flopped around like a fish for a moment or two. It might have all been very amusing if he hadn’t abruptly placed his hands on the floor and pushed himself to his feet.

I figure this is why some people have trouble putting down the returning dead—at times they’re eerily human.

I kept the gun trained on him. “Doc…”

“Subject reaches attack position quickly. Seems to regain use of limbs very fast…maybe he’s remembering how to use them?” Doctor Samuels tilted his head, as though he hadn’t considered that thought before. “Seems uncertain as to which target to go after…”

“You do this 
all day
?” Tony asked.

Harrison opened his mouth and emitted a low growl, then dragged his right foot forward. I broadened my stance; once they began the undead hokey-pokey, attack was only seconds away.

Doctor Samuels nodded glumly. “Pretty much. All right, Vibeke, you may dispatch him.”

BANG!

Harrison’s eyes crossed before he toppled over.

I kept the gun on him for a moment longer, just in case he decided to get back up. For the most part, all those awful zombie movies I hated so much were spot-on: you got them in the head, and they stayed down for the long haul. But everything else had gone wrong since this whole endtimes business began, so I figured it wouldn’t take long for the zombies to develop some sort of resistance to bullets, or learn how to fly, or something similarly inconvenient.

I re-holstered my pistol. If I could avoid puking on the dude, I’d consider it a job well done.

The doctor picked up his clipboard and jotted down several sentences, his frown growing more by the moment. “I was afraid of this.”

“Afraid people still got up?” Tony asked. He nodded at me and said, “Good shot.”

“Thanks.”

Doctor Samuels shook his head. “No. We had our hunches, but…well, I suppose I’ll have to tell Hammond.”

“Tell him 
what
?” I asked. This whole operation was starting to reek of bad news.

Doctor Samuels picked up his largely untouched dinner tray. Damn, the man had planned on eating during a reanimation? That sort of thing would put me right off my canned corn. “Harrison was a diabetic,” he said. “We ran out of insulin a few weeks ago, when command stopped sending the medical supplies. We tried to control it with diet, but he slipped into a coma a few days ago, and expired…oh, yesterday morning.”

Hmm. That didn’t jive with the usual story we received, like Harrison being bitten by a ravenous fiend from the tenth layer of hell, or Harrison trying to resuscitate his dead girlfriend, who had promptly displayed her gratitude by biting his lips off.

“He wasn’t bitten,” the doctor said, just in case Tony and I were too thick to process his meaning. “We checked him thoroughly. Not a mark on him.”

 “Maybe he was bitten before and it just healed up?” I asked.

“He was one of the first residents of Elderwood Refugee Camp. Most of the long-term refugees came here 
before 
the outbreak reached us—it took time to migrate down from the impact sites, or so we thought. But some of us had been wondering about its rapid spread, especially considering how slow most of the revenants are…”

Tony finally re-holstered his gun. “Something about the undead makes people do real stupid things. 
That’s 
what you should look into.”  

“We knew the dead were getting up without a transmitting bite, but only in the areas nearest the impact sites. Harrison was never near any…and that puts a bit of a twist on our diagnosis,” the doctor went on, as if Tony hadn’t said a word. “It’s in the air. It seems those who are further away take longer to wake up, after they die, but they do indeed wake up. Probably with disastrous results for those who think only a bite transmits the cooties.”

That was probably everyone. “This doesn’t sound good, Doc,” I said.

“It’s not meant to.” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the ceiling, and the leaden skies a few feet above it. “We were operating on the belief that those who survived outside a five-mile radius were free of the pathogen, provided they were not bitten. And once we figured out how to treat the bites, well, all the better. But communiqués from other camps, when we still received them, suggested some disturbing findings. I suspect whatever the meteors brought with them has lingered, and Lord knows we’ve all inhaled it.”