Albert said, “Conrad, wait a minute.”
Conrad rose to his feet. “You’re not trying to better this world.” He took a step toward the scientist’s desk. “You’re trying to destroy it.”
Albert’s black eyes were wide. He opened his mouth, tried to speak, looked at Norman for help.
“
You
are what’s wrong with this world.” Conrad placed his hands on the desktop, leaned down close to the scientist’s face. “You scientists and your—”
“That’s enough,” Norman said. He too had risen to his feet. “Conrad, sit down.”
Conrad remained standing, glaring back down into the scientist’s wide black eyes.
“That’s an order.”
Conrad stood up straight, took a step back to his seat, sat down.
“Albert,” Norman said, “would you please give us a moment? Afterward we’ll take him to meet Gabriel.”
Once the scientist had left—ignoring Conrad’s glare as he maneuvered his wheelchair from behind his desk, past the two men, and out of his office—Norman turned to find Conrad glaring back at him, shaking his head.
“What’s going on here?”
“Conrad.”
“Just what the fuck is all of this?”
“Conrad, settle down.”
“Are you a traitor just like him? Do you actually believe in the shit he was saying?”
Norman stepped in even closer, pointed his finger right at Conrad’s face. “I am still your superior officer and I will not be talked to like this. Do you hear me?”
Conrad only stared back at him, at the tip of the old captain’s finger. For a moment he was reminded of that man from the other day, the mechanic who thought he’d make some easy money.
“Look at me. Look at me straight in the face. How long have you worked under me? How long have you known me? Come on, answer me. Tell me how long.”
“Ever since I became a Hunter.”
“That’s right. And once, in all that time, did you ever suspect me of being a traitor? Tell me truthfully.”
“No.”
“Okay. So now why are you acting like this? I thought you trusted me.”
“I do, sir.”
“Then start acting like it. I’m not going to lie to you, and neither is Albert. Albert is a brilliant man, maybe one of the most brilliant on this planet. He only has the existence of our humanity in mind. That’s all he cares about. So at least hear him out. Listen to what he has to say, think about it, and then speak. Don’t act like a jackass again. Understood?”
Albert led them
down the corridor without a word. As before, they kept pace behind him, but now Conrad wanted to say something to the scientist, he wanted to apologize. But the opportunity never came, what with all the people in those long white coats walking past, until they turned another corner and a man wearing a black uniform walked past them but then stopped and said Conrad’s name.
Conrad paused, turned back around.
“No way, it really
is
you.”
The man was about Conrad’s age, about Conrad’s height. His hair was buzzed, he had a short goatee, and it was clear just by looking at him—simply by the way the man stood, the hardness of his face, the blackness of his eyes—that he was a Hunter. Or had once been a Hunter. Suddenly it occurred to Conrad the reason why Thomas had been able to spot him so quickly, how when you became a Hunter you entered into a brotherhood that made it almost impossible for you not to identify others of your kind.
The man was smiling, but the smile quickly faded when he realized Conrad didn’t recognize him.
“It’s Scott, man. Don’t you remember? We
graduated
together.”
And like that, Conrad’s years at Artemis came flooding back, and he remembered the hours he spent in class, the hours he spent training, the hours he spent with his classmates at the bars. Out of a class of three hundred only nine had graduated that summer day, and this man here had been among them, having accepted his broadsword from General Thaddeus, having watched in silence and no doubt resentment as Conrad accepted his broadsword from his father.
“Scott,” he said, and stepped forward, extended his hand, “I can’t believe it’s you.”
Scott’s smile returned at Conrad’s sincerity.
“How have you been?” Conrad asked. “Did you get assigned here right out of Artemis?”
“No, I went down south, stayed there a few years, transferred around, until I was offered this job as a Tracker.”
“A Tracker?”
Scott frowned at Albert. “Doc, you keeping my man here in the dark?”
“Actually we were just on our way to visit Gabriel.”
“Oh,” Scott said, and with that simple word something changed in his voice. He looked at Conrad, shook his hand again, and said, “It was good seeing you, man. And hopefully we’ll be working together soon.”
Conrad said he hoped so too. He wanted to ask Scott more questions, like just what exactly this place was, what was its purpose, what was so special about this Gabriel. But Scott had already turned away and was headed down the corridor, disappearing around a corner. The three men continued forward, Albert leading the way, until they came to a room and Albert pressed another button on his chair and the door slowly swung open.
“Go ahead, Conrad,” Albert said. “After you.”
The first thing he noticed after stepping inside was the set of bars running the width of the room, dividing the space in two sections. Unlike the corridor and Albert’s office, the place wasn’t brightly lit, and Conrad saw that there were no fluorescents in the ceiling. Instead there were floor lamps about six feet tall situated all around the room, both on the other side of the bars and on Conrad’s side. The only other thing on his side was a simple black chair, facing the bars.
What was on the other side of the bars, though, was what captured his attention. The room was fairly large, the section behind the bars taking up three-fourths of the space, and there were shelves upon shelves of something Conrad thought he’d never see again in his existence.
Books—actual
books
—lined the shelves. There were at least half a dozen cases in all, and there may have been more but Conrad could barely tell because his dead mind was racing. He took a step forward, having suddenly noticed the fish tank, much like the one in Albert’s office, and while there were tropical fish in this tank swimming lazily through the water there was something about these that just wasn’t right.
“Are those fish,” Conrad said, touching his dry tongue to his dry lips, “are they …”
But before he could finish the question, before he got out any more words, there was movement behind the bars.
In a chair that was faced away from them, a figure had stood up. Now it turned, peering through glasses at who had entered the room. Setting a book down on the table—and still Conrad couldn’t get over it, seeing that book and all the rest, things that had been destroyed, banned, illegal all over the world, things he had actually destroyed himself—the figure approached the bars slowly, a smooth, steady pace that just wasn’t natural.
The figure said, “So is this the new recruit you were telling me about, Albert?”
Conrad’s hand went instinctively to his broadsword. But he wasn’t wearing his broadsword; he wasn’t wearing a weapon of any kind.
“Hello, Conrad. I’m Gabriel. It’s very nice to meet you.”
And the zombie stuck its living hand through the space of the bars, a simple, common gesture, as if from one friend to another.
Back in Albert’s
office, the fluorescents were humming, the fish tank was bubbling, and the three men were silent. They were in the same places as before—Conrad and Norman in the chairs, Albert behind his desk—and as before the mood was tense.
Conrad sat slumped in his chair, his head bent, staring at his wedding band. He moved the gray ring around on his finger, all the while thinking about how when he finally expired—when all his hair fell out, his skin and bones decayed to nothing—this ring would still be the same, unchanging, the only testament to Conrad’s existence. He blinked, stopped moving his wedding band, instead moved each of his fingers one a time, as if testing their flexibility, before clearing his throat and looking up at Albert.
“You have a zombie here.”
The scientist sat back in his wheelchair, his elbows on the armrests, his hands clasped together in front of his face. Slowly he nodded.
“Actually we have twelve, counting Gabriel. We did have thirteen until two days ago, but … well, you know what happened.”
Conrad frowned.
“He was the zombie you hesitated in killing,” Albert said.
“What do you mean he was the zombie I hesitated in killing?”
Albert stared at Conrad for a long moment, his hands still clasped before his face. “I’ll answer your question, but first I want to tell you a story. It’s about a boy who many believed would expire before his tenth animation day. Even his parents believed this. He had contracted a parasite which was eating away at his feet, at his legs, working its way up to the rest of his body, and the boy and the boy’s parents and the boy’s doctors had to make a very important decision. In the end they decided to take the boy’s legs, to tear them from the rest of the boy’s body, to try to save what was left.”
Albert moved his chair out from behind his desk, turned so he faced Conrad. He reached down and rapped both of his legs with his knuckles, the sound of hollow wood momentarily joining the humming and bubbling.
“That boy was me, of course. I was the one everybody thought would not last until he was ten. In fact, if it had been up to my parents and doctors, that parasite would have continued eating away at my body until there was nothing left. It was my decision, and I actually had to fight for it, an eight-year-old boy arguing with adults not to expire. In the end they took my legs, managed to stop the parasite, and here I am today. I might not be much to look at, but at least I’m here, and I’ll tell you—right after it happened, that surgery, I had a new appreciation for this … well, we call it existence, but I like to think of it as life. We are dead but somehow we continue living, even though almost all of our major organs have shut down.”
The scientist moved back behind his desk, rested his hands on the desktop.
“So I had this new appreciation, and I started studying the living. I went to the Internet, one of the few things that survived the Zombie Wars, and I started researching what you and almost everyone else on this planet call zombies. Long ago the Government went through and deleted all the sites about the living, but some still do exist. And from these I learned about them, their history, who they were. Yes, we did evolve from them, they are our inferiors, but still … Conrad, how much do you really know about the living?”
Conrad was silent.
“Do you know that they see colors? That to them the world is not just black, white, and gray. According to Gabriel, there are thousands of colors, different shades, different mixtures. And did you know the living can actually taste things? They can smell things, too. They have actual feelings. Verbs such as sad, happy, and angry are just words to us, but to the living they actually
feel
these things. And they
dream
, Conrad. They actually dream while they sleep.
“Now I’m not going to answer your questions just yet, but instead ask you a question of my own. Here it is. How are zombies created?”
The question caught Conrad off guard. So far he’d sat there, listening, trying to follow what the scientist was saying, but now this question caused him to quickly sit up in his seat. He heard the continuous bubbling of the fish tank and found his gaze shifting to where it was in the corner, those dead tropical fish moving through the water, and he remembered the fish tank in the zombie’s cell, those
living
tropical fish, and for an instant his dead mind played a very cruel joke and overlapped those two images, a perverted, unnatural snapshot that Conrad had to rapidly blink away.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Don’t you think that’s strange? That through all your training, all your time at Artemis, and all the years you’ve been a Hunter, you never once learned how the things you hunt are created?”
“I know that only children are vulnerable. Those around the age of ten.”
“But do you know
why
?”
Conrad shook his head.
The scientist picked up the phone from off the desk, pressed a button, and said, “Bring it in.” When he set the phone back in its cradle, he stared at Conrad for another long moment before speaking.
“The living are created two ways. The first is what you had mentioned, though there is more to it. Yes, it seems that children around the age of ten are the ones susceptible, but it’s more than sheer randomness. The second is simple reproduction—a living male and a living female come together the same way a dead male and dead female would come together, and nine months later a living infant is born.”
“But that’s impossible,” Conrad said. “Zombies almost never live to full adulthood.”
Albert said nothing. He only stared back at him, his stiff face never changing, and after a moment Conrad got it.
“You’re talking about Heaven, aren’t you?”
The scientist nodded. “Despite what the Government tells the public, the place does exist. We just don’t know where it is.”
For the longest time Conrad was silent. He was having a hard enough time accepting everything else he’d seen and heard so far—and that scene in the zombie’s room, the zombie extending its hand for Conrad to shake, kept haunting him—but now this was starting to become too much. Yes, he’d heard about Heaven before—what dead person hadn’t, especially a Hunter?—but every time it was mentioned there was always that silent acknowledgment that the story was nothing more than a myth.
Mostly the stories came from those pro-living extremists who believed that the zombies weren’t evil at all, adults who actually encouraged their children to try to become living when they turned ten. These were the people who hated Hunters, who tried everything they could to destroy them, and who very recently tried expiring Conrad.