Deadrise (39 page)

"They’re not that stupid." Matt said. "Unless they got plenty of zombies to back them up they don’t like to get too close." Matt scanned the forest. The dog ran up to the tree line and began to bark, jumping and running back and forth.

"There’s something still out there." Rick said from the third floor.

"Can you see anything?" Matt asked.

"I can’t see shit."

Suddenly a loud, high-pitched scream sounded from the forest, shattering the silence. The scream continued higher and higher, rising in pitch until it stopped abruptly.

"That sounded like a man! No human could have survived in those woods with that many zombies about!" Susan said incredibly.

The dog continued to run back and forth at the tree line, barking and snarling.

"Look there!" Rick hollered and pointing the flashlight into the tree’s twenty yards out from the house. Something flew out of the forest and plopped heavily to the ground. Large, and dark, it rolled across the lawn several yards before coming to rest near the edge of the cement deck. Zeke, the black lab was on it in an instant, sniffing and growling.

"What is it?" several voices asked at once. Rick played the beam of light across the lawn, trying to get a good look around the dog.

"ZEKE!" Scotty called. "GET AWAY FROM THERE!" The dog instantly scampered away, turning back to the forest and took up barking again. Rick focused the beam of light onto the dark, bowling ball size object.

It was a human head!

It was lying on its side, right cheek down. The face was constricted in a mask of pain, the mouth pulled back into a ragged scream. Its glazed eyes reflected the beam of the flashlight. Luckily for all that the ragged, bloody stump of the neck was facing away.

"We should all get back inside." Mac said. "There may be a superzombie out there right now watching us." Nobody objected to that.

Matt quickly stepped back into the tool room and closed the door. He and Susan hurried back through the garage and into the kitchen. Mac was already there. Rick came in from the hallway stairwell. A few moments later David and Samantha walked in. Matt noticed they were holding hands. He smiled. Good for David.

"Mom is with the kids." David said.

"Scott and Jennifer are keeping watch upstairs." Rick said.

"I’ll keep watch here." Mac said, taking a position by the sliding glass doors.

Matt wanted to tell him that if a superzombie still was out there he was standing in a perfect line of sight, but figured that Mac already knew that and kept quiet. Perhaps he was trying to tempt the bastard into shooting? The dog ran up to the door and lay down, tail wagging.

"How could a man have been out there among all those zombies?" Susan asked.

"Maybe he was up in a tree." David said.

"What the hell was he doing out there?" Rick asked.

"Maybe it was our neighbors from down the way?" David said. "Maybe they were waiting for nightfall to come check us out?"

"You got an answer for everything, don’t you kid?" Rick said with annoyance.

"Maybe I do." David shot back. Rick made to retort but Matt cut in.

"David might be on to something." Matt said. "Whoever lives over there appeared hostile. They saw us fly over here then a little while later they saw the chopper leave, come back and leave again." Matt continued. "They probably sent someone over to see if we were still here."

"Makes sense…" Mac said.

"But what about the zombies?" Samantha asked.

"Some of them probably lived here on the lake before…" Matt paused uncomfortably. "Or they wandered up from town. The guy was already in the tree checking us out or the zombies came along and he climbed up in the tree."

"So it probably was a superzombie that killed him." Mac said. "It may have been leading the other deadfucks to us and spotted the guy up in the tree."

"For all we know the poor bastard killed more of them out there in the woods." Rick said.

"Maybe it was Zack that got him." Susan suggested.

"I hope not. If that was Zack we saw this morning I hope he fled far away from here." Matt said.

"I guess I should contact Jenkins and let him know what happened." Rick said.

"He’s got his own problems down in Park City." Mac said without turning away from the back doors. "We have everything under control."

Matt thought he detected a bit of hostility towards Jenkins in Mac’s tone, but said nothing. Jenkins was an asshole.

"Tomorrow morning we can round those bodies up and burn them down by the water."

"I’ll keep watch down here." Mac said. "I’m up for the night and the dog will sound the alarm if anything tries to sneak up on us. The rest of you should try to get some sleep."

Without much fuss everybody drifted back to there rooms. Rick returned to the Third floor balcony where his wife stood watch. Alone in the kitchen with only the dog, Zeke for company, Mac pulled a can of coffee from the cupboard and set about making a fresh pot…

Chapter 43

Tuesday June 26, 2001

Park City, UT

8:14 AM

Jenkins face involuntarily cringed as he peered through the thick Plexiglas window of the quarantine chamber and beheld the…
Thing
inside.

The thing Ron had become.

The skin was mottled black and green, more fungus than flesh, peppered with boils and blisters that oozed a bloody, viscous liquid. And if one looked close, they could see it still retained a vague, humanoid appearance. The blasted head was a swollen, corpulent bulb of putrid flesh. The eyes, nose, mouth were gone, replaced by a sprouting bunch of thin, slime-covered tentacles a foot long that wriggled in the air. The arms and legs were reed thin and spread wide, the fingers and toes elongated and spread across the floor of the room like pulsating, rotten vines. The entire torso was bloated at least five times its normal size, the flesh stretched balloon tight like a massive overripe fruit until it began to crack in some places, oozing bloody infection into an expanding pool beneath the things body.

"And you are sure Ron is dead?" Jenkins heard the disgust in his own voice.

"Quite sure Colonel Jenkins." Answered the Mad Doctor. That was Jenkins name for the hyperactive, anal-retentive doctor he’d been dealing with since first coming to Park City two days ago. Looking at him, Jenkins realized how much this bastard actually fit the part. He was tall but thin as a rail with long dark hair, wire-rimmed glasses over wide, intense eyes that were constantly probing, analyzing. He wore a white lab coat, brown slacks and black shoes.

"What has he become?" Jenkins turned back to the horror in the specimen room.

"Our tests indicate that it is a malignant strain of the Alpha virus, mutating…evolving…-"

"We’ve heard all of this before Doctor Cooper." General Parker interrupted. He stood beside Jenkins, peering into the room, his fleshy face a sour mask of distaste. "What is it?"

The doctor was silent for several moments before answering. "We do not know."

"You’ve got to at least have a few ideas." Jenkins said. The military command running Park City might be inept fools but this doctor seemed pretty smart, mad as a hatter, but still smart. The doctor didn’t answer Jenkins question. He just looked into the specimen chamber with an intense, fascinated stare.

"Dr. Cooper?" General Parker asked sharply.

"Yes…some theories." The doctor didn’t take his eyes off the creature as he spoke.

"DR. COOPER!" The General snapped. The doctor jumped at the Generals bark, cringing away, his large eyes growing even larger.

"General? I assur-"

"SHUT UP!" The General barked back. The doctor cowered away, shivering in fear. The Generals angry mask melted back to his flat monotone. "You will give Colonel Jenkins and me your undivided attention. Do you understand?"

"Yes sir." The doctor replied meekly.

"Good. Now I believe Colonel Jenkins had a question for you?" The General turned to Jenkins, indicating that he should speak.

"You’ve got to have some idea as to what that thing in there is."

The Doctor was silent for several long seconds before he answered, taking another look into the chamber. "All of our tests indicate that the specimen has mutated into some sort of gestation pod."

Jenkins and General Parker both shot the Doctor a questioning look.

"Gestation pod for what?" General Parker asked.

But instead of answering the Doctor turned away from the window. "If you’ll follow me over here to the console." They were standing in the main laboratory control room. The Doctor led them over to a computer terminal. He quickly punched a few keys on the keyboards and the screen came alive with a full color, thermal display of the pod, with its biological and physiological readouts to the side.

"As you can see this particular strain of the creature is warm blooded as opposed to the Alpha and Beta strains."

"Zombies didn’t show for shit on thermal optics." Jenkins said.

"Of course not. They are dead." The Doctor said stiffly. He didn’t like being interrupted. "But as I was saying, this creature is warm-blooded."

"You said that thing is morphing into some kind of gestation pod, but for what?"

The doctor gave Jenkins an annoyed look, as if he were keeping him from something far more important. But he also caught the Generals hard stare. The doctor punched a few more buttons on the keyboard and the image on the screen changed. It was still the gestation pod, but the image was more transparent, making the insides of the thing visible. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of small, slug sized creatures writhing and squirming about the sack of fluid inside the bloated torso. The little creatures were just a few inches long and their wriggling reminded Jenkins of sperm seen under a microscope.

"What the hell are those?" Jenkins asked.

"Until I am able to examine one I cannot offer anything more than a hypothesis."

"So hypothesize." Jenkins said.

"It’s the true face of the virus. The Alpha-Alpha so to speak." The Doctor got a dry little chuckle at his attempt at humor.

"You mean those little bastards in there caused this whole thing?" Jenkins asked, pointing into the room.

"That is one theory for what is transpiring in there. Nothing more. Indeed, all we have for the entire phenomenon is theories. I’ve shared many of these with General Parker."

"The General and I discussed a few ourselves." Jenkins said. "So what do you think Doc?"

The Doctor put on his most serious face and looked Jenkins straight in the eyes. "I am of the belief that the plague is extraterrestrial in origin."

"Fucking aliens." Jenkins said.

"I didn’t say alien invaders Colonel. I said extraterrestrial in origin."

"What’s the difference Doctor?" The General sounded genuinely curious.

"I believe, as do many of my colleagues on the medical staff, that the Bio-Necrosis is the result of an extraterrestrial virus unleashed upon the earth from a meteor impact."

"What evidence do you have of that?" Jenkins asked.

"The theory of planets seeded with life via meteors and asteroids is an old one Colonel Jenkins. I’ll explain. You have a planet teeming with life, Earth for example. Now along comes a large asteroid that impacts with the planet, a planet killer like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It would be worse than any nuclear holocaust you could imagine. Millions of tons of debris will be hurled into the atmosphere, some even out of the gravity well and into space. Gravity will naturally cause the debris to coalesce and over millions of years form into large, solid objects, such as meteors. Most are dead, frozen hunks of rock but maybe, just maybe, there is one out of every hundred million or so carrying bacteria, perhaps strains of virus and other microscopic forms of life. Then these meteors drift through space for millions of years until they are caught by the gravity of a star and eventually one of the planets orbiting this star. The meteors fall into orbit of the planet, plunging into the gravity well. Most probably burn up before they impact, but some will impact the surface. And there, a new life form is introduced: A sort of galactic pollination. Survival of the organism depends entirely on the new environment and its ability to adapt to the foreign ecosystem. If a seed meteor were to hit say, Mars, or even the moon, most likely any organism present would perish. But what if one were to hit earth? Lush, fertile, teeming with life?" The doctor ended his statement as a question, unanswered and open for interpretation.

"You think that’s what is happening right now on earth?" Jenkins asked.

"I do. We have an extensive database of known bacteria and viral agents, both natural and man-made. The BioNecrosis virus is something entirely new."

"Could it be an engineered virus?" Jenkins asked.

"That was our first assumption. However under close examination the virus shows none of the genetic markers associated with of engineering. As far as we can tell it is a naturally occurring virus."

"They are discovering new viruses and diseases in the jungles all the time. Deforestation sets them loose. Maybe that’s what we’re dealing with here." The General said.