The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (6 page)

Xiao followed the noise past the official test subjects, who squirmed about in rat-fear, but otherwise looked fine. The problem was in the cages beyond them where his rats were. His rats had been injected with the same formula Dr. Lee’s had used in her project at Walton, the same formula that had been sabotaged by Eng, the same one that Eng had assured him would work miracles.

“What is this?” he demanded. “What did you do?”

His rats looked awful. Their usually glossy coats were clotted and nasty. Even though each enjoyed a cage to themselves they were patchy and mutilated as if they’d been fighting. The wounds wept a black substance and the same fluid dripped from their eyes.

His proximity to the cages riled them up to a higher degree. They hissed even louder and flung themselves against the thin metal bars to get at him. Some even tore at the bars with their jagged teeth; one somehow managed to break the metal.

Xiao turned to the girl in outrage. “Explain this!”

She hadn’t budged from the doorway and now she cringed back another step. “We believe this is a side effect of the Com-cells. We did not stray from your instructions.”

“I want to see the access logs. I want to know who fed them and what they fed them. Someone will pay for this…and you…”

“Doctor Yaoh.”

“Doctor Yaoh? You call yourself a doctor? If you’re a doctor why don’t you tell me what is coming from their eyes. Hmm?”

“We don’t know. You were in meetings all yesterday and you told us not to bother you at home and you said to run only the prescribed tests. You were very clear on that, sir.”

She was right but that didn’t absolve her in his eyes. “Do you not understand the first thing about taking initiative?” She kept her eyes on her clunky, sensible shoes. “I guess not. You have a lot to learn about science, Yaoh. We’ll start today. I want you to find out what that black fluid is. Run cultures and do a full blood panel on them. And then…then move them to the number three lab and increase their bio-status to Category B. Just in case.”

Category B required a much more stringent level of personal security: hoods with face-shields, gowns, and heavier rubber gloves and boots.

As per his instructions, the infected rats were moved, and in accordance with their training, all precautions were taken. The staff was glad to see the rats moved, especially Yaoh. These particular test subjects gave her the freaks and she had stepped back, allowing the other scientists to wrangle the hissing and squirming little demons into smaller transport cages.

Given the choice between touching the fiends and cleaning up after them, she happily chose the latter, right up until a piece of jagged metal punctured her glove and slid beneath her skin. The “9” laboratory hadn’t had its bio-safety level increased and all she had on was latex. She didn’t panic, not entirely, but she was afraid and disgusted nearly to the point of being nauseous. The rats had been revolting, filthy things, and the black goo had smelled of a toilet in one of the city slums where the water only ran every other day.

Cleaning the tiny pin-prick was her first concern. As she hurried to the sinks, she tore off the gloves and went through the ten-step procedure to clean a puncture wound, leaving off the final three steps: present one’s self to the building medical personnel, fill out an incident report, and present one’s self to one’s immediate supervisor.

Yaoh wasn’t about to put her neck right into the noose over such a small scratch. Jiang had a reputation for firing first and asking questions later and she needed the job. For five minutes, she scrubbed the wound until her flesh was red and raw. Satisfied that no germ could have survived, she reached for the paper towels and that was when she realized that in her haste she’d stuck her gloves in the front pocket of her lab coat instead of disposing of them properly in one of the bio receptacles.

She glanced around quickly to see if anyone caught the mistake and then slipped the soiled gloves out of her pocket and into the proper trash. She didn’t see that in the bottom of her pocket was a small drop of black goo.

It was just one mistake; one small breach of protocol—but it wouldn’t be the last.

Within thirty minutes Yaoh was wincing from a headache. In another thirty it was practicably unbearable and yet in the People’s Republic of China you couldn’t simply beg off work so easily, not if you wanted to keep your job. There was always the option of going to see the medical personnel, however Yaoh was suddenly feeling suspicious of them and their needles and their bright lights.

“I have a meeting,” Yaoh suddenly declared to the other scientists. “With a representative.” This stopped the friendly banter, which had been going around the room. Everyone’s mood had lightened now that the black-eyed rats had been moved much further down the hall; now they went thin lipped and their smiles took on a preformed appearance. Sudden meetings with a
People’s Representative
were usually an unpleasant harbinger of things to come.

“It’s about my cousin,” Yaoh said, trying to assure them. “She’s…they think she’s a subversive but she isn’t.”

That helped, but only a little. Everyone in China had heard stories where investigations blossomed and grew deadly roots that reached out to strangle the guilty and the innocent alike.

One of the scientists, a man named Veng who had unruly, spiked hair, and wore glasses two centimeters thick, and who had a serious crush on the meek Yaoh, asked: “Do you need a character witness? I am more than willing to…”

“No,” Yaoh said, practically running out of the lab. With her head throbbing, she headed for the lady’s room, but at the door she heard voices on the other side. They would be loud as a roomful of hens, she just knew it. She knew they would cluck maddeningly and the sound would pound into her head making her grow crazy, making her want to hurt them. She already wanted to hurt them.

Barely holding herself together, she went for the elevators and rode one deep underground where it would be quiet and cool, and where there’d be fewer people to hear her moan. The basement was a labyrinth of storerooms and machinery and dark shadows if one knew where to look. 

Yaoh searched out the dark to hide in. She found a room in which the lights had burned out. It was perfect. Not only was it properly gloomy, it was also piled to the ceiling with boxes of lab equipment, all of which clinked with the sound of glass on glass as she barricaded herself in.

Her mind was going—the pain was great and so too was the hate. It was awful and all she could think was that she had to hide, she had to burrow as far from people as she could get or she would hurt them. As fast as she could, she moved the boxes against the door, and all the while the sound of the lab equipment breaking went right along her nerves like someone dragging a needle across her brain.

Still she worked and she took the pain, knowing that it would be a blessing when all the boxes had been shipped to one side of the room and there was only quiet and dark.

Finally, it was over and all that there was left to her was the pain etching along the neurons in her brain. There was a sound that accompanied the Com-cells multiplying: it was a crackle, like fire. It started small much like the pain had, but soon the crackle became a roar, again just like the pain.

Long, hard minutes passed and both the pain and the sound grew huge in her head. The pain thrummed and the sound of it was enraging, building and building within her until she couldn’t take it anymore. With a shriek, she charged the boxes and began throwing them aside in great heaps. Something drove her to get out of the room but her eyes were growing ever dimmer and the room seemed to grow darker with each box she flung. The boxes crashed as she heaved them but where the door was she couldn’t tell. There were always more boxes and more pain.

She was in the far corner of the room with a box high over her head when the door was shoved open behind her and a stab of light had her cringing.

“What’s going on?” a man asked. He was short and thin with olive skin and black eyes. These generalities were the most Yaoh could make out, that and the fact he looked so clean. And he smelled clean, cleaner than she felt at least. From thirty feet away, she caught his scent, an intriguing mixture of old sweat, cheap cologne, and yesterday’s fried dumplings. It awakened something primal inside of her.

Yaoh was suddenly ravenous. It was a wicked, greedy hunger that knew no bounds. It was a hunger that neither morals or laws could restrain. By now, her brain was black with the Com-cells, she was simply beyond thinking. She leapt over piles of fallen boxes to get at the man.

His eyes bugged to the full extent his epicanthal folds would allow and, too late, he tried to slam the door in Yaoh’s face, only she was far too fast. She was strong, as well.

Her ninety-four pounds felt like a hundred and fifty to
Xun Long Bao. He was a maintenance worker and was used to hefting large boxes and crates around all day long and yet this tiny woman pulled the door out of his grip and was on him before he could even think about screaming.

When they went down, struggling together and her teeth tore into his left bicep, he certainly screamed then. It wasn’t the bite of a rape victim using her last defense or even a lunatic under the spell of some mental aberration, it was the bite of a monster. She latched on and then pulled up with her whole body, tearing out a hunk of meat that dribbled blood all down her face.

She tried to swallow it without chewing and nearly choked. At first Xun could do nothing but scream but as she tried to retch up his flesh he pushed her off of him, finding her surprisingly light. Then he was on his feet and racing down the hall with Yaoh right on his heels. She was cheetah fast, but had terrible vision and wasn’t good at abrupt turns. This was the only thing that allowed him to make it to the stairs ahead of her. He ran up four flights and burst out into the lobby of the
Siangou Building.

“Call the police!” he wailed, running for the main doors. “Call the police!”

Yaoh came out of the stairs filled with an all-consuming hunger. It was a predatory hunger. Even though there were people all around her, she oriented on the fleeing man. She could smell his fear, it was invigorating. She could smell his blood, it was intoxicating.

She raced after him as he left building, running into the heart of Shanghai, the most heavily populated city in the most heavily populated country in the world. The streets teemed with humanity. The roads were like endless rivers of people. They crowded the heavens, living one on top of another in skyscrapers that reached a hundred stories into the air.

Their smell was overpowering, taking over the last remnant of Yaoh’s mind. She went mad because of it and her hunger was only equaled by the sudden rage that engulfed her. She wanted to kill them all.

People shied away from the tiny woman with the black eyes and the mouth that was runny-red with blood. She looked like a demon and that was appropriate; within a day, she would create hell on earth.

When she tore through the crowd, fighting to get to the wounded maintenance worker, she infected nine people. When the police tugged her off his limp body she infected six more and left spores lingering in the air. She was taken to the fourth busiest police station in the city and within three hours, there were over two hundred people infected in the building. They roared and spat and bit and slowly the Com-cells spread.

The 7AM to 3PM shift raced out of there as soon as they could. Some went home to infect their families. Others went to the market and infected scores more there. Many, with headaches growing behind their eyes, went to one of the fifty bars between the station and their homes. In all, they took fourteen different busses and six different train cars, coming in close contact with over a thousand people. On average, those thousand took two hours and six minutes to become contagious and by eight that night, the city’s police force had responded to over three-thousand Com-cell related attacks.

It might seem like a drop in the bucket in a city with twenty four million people, and yet those attacks would decimate practically the entire police force by eleven that night, leaving the city completely defenseless. China had no second amendment. People were forced to defend themselves with knives and clubs, bricks and sticks, all of which were practically useless.

The numbers of zombies in such an environment swelled exponentially, doubling every hour. At nine, there were six thousand zombies roaming the streets attacking everyone in sight. At ten, that number was twelve thousand; at eleven, that number was twenty five thousand.

The sun rose on a city in flames. Bodies and body parts littered the streets. Zombies, now numbering over a million, surged in teaming packs toward anything that was even vaguely human. Brick and steel would keep them at bay, however the majority of the city lived in densely packed slums; a perfect breeding ground for a zombie army that would, before the day was out, rival the size of all the armies in the world combined.

And that was just the first day.

A fundamental shift had occurred in Dr. Thuy Lee. It announced itself civilly; in a manner no one else would’ve ever noticed.

She slept in.

Not that six in the morning was sleeping in for a normal person, but for her it was and, regardless, she never slept in. Never. Thuy Lee always had too much to do.

In middle school, on top of her regular studies, there had been violin practice two hours a day, and her language tutor. In high school there was her 5.0 grade point average that she maintained from the first day right up until she gave the valedictorian speech—and there was also piano and early placement college courses.

At the university there had been the shock that it wasn’t the temple of knowledge she had expected. She had discovered there were three categories of students: the first were the partiers, who eked their way through classes, coming in with red eyes and smelling of dirty laundry. The second were the pseudo-intellectuals who went around all day using the very largest words in their vocabulary, spitting them out as though they were bullets of the gun. Later in life they were the ones most likely to mention their degree within the first two minutes of meeting someone new. The last category was made up of people who were genuinely excited at the idea of learning something new—like Thuy.

Thuy carried twenty-six credit hours a semester and wished she could sleep even less than the six hours a night that she did. She had burned through her classes one after another, ingesting every new fact she could get her hands on.

After that were her postgraduate studies and then there was her first real job: R&K Pharmaceuticals had grabbed her up as fast as they could. Even before she had tossed her mortar board in the air they had her signed on like a left-handed pitcher with a 98 mile an hour fastball. Even then she had not let up. For the last ten years she had worked eighteen hours a day trying to unravel the mystery of cancer.

All her life she had been working her hardest, striving to be perfect and now she was clearly not. She had failed and failed huge.

Strangely, it brought about not a sense of melancholy but a sense of relief. This was the first day of her life she had nothing to do. She had no job—or so she suspected. Her research, regardless that it had been sabotaged had been responsible for mass death. Her career was over. No one would touch her after this. And this meant that she had nothing to do with her morning.

The authorities would want to talk to her, she was sure, but what could she say that would be at all helpful? Aim for the head?

Next to her, Ryan Deckard was breathing lightly. He smelled of her shampoo and was bursting the seams of her pink silk robe. The night before, after each had showered, they kissed gently, neither had the strength to do more, then each fell so quickly into sleep that they slipped into unconsciousness intertwined like lovers. He had rolled over in the night and she had awakened wishing he would come back and then, she wished she had the courage to roll over and cuddle him.

Her dreams had been of Von Braun and Riggs. Their faces kept crumbling off and they had chased her, relentlessly, first through a burning building and then out into woods that were deep and endless. When she woke in a sweat, she had wanted Deckard to hold her, to rescue her.

She knew what most of her colleagues would say about that. They would cluck for sure. There were many feminists in the science community and, for the most part, Thuy had no need of them. To her the real feminists were the giants of the past who had freed women from what was, for all intents and purposes, cultural slavery. Those women were people to admire. The whiners of today who became offended when a man held a door open for them were shadow-puppets in comparison.

Besides, Thuy was too busy outdistancing men in every way to be coddled by perpetual complainers. In fact, she liked to think she was the ideal feminist having made her own way in the world while demanding and receiving the respect of both men and women alike. Yet, and here she winced a little at the thought, she was wishing that Deckard would hold her and chase the terrors of the night away. Of course, Thuy had an excuse, she had seen things of such horror it was a wonder she didn’t have her thumb permanently corked in her mouth.

Through slitted eyes, she gave Deckard a peek. He seemed younger in sleep. The hard lines of his face were more relaxed and the normally grim set of his lips was gone; he seemed softer somehow, but worn at the same time. Part of this was due to the fact that he sported little scabbed-over cuts all over his face and hands courtesy of the explosion set by Anna Holloway. Thuy still didn’t quite understand why the young woman had tried to burn the Walton facility down. Was it to hide evidence? Weren’t the zombies roaming around killing people evidence enough? And what part did Eng play? Had there been two saboteurs involved? Or was Eng merely a spy? Or was Anna the spy and not a saboteur after all?

Thuy didn’t think she would ever know. And really did it matter now? Years of her hard work had been destroyed, utterly; there would be no going forward no matter what happened. There would only be the endless investigations and finger-pointing and lawsuits and the testifying—assuming of course that the authorities could get the infected patients rounded up and controlled without spreading the disease further.

This was something that the efficient-minded Thuy would have thought had been completed by now. Yes, there had been a lapse in security…or a few of them she supposed, but she was sure that by now Walton had been surrounded and that the majority of the infected people had been killed in the fire or had been captured by the police.

She was clueless about the terror and the slaughter that was occurring in Poughkeepsie or that the little stream that coursed through nearby Pleasant Valley ran red for miles down to the Manchester Bridge, or that the town of Highland, across the Hudson, was so devastated that out of a population of 4720 people, less than a tenth could still be counted as human. A sleepy toll-taker, wearing a bland expression and a neon-yellow vest over a set of proverbial watermelon sized breasts, became the first to die in Highland as a band of black-eyed zombies followed a car up the incline.

“You can’t be walking in the middle of the damned road,” she yelled out to the group from her seat in the toll booth on the eastern end of the Mid-Hudson Bridge. “And please! Don’t think you can come up on me like I’m scared of you sorry-ass punks.” Her name was Yvonne Tillers; she was two-hundred pounds of sass. She had grown up in the Bronx and none of the skinny white boys with their patchy beards and their hipster glasses who attended one of the colleges in the area threw the least amount of fear into her.

Before the boys could make it into the light of the toll station, she was out of her booth, the many gold rings on her fingers flashing. Yvonne was a sight to see when she got angry. It was a true fact, no one messed with her when she was angry. “Get your sorry asses over on that side walk before I call the po…” It was then she saw their faces. In that second her anger straight up disappeared. The heat of it was just gone, replaced by a sudden cold terror. She tried to run back to her toll booth but her two-hundred pounds of sass wasn’t made for sprinting. They caught her in the door of her booth and she screamed and screamed. Her screams echoed over the Hudson for what seemed like ages. Twenty minutes went by and still she screamed, a heart rending sound. The beasts had to gorge their way through rolls of belly fat just to get at her vitals.

Yvonne died a very slow death.

Others heard her screams. The birds and animals that heard it shivered in their nests and their burrows. The humans cowered in their homes doing nothing but locking the doors and calling the sheriff. A hundred calls were made; after three rings they went to a pre-recorded message because the sheriff had died hours before at Saint Francis Hospital where the zombies outnumbered the living by ten to one. He had died screaming much the way Yvonne had screamed: high and girlish.

And Thuy knew none of this. Her night had been one of basic survival. She had fought to stay alive before fleeing through a gap in the quarantine. Then she had slept, unaware of the chaos she had left behind. Unaware that Highland had been overrun by horrible creatures that were somewhere in limbo between the living and the dead, or that in the town of Lloyd people hid in basements and attics, under cars and in trash bins, and, in the case of three ten-year-old boys who’d been having a sleepover, in a tree house.

The zombies had sniffed them out, but the wooden planks nailed to the trunk of the cottonwood had been an obstacle they could not overcome, but this didn’t save the children in the long run. After hours of waiting to be rescued, one of them, Jared Cooper, went mad from fear and worry and decided to chance making a dash for home where his parents were supposedly waiting, just up the street. There were four zombies beneath their tree and the other two boys pleaded with him not to go.

“I’m fast. I’m fast. I’m fast,” he repeated over and over as he looked down the plank ladder. Even for a ten-year-old, Jared was athletic. He played basketball and football and he was fast and agile even with fear contorting his limbs, making him want to shrivel into a ball. He fought the feeling and went down the ladder like a monkey. At the bottom, he zigged around the zombies and their long arms. One hooked the collar of his wind-breaker and tried to reel him in but Jared was able to pull away, leaving his jacket behind.

He ran up the block, past the Dern’s house, noticing that the front door was smeared with blood and flung wide. He ran past the Albertson’s which was brightly lit but abandoned. He ran past the McDonald’s and stared with wide unblinking eyes at the body on the front porch. It was Lisa McDonald, the only girl he had ever seen naked. He had seen her in the flesh on a dare. A month before, he had shimmied up the birch that grew outside her window and stared in at her as she got ready for bed. She had dropped her shorts like it was no big deal and walked around her room in only her tank top. He saw her butt and everything. Then she took her top off. She had been eleven and flat as a board. He would later tell his friends that she was “skinny” and “there was nothing there,” and yet he had stared, entranced, growing a funny twig of a little boy boner.

Now she was lying on the porch, face down and one of her arms had been torn off. It was lying in the grass making no sense to Jared. It looked pale and still serviceable as though someone could stick it back into its slot and it would be good to go.

Jared ran with his head swiveled like an owls. The bare arm, the same one he had seen attached to that beautiful, scrawny girl, wouldn’t leave his mind. It was the first thing he planned on telling his mom about when he got home.

Three doors down was the house he grew up in. He hammered on the door but couldn’t yell; his lips were numb from his fear. His throat felt terribly scratchy like bark rubbing on burlap. He could only bam on the door until his hand hurt. When he looked back, he saw that the zombies were coming for him. They started appearing in doorways and through the slats of fences. Jared began crying and with his lips against the heavy wood door he croaked out a single word: “Mom.”

His mom was home but Karen was too dreadfully afraid to even think about moving. She was afraid in a way that no twenty-first century woman could fathom. It wasn’t a fear of missing a car payment or getting too tipsy at a fourth of July barbecue. It wasn’t even the vague, nebulous fear of American crime which always seemed to happen to someone else.

It was fear unimaginable.

She had seen her husband Gary being eaten. The last time she had seen him he was crawling across the kitchen linoleum with their neighbor, Libby Keats riding him, tearing at his shoulder meat with bloodied teeth. He had been hamstrung by Libby’s twins, one of whom had been in the corner chewing on Gary’s left foot. The other twin had been under Gary with his head half buried in his round belly burrowing his way through Gary’s intestines.

Gary had come to a shuddering halt next to the marble-topped island where the family normally took their breakfast and where Libby would come over sometimes to sit and crab about her life. Like a water buffalo being eviscerated by a pack of lions, Gary had toppled over on his side and was tugged here and there as mother and sons ate their fill. Above him on the wall was a cuckoo clock; it cheeped pleasantly every time the second hand began a new revolution. It cheeped pleasantly twenty-six times before Gary let out a last sad, wet noise and died.

It was twenty-six minutes of hell for Jared’s mom who had been hiding beneath the sink. Now, she was sitting in her bed holding the pistol she had always detested. She had been “afraid” of it back before she understood what real fear was. It was pleasantly heavy. The weight made the gun feel real when nothing else did. She cuddled it, waiting for the perfect moment to put it against her temple and pull the trigger, and yet the perfect moment never seemed to arise. She figured she would know when it came.

Jared ran from the zombies, his legs going in barely controlled wheels as he sped around the house for the back door. It was open! He dashed through, shut it behind him, and then stopped. His ten-year-old body locked rigidly in place by the transformation that had occurred in his kitchen. There was a great pool of drying blood that had made a literal island of the marble topped island, and there were smears of red, lumpy stuff and a partially eaten foot beside the cabinet where the cereal was kept. The body of his father was long gone. Gary had come back to life an hour before and had literally stomped away.