Zombie Kong - Anthology (23 page)

“Quit it!” I said. “You’re hurting him!”

“Any friend of yours has to be a loser,” said Eddie. “And that’s one ugly friend you’ve got there. Where’d you find him, at the zoo?”

“If you don’t stop…”

“You’ll what? Cry on me?”

Suddenly, Bobo jumped down from the monkey bars. He landed between Eddie and me. For a moment, I was blinded. All I could see was Bobo’s butt. And that’s when I heard the scream. It was Eddie, and he was crying bloody murder. I ran around Bobo and saw that he had picked Eddie up. Eddie’s arm, up to the elbow, was buried inside Bobo’s mouth, his fangs working feverishly to chew through the muscle and bone. I felt hot bile rise in my throat as Bobo spat the gory appendage aside. And Eddie, and all his loser friends, shrieked. Some of them picked up rocks and began to pelt Bobo with them, and he knocked them all aside, letting loose with a guttural roar.

As for what I was doing? I was simply standing there, mouth wide open, watching the entire episode. I didn’t know the first thing to do.

But I did hear the woman’s scream over Eddie and his friends yelling, and Bobo’s growling. There was a subdivision behind the playground, and I turned around to follow the direction of the scream. I saw her standing in her backyard, hands to her face, screaming as she stared at Bobo. For some reason, I screamed myself when I saw her dart inside her house. I don’t know why, but I knew it couldn’t be leading to anything good.

Rooted to the spot, I watched as Bobo tossed Eddie away. He landed like a ragdoll in the dirt and crumpled up into a fetal position, crying his head off. The other boys stopped throwing rocks and turned away to run. They simply left Eddie there to tend to his own wounds. I felt a rush of hot anger at that. The fucking cowards!

I didn’t linger on Eddie long, though. We can’t forget that I practically hated his guts. So I turned my attention to Bobo. The large gorilla roared and beat his chest. Then he walked away and returned to the monkey bars. He climbed to the top, still roaring, and beat his chest, again. Then he raised his arms to the sky. I couldn’t see his eyes very well, but I knew he was crying. The big guy didn’t really mean to hurt anyone. He just wanted to reach the sky. He just wanted to be free of Charlie, Eddie, and probably, if truth be known, even me.

And I couldn’t blame him.

I took a step forward, reaching a hand towards Bobo, when two police cruisers skidded to a stop on the edge of the playground. The policemen threw open their doors quickly, taking position behind them, guns drawn and aimed directly at Bobo.

“No! Don’t hurt him!”

But the police ignored me. I was just some dumb kid to them. And there’s no telling what that distraught housewife had told them. She’d seen Eddie’s arm hanging out of Bobo’s mouth, and she had heard all of our screams. To the police, I was probably just another little kid in a shit heap of trouble.

I started to run towards Bobo, who returned his attention to me. And I could see those glistening tears in his eyes.

He just wanted to reach for the sky.

Bobo threw his arms up again, and that’s when the police let loose with their gunfire. The bullets tore into Bobo’s hide, spitting flesh and blood everywhere as he tumbled from the monkey bars. He slammed down on the ground, just a few feet away from where Eddie was still crying, and I knew he was dead. The thought that he might have survived that barrage never entered my mind.

I walked over to his corpse and knelt down. I ignored the warnings from the cops to stay away from him. Instead, I knelt beside Bobo and took one of his large hands in my own. It was already cold.

TW BROWN

Iced

“…erratic behavior of the Gulf Stream has brought unseasonable weather to most of the UK––

Click

“…scientists continue to insist that this temperature anomaly, seen in parts of China and—”

Click

“…section of ice the size of the state of Georgia has broken free—”

Click

Brett Urban switched off the television and tossed the remote onto the conference table. A dozen well-aged men in near-identical suits stared back, expressionless. He took a deep breath and considered his next words carefully. “The Athens camp is believed to be in that section of ice.” Brett leaned forward, placing both hands flat on the polished mahogany.

Looks were exchanged, but he didn’t think it had quite sunken in. Then, like somebody switching on a bank of lights, eyes began to widen.

“Mister Urban,” one old man said, peering at Brett over his thick glasses, “are you telling us that the expedition team is—”

“I’m not saying anything yet,” Brett interrupted. “But I need to be on a plane now, before any of the media, or worse… the environmental activist groups… get on scene.”

“Have all traces of that camp sanitized, Mister Urban,” another old man hissed.

“The last thing we need is this administration getting wind of our operation,” a third added.

Brett leaned down and grabbed his case. “Give me twenty hours and tell your friends to keep the satellites away from the area until you hear from me.”

As he left the room and closed the door behind him, he heard the buzz of conversation kick in. The old codgers were, without a doubt, on the phone to various contacts within––and on the fringes of––the government.

DECC Corporation was funded by some of the wealthiest men in the world, and when a geological report arrived claiming that a microbe, previously unknown to man, had been discovered in a glacial ridge in Antarctica, a team had been dispatched immediately. Unlike most government research teams, the expedition had the best equipment money could buy.

Less than two weeks later, DECC’s headquarters received confirmation.

Within a month, experimental stations all over the Antarctic region began encountering
problems,
ranging from equipment issues to a mysteriously sudden termination of funding.

One outpost—funded by a joint Chinese-Russian Intel organization—proved tougher to deal with. Their power generators suffered a catastrophic fire. By the time an evacuation team arrived, all of the members of the outpost were dead. Frozen.

Brett walked onto the tarmac and crossed the expanse to board the waiting plane. He sat down, strapped on his headset, and nodded for the pilot to take off. Conversation wasn’t necessary. Vic Brady, the pilot, knew where to go. He flew Brett wherever the corporation needed his special talents.

Brett opened his case and read from the folder that had been waiting for him in the conference room. The microbe was perplexing, with one curious finding: there was something in the genetic makeup suggesting a loose relation to primate DNA.

Initially, the board at the DECC Corporation had been furious. After years of raping the Amazon in search of the “one thing” that would offer them a miracle cure for everything, they believed their payday had come.

Brett did not want to be in Rachel Redding’s shoes. Doctor Redding had insisted that the seemingly mundane finding by a third-rate geological team was indeed the break they’d been looking for, being one of the first to examine the sample in a DECC lab.

Brett had been along when the doctor’s handpicked team was sent down.

Vic and him were the only outsiders who knew where the site was located. Even the construction company that had assembled the facility had been handled; an unfortunate plane crash ensured nobody would find Athens. The men who ran DECC didn’t even trust each other with the knowledge. Each of them owned well known, multi-billion dollar companies credited with something mankind could not live without—from technology to snack foods––and each of them had stolen the core idea from a friend, family member, or colleague.

Brett read from his notes as land vanished beneath him, replaced by the waters of the Atlantic.

His mission was simple, his objective clear: take possession of samples, notes, and research; destroy all other evidence; eliminate all persons, and destroy the Athens facility.

* * *

Vic Brady’s voice sounded in Brett’s headset: “Mister Urban, we should be in range for the beacon, sir.” It was the final failsafe of the Athens facility, built to blend in with the environment. Even if a satellite passed overhead, it was unlikely to see anything.

Brett flipped open his laptop and brought up the tracking screen. The central beacon, indicating the facility, appeared as a red square. All members of Athens were medically fitted with a tracking chip, and blue dots indicated personnel. By clicking the blue dots, Brett could bring up a person’s dossier. Or if he typed in the name, it would highlight the corresponding dot.

“I should have us on the ground in twenty,” Vic announced.

“Mmm-hmm,” Brett acknowledged, his eyes fixed on the screen.

What he was seeing had him perplexed. And Brett Urban didn’t experience that feeling very often.

* * *

Swirls of snow and ice crystals made it difficult to see, but Brett had seen enough during the descent to know there were problems, aside from the huge sheet of ice that had broken free and was slowly drifting north. Current projections had it on a collision course with Africa. Given the degree of melting between now and then, it would still be the size of Georgia when it arrived, and having it collide with
anything
was bound to have consequences. He needed to get in and out so the proper authorities could avert the potential crisis.

But back to the problem at hand: the residents of Athens were not where they should have been. Almost half of them were two miles east of the facility. From what Brett could see, there was nothing in that direction, aside from a nasty wall of ice. Truth be told, it looked like the Cliffs of Dover. Strange how he hadn’t noticed it when he’d dropped the research team off, or during any of his three subsequent visits since then.

Nope,
he thought,
there had not been a cliff over there. No wall of ice… or whatever it is.

The members of the research team were divided into two clusters of six and eleven. The group of eleven was bunched together on the far side of the camp, as if they had been locked outside and were trying to get in. The other group was halfway between them and the facility. A single member was inside the building, and if the overlay was accurate, he was in a storage closet; it looked like he was hiding.

Brett checked his computer and discovered the man in the closet was Matt Whitehurst, biochemist.

There were three people in sickbay––again, bunched together at the door. The rest were scattered in singles and doubles throughout the facility, exhibiting a disturbing lack of movement.

He’d located Doctor Redding.

She was alone in one of the facility’s recreation centers. Like the others, she wasn’t moving much, until the airplane circled the complex and touched down. Then, some of the scattered members showed activity, but not the mob on the far side of camp, and not Matt Whitehurst.

Something about this was very wrong, but for the life of him, Brett couldn’t figure out what.

2

Doctor Rachel Redding heard the droning sound of an approaching aircraft, knowing it would come sooner or later. Now all she had to worry about was their intentions. She held no illusions about their mission, and it didn’t take a paranoid conspiracy theorist to assume that the DECC wasn’t exactly above board. If a single radio message had been sent out in regards to what was going on, there was no telling what the response would be.

Doctor Redding, known by her colleagues as the no-nonsense type, prided herself on being an atypical woman. She felt no ticking biological clock as she passed forty, and while her looks—wavy brunette hair just past the shoulders, a curvy, athletic body, and hazel eyes—turned heads, she found little desire to copulate. On the rare occasion that the urge arose, she was quite adequate at dealing with it herself.

The events of the last four days made her angry; there was no logic for what she’d seen. She knew there was a misguided and ridiculously delusional section of society that reveled in what she’d witnessed, but even after witnessing it firsthand, her mind was not able to accept it.

The dead do NOT get up. They do not eat the living.

The organism they had been sent to investigate baffled everybody. When one of the biologists came back with evidence linking the sample to primates, nobody was thrilled. It did not explain the cellular activity seen under the scopes.

Then an unlikely error produced interesting results: Doctor Jane Reason nicked her hand while dealing with a sample; she didn’t report it until later that afternoon. The sample, now contaminated with her blood, would have sent a buzz throughout Athens had it not been for the massive ice slide, and subsequent fissure, that allowed a state-sized section of eons-old ice to break free.

After that, it was one unbelievable event after another: the team that had been at the site of the original find came on the radio, hysterical. There was a great deal of screaming. Then… silence. Attempts at hailing them were unsuccessful, but later that night, two members of the team arrived at Athens with fantastic stories.

Everybody listened, but nobody believed the stories, which were dismissed as delusional rants by individuals cracking under the pressure of isolation in a desolate environment. There could be no truth to their tale of a fifty-foot-tall white gorilla breaking free of the ice that cascaded down the Ronnie Ice Shelf.

The debate was heating up, and the two “obviously crazy men” were being restrained when Doctor Jane Reason stumbled into the room.

And here’s where things became difficult for Doctor Redding: take the possibility of Doctor Reason being a walking corpse out of the equation––the human jaw should not be able to exert the amount of pressure necessary to bite into somebody’s neck and tear away a chunk of flesh. Also, evolution has rendered man’s incisors useless when it comes to ripping and tearing. Yet, there she was, falling on top of one of Athens’ support staff (a fancy label for the cooks, repairmen, and janitors), and biting a hole in his neck. During the struggle, just about everybody involved came away with an injury, be it a scratch or a bite. And just as things seemed to be under control, the man with his throat torn open defied logic and sat up.