Undead Rain (Book 3): Lightning (Fighting the Living Dead) (7 page)

“At the time, the question came up of how this pure strain would react with the faulty vaccine that causes hybrids. We decided that it would have the same effect as the virus that is transmitted by a bite and the victim would become a hybrid. But because of the absence of some impurities that are transmitted from the biter to the victim, we decided that the transformation into a Type 3 wouldn’t involve the usual four-day sickness.”

“So there’s nothing to worry about,” Sam said.

“We were wrong,” Doctor Colbert said. “After the two sites lost contact with each other, we did some further studies here at Alpha Two. We went beyond simple theory and performed a series of experiments in this lab to find out what would happen if a vaccinated person were injected with the pure strain of the virus.

“The experiments had no real-world application; we didn’t think anyone would actually ever be injected with the virus—why would they? But scientific curiosity drove us to seek answers anyway. The results were conclusive; the vaccine has no effect whatsoever on the pure virus.”

Next to “Type 1” on the board, she wrote the word “Pure”.

“So that is how we classify the infected. When the virus is transmitted by a bite or scratch to an unvaccinated person, that person dies, and a Type 2 is created. A zombie. Add the vaccine into the mix, and that creates a victim who remains alive, but becomes driven by a homicidal rage. That is a Type 3. A hybrid.”

She pointed at the top of the board. “But if someone is injected with the pure virus, they become a Type 1. At the moment, there is only one Type 1 in existence…Vess.”

“So if we don’t get the antivirus that this H1NZ1 is needed for, we’ll become like him?” Jax asked.

Doctor Colbert nodded.

“Okay,” I said, “But we’re going to be given the antivirus when we get back to Alpha One, so why panic?”

“Tell me exactly when you were injected with the pure virus. What time was it?” Colbert asked.

I shrugged. “I didn’t check my watch.”

“It was eight thirty,” Jax said. “There was a clock in the room, and I noticed it said eight thirty.”

On the whiteboard, Colbert wrote “Introduction of virus: 2030 hrs Sunday.” She drew a vertical line beneath the words and asked, “What time is your rendezvous with the people from Alpha One?”

I told her, and she wrote “1300 hrs. Tuesday” at the bottom of the vertical line.

She said, “That would be plenty of time if you had been bitten, or if our original theories about the pure virus were correct. You’d be able to return to Alpha One and receive the antivirus with time to spare. From the time you were injected, you would have ninety-six hours before becoming a Type 3.”

“You’re saying we don’t have that long,” I said.

Shaking her head, she drew a horizontal line halfway up the vertical line and wrote “2230 hrs. Monday” next to it.

“The people who injected you were working on outdated information regarding the pure strain of the virus. This is when you’ll turn,” she said. “Tomorrow night at ten thirty. You don’t have anywhere near the ninety-six hours that the people at Alpha One thought you’d have. The pure virus works much faster than that.”

She checked the clock on the wall. “You have twenty-four hours left.”

“
I
don’t fucking believe
this,” Sam said, throwing his backpack to the floor. “I knew we’d get screwed over by those fuckers on Apocalypse Island.” He paced back and forth along the length of the lab, muttering to himself.

“They didn’t know anything about it,” I reminded him. “They thought that everything they told us about the virus was correct.”

“Just shut the fuck up, Alex.”

I decided to let him work out his anger issues by himself. I didn’t want another punch to the gut.

Jax was standing by the window, looking out at the rainy night. I went over to her. “Hey, are you okay?”

She nodded but didn’t say anything.

“We’ll get through this,” I said. I didn’t really believe those words, not at that moment. We were only twenty-four hours from becoming creatures like the thing in the vents.

Jax sighed. “I don’t think so. Not this time, Alex. I’m going to die not knowing if my boyfriend is still alive or not. I’ll never know what happened to him. And he’ll never know what happened to me.”

“Don’t think like that,” I said. “This isn’t over yet.” I was trying to reassure Jax but I was in exactly the same situation; if I didn’t get that antivirus, and turned in twenty-four hours, I would never know what had become of Joe and my parents. Lucy’s fate, on the other hand, was certain; she would turn. I guessed that the guards at Alpha One would kill her once she ceased being a human being. Hart’s wife, Kate, would suffer the same fate.

An idea came into my head. It was probably too late for me, but if I could get my backpack full of H1NZ1 to the rendezvous site, Hart would find it and take it back to Apocalypse Island. Lucy and Kate could be saved, even if we couldn’t.

Jax reached inside her T-shirt and pulled on the thin gold chain she wore around her neck. “Derek gave me this,” she said. “He asked me to marry him.” A diamond engagement ring hung from the chain, sparkling in the lab’s artificial light. “I never wore it because I couldn’t decide if I was going to say yes. I was an idiot. I should have said yes without even a second thought. I didn’t realize how precious our time together was. I didn’t know it was going to end so suddenly.” Her shoulders began to hitch. I put my arms around her and let her cry against my chest.

I liked Jax. At times, she seemed to be the most vulnerable person in the group, and that was endearing. Even though she could be damn tough sometimes, she wasn’t in the same league as Tanya. Jax showed her softer side sometimes, and the fact that she wasn’t afraid to show it made me like her even more.

It felt good to hold another person, even if it was someone I really didn’t know. In the midst of death, destruction, and a countdown to our own demise, there was comfort in the touch of another human being.

The moment was ruined when Sam kicked a steel worktable with the toe of his boot. The sound reverberated through the lab.

Jax pulled back from me with a little smile, and turned to face Sam. “What’s wrong with you?”

“This is some fucked-up shit, man. I don’t want to die here.”

Doctor Colbert spoke up. “I thought you people were fighters. I’d never seen a more motivated group of survivors. I was barely surviving here, thinking I was going to die, but you convinced me to try to live again. You showed me that the zombies have a weakness, and told me that there are still scientists at Alpha One working on a solution to the problem we face. You gave me hope. Now you’re giving up? You have twenty-four hours left; are you going to spend them doing nothing but waiting to die?”

“She’s right,” Jax said, wiping tears from her face. “I don’t want to sit here doing nothing while time ticks away. There must be something we can do, something we can try.”

I asked Colbert, “Is there any way we can communicate with Alpha One from this facility?”

“No, we tried that. When they didn’t answer our calls, we assumed the island had been taken over by the zombies. We had problems of our own, so contacting Alpha One wasn’t exactly a priority.”

“And there’s no other way to speak with them?”

She shook her head. “No. We kept in contact via telephone, email, and video calls, but it all stopped suddenly. Our network went down.”

So, communication with Alpha One seemed to be out of the question.

“How far is it to the coast?” I asked.

“About seventy miles.”

“We can get there by car,” I said.

“This is bullshit,” Sam said. “When we get to the coast, then what? Do you think we’re just going to find a boat to take us to Apocalypse Island?”

“I’ll row there in a dingy if it means saving our lives,” I replied.

“Don’t be stupid, man. We’d get to the coast and we’d be stuck there. And don’t forget that there are soldiers crawling all over the coast. We’d get captured before we even reached the beach.”

“We’ll have to come up with a plan,” I said, “but first let’s get out of this building and back to the guard station. Tanya and Johnny deserve to know the situation, and maybe they’ll have some ideas on what we can do about it.”

Sam continued pacing back and forth. “We’re all fucked.”

“When did you become such a pessimist?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure what had happened to Sam lately, but he had changed from the easy-going, levelheaded man I had once known. He had always been impetuous and brave, but there had been an underlying calm in his nature. And as a cameraman for survivalist Vigo Johnson, he had surely been in some harrowing situations, yet he seemed not to be affected by them or anything we had encountered together. But since being injected with the virus, the calmness had been replaced with anger. Maybe he had only fooled us into believing he’d had his shit together, and the facade was now slipping.

“When did you become such an optimist?” he threw back at me. “When we met you, you were whining about everything. Now you’re all ‘fuck yeah, let’s do it.’ You’ve changed, man.”

I wasn’t sure he meant it as a compliment, but I took it as one. I remembered complaining about everything all the time. I wasn’t sure what had changed inside me, but now I hardly saw any point in griping about the little things that annoyed me. The things I used to complain about paled in comparison to the big problems I had to deal with now. Maybe, like Jax, I had realized that life was precious.

I didn’t want to waste any of that precious time, even if I only had twenty-four hours of it left. Especially if I only had twenty-four hours of it left.

Maybe I could at least get the H1NZ1 to the helipad where Hart would be landing in a couple of days’ time. Doctor Colbert could tell him what had happened, and fly to Apocalypse Island with the chemical to do some good. Maybe she would be a part of the team that would finally figure out how to deal with the zombies for good.

Jax leaned against the lab table as if she had suddenly lost all her strength. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

She clutched her right arm, pain etched across her ashen face as she shook her head. “No,” she said through gritted teeth. She doubled over, falling to the floor, moaning in agony.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Doctor Colbert desperately.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s reacting badly to the virus.”

“I’m okay,” Jax said. “Help me up.”

She took my hand and I helped her get to her feet. She leaned on the table, breathing deeply. Beads of sweat had broken out across her forehead.

I put an arm around her, but she shook it off. “I’m fine,” she said.

I didn’t know what was happening to her, but I decided that we should get out of here as soon as possible and regroup with Tanya and Johnny in the security-guard station.

I went to the door and looked out at the corridor. It seemed deserted. I pressed the button on the walkie-talkie.

“How does the fourth floor look from the cameras?” If this floor was clear, all we had to do was ride the elevator down to the reception area and get the hell out of the building.

There was no answer other than static.

I tried again. “Tanya? Johnny?”

Nothing.

Then Tanya’s voice came over the airwaves, sounding worried. “Alex, there’s something…we don’t know what it is…but it just ran past one of the cameras on your floor.”

“What? Where?” I looked out at the corridor again. “I can’t see anything.”

“It was by the elevators,” Tanya said. “I’m panning the camera around but I can’t see it anywhere. It moved too fast.”

I turned to the others. “What do you think? Should we wait, or go now?”

“Let’s go,” Sam said, “I’m sick of this place. There’s too much science everywhere.” He looked at Colbert. “No offense, lady.”

Jax nodded. “I want to get out of here, too.”

Doctor Colbert said, “I’ll go along with whatever you decide.”

“Okay, let’s do it.” I opened the lab door and we went out into the corridor. The sprinklers had stopped, but the walls were dripping with water, and there was at least an inch of it covering the floor. I went ahead, moving as quickly as I could while still being alert and wary. I wanted to get out of here as much as everyone else, but I didn’t want to go rushing into trouble.

We got halfway along the corridor, the elevators in sight ahead, when a crashing sound made me turn around. The grille of the air vent in the corridor had hit the wall and fallen to the floor. A shape leaped out of the hole and landed in the corridor.

It was obviously Doctor Marcus Vess. His face was lined with dark veins, his eyes yellow, but I recognized him from the videos. He was naked, his entire body’s vascularity prominent and dark beneath his skin. He was covered with blood, some of it dried, some fresh. He grinned at us.

“Run!” I shouted. I turned and splashed toward the elevators as fast as I could.

When I reached the elevators, I took a left turn toward the main stairs. If I had turned right, I would have hit the locked access door, and I wasn’t sure if I would have time to swipe my card through the lock before Vess caught up with us.

But when I barged through the swing doors, I realized my mistake; the stairs were swarming with zombies, probably the ones that had been driven here by the sprinklers. I tried to halt my forward momentum but barreled into an undead woman dressed in a lab coat. She snarled at me and tried to bite my face. I pushed her away with my bat, wincing at the fetid smell that seeped from her decaying flesh.

Sam came through the door and started swinging his bat. I heard the dense wood make contact with rotten flesh as zombies began falling onto the stairs.

There were too many zombies for us to fight our way through, and Vess must be right behind us. I backed out through the doors into the corridor and turned to face Vess. He wasn’t there. He was running toward the access door, where Jax was desperately sliding her card through the lock, her blue eyes wide as she watched Vess get closer.

For some reason, she had turned right where we had turned left.

The doors mercifully opened. Jax ran through. The doors closed before Vess reached them.

Through the glass, I could see Jax look over her shoulder, slowing her pace as she realized Vess hadn’t made it through the door. She made it to the end of the corridor before she winced, grabbing her right arm and doubling over just as she had in the lab. She leaned against the wall, grimacing.

I was sure Vess was going to come back this way. We had no chance to get to Jax, but the emergency stairs door was on her side of the access door. If Johnny or Tanya could come up those stairs, they could get Jax to safety.

I hit the button on the walkie-talkie. “Jax is in trouble.”

“Johnny is already on his way,” Tanya replied. “As soon as he saw her heading for that door, he was out of here and running into the building.”

The doors behind us swung open and the zombies came shuffling through, moaning and reaching for us. We backed away toward the elevators. I shot a glance over my shoulder, preparing myself for when Vess finally turned around and came for us.

But he didn’t do that. After watching Jax for a moment, he climbed up into an air vent.

“Oh, fuck,” I said, “he’s going to come out on the other side of the door.”

Jax was still leaning against the wall in obvious pain. She slid down the wall, clutching her stomach. She was helpless.

An air vent on the other side of the access door smashed open and Vess jumped down into the corridor, his feet splashing the water on the floor.

Seeing that he was on the same side of the door as her, Jax tried to crawl away.

Vess walked forward toward her as if he had all the time in the world.

The emergency stairs door burst open between them and Johnny appeared, Desert Eagle in his hands. He pointed it at Vess and shot.

Vess went down, falling backward into the water and lying still.

As the zombies advanced, we backed up past the elevators and into the corridor Jax had taken when I had stupidly headed for the zombie-infested main stairs.

“We might as well go this way,” I told Sam and Doctor Colbert. “The zombies are blocking the elevators now.” The threat from Vess seemed to be over. Now all we had to do was get to those emergency stairs and out of the building. We could figure out later how to get to Apocalypse Island.

We turned and started heading for the access door. Through the glass in the door, I could see Johnny carefully approaching Vess’s unmoving body, the Desert Eagle shaking a little in his hands. Beyond him, Jax was sitting in the water on the floor, her face ghostly white. Her eyes were shut tight, her features twisted with pain. If her pain was brought on by the virus in her system, I wasn’t sure she had even the twenty-four hours Doctor Colbert had promised us.

As Johnny got close to Vess, he bent over to look at the creature’s face.

Vess shot his arm up and grabbed Johnny around the throat, lifting him into the air. He got to his feet, still holding Johnny up above his head. I ran for the access door, pulling my Desert Eagle from its holster. My other hand dug the door card out of my pocket.

Despite her pain, Jax had managed to get her gun into her hands. She lifted it and aimed at Vess, who moved a struggling Johnny into her line of fire. Jax hesitated.