Behind the window was a small room—a former office, perhaps?—with two long tables covered in computer equipment. Two men in guard outfits sat at one table, eyes shifting between their monitors and me. Behind the other stood two people. I didn’t recognize the first one, a stocky middle-aged man wearing a dark blue suit and a dubious expression.
But I recognized the other, even though we’d never officially met.
“Hi, Doctor Charish,” I said, giving her a tight smile as I fought to hold onto my ragged composure. “Did you kill Sofia?” Sure, McKinney might have been able to go straight from the failed ambush to Sofia’s house, but it made more sense that he had someone else working with him that night.
Dr. Charish leaned forward and touched a button in front of her. “Why, yes. Yes, I did.” Her voice came from a speaker above the window, yet I could also hear it, muffled, through the glass. That glass was thick, but it wasn’t bulletproof-thick. Was it thick enough to keep out a pissed-off zombie? I sure as hell wanted to find out.
“Why? Because she was playing both sides and working with Kang?” I shook my head, baffled. That didn’t make any sense.
The woman smiled. “No. Although, yes, she was indeed briefly involved in a rather pathetic series of talks with Kang regarding her pseudo-brain formulation. She always was too altruistic for her own good. But that, of course, ended when Kang died.”
Sudden understanding swept through me. Now Sofia’s reactions over at Marcus’s house made sense. Sofia had no intention of giving Pietro a monopoly on the fake brains, so she approached Kang to let him know he wouldn’t be cut out. But then Kang was killed, and not long after that it looked as if Zeke—a zombie—had tried to sneak into the lab. No wonder she was freaking out, thinking she was at the heart of some sort of conflict between zombie factions. I was beginning to wonder whether there really were any zombie “factions” at all, at least not in the way that Pietro made it out to be. Perhaps Kang had been the de facto “leader” of the zombies who bought brains from him, but there was no way he had as much influence and power as Pietro.
“So why kill her?” I asked.
“Sofia suspected that I had a pet project of my own.” She made a sweeping gesture around her. “And I knew that once she heard you’d been attacked, she’d go tattling to Pietro.” She nodded toward McKinney. “That being said, we need to get started.”
Still baffled and off-balance, I turned as another man walked in. The two guards left, leaving just me, McKinney, and this new guy in the room. The exiting guards pulled the door closed, and a shiver ran over me as I heard it lock from the outside.
The newcomer looked like he was in his late twenties, blond and blue-eyed, with a short haircut and muscular build to match the other guards here. He had on a simple white t-shirt and grey sweat pants like mine—though obviously much bigger—and he held himself so stiffly that I had a feeling he was holding down fear by the sheer force of his will. Fear of me? What the hell was going on?
I jerked as a beep sounded in the room. “Now recording contagion series one point one,” Dr. Charish said.
“Angel, this is Philip,” McKinney said. “He volunteered for this study.
Baffled and wary, I gave Philip an awkward wave. “Um, hey, Philip.”
He gave me a tight smile and short nod in response.
“And now, Angel, if you would be so kind,” McKinney said, “please turn Philip here into a zombie.”
I could only blink at him stupidly for several seconds. “Wait, what?” I said once I found my voice. “I can’t do that! I’ve never done that before!”
“I suggest you figure out how,” McKinney said, tone mild.
I looked in horror to Philip. “You volunteered for this? To become a zombie?”
He lifted his chin. “I’m a volunteer for the enhanced soldier protocol.”
“Enhanced soldier…” Suddenly I understood—at least part of it. They want to make zombie soldiers. This has nothing to do with zombies vs. zombies. It probably never did, or at least certainly not to the degree that we all thought. Dr. Kristi Charish had taken this whole thing to another level entirely. Well, that explained the whole secret lab thing and the team of mercenary guard types. Zombie soldiers…? Would the government be interested in something like that? Probably. Or maybe a private contractor like those Halliburton people in Iraq. I peered at the man in the suit behind the glass. He looked soulless enough to be either government or corporate.
But they haven’t fully committed, I thought as I looked at the slight frown on the man’s face and the tension on Dr. Charish’s. Not yet. They want some proof that this is real and that it’ll work. That explained why this whole scenario seemed rather low-budget. Why sink a bunch of money into a project that sounded like a shitty late night movie? No, Dr. Charish had to prove she wasn’t giving her sponsors a line of bullshit. She needed to show them what a zombie could do, show them that more could be made.
And that was why they now needed a real, live, fully functioning zombie. Me.
I looked at McKinney. A hint of a smirk curved his mouth, and I abruptly realized that he had recognized me when I went to the lab to pretend to apply for a job. Anger at myself swept over me. I thought I’d been so damn clever. They needed a zombie, and I’d been the logical choice since I’d been doing my best to become a pain in their ass.
Didn’t matter. I had no intention of doing what these assholes wanted. I turned to the window. “Y’all are completely fucking batshit insane,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest defiantly. “No. I won’t do it.”
McKinney shrugged. “I rather expected you would say that.”
And with that he pulled his pistol and fired two rounds into Philip’s chest.
The sound of the bullets slammed through the room while I cried out in horror. Philip staggered back, then slid down the wall, gasping for breath as he clutched at his chest.
“It’s simple, Angel,” McKinney said. “Turn him into a zombie, or he dies.”
“You fucker,” I breathed, moving to Philip on shaking legs. Dropping to my knees beside him, I struggled to remember what Kang and Marcus had said about how zombies were made. A simple bite isn’t enough. There’s some mauling involved. So…what the hell does that mean? Do I simply bite him and keep biting him until he’s a zombie?
Philip’s eyes met mine. “Do it,” he gasped. “Please.”
I felt strangely ridiculous and self-conscious doing this with all these people watching, especially knowing that the whole thing was being recorded, monitored, videotaped, and anything else that could be done. Talk about the ultimate performance anxiety.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, then pulled his shirt aside at the collar, leaned over, and bit down hard on the junction of his shoulder and neck. He stiffened as I increased the pressure. I tasted blood, and nausea rose at what I was doing…
But only for an instant. Hunger abruptly surged, but far different from what I was used to. This hunger urged me to bite harder, to rip the flesh away. I dimly felt him struggling against me, but I was strong—far stronger than he was, and I held him pinned down while I literally mauled his neck and chest, tearing the shirt away, biting and ripping until even the gunshot wounds were lost in the damage and resulting gore. Yet I didn’t feel any sort of urge to get at his brains, only the overwhelming need to mangle him as much as possible.
And then as soon as it had started, the urge was gone. Philip lay still on the floor in front of me, blood flowing from a dozen wounds, though so sluggishly that I knew it would be over for him soon.
“God damn,” I heard McKinney mutter.
“Brains,” I rasped through the blood and flesh in my mouth. I turned and spat a gobbet of who-knew-what onto the floor. “He needs brains right now,” I said, louder. I heard the door open and close, but I didn’t take my eyes away from the bloodied man in front of me. A second later something cool and slippery was pressed into my hand. I didn’t need to look down to see what it was. Right now my parasite was working overtime, doing what needed to be done. I was a passenger in my own body at this point.
I put a large hunk of brain into my mouth, then leaned over Philip and started biting him again—but this time not trying to damage him. Somehow I knew what was going on—now I was transferring the necessary proteins over to Philip along with the colonizing spores, using the previous wounds as pathways. I felt like a mother bird, chewing the brains up to mush then spitting them out into Philip’s body. A part of me knew how unbelievably disgusting this was, but I kept going, chewing, biting, spitting.
Philip took a sudden gurgling breath, and I paused. The bites were starting to close up. I shifted to where I was sitting against the wall and pulled Philip to me, cradling him against me. Now I began to feed the brains to him directly, placing small hunks into his mouth. He shuddered as the first piece hit his tongue, but then his own newfound instinct took over and he swallowed it down. I continued to feed him, watching as the wounds healed before my eyes like some sort of time-lapse film.
His eyes blearily opened after the last bite. “Now you gotta sleep,” I told him, or rather, my parasite told me to tell him. Because that was how it worked, I instinctively knew now. Infect the new zombie, feed it, then let it sleep while the parasite does its thing and gets all happy and settled in its new home.
An oddly content smile curved his mouth, then his eyes drifted closed again. He leaned his head against my shoulder and slept like that while I held him, the two of us surrounded by a pool of his blood.
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew someone was trying to pull Philip from my grasp. I jerked awake and clutched him tightly to me.
“No,” I gasped. “Get away. He needs to stay with me.”
The guard didn’t release Philip’s arm. This was the one with the too-perfect eyebrows. “I need to take him. Get him checked out.”