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The B-MOSZ, Hunt explained as she led me down the hall, was a vast complex extending five stories underground underneath SFU.
“In the nineteen sixties, when we first began to organize emergency plans against outbreaks, the government decided that each major city needed to have a secret safe zone where citizens might be able to live in the case of a zombie or nuclear attack,” she said briskly, leading me down another hallway. “SFU’s design was commissioned with this in mind. As you know, SFU was designed so that students could go from one building to another without having to go outside.”
“I thought that was because of the rain,” I said. But it made sense now. SFU was full of pedways which were raised overhead — you could walk right over a horde of zombies and be completely safe from them. “That’s why the buildings all look like some kind of concrete military bunker.”
She nodded curtly. “And underneath the buildings, which are designed to withstand zombie attack, we have generators, stockpiles of food and medications, laboratory facilities, and accommodations for several thousand people. Obviously most of this is powered down.”
“Whoa. And every city has something like this?”
“Not every city has one as extensive as ours. You’ll be interested to know that the Halifax Citadel Hill was similarly outfitted. But it is barely a tenth of the size.”
I was gobsmacked. “Okay, so... where are we going?”
“Here.” She stopped.
“My laboratory,” said Doc Mullins. “At least, one of them.”
“Morton has two labs. His official one, which he uses for basic experiments and projects on the SFU campus, and this one, which is for his higher security experiments.”
“So, his zombie stuff.”
“Yes. Originally we had all experiments running out of his upper lab, as we didn’t want to give him access to our secure facility. But I made an argument several years ago that Morton could be trusted and that it was more secure to keep things below ground.”
“For which I am grateful,” said Doc.
She smiled at him, flashed her key fob, and opened the door to his lab.
The lab was really big, with lots of cages lining the walls. The hamsters all came rushing to the front of their cages when we walked in.
“You know this one,” said Dr. Mullins with a smile, pointing at a cage.
“Is that the one that got out? You still have him?”
“I do.”
“How old are most of these hamsters?”
“I have my base population which, I admit, I have grown attached to. Some of them have been here for several decades. The virus appears to give them a lifespan of well over twenty years. If we scale that into human terms, that would indicate that my adopted children can expect to live for eight hundred or possibly even a thousand years.”
“Jesus.”
“We need to tell her, Morton,” said Agent Hunt urgently. “I just picked your lab because there are places to sit.” She pointed at a stool near a microscope. “Sit, Stella.”
I sat.
Agent Hunt sat in a computer chair next to a desk with a large computer on it. Doc busied himself with a coffee maker.
“So,” said Hunt. “You asked me how they could be spreading an outbreak if they were intelligent and conscious, like Morton and his family. Well, it’s time to tell you that it is possible for someone to be technically still alive — in the way that Morton is alive — and still be capable of spreading the virus.”
“With sex? It’s sex, isn’t it?” I said dully.
Doc raised his eyebrows. “Of course not. That would be highly inefficient. She means through saliva.”
“What?” I turned and stared Hunt. “But they can’t. Howie told me over and over that they can’t. Doc told me over and over that they can’t. They only turn infectious after they go full zombie.”
“That’s what they told you. But we knew that wasn’t completely true — which is why, when you were so sure that the hamster wasn’t contagious, we insisted on testing it anyway,” said Agent Hunt. “You remember that, don’t you?”
“Yes... but...”
“And you knew that we swabbed the Mullinses routinely to check that they were still not infectious.”
“Yeah but I thought that’s just because you were paranoid assholes.”
“Well,” said Hunt, looking amused. “That may be true too. But the fact remains that it is possible for an infected person using Morton’s formaldehyde treatment to be conscious, intelligent, and contagious. And Morton and his family were forbidden to mention it to you.”
I gaped at her. “So... you’re telling me that Howie could have become infectious at any moment? And that he knew this but didn’t tell me?”
Doc Morton looked up from the coffee pot. “No, no,” he said. “You were completely safe. You see, it is only under very particular conditions that we could have become infectious, and since we have never, and would never, pursue those conditions, we were safe.” He handed a cup to Hunt, who accepted it graciously. He held up the coffee pot questioningly but I shook my head.
“What conditions?” I demanded.
“Let me tell the story,” said Hunt to Doc. “You’ll take too long.” She looked at me. “He tried feeding human brains to his half-zombie rats.”
I looked at Doc. “You used rats back then?”
He nodded. “I switched to hamsters later because...”
“Let’s stay on track,” interrupted Hunt. “He thought that human brains might be more effective than pig brains, and he was right. The rats developed astounding levels of intelligence.”
Doc nodded. “They improved five hundred percent in maze tests and they began observing myself and my assistants with a level of awareness that I can only describe as eerie. We were very excited by the implications.”
“Well, since you’re not a Nobel prize winner and Howie couldn’t make it through university and you’re still living off of pig brains, I’m guessing something went wrong.”
“The rats became infectious,” said Doc. “They were alive and intelligent — extremely so — but they were shedding live virus in their saliva as if the virus had progressed fully. In fact, they were even more highly infectious than your average zombie. Just a touch of their saliva — a bit in your mucous membranes — and you would contract the disease.”
“Oh. Fuck.”
“Morton’s rats also became aggressive,” said Hunt. “Very aggressive.”
“The concerted snarling of fifty rodents when you walked into the room was unnerving,” said Doc. “They also developed extreme strength. This, combined with aggression and cunning, resulted in all fifty of them escaping their cages one night. I arrived with an assistant to feed them in the morning, and I’m afraid he was killed very quickly. Only my immunity and quick-healing abilities prevented me from succumbing as well.”
“Jesus.”
“I ended up having to put a stop to the experiment myself. It was extremely difficult for me to capture and destroy all fifty of them, since they were very fast, highly intelligent, and very strong.”
“How long did it take you?”
“Nearly two days without rest. And it would have taken longer, in fact, if they hadn’t managed to break into my fridge and help themselves to the remaining human brain material.”
“What do you mean?”
“At the beginning, they were working together with the kind of organization that rodents simply are not capable of. For example, they worked together to brace themselves and pry open the fridge.”
“Jeez, it sounds like something out of The Rats of NIMH.”
Doc ignored me. “And they kept me distracted by allowing me to successfully catch some of them at the other end of the room so that I didn’t see what they were doing. But once they got into the brain material, their organization fell apart. Their aggression increased further and they began to fight each other for the remaining food. I was able to take advantage of their distraction and destroy the remaining rats.”
“So, now you think that this zombie organization has been eating human brains, and now they’ve all gone off the deep end. And they’re probably infectious?”
Agent Hunt nodded. “Probably very infectious. Morton’s research report was immediately suppressed, and the agencies that knew about it kept it highly classified. The fear was always that someone would see it as a way to seize immortality, intelligence, and strength simultaneously.”
“And now they have.”
Doc rubbed his face. “My predictions at the end of my report were that a human who consumed human brain material would likely show a drastic increase of intelligence, but that it would also be accompanied by infectiousness, emotional imbalance, and uncharacteristic aggression.”
“So, basically a highly intelligent, coked-out serial-killer zombie instead of your standard mindless, shuffling, moaning kind.”
“Yes. And with a virus load so potent that it could potentially even spread through the water supply.”
I understood what I had been seeing now. “We’re fucked. We’re so fucked.”
Dr. Mullins almost smiled. “Well put, as always, Stella. Yes. You could probably say that.”