The glass wall of the phone-booth elevator opened, and they all stepped into a sterile metal passageway that looked like an oversized air vent. A set of hospital doors swung open automatically on their approach and they entered the top-secret laboratory located somewhere underneath the White House.
“Gustafson!” a voice boomed. “Where’s my mother-lovin’ coffee?”
A big man in a military uniform walked toward them from the back of the room.
“This is Brigadier General Munschauer, White House chief scientist.”
“Who are they?” The general pointed at the kids.
“They’re friends of the girl, sir.”
“Where’s Madison?” Zack demanded.
“Watch who you’re talking to, hotshot. I haven’t had my evening coffee yet.” The general picked up a cup from the tray and took a sip. “Kah!” He savored the taste, sniffing the hot drink. “Your friend is quite a specimen…. How did you get here all the way from Phoenix?”
“Ozzie flew us,” said Rice, gesturing to their wounded pilot.
“The boy’s leg needs attention, sir,” Agent Gustafson explained.
The general bent down on one knee and inspected Ozzie’s fractured shin. He looked up at Agent Gustafson. “Take him to Room twenty-three. Tell them to reset the bone and cast him up.” The special agent carted a wheelchair over to Ozzie, who plopped down in the seat and was rolled off down the hall.
“Follow me,” the general said. He led Zack, Rice, and Zoe to a curtained-off section of the laboratory.
“Right now she’s stable,” General Munschauer said. “But she’s lapsed into a metabolic retox and her B and T cells are severely depleted.”
“Not possible,” Zoe said. “Madison doesn’t even eat BLTs…. She’s a vegan.”
“You’re not really speakin’ our language, sir,” Zack explained.
“See for yourselves.” The general pulled back the curtain.
They gathered around the gurney.
Madison had a plastic tube running up her nostrils and an IV tube stuck in her arm. Her skin was gray and wrinkly, and she took quick, shallow breaths. Suction cups were stuck to her forehead. Dangling tubes and plastic cylinders filled with variegated fluids hung around her face. Her eyes were shut, and a heart monitor beeped slowly with her pulse.
“Is she asleep?” Rice asked.
“Not exactly…,” General Munschauer replied dismally. “She’s recuperating.”
“She looks like ET at the end of ET,” Zoe said, her voice quivering.
Zack turned to the general. “She’s going to be okay, right?”
Munschauer cleared his throat. “We hope so….”
Zoe petted her friend’s head and whimpered, “You used to be so beautiful.”
Just then, Rice’s backpack started to rustle and growl. Twinkles barked. Rice unzipped his bag, and the tiny Boggle pup jumped out. Zack scooped him up, and Twinkles whined happily.
“Arf!”
The heart machine next to the stretcher beeped faster, and everyone turned toward the gurney.
Madison opened her eyes. “Twinkles?” she whispered meekly.
The puppy jumped from Zack’s arms onto the stretcher. Twinkles licked Madison’s face delicately.
“Hey, boy…” Madison coughed softly.
“You all should be extremely proud of your friend,” the general told them. “Her courage is remarkable. She single-handedly unzombified the First Family, and because of her, a lot of important people are still human.”
“Well, what about the second family…and the third…and the millionth?” Zack demanded. “A lot of people need her help—not just the ‘important’ ones.”
“If Madison had known you weren’t helping everybody, she’d never have let you use her up,” Rice said.
All of a sudden, a tall woman with red hair opened the curtain. She wore a white lab coat with a name tag that read DR. DANA SCOTT, DISEASE & IMMUNOLOGY TASK FORCE. She pulled down a mint-green scrub mask from her face. “Time for your shot.” Dr.
Scott squeezed past the kids, holding a large syringe. She squirted some liquid into the air and flicked the tip of the needle.
“I’ll leave you to your business,” General Munschauer told the doctor, and left.
“No more needles,” Madison said wearily.
“This is just a B-twelve shot to help boost your immune system,” she said kindly. She pinched Madison’s arm and depressed the plunger.
“What’s the B stand for?” Rice queried.
“Vitamin B.”
“Oh,” he said. “I thought it was for ‘biloba.’”
“Like ginkgo biloba?” Dr. Scott laughed. “Why?”
“Because that’s, like, the whole reason she’s the antidote.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yeah, and if you give ginkgo to zombies, it knocks them out and, like, slows the zombie virus or something….”
“Slows down the virus, really…?” Dr. Scott stared off into the lab, thinking out loud. “But without an original specimen, I can’t produce a serum….”
“Specimens?” Rice nudged Zack. “We’ve got mad specimens….”
“If we just had a sample of the original virus, then I might be able to generate a viable base serum to mass produce the antidote…,” she went on, still talking to herself.
Rice wriggled out of the shoulder straps and reached into his pack. He held up the plastic bag with the zombified fingertips still twitching around inside. Rice then opened the Ziploc baggie and dumped out the revolting day-old zombie burger. The processed mystery meat pulsated as if it were alive.
The stench was gut-wrenching. Zack’s nose crinkled. Dr. Scott’s eyes widened with excitement. Twinkles’s snout twitched wildly, catching a whiff of the rank hot-doggish scent.
“Okay, let’s let this brave little lady rest. We need to go run a couple tests.”
They left Madison alone and walked to a lab table equipped with a microscope, test tubes, and scales, all sparkling in the white fluorescent light. Dr. Scott snapped on a pair of latex gloves. She took the BurgerDog specimen and scraped off some samples into a petri dish. She then added a green liquid. She added some of Rice’s ginkgo biloba and mixed it all together.
They listened intently as Dr. Scott explained her hypothesis.
It was all antibodies, T cells, base serums and vaccines, passive immunization and cell cultures, recombinant vectors and mutagenic strains—Zack had absolutely no idea what this lady was talking about.
A short while later, Dr. Scott looked up from her microscope. “All right,” she said. “You want the good news or the bad news?”
“Let’s start with the bad news, doc,” Zack said.
“The bad news is that we can’t formulate a cure from the BurgerDog specimen alone,” she said.
“What’s the good news?” Rice asked.
“The good news is that through the recombination of the mutated virus with the antiserum, we should be able to cultivate once the phytotoxins morph with the antibodies…and blah blah blah.”
Zack’s eyes glazed over as Dr. Scott’s medical jargon turned into a series of droning blahs.
“…blah blah…but if one of us ingests the original virus, then we could potentially harvest the antigenic protein complex from the biogenetic mutation, which is blah blah blah, and could save us all.”
“So…someone here has to actually eat that stuff?” Zoe asked, gleaning the gist.
“Precisely.” The doctor jotted something down in a logbook.
Zack furrowed his brow in confusion. That’s the good news?
“Well, I can’t do it,” Zoe asserted.
“Why not?” Zack said.
“Because I can’t turn back into a zombie,” she said. “Hah!”
“And I can’t eat it,” said Dr. Scott. “I’m the only one who knows how to concoct the antidote.”
“Looks like it’s just you and me.” Rice clapped a hand on his buddy’s shoulder.
There was a long silence before anyone spoke. “There’s only one way to settle this,” Zack announced.
“Best of three?” Rice asked.
Zack nodded.
And so commenced the highest-stakes game of Rock-Paper-Scissors ever played. “One-two-three, shoot!” Both of them threw Rock. Followed by another Rock…and another.
“Stop doing Rock!” Zack shouted.
“You stop it!” Rice yelled back.
“One-two-three, shoot!”
Zack’s Paper covered Rice’s Rock.
“One-two-three, shoot!”
Rice’s Rock smashed Zack’s Scissors.
“One to one,” Rice said.
There was a long hesitation, as the two friends stared at each other, flaring their nostrils.
“One-two-three, shoot!” They did the two Rocks thing, three more times.
“Shoot!”
Zack threw Rock for the fourth time, caught up in the quadruple-reverse psychology. Rice held his hand flat over his buddy’s fist—Paper. Rice dropped to his knees and threw up his arms as though he had just won a Grand Slam tennis tourney. “Eat that!”
“No.” Dr. Scott handed the BurgerDog to Zack. “Eat this.” The good doctor stood close at hand, ready to administer the last available dose of Madison’s blood.
Zack’s stomach dropped as he looked down at the diseased piece of disgusting fast food. The bun was soggy and growing mold, and a spiral clump of hair clung to the patty. The clumpy pistachio-green mayo relish smelled like rotten raw chicken.
“Doc, are you sure about this?” Zack asked skeptically.
“It’s our only chance,” she told him.
Zack looked at his sister helplessly. She shrugged. “He won fair and square, Zack.”
Zack lifted the lethal sandwich slowly to his mouth and sunk his teeth into the burbling meat patty. He chewed as fast as possible, trying hard not to gag it back up. Tears streamed down his face as he choked down the viral fast food.
He gulped a second time and then a third.
A massive head rush made him immediately nauseous.
Zack looked at the skin on the back of his hand. It grew rough and crinkly, aging eighty years in an eyeblink.
All of a sudden his vision became blurry, and he could barely see. He could hear the blood beating through his head. He started to hyperventilate. His lungs stopped pumping air. He couldn’t breathe. There was a flash of red, and then everything went completely black as his eyeballs rolled back into their sockets.
Zack’s final thought before he collapsed was, I should have thrown Scissors.