CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

 

DR JENNY CRANFIELD leaned back from her desk, her head throbbing. She removed her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose as she reread the last paragraph she had written on the monitor screen, then stood from her chair, arching her back. She had been hunched over her workstation for the best part of the morning, and her neck felt as stiff as the corpse on the gurney behind her. She reached up and squeezed the nape and her shoulders, the muscles tense beneath her touch, though her efforts were limited with only one good hand at her disposal. She looked down at the left, the appendage swathed in bandages, and once more attempted to flex it, but the cramping pain returned to travel up her arm. It was like a dead weight, as if the tendons within had frozen; she fought the urge to slam it against the wall, just to give it back some sensation.

Jenny tugged open a drawer and rooted amongst the detritus to retrieve a packet of paracetamol, then wandered over to the sink. She swallowed two of the tablets, and leant under the running tap to wash them down. As she wiped her mouth, her gaze returned to her injured limb; she was certain the fatigue and her body's tenderness were in some way connected to the bite she had received. She'd been checked out by one of her colleagues straight after the incident, who had cleaned and dressed her wound before giving her a couple of jabs, mostly as a precautionary measure. He'd said he could detect nothing untoward and had taken a blood sample to put her mind at rest, but she remained convinced the wound was infected. Who knew what diseases that test subject could possibly be carrying?

Gannon had assured her that the corpse had been sterilised before the experimentation began, but even then, he had admitted, post-resurrection the virus hadn't halted the cadaver's necrosis - flesh and muscle were continuing to rot as bacteria set to work upon the dead tissue. That had certainly popped his little balloon; what use would the military have for a platoon of these things if they were falling apart? He had convinced himself that they could still be deployed for limited periods, though he was plainly disappointed with the results, blindly hoping that HS-03 would suddenly pull a miracle out of the bag. Still, she reasoned, it wouldn't be the first time that the British Army had been sent out with substandard equipment.

She didn't know how long the project was destined to last anyway. By all accounts, the Minister was less than impressed and determined to shut it down, though Gannon characteristically remained optimistic that he could make the politician see sense. She wasn't sure if the politician didn't have a point. In twelve years of researching and engineering toxins and bio-weapons for the MoD, this had crossed the line from genuinely working in the best interests of the country's defence to ghoulish frivolity. Gannon was a brilliant scientist - one of the top minds in the UK - but he must've recognised that this was going to be a hard sell, and she now thought that he was persevering with it out of sheer obstinacy. If the media ever got the merest sniff of the work that was being conducted here, they were going to crucify him - and undoubtedly Sedgworth too, no matter what plausible denials he could muster - and tar him with the familiar accusations of playing God. For once, Jenny was inclined to agree; this mockery of the dead had no place in a nation's arsenal, even if it did save troops' lives. What could they possibly claim to be battling for, sending out a squad of reanimated cadavers to fight on their behalf? Freedom? Democracy? Peace? They who had enslaved their own dead? Who, in whatever corner of the globe, would consider that civilised?

And there was the aggression factor, something that had taken them all by surprise. Gannon's theorising had suggested that once HS-03 got to work on primary functions of the brain - triggering movement and the most basic awareness of its surroundings - it would render the motorised corpse entirely open to direction, allowing them to input orders and place it completely within their control. But the virus had taken hold on the cerebellum's centre and developed it in a totally unexpected direction; along with the motor-control and rudimentary behaviour patterns came an uncontrollable violence. It was as if it had awoken the brain's most primal root, reverting the subject back to an animalistic state.

In the case of Corporal Littleton - or HS-03/ref.4176, to give him his official title - within minutes of getting up and walking, he (it, she admonished herself, she had to remember to refer to them as impersonal objects; they were no longer human beings, displayed no intelligent life-signs, and exhibited similarly no personality; they were simply dead sacks of meat) appeared threatened by the scientists' presence and lashed out. Even then, it wasn't clear how the corpse had managed to ascertain that there were people in the room - there were four of them: Gannon, herself, and McKendrick and Horton - since it didn't appear to have had his sight fully restored. The pupils were filmy, and the way it moved its head seemed to indicate that it was using some other sensory perception to gain understanding of its environment. Likewise, sound and smell must've been equally undeveloped, if they were indeed working at all. But there was no denying it was immediately aware of their proximity, for it staggered towards them in a stiff-legged gait, gnarled fingers reaching out. As they all backed away, Gannon whispered that perhaps it was looking to feel whether they were of the same species to reassure itself; reading their physiognomy like a blind man runs his fingers over Braille. It clattered into them and Jenny put out her left hand to restrain it, a mistake she instantly regretted.

Its advance was not borne out of a need for kin recognition, but hunger. It grasped her wrist and bowed its head as if for a romantic peck, but instead bit down on the fleshy part of her palm, ripping away a fat inch of skin and muscle with a savage twist. Jenny screamed, white-hot pain lancing through her forearm, watching, unbelieving, as blood pumped in a crimson mini-fountain from her ravaged hand and hit the floor in heavy splats that blossomed into rusty explosions on the tiles. The cadaver stood before them, still holding her in a vice-like grip, and slowly began to chew, red trickles coating its chin, stark against the pale white of its face. It exhibited no semblance of pleasure in the act, its features as blank as if it were still lying on the slab, as if this was something it was directed to do by an inner instinct. Indeed, it exuded the disinterested air of a baby suckling upon a teat, unconcerned by the method by which it obtained its food, only that its belly was being filled.

Gannon and the others were paralysed for mere seconds, but those moments seemed as if time had slowed to a crawl; they stared, frozen, at the ragged bite-mark on Jenny's hand, which was by now slick with blood. It was only when the corpse ducked forward once more to take one of her fingers between its teeth that they finally sprang into action. They seized its arms and wrestled it back, forcing it to relinquish its hold of her wrist. Once she was free, she sank to her knees, sobbing, clasping her wounded limb to her chest, already feeling a stiffness stealing its way up her arm. She shrugged off her white coat and wrapped it around the injury, stemming the flow of vermilion fluid from her already pallid hand.

Once the cadaver was distracted from its meal, it fixed its attention on the three scientists that were trying to pin it down; apparently, its greed was indiscriminate. It lunged for them too, jaw snapping, grasping for anything it could catch hold of. For one tense moment, it grabbed Horton's shirt and yanked him forward, its maw opening wide to take a chunk out of his neck, but Gannon punched it hard in the temple. It evidently did little to hurt it, but blindsided it enough for them to consolidate their grip on its arms. They yelled at Jenny to hit the security alarm, and she woozily found her feet to slam her fist down on the red button encased on the wall.

Within seconds, half a dozen armed personnel filled the room, Gannon repeatedly instructing them not to shoot. Instead he got one of them to pass him a pair of binds to secure the creature's hands behind its back, another to hogtie its feet together, then fashioned a makeshift muzzle from a broken-in-half broom handle jammed between its teeth. Only once he was confident that it was fully incapacitated and that it posed no additional threat did he indicate to his colleagues that they could back away from it. They stood in a semi-circle, breathing heavily, looking down at the cadaver wriggling like a bug trapped for a school kid's project, its teeth cracking against the broom handle, sliding out of grey gums. The security guards in particular were a little taken aback by what they were witnessing; they were generally not privy to the nature of the experiments that were conducted within the labs, and had next to no knowledge of Gannon's resurrection serum. Possibly keeping them in the dark like that was a wise move, Jenny had mused; many of them were ex-military, and if they knew where HS-03/ref.4176 had come from, what it had been in life, they might not have been so quick to come to Gannon's aid.

Instead, he'd reassured them that the subject was merely being tested for increased levels of adrenaline, and its pallor and mania were side effects of the drugs they were prescribing. She could tell they didn't believe him for a second, but since they could not formulate an explanation for themselves, they seemed to grudgingly accept it. Gannon was told that for a security breach of this kind - and especially since a member of staff had been wounded (all eyes had turned towards her then, her deathly white face and arms pockmarked with maroon stains) - a report would have to be kicked upstairs. Gannon had readily agreed, eager to usher them out of the room, fully aware that the MoD bods would clamp down on it and make sure no details ever emerged outside of Monkhill.

While he and Horton had dragged their bound creature off to a quieter area where it could be monitored safely, McKendrick had led her to the infirmary and treated her injury. McKendrick was a relatively recent addition to the team, having transferred over from an outpost north of Sydney, and was a cautious, introspective young man. As he carefully wrapped the bandages around her hand, she asked him if he thought what they were doing was a step too far.

"I don't like it," he'd said. "But I doubt it'll stay like this for long."

"What do you mean?"

"This," he groped for the right expression, "walking army of the dead that's supposedly going to fight for us. It's not going to happen. The public, the politicians, they're not going to stand for it. But what it could prove to be is a starting point, a catalyst for a whole new take on the problem. The idea of using reanimated cadavers will mutate into something else, something more workable, and we'll take the best bits from what we learned with HS-03 and use them in a different direction."

"Gannon seems keen on his pet ghouls."

McKendrick snorted a laugh. "I think he actually fancies himself as a Junior Frankenstein. But it's his pride that, for the moment, won't let him see past his zombies."

"Don't let him hear you use the Z word."

"He kids himself that the HS-03 subjects are in the best interests of the country, but the fact is he just wants to be like the criminal mastermind from the horror movies, controlling them all. What's that one about the dead working down a Cornish tin mine?"

"I don't know," Jenny replied, looking down at her bandaged limb. "Those sort of films aren't really my cup of tea."

"Well, that's what Gannon would have them doing, if he had his way." He paused. "But it'll change. He'll recognise the serum's limitations, and it'll spark off some new theories and we'll start working on... I don't know, combating organ failure or bolstering a soldier's immune system." He paused again. "Things can't stay the way they are." He finished binding her wound. "Best I could do. You'll probably have some scarring."

 

 

AS JENNY STOOD in the lab, head still throbbing despite the tablets, she tentatively pressed her fingers against the linen-wrapped flesh of her hand; it felt rigid and unmoving, as it if were calcifying. She was beginning to worry at what kind of infection had spread into her system, and considered taking herself off to A&E at the local hospital. Gannon would hit the roof if he found out; once the Casualty docs started asking questions, it could bring down all sorts of unwanted heat on the facility. If Monkhill had a cardinal rule, it was containment - the neighbours had no reason to know the research that was being conducted on the premises, and if problems arose, they were to be dealt with inside its walls. Once it entered the public domain, there was no way of controlling the snowballing of information. All the same, she was aware that she was gradually feeling worse - her legs seemed wobbly, and her eyelids were growing heavy - and decided she should readmit herself to the infirmary, and let them sort it out. She was in no fit state to work.

She pushed herself away from the worktop edge and headed towards the door, immediately sensing a rushing wave of nausea pass through her. She staggered and clattered into her chair, coughing bile into the back of her throat, putting out her good hand to steady herself. It made contact with the gurney upon which the cadaver lay, strapped and muzzled, it's searching eyes swivelling in their sockets at her sudden proximity. It was the fourth or fifth test subject to have been injected with HS-03 - a John Doe that had been commandeered from a military hospital - and its stomach cavity had been surgically emptied to gauge the effect of hunger upon its actions. The edges of its belly were pinned open, and several feet of intestine had been removed and curled into a large stainless steel dish to the side. All that remained of its digestive tract was a russet-brown hole surrounded by muscle and fat, and yet it had attempted to feed whenever she had gone near it, its teeth champing, its head struggling to get closer to her. It was clearly not looking to sustain itself, since it no longer had the organs that required the nourishment, but was instead simply gorging itself on the primal act of consuming meat, directed by the virus working on its brain.

Jenny leaned against the gurney, gazing down at its naked form, sweat now prickling her brow, and suddenly, barely thinking, she reached forward and untied the muzzle. Instantly, it issued a groan and moved its jaw in a bovine manner, trying to chew on anything it could reach. Its arms strained against the bonds, and its dissected abdomen tore a little with the movement, the skin splitting as far up as the ribcage and down to the pubic bone, red sheaths of muscle visible beneath the yellowish skin.

Jenny held out her right hand above its mouth, and the corpse snapped at it, like a pet offered a treat. Its head pushed higher, its neck wrenching with the effort, but she kept the limb safely out of its reach, the fingers several inches from its clacking teeth. Then, she replaced the offered titbit, proffering her injured left hand. The result was what she feared: the creature showed no interest, its head sinking back onto the stretcher, exhibiting none of the excitement it had showed seconds ago. She waved it closer still, but there was no response. She stepped back from the gurney, breathing heavily, her mind racing at the implications; the dead subjects were stimulated by the presence of living flesh, seeking to feed upon it. The fact that it didn't react to the wounded limb suggested that the cadaver couldn't sense a pulse. As far as it was concerned, her left hand was as dead as it was.

She had to get help, she instructed herself. A necrosis had spread from the bite and was in the process of killing all the cells in her lower arm, no doubt coursing through her body as she stood there, passing on its taint. The thought made her feel sick again, and light-headed. She stumbled forward, leaving the corpse mewling behind her, and focused on getting out the door, taking no more than half a dozen steps before a paralysing coldness arced through her, punching the breath out of her and draining all the strength from her legs. Jenny dropped to her knees, bringing her hands to her chest; she felt as if her lungs were crystallising, seizing up. She gasped, clawing for air, aware of her muscles shaking. She was dying, she realised, and she didn't have the energy to cry for help. Her body was riddled with the bacteria, and it was shutting everything down, organ after organ, like light switches being flipped one by one. She curled into a ball, visualising the virus racing through her, changing her from the inside out, blood cells laid waste by the nuclear blast of its wake. A growing darkness was stealing into her head, and an agonizing swell of pain blossomed throughout her being. Her mouth was frozen into a savage rictus grimace by the time her heart stopped half an hour later.

Twenty minutes after that, her mouth started moving again.

 

 

GANNON WAS TINKERING with a cadaver's brain when he first heard the alarms. He was trying to reverse-engineer the serum, or at least tweak the affect it had on the organ's central core, reducing the resurrected corpses' predatory, cannibalistic tendencies (but they weren't cannibals, he told himself; their desire for human flesh was not an interspecies act, since they were no longer of the same genus). The speed with which HS-03 took hold of those it was administered to had been expected. After all, it had been artificially constructed based on the HIV, cancer and influenza models - tenacious, aggressive viruses that took no time at all in disabling a victim, riddling its cells, destroying the immune system and adapting the subject for its own use. And, indeed, part of his interest in creating HS-03 from the ground up was to monitor what the bacteria actually wanted to do. To the observer, for example, cancer has no other purpose but to destroy; but to understand it, the scientist had to look at it from the virus's point of view - what did it seek to gain from corrupting its host? Could it possibly see itself as an instrument of change, developing a fully functioning body into something else? The question was, what was that change initiating? In the case of HS-03, it was using the dead as a blank slate, hot-wiring their neurons and kick-starting them into life - but a life dictated by the virus and what it wanted.

Gannon couldn't fathom why it was instigating this primal hunger, especially since it had been proven that the need for food was purely superficial. It was almost as if the bacteria was unlocking and accessing the latent memories still trapped within the cadavers' heads, the root instincts that were as much the legacy of mankind's stone-age ancestors as the nub of their prehensile tails. It was reawakening them, channelling them.

When they first discovered this hunger for flesh, Gannon had hoped that it could be fine-tuned into an additional weapon, something extra in their biological arsenal. Not only would they be fearless and indefatigable, but this army would consume what it destroyed, like a plague of locusts sweeping through the enemy ranks. But he soon realised that their cravings were indiscriminate and impossible to control; his colleagues too were uneasy with this side effect of HS-03, especially after Dr Cranfield was assaulted and bitten. Bringing the dead back to life had tested their scientific moralities to the limit, but honing them as carnivorous attack dogs was something else entirely. More than a handful had protested and refused to go near what they called the 'ghouls'. Gannon had argued that they were being emotive, and basing their opinions on what they may have seen in late-night movies, but he knew the writing was on the wall for the project. Sedgworth would never greenlight it, not as it stood; he wouldn't want to be known as the minister that unleashed the flesh-crazed undead on the world. That was the sort of thing that history would judge a man by.

The politician had tried to remain unmoved by what Gannon had told him about Totenkrieg, but the doctor could detect that the Minister was secretly shocked that something like this had been attempted before. Or, more likely, the fact that the powers-that-be on the home front had deemed the scheme worthy of stealing from the Germans once the war was over. It never really got beyond the planning stage with them either; they'd only ever developed one platoon, and the viral prototype had been crudely manufactured. He wondered if they too had had control issues with the resurrected, unprepared for what they had let loose.

He had a skull open before him, the flap of scalp peeled back like the lid of a tin can, and was probing the dull-grey organ within, dissecting choice segments for examination and testing. What had become immediately evident was that, while the resurrected could survive any amount of tissue damage and limb removal (they had undergone a barrage of weapons' fire trials), brain injury cancelled their ticket for good. Clearly, once HS-03's activation point was destroyed, either by bullet or blunt trauma, it lost its hold over the corpse. As soon as he'd drilled into this particular head, the subject had gone still. He wondered if the virus survived beyond the host shutting down. He wanted to chart its growth and development, to see if it could be limited somehow; if he could stunt its spread, perhaps he could curtail the cadavers' carnivorous instincts.

Gannon slid a sliver of brain matter under the microscope and was adjusting the magnification when he heard the dull popping of a gun being fired somewhere further down the facility's corridor. He looked up instantly, cocking an ear and wondering if he could have imagined it. His query was answered straight away; it came again in a short burst, this time followed by shouting that was growing louder as if the cries were coming closer. A moment's silence, then the alarm sounded, a strident wail that got him moving.

He strode out of his lab and into the corridor, white coat twisting in his wake, only to confront a scene from a nightmare. A security guard was edging backwards, a pistol gripped in both hands, attention fixed on the figure stumbling towards him. It took a Gannon a second to realise that it was Jenny Cranfield. The lower half of her face was coated in blood, and her hands, even the bandaged one, were crimson, as if she'd dipped them in a pot of paint. She stumbled stiff-legged, barely aware of her surroundings, and it wasn't until his eyes travelled to the floor that he saw the two bodies lying motionless just behind her, their throats torn open. It was Horton, and his assistant, Petley. They looked like they'd been savaged by an animal.

"What the fuck's up with her?" the guard said as he came level with Gannon, gun still held out in front of him.

"What happened?"

"Heard screams coming from one of the labs down there. She was fucking ripping into them, eating their throats out. I thought it was a practical joke at first. I mean, I know what you guys have got down here, what with the fucking dead boys and all. Thought it was just a load of fake blood and a bunch of bored docs trying to wind me up. But there's something up with her eyes, I saw it as soon as she turned round, and she went for me as soon as she knew I was there. I saw too that the guys were properly goners, there was no mistaking that."

"I heard shooting."

"I had no choice. I gave her a warning, said I was licensed to protect the facility, but she kept coming. I put a couple of rounds in her shoulder to push her back, and when that didn't stop her I aimed for her chest. She should've gone down, but it was like she barely even noticed. Is she fucking high on something?"

Gannon now saw the red holes on Jenny's lab coat and blouse where she'd taken the hits; the blood had bloomed in flowery explosions on the white material. But she seemed unconcerned by the injuries, continuing her advance. He shook his head in disbelief, not wanting to admit to what he was seeing. She'd been infected, it was the only explanation. The bite she'd received on the hand must've passed on the virus - did it travel in the saliva? - and effectively killed her, then brought her back with the same characteristics as the test subjects.

My God, he thought, if it can spread like this, we have to contain it.

"Jenny," he called out over the blare of the alarm, hoping that some vestige of her intelligence still remained. "Jenny, can you understand me? It's Robert."

She gave no indication that she could even hear him, her blind eyes sweeping the corridor as she stumbled forward. They were running out of space to back into.

"Aim for the head," Gannon murmured.

"What?"

"Shoot her in the head," he hissed. "It's the only way to stop her."

Just at that moment, the lift doors opened and a security team poured out, alerted by the triggered alarm. They jogged towards the scene of carnage, semi-automatics held down by their sides, and paused beside the two bodies. Their arrival caused Jenny to halt and half-turn, sensing their presence. The team leader seemed unsure of who he should be directing his warnings at, but once he caught sight of the ragged, gore-flecked woman, he raised his gun.

"Don't make another move," he shouted.

"You have to shoot her in the head," Gannon yelled. "She's infected. There's nothing else you can do to stop her. Kill her." Then, as an afterthought: "She's already dead anyway."

"What the hell are you talking about?" the squad leader replied, not taking his eyes off Jenny, who staggered vaguely in his direction.

"She's infected with a virus that she'll pass on to you if you allow her to get close. She'll kill you, believe me."

"Doctor Cranfield," the other man said, directing his attention to the swaying figure, "I'm not taking any chances. Do not move. We'll try to help you. But don't come any nearer."

Jenny paid the words no heed. She moaned quietly, and continued to totter forward.

"Damn it, this is your last chance," he started, when a hand shot out and fastened on his ankle. He yelped, looking down to see one of the bodies - one of the scientists with the gouged throats, who couldn't possibly be still alive - pulling himself forward and taking a bite out of his right calf, tearing a thick chunk of flesh from his leg, stringy sections of muscle trailing from the wound. He screamed and overbalanced, his finger tightening on his semi-automatic's trigger; bullets blasted through the windows of a nearby lab and exploded the vials and test tubes inside. He hit the floor to find his attacker crawling over him, hands tearing at his uniform. His colleagues instantly rushed to his aid, four of them pulling at the scientist, unaware that the other corpse was getting to his feet behind them.

The thing that used to be Horton grabbed one of the guards by the head so hard a finger pierced an eye socket and wrenched it backwards, simultaneously taking a mouthful from his shoulder. The others turned, shocked, momentarily slackening their grip on the figure assaulting their superior; it was enough for the scientist to wriggle free and chew a lip free from his victim's face. The team leader had his gun trapped under him, but brought it up enough to fire several shots into the man's belly. He didn't even flinch.

By this point, Jenny had reached the fray. One of the security guards spotted her and brought his weapon to bear, shooting her in the torso half a dozen times.

"In the fucking head," Gannon bellowed.

The guard raised his aim and fired, the back of Jenny's skull exploding in a vermilion shower, shattering one of the lab windows behind her. She dropped to her knees, then collapsed sideways.

"Give me your gun," Gannon instructed to the man standing beside him, who - stunned - passed it to him without question. The doctor ran toward the melee. Another of the team was wrestling with Horton, fending him off as he snapped his teeth ravenously, while Petley was being lifted to give the gunman enough room to take a shot. Gannon didn't hesitate: he placed the barrel against the side of Horton's head and fired, brain matter painting the wall and sprinkling the guard's face. Then he turned and helped them pull Petley away from his meal, just enough to stick a gun in his mouth and empty his skull. Gannon felt a slick, warm mass wash against his skin as the corpse slid to the floor.

He sagged against the wall. For a moment, all he heard was the wailing of the alarm offset by the choked groans of the injured, and when he put a hand to his forehead it came away wet and bloody. Shakily, he got to his feet and strode over to a telephone mounted near the lifts, grabbing the receiver that connected the labs with the front desk.

"This is Doctor Gannon. We have an emergency - quarantine restrictions are to be put in place immediately. Nobody goes anywhere without my say-so. Inform the ministry we need clean-up and medical staff here right now."

He gazed back at the carnage, hoping that they could do enough to lock it down. But in truth, unbeknownst to the doctor, the end of the world had already begun.