Page 3

"You get a lot of these zombies?"

"We don’t call them zombies," I snap. They all look at me, and I wish I hadn’t spoken. But there’s no way out. "It’s neither accurate nor useful as a term," I continue.

"What’s wrong with the word?" asks the woman. The two men are staring with fascination at the thing in the cage. I don’t know what they’re looking at, the Enemy in person, whom they’ve almost certainly never encountered this close-up before, or the fact that the Enemy is female, young, pretty despite the hair, and completely naked. "Everyone calls them zombies," the woman says.

"This is our Doctor..." the Director begins. "Doctor..." he repeats, searching his memory for the name. I’m not surprised that he doesn’t know who I am; he’s known to be much more of a politician than a scientist these days, and no longer involves himself in any way with research, preferring instead to raise funds, promote himself, and court publicity; witness this present moment. "One of our scientists," he compromises. "He’s involved in studying the disease."

"What do you call them, then?" one of the men says. He’s short, young, and has a large reddish birthmark on the side of the jaw. "If they aren’t zombies, what are they?"

"They’re the Infected," I say. "Here, we call them test subjects, because we experiment on them, as the Director told you." I glare at the Director’s shiny bald head. "But out there, they’re just the Infected."

"I don’t understand – what’s the difference?" the woman asks. The men are both looking at the thing in the cage, which stares back at them, unconscious and uncaring of its own nakedness. "What’s wrong with calling them zombies?" I see her nodding slightly at one of the others, who looks away from the thing to nod back, and I know I’m being recorded, but I’m too angry to care. I don’t know what I’m so angry about – the Director, or his breaching the regulations so openly, or the two men ogling the poor naked creature in the cage, or this beautiful young woman with her rehearsed questions. I don’t know what I’m so angry about, and I don’t care.

"They aren’t dead, for a start," I snap, "like the zombies of your horror films and stories. They aren’t dead people come back to life. They’re living people infected by a virus that destroys their higher brain functions and leaves them with only aggression and the urge to bite and scratch anyone they can find."

"Like rabies," says the woman, brightly.

Maybe she’s better informed than she pretends. "Very much like rabies in some ways," I tell her. "The virus is transmitted by bites or scratches from an infected person, and it travels up the nerves from the inoculation site until it reaches the brain. There it settles in and inflames some parts of the cerebral cortex – that’s the part of the brain that deals with conscious thought among other things – and the brain stem. The infected person becomes aggressive and dangerous, as well as virtually impervious to pain – like the furious form of rabies. The virus by this time has travelled back down to the glands – and the person can pass it on by a bite or a lick or anything else involving body fluids...including sexual intercourse."

"Then," says the older, thinner man, stepping away sharply from the cage, "are we safe here?"

"Yes," I say. "They can’t get at you from inside the cage." I don’t mention that the thing could, theoretically, pass it on by throwing its dung at us, like chimpanzees, or by splashing urine through the bars. But there’s no point in saying that, because the Infected don’t do that. The virus hasn’t evolved enough yet to make them think of it. In any case, they excrete little if anything at all.

"Whatever you call them," says the birthmarked man, "they don’t look like zombies to me."

"You’ve probably been watching the old movies," I tell him. "You expect them to go white-eyed and black-toothed and break out in pustules, maybe. But the virus doesn’t work that way. It can’t, because – like rabies – it affects the nervous system and the glands. There’s no way it can make all those spectacular changes. And, unlike those movie zombies, they’re very efficient pack hunters." I swallow at certain memories. "I know."

[ Continue to page 4 ]