Zombie Zero (9 page)

Chapter 7

The communications between the crew on Mars and the crew on Earth were primarily typed messages. A video recording could be sent, but two-way calls were impossibly awkward. As much as twenty minutes could pass while the signal flew through space to be translated electronically, and that was just one way. Still, Adams activated the live feed and began talking in hopes of a swift response. He was reporting on their shocking discovery, a pile of corpses that looked like they ran out of food before they ran out of air. They had apparently been up here for some time, although they had been preserved almost perfectly by the airless vacuum they were found in. Adams didn’t know whether he was more disturbed by the fact that they had obviously been human, or that they had obviously started eating each other. He also needed to know why the supply ship had received a change in their itinerary while en route. The new orders said to dock, and wait, rather than start on the return trip to Earth. It didn’t make sense; the planets were drifting further apart, and every moment that passed made the journey a longer one. Very far away, in the same moment…

“Maya, what are you doing?”

Mallory was the first in the room, and he saw her looking over the edge of the stone coffin. There was something strange about her eyes, but he hardly noticed for the shock of seeing the upthrust sarcophagus. She was sitting up in the coffin, smiling, as he came to kneel beside her in the sand. His gaze was on the stone box, the carvings along the sides and the markings on the front.

“Are you alright?” He glanced at her as the others filed into the room, and this time he did notice her eyes. For a moment they were Maya’s eyes, dark and penetrating and beautiful. They swirled with black, and then they were orbs of shifting sand.

“I’m wonderful, professor.” Maya smiled. “Won’t you join me?”

His face was a mask of confusion for a moment. His eyes dropped to the edge of the box; when they rose to meet hers again, they swirled with the colors of shifting sand.

“Of course,” Mallory said, dropping his head.

Todd was next, elbowing Allen aside to kneel beside Mallory.

“Maya,” he said. “What are you doing in there?”

“She is reborn,” Mallory murmured.

“What?” Todd nudged Mallory. “Professor, are you-”

As Elayna knelt on Mallory’s other side, Todd’s eyes swirled with shifting sand, and he nodded.

“Oh,” he said. “She is reborn. She is beautiful.”

“She is beautiful,” Elayna sighed, the color in her eyes gone as well.

They turned to Allen as he came up behind them.

“Guys,” he said. “What’s going on?”

For a shocked forever moment he stood there, looking at them each slowly in turn. Allen felt tendrils of electricity tickle his brain, he saw broken images flash behind his eyes, he felt the fingers of a pleasant invasion stab into his head. As his eyes fell on Maya, he seemed to flip from her perspective to his a dozen times in a blink; he couldn’t remember if he was him or her in that blink. Then the electricity fired throughout his brain, the images became a bank of scenes behind his eyes, and the pleasant invasion turned to complete occupation. Allen’s eyes swirled with the colors of shifting sand, and he stepped forward.

“Maya,” he breathed. “Mother to us all.”

“I’m so hungry,” Todd groaned.

Allen turned at the strange sound that had become Todd’s voice. He saw that Todd’s skin had gone to a pale dead gray. Todd looked at him sideways and smiled, and Allen saw a set of jagged biting teeth between his blue parted lips. A need like he had never known twisted at Allen’s gut, a hunger that wanted to take over his thoughts and his limbs. The hunger wanted to know what Todd’s meaty shoulder would taste like, and how the hot splash of Todd’s blood would feel against his face. Allen ran his dry tongue along his own teeth, felt sharp points in his own mouth.

“You mustn’t feed yet,” Maya said, and they all nodded. “You must pack your things and go to the airport. You must hide the change you are undergoing. Do not smile, or interact unless necessary. Once you get where you are going, and clear of the airport, you may feed at last. Take only one bite of each person for the first three days. After that, you may feast until you are full.”

They all continued to nod as she spoke. When she spoke of feeding, they all began to growl like Todd had earlier; all but Elayna, who looked the men over and inched away slightly. Maya’s eyes went from dark defined beauty to shifting sand to black layered glass. Countless tiny ones and zeros were laid out on the endless curved layered panes.

“We need to go outside,” Maya proclaimed.

She stepped out of the sarcophagus, and they all stood back to look at her for a moment. Allen was accustomed to having his breath taken away by her beauty, but this was almost too much. Maya’s flesh was not like theirs; where their skin was drying rapidly and already beginning to flake off their faces, her face seemed fuller and rounder than before. She seemed to glow with a timeless beauty, and somehow she seemed both incredibly old and impossibly young at the same time. The curves of her body were more pronounced, and the way she moved was slow sensual quicksilver dancing before him.

Allen was overwhelmed, and a warm wave of emotion coaxed a tear from his eye as he stared at her. He reached up, absently, to wipe it away. It was blood, not salted transparency. Allen glanced at the others, then licked his fingertip clean hungrily.

When they were outside, Maya arched her head back to gaze at the stars. Allen saw a network of images from around the world flash through his mind in a dizzying kaleidoscope, then watched the night sky become a criss-crossing stream of digital activity. He couldn’t see them like she could, or manipulate them; but he could see what she was doing through her eyes. Allen watched the patterns of light glow and pulse with her thought, a blip here and a burst there, transfixed. Her eyes still heavenward, Maya spoke to each of them.

“Professor, you will be flying into Beijing.” Mallory nodded, wordless. “Get out of the airport and grow our family.”

“Elayna, return to America.” Elayna knitted her brow, then nodded. “Make your brothers and sisters until only we remain.”

Allen had seen the electrical activity in the sky, and the patterns that shifted with Maya’s thought; but the specifics had been beyond his grasp. He awaited his assignment with hungry eagerness.

“Allen,” Maya said softly. “You are going to the other America. Todd, you will go to Australia. After the spread, it will be difficult for all of you to get back here. Do whatever you must. I will be here. I will be waiting. Go, my children. Feed your hunger, and grow our family.”

Maya turned and strode back into the darkened passageway. Allen watched through her eyes as she made her way to the stone box and lay inside once more. He heard Todd growl, then let out a hungry howl. It would have chilled Allen to his bones if the same starved song hadn’t been singing in them. He nudged the larger creature.

“Hush,” Allen said. “Keep it together, man.”

The four of them headed back to the hotel on foot, to pack their bags and catch their flights and spread this gnawing hunger across the globe. Allen mused that it all made a beautiful kind of sense, if he looked at the world through Maya’s perspective. Looking at the world through his own eyes showed him only desperate hunger, and food he couldn’t eat, so he kept looking at it through hers.

Chapter 8

In a privatized prison, which received thirty-five thousand dollars a year for each inmate it could coax or keep inside, Warden Johns literally sat at his desk counting his money. It wouldn’t be long before he could retire and live forever in the Philippines, instead of only spending two weeks a year there. They were just numbers on a computer screen, but they meant more than that to the warden. They meant freedom: sweet, intoxicated freedom in the arms of a blurred stream of beautiful exotic women who couldn’t say his name right even if they knew it. At the same time, in the same country…

Elayna was not going to eat anyone. Maybe Maya hadn’t gotten as deep into her mind, or maybe the thought just turned her stomach a little too deeply. Whatever it was, she was not going to eat anyone. She would fight the gnawing hunger in her gut until it consumed her from within. She would let the pieces of her skin that kept falling in her lap sit there for anyone to notice. She wouldn’t smile, and show her teeth; but she wasn’t going to eat anyone either.

Elayna could still see through Maya’s eyes; the more her resolve strengthened, the more fuzzy the images became. It happened gradually over the long flight. She watched through Maya’s eyes as Maya watched through the others’. She watched her father land first, calmly hail a cab and climb in. He left his luggage spinning round the airport carousel; they had only packed to avoid arousing suspicion. His deodorant wasn’t going to stop him from stinking like rotting flesh, and his toothbrush would fray to uselessness if he tried to use it. He didn’t even need the passport or money in his pocket anymore, or he wouldn’t in a few days; all of that would be useless paper soon if Maya had her way.

Mallory bit the driver as soon as he closed the door behind him. The man opened his mouth to scream, or protest, but a strong hand covered his mouth. The hand became stronger as change swept over them both. Raw primal power coursed through the professor’s body, and he held the other man easily. He felt the driver begin to tremble as the bite did its work. There was only a few moments of struggle before the man relaxed in his grasp and sighed.

“Drive,” Mallory said. The car pulled away from the curb as Elayna watched from her unique vantage point. She thought for a moment that it had been a lucky find, for him to climb into a car in China and have the driver speak English. Thinking about it, watching the scene, she realized that hadn’t been the case at all. She realized it when the driver spoke words that she had no reason to understand. Somehow she knew what he had said, as did Mallory.

“I know,” Mallory responded. “I know you’re hungry. I am too. We need to get away from the airport. Go somewhere with people that isn’t too busy this time of day.”

They were communicating in images sent from one twisted mind to another. Elayna saw them as clearly as the scene, or her own rotting hand in front of her face. The professor sent him a string of pictures: the cab stopping again and again to pluck someone off the street, only to drop them changed a block or so later. Many of the images were of the driver or the professor rending flesh with their teeth, splattering blood about in what looked like an ecstatic feasting.

Elayna tuned out the scene before they could pick up their first victim. She thought of Todd next; immediately she felt awash in a sea of power and blood and hunger. It was hard to look back in his thoughts to see if his first bite had been deliberate disobedience or if the twisting hunger had simply been too much for him. He was still aloft, but the airplane cabin had become a sodden mess of blood and bodies. There was not a single human left aboard. All of them had changed, bitten by Todd or someone that he had bitten. Many of them had changed again, and they were feeding on those that remained in the vulnerable first stage.

There was no fighting at this point, although the state of the cabin was covered in evidence of struggle. There was only feasting, one type of monster consuming the raw protein and liquid iron that the others gave freely. Several of the creatures with thick ridged skulls and long limbs and rows of jagged teeth would flay one of the others, eating them in strips and drinking them in gulps. The victim would lie or sit in a welcoming pose until the light went out in their eyes and their bodies relaxed into death. The stronger ones would continue to feed until the bones were stripped clean, their skulls growing dense with iron and their muscles thickening along their lengthened limbs.