Gravewalkers: Dying Time (36 page)

“
This must be it,” he
called Carmen, “and it’s pretty nasty.”

When Carmen went to see,
she lit the interior of the chamber with the beam from her electric
torch. After she had examined the little room, she said, “I can see
five bullets on the floor. I believe that they fell from their
heads.”

“
Then that leaves one more
to account for,” Critias reasoned. “We need to find the guy with
the gun who positioned the bodies. Since you had to kick the door
open to get that chair out of the way, I assume he never left here
unless there is another exit we don’t know about.”

She pointed to the toilet
area doors that were the only place left they had not explored,
“What was worth killing those people for?”

Critias went there, then
shoved open the women’s room door with his boot. He searched all
the toilet stalls to find nothing. Critias repeated the process in
the men’s restroom. In the last stall on the men’s side, Critias
discovered a dead junky with a plastic bag taped around his head.
The man still had a hypodermic needle that hung out of his arm. He
sat preserved like a sort of raisin. The man was definitely a fully
transformed infected when judged by his lack of decomposition. The
ghoul stayed dormant from lack of hydration.

Just to be on the safe
side, Critias pulled his panga-bowie blade then used it to swish
off the body’s head clean across the shoulders. He felt bad that
Carmen was not there to see how surgical a sword hand he was. He
searched about a bit to find a pistol in the belt of the man’s
pants, which had rusted to a paperweight, so he dropped it in the
garbage can as he went out.

Carmen went in to see the
ghoul and then came back with a perplexed expression, “My logic
processor offers a peculiar scenario. I deduce from the bag on the
man’s head that he was practicing an asphyxiation masturbation
ritual in the toilet while also injecting recreational drugs into
his arm to celebrate the homophile homicide murder-rush he got from
shooting all the others, resulting in his accidental overdose.” She
tossed him a medical vial that she had taken from the body’s
pocket. The label read it was a medicinal cocaine
solution.

He tossed the bottle back
to put in her pack, “I must say that it disturbs me that I made you
a romantic heterosexual, I’m the only man you have ever known, and
you came up with that horrendous theory. That bastard was up to
something voodoo-bullshit or I’m a cowardly scavenger. If he wanted
to be dead, he had a pistol and if he wanted to get high, he
wouldn’t have put a bag on his head, so something else entirely is
going on here. He shot those other eggheads because they discovered
something or they were going to take something away from him. You
need to go through their papers to find out what that was. Let’s go
back to that video room that was so nice and clean. We can take a
break, have a snack, and watch some of their movies.”

She advised, “We need to go
around later to forage all the valuable drugs and
chemicals.”

They went to the
pitch-black windowless video room then locked themselves
inside.

Carmen took her portable
field generator from her backpack. She explained, “Kevin assembled
the capacitors I needed to make better use of this.” That meant
they would soon have flowing electricity for the contemporary
devices in the room. Carmen set the output voltage then plugged
both the video screen and the disk player into sockets Kevin had
attached to her power device.

Once she had the screen and
player operational, Critias put in the first disk. The device was
similar to a holographic laser disk medium from his own era, so he
managed to operate it easily enough. As he pressed the loading tray
to close on his selection, Critias said, “Let’s see what everyone
was so excited about, shall we? It’s kind of flattering that we get
to be the first people ever to know what caused all
this.”

Carmen moved the boardroom
table over on its side against the doors. Once she had the floor
thus cleared, she spread out the fire-blanket from her pack then
stripped herself naked so as not to transfer any contamination onto
their clean zone. She finally stretched out to relax and let her
skin breathe. Once she was comfortable, Carmen told him, “That
diving suit blocks my epidermal gas exchange. I really need to get
some air for a while.”

“
I know how that is,” he
sympathized being familiar with the confines of his own armor. He
pulled up a chair to sit with a perfect view of both Carmen’s
breathtaking posterior and the video screen at the same time. He
suggested, “You control the fast forward to show us the good
parts.”

She pressed the buttons on
the player to search through the footage. Carmen narrated to
Critias what she saw that was worthy of his interest, “It seems
like this local Mexican archeologist has called a team from here to
lend him assistance. The man discovered that sarcophagus down in
some underground vault complex. It was already dripping man-eating
digestion grossness and he wanted them to tell him what that stuff
is.”

The ponderously careful
process of exploring the crypt consumed volumes of video without
relating anything of real importance. Disks later Carmen found
another point of interest, “Now this is getting exciting; we have
one, three, now five armed men who are decidedly unfriendly. They
appear to be local tribesmen judging by their manner of dress.” She
turned up the sound so they could make out the voices speaking
Spanish that Carmen translated. “These local men are saying that
the scientists are trespassing on sacred native grounds and that
anyone who ever enters the underground tomb suffers the death
penalty. This man on the science team says he never went down there
so he wants to shoot one of his guilty associates to prove his
commitment never to speak of the place or return. Gunmen are
herding everyone but the traitor down into the tomb. The handsome
scientist has thrown a contaminated surgical probe that he had
earlier lanced into a sarcophagus mouth. The lance strikes the
traitor in the leg wounding him. Now we know it was that
backstabber who will fly off for Mexico City, have himself a
prostitute, and trigger the Outbreak.”

Critias had his doubts,
“How could the sarcophagus be here if the science team is dead
before they take it?”

“
True enough,” Carmen
agreed. “Their cavalry has arrived.” A group of commandos in
paramilitary black rushed out of the jungle to save the scientific
team by using accurate maschinenpistole automatic fire to kill the
native gunmen. Carmen laughed after she listened, “The traitor has
successfully talked his way out of his treachery. He says he was
only stalling for time, pretending to collaborate so their security
forces could arrive to deal with the situation.”

“
He never went down into
the tomb and he is a backstabbing whore.” Critias deduced the
situation, “He must be their lawyer.”

Carmen searched through
stacks of documents she had collected from anywhere she saw them.
“This is important,” she handed the page to Critias. “There’s a man
inside that sarcophagus and he’s a dormant infected.”

After she sifted through
many pages, Carmen found a whole folder of special interest, “They
learned about the Mexico City Outbreak from seeing it on television
while working here on this project. It seems that the police
headshot patient zero then gave his name on the news broadcasts. He
was running around biting people. Even though the scientists here
were fully aware that they had the specimen that was the source of
the plague, they refrained from informing the civil authorities;
instead, they worked diligently on creating their own
vaccine.”

That news astounded
Critias, “Are you saying there’s a vaccine here?”

“
Nope,” she answered as
she studied more documents. “This says they kidnapped a homeless
person then deliberately infected him for studying the progressive
stages of transformation; successfully I might add. They managed to
isolate the cause of the cannibal psychosis and from that
determined how to prevent the condition from occurring. So in
short, they claim to have discovered the secret to biblical
immortality.”

He had to ask, “What is the
secret to eternal life?”

“
This research indicates
that when a human being is in the early stage of infection and
experiences systemic hypoxia in conjunction with high doses of
tropane alkaloids, they will gain all the physical advantages of
the ghouls with a mind intellectually and emotionally intact. The
cocaine solution that man on the toilet injected into himself would
be a suitable agent for this purpose, as would other questionable
drug practices of this era, such as Ritalin or assorted other
chemical agents unfamiliar to you.”

Critias thought he
comprehended what she had said, “If you get infected and overdose
on cocaine while wearing a plastic bag on your head, then you will
eventually wake up as one of the zombie nation only with a
functional brain.” From that, he understood even more about what
was going on. “The populace in general that had this Ritalin in
their system, cocaine, or one of these other drugs you mentioned,
they ended up smarter than the average brain eater; and if by some
freak improbability they also somehow managed to drown themselves
or suffocate, like crashing their car into a lake, they might even
wake up talking.”

“
Or whispering,” Carmen
added, “maybe they even ring bells to call their trained hunter off
before he got himself killed.”

“
Hell,” Critias used his
favorite curse. “We’ve been getting our asses kicked by
crack-heads.”

“
It seems so,” Carmen
agreed with his assessment. “I suspect more children than adults
had the Ritalin, but as a rule fewer kids escaped being devoured
entirely, to then be able to regenerate afterward.”

“
Send all this to Kevin,”
he instructed. “Jim will be mighty pissed if he finds out we didn’t
tell him this stuff as soon as we knew.”

Carmen play-saluted him
then transmitted to Kevin. She sent Critias' message along with a
full sensory copy of her entire mission experience that included
the videos and all the research documents, as well as anything else
she had thought, heard, or seen.

He assumed she was finished
when Carmen put her head down a moment as if she lost consciousness
and then sat back up. Critias asked, “How much did you tell
Kevin?”

She answered honestly, “He
knows everything I know and will make much better use of it than I
can.”

He asked about an unrelated
topic, “Could you disable his inhibitor chip?”

She surmised, “Traveling
back in time would have caused Kevin to have the same division by
zero internal navigation-clock error that I did, so I don’t think
he has directives anymore. Kevin is just a cunning liar and thinks
I’m not smart enough to know. I assume he thinks you don’t know
either, but I’m not as dumb as he thinks and I believe you must
also suspect it.”

Critias nodded, “No
offense, princess, but if he’s so much smarter than you, I find it
hard to believe you could ever accomplish anything like that and he
couldn’t.”

“
We may never know,” she
rolled over onto her back to stretch into an accidentally erotic
pose; then she flopped over onto her side with a yawn as if she
planned to take a nap.

He guessed, “Did Kevin send
you a new laziness upgrade during your uplink?”

“
It must be working,” she
confirmed his powers of observation. “I wanted to try it out and it
does feel wonderful, makes you wonder why anyone does
anything.”

He got back to their
mission, “So the guy in the toilet with his head in a bag is a
what?”

“
Decapitated for one
thing,” she chuckled somewhat amused. “If their research is
correct, he’s the same man he was before he infected himself, only
now dehydrated, immortal, and still entirely
contagious.”

He asked, “Do you think he
could talk?”

She smirked at the notion,
“I could read his lips I suppose, if you watered him like a plant
for a while. He won’t be doing much talking without lungs; I’m
pretty sure of that.”

He wondered, “So how do we
know that he’s not the specimen we need?”

She shrugged only it came
off like a sexy sort of squirm, “Take his head with you. It’s not
like you’ll have to chop it off a second time, and it is a
convenient size for carrying.”

If he was going to take the
head, he still had a larger issue to deal with, “So you have any
ideas for taking the man in the box?”

Carmen considered that, “We
wrap him up in sheets or whatever and then you carry him home on
your back.” She stretched again then eyed him sleepily, “You’re
strong enough to manage it I think.” Carmen yawned then put her
head down where she fell asleep.

Critias removed his armor
to sit beside Carmen on her blanket to have a picnic meal. They had
plenty of time before sunrise to make it back to the plane so
Critias decided to let her rest while he watched the action parts
of the home movies again and smoked a smoldering cigar.

When it came time to
collect the specimen, Carmen volunteered to do the dirty work. She
left all her possessions safe in the conference room while she
dressed in a scientist’s plastic clean-suit. Carmen tiptoed through
the goo on the floor of the containment room then lifted a nude
male human body from within the sarcophagus. The ancient ghoul had
the same coating of turquoise slime like everything else. Carmen
carried the well-hydrated healthy-appearing body out to lay it on a
stainless-steel examining table where she wiped it clean with paper
towels then wrapped it tightly inside some of the abundant white
sheets. By weaving in more sheets, she fabricated a pair of secure
carrying straps to make the whole package into a sort of Andean
crouched mummy backpack.