The Dead Won't Die (14 page)

“Sorry,” the man said to Kelly. “I wish people would just tell me when I'm being a jerk. It's hard sometimes for me to know.”

“You're being a jerk, Stu,” Miriam said. “Now give her some space.”

Stu did as he was told.

Miriam smiled at Kelly. “I'm sorry about that. This is Stu and Juliette Huffman, my leading researchers. It may not seem like it, but I can assure you they're both quite brilliant.”

“It's alright,” Kelly said, though she still looked a little doubtfully at Stu.

“We build morphic field generators here,” said Miriam. “As you can imagine, the Triune Movement gets discussed quite a bit around here.”

“There's no discussion,” Stu said. “It's nothing but a bunch of alarmist nonsense.”

“I don't think it can be dismissed that easily,” Juliette said.

“Don't even start,” Stu said.

“I'll start with you if I want to, mister. You can't dismiss it that easily. You know you can't.”

“The triune brain was dismissed as hogwash a hundred and fifty years ago,” Stu said. “I don't see why we have to keep dragging it out again. Nobody seriously believes that.”

“I'm not so sure about that.”

“Great!” Stu said, throwing his hands into the air. “My own wife, a Triune nut job. Next you'll be dragging out phrenology as a basis for zombie behavior.”

“Don't be so dismissive with me. You know you can't explain why the shepherding runs failed to turn away the herd. Or have you come up with a magical explanation for that, too?”

“You're the one who's going to need a magical explanation if you want to show how there's any possible way a morphic circuit could form between the basal ganglia and the limbic system. That just doesn't happen. There's no commonality to act as a circuit bridge.”

“You two,” Miriam said. “Please. You give me a headache.” Miriam turned to Kelly and rolled her eyes with a smile. “It's like this all day long, every day with these two.”

“It's okay,” Kelly said. “It's fascinating. But Stu, earlier you called me a Triune nut job. What is that?”

“What do you mean?” Stu said.

“What's a Triune nut job?”

“Have you never heard that term before?” Miriam asked. “Triune, I mean. Not the nut job part. That's just Stu being a jerk again.”

“I read mention of it in those journals, but . . .”

“Aunt Miriam, they're not part of Temple society,” said Chelsea.

“Really?” Miriam said, raising an eyebrow. “Where are you from?”

Chelsea spent the next twenty minutes describing the wreck of the
Darwin
and everything she'd been through after that. She told her about being beaten and raped in the Slaver caravans and how her brother, Chris, had turned on her. She included everything, right up to the moment when Miriam had rescued them.

Everything except Nick.

Jacob noticed she left that part out.

“Oh child,” Miriam said. She took her niece's head in her hands and hugged her to her breast. “These men, do you know who they were working for?”

“No,” Chelsea said. “They didn't say. They just wanted Daddy's notebooks.”

Miriam shook her head. “That's not good.”

“Wait,” Kelly said. “I'm still confused. What is a triune brain, and does it have something to do with those men who were trying to kill us?”

“I think it does,” Miriam said. “Okay, I'll run it down for you. You know that the morphic field generators are the basis of our technology, right?”

Kelly nodded.

“Okay, well, for years before the outbreak, morphic fields were used solely as a power source. The U.S. military developed it in the 2060s as a cheaper and safer replacement for nuclear power. As a form of electromagnetic energy, they have the power to make aerofluyts fly and light cities. Unfortunately, the outbreak kept the technology from reaching around the world. But that's when we discovered that morphic fields had peculiar effects on zombies. It was called the shepherding effect. Modulate a morphic field a given way, and you could make a zombie go anywhere you wanted it to go. We've used it for years to guide the bigger herds away from developing communities like your home of Arbella.”

“You do that?” Kelly asked.

“Is that why we've never seen these aerofluyts before now?” Jacob asked. He'd risen from the cot and was standing on shaky legs.

“Jacob,” Kelly said. “Get back in bed.”

“No, no,” he said. “I'm fine. And I want to hear this. Is that why we've never seen the aerofluyts before now?”

Miriam nodded. “They have carefully controlled flight paths that keep them away from the established communities. The caravans, like the one you described, Chelsea, see them sometimes, but that can't be helped. The regular communities, though, those are off-limits.”

Kelly waved her hand in the air like she wanted to dismiss all that. “What about the triune brain? You were telling me about that.”

“Yes,” Miriam said. “So for years we've relied on morphic field technology. But about fifteen years ago some of our medical community started noticing a simultaneous rise in children born with autism and a rapid rise in Alzheimer's cases in people in their middle age. Both trends are accelerating, unfortunately. Some of those same researchers went back to the triune brain theory, which was first developed by a neuroscientist named Paul D. MacLean back in the 1960s.

“His idea was that the human brain was divided into three parts. You had the primitive reptilian core, the basal ganglia, which, incidentally, is the only part of the brain to still show signs of function in reanimates. Paired with that is the paleomammalian complex, or the limbic system, which consists of a number of parts of the brain and regulates things like emotion, certain types of behaviors, and how motivated a person can be. The third part of the brain is the neomammalian complex, which is only present in humans and gives us the power of speech and other higher forms of thought.”

“Okay,” Kelly said. “I got that. But how does that have anything to do with zombies?”

“MacLean's theory was thrown out in the late twentieth century and replaced with more involved theories of how the brain functions,” Miriam said. “But zombies changed all that. As soon as people started studying reanimates, we learned that the higher cognitive functions of the brain were nonexistent. Anybody who's ever watched a zombie try to work its way past a simple obstacle can tell you that. Researchers found that there was limited activity in the hypothalamus, cingulate cortex, and the amygdalae portions of the brain—all part of MacLean's paleomammalian complex, by the way—but in the main, only the reptilian part—actually, that's a misnomer, because the basal ganglia is present in all vertebrates and therefore probably dates to the common ancestor of all vertebrates, long before reptiles—but anyway, only the basal ganglia showed any considerable signs of activity in reanimates. MacLean's model of the brain seemed to explain what was going on with the reanimates, and so the model of the triune brain was dusted off and revamped.”

“And calling someone a Triune means what?” Kelly asked.

Miriam frowned deeply. “It means that a person is a follower of the Triune Theory. In most of the scientific community, it's an insult. Like calling someone a Luddite, if you know that term.”

Kelly shook her head.

“It's not important,” Miriam said.

“It means that believers in that tripe haven't got a lick of common sense,” Stu said.

“Will you please put a fucking sock in it?” Miriam said.

The whole room went quiet.

“Please,” she said. “Just for a minute.” Miriam motioned to the suits along the side wall. “Stu, will you and Juliette please go make the battle suits ready? Please. I got a quick look at what we're dealing with down there on the ground level, and I think we're going to need them.”

“Yes, of course,” Stu said.

He shrank away without another word, and Juliette followed right behind him.

“I'm sorry,” Miriam said. “But as you can probably see, this issue has sharply divided Temple society.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Kelly said.

“Here's the thing. When the first studies were done on zombies and the triune brain model, researchers found that the morphic fields acted directly on the basal ganglia. That formed the basis for our shepherding strategies, which we used to control the movements of the larger herds.”

“But . . . ?”

Miriam smiled. “You caught that. Good. Well, the problem, as I mentioned, was that no one seemed to know what to make of the limited activity still present in the limbic system. It didn't seem to influence zombie behavior in any way, but it couldn't be explained away, either. It still hasn't. That's where the Triunes come in.

“My brother, Alfred, started out as a neurosurgeon. People used to tell me all the time that he was the most brilliant man they'd ever met, and I would always have to agree. It pained me to admit it, because Alfred could be a real prick about it, but they were right. He was brilliant. Freakishly smart, actually. And, like most of the scientific community, when he first heard the Triune Theory that morphic fields were somehow changing the zombie brain by acting on the limbic system, he dismissed it as sloppy reasoning.”

“Yeah,” Kelly said, “but the brain is complex. I've read stories about people who suffered terrible head trauma, who nonetheless relearned things like language and how to walk. The different parts of the brain overlap and can even change function, can't they?”

Miriam nodded. “Absolutely. Spoken like a true believer in the Triune Theory, by the way. It was that same line of thinking that led my brother to change his thoughts on the Triune Theory. About ten years ago, he flipped to the other side. He converted, if you will. He even sent me a note one day saying that he had become the Paul to MacLean's Triune Church. I didn't even know what he was talking about at the time, but he began speaking out publicly against morphic field technology. He claimed it was responsible for the increased incidence of autism and the rise in cases of the early onset of Alzheimer's. I don't know if you've had a girlfriend start a new diet and she gets all weird about it, and it's all you hear from her, but that's what he was like in those days. I couldn't have a conversation with him that didn't turn into a debate on morphic field technology. It put a rift in our family that never healed. He made a lot of enemies in the public sphere, as well. The same people who used to tell me how brilliant he was started calling him a crackpot.”

“Why? Because he was saying that the morphic field generators were working on living brains the same way they did on the zombies?”

“Essentially, yes. You have a better grasp on this than you think you do, young lady. Alfred's main idea was that the living person's brain was not all that different from the zombie brain. Take away the neomammalian complex and you have, essentially, a zombie brain. His idea was that our constant exposure to morphic fields was somehow damaging our brains.”

“Which should be easy to prove, right?”

“You would think, but no one ever could. The main problem is that morphic fields obey the laws of electromagnetism. If there was truly something to the Triune Theory, then there should have been a viable circuit working within the brain, two poles with the circuit going between them, right? But nobody, including my brilliant brain surgeon brother, could ever find that second pole. And that's why the theory has split our society the way it has. Half the population thinks this technology is just fine. The other half thinks that it is responsible for killing us all. If Alfred's theories turn out to be true, a lot of people will stand to lose an awful lot of money, not to mention their professional reputations. You can see why he made enemies.”

Kelly pointed to the notebooks. “Could I show you something I saw in there? Please? I think your brother may have found that second pole.”

The two women carried the notebooks off to a far corner of the room, leaving Jacob standing there.

Which was just as well. He hadn't followed half of their conversation. Hell, he hadn't even understood that much of it. As soon as Kelly started in on her science stuff he just tuned it out. He'd learned enough of it to get through school, but as far as he was concerned, that was the end of his involvement with the subject. Anyway, whatever he actually needed to know, Kelly would dumb down for him later.

What really interested him were the space suits parked along the side wall. No, not space suits, he reminded himself. Miriam had called them battle suits, and after seeing her use the suit downstairs, he wondered why the term hadn't occurred to him already.

“Did you guys build these?” he asked Stu and Juliette.

Stu glanced back over his shoulder at him. “No, these are antiques. We just keep them running.”

“Antiques? They look pretty impressive to me.”

“They're relics from the outbreak. They used to outfit every soldier with one of these.”

“An army of these?”

“That's what I'm told. Whole hell of a lot of good it did them, though.”

Jacob could hardly imagine that. If one of these things could level the crowd he'd faced downstairs, an army of them must have been able to make short work of a herd.

Even a huge one.

With a phalanx of battle suits taking the field, the zombies should have been rolled back into oblivion.

“The early military versions weren't like this,” Stu said, almost as though he could read Jacob's thoughts on his face. “We've made a few improvements.”