Zombies! (Episode 9): The Changing of the Guard (2 page)

During their dinner, he talked and coaxed her into talking. They learned so much about each other. She found herself absorbing the facts of his life as if they were her own. Everything he said was fascinating. Every story of a trip to the corner market was a bold new at adventure that had her riveted to her seat.

Toward the end of dinner, he told her about his work. Or, his previous work. She knew he was a geneticist. He had mentioned that the night before in the pub. What he hadn't told her was that he'd always worked under government grants. His latest research had ended a little more than a year before and left him badly shaken. He didn't get into the gruesome details, but he told her enough so that she understood its seriousness. He confided in her that he had falsified his reports and destroyed all of the samples. His bugs would forever remain unknown. It hurt him, she could tell. He didn't exactly say that it was his life's work, but she got that impression. At any rate, he hadn't worked since that time. Money wasn't really an issue for him. It never had been. So he had used the time to clear his head. He'd been on vacation to China and South Africa. He'd visited churches and temples and mosques. In a year, he had explored the world and its philosophies and himself. He'd essentially run from his life. Up until meeting her, he had even fled potential relationships. Nothing long term or short term. Lucy was the first woman he had engaged in a very long time.

By the time he was paying the check, she was sure that they were going to spend the night together. He didn't ask. He never even hinted. It was part of his charm, or maybe just part of his strategy. There was never a doubt in her mind that every word he'd told her was true, but she was still a guarded woman. If she was going to go to bed with him, it was going to be something she did because she wanted to do it. Not because he had talked her into it. So she decided that he was attractive enough and charming enough and worthwhile enough to sever her marriage vows.

He didn't argue.

For the rest of the week, she spent every free moment with him. He took her to the shops and the theatre. He showed her the sights at night. She barely saw her colleagues who, during work hours started off teasing her mercilessly but later turned to words of caution. They all knew she was married. Those closest to her knew there was trouble in the marriage. But Lucy didn't care what they knew or what they thought. For the first time in a long time, she was enjoying herself. She put aside all questions of consequence. For just one week, Rudy Ludlow was the man of her dreams.

He saw her to the airport on her last day. She kissed him goodbye but had no answer when he asked when she'd be back. Her work schedule had been set for the next four months and London was not on the itinerary. They exchanged email addresses and she promised to get him a list of the cities to which she would be travelling. Maybe they could meet in one or two of them. Then she boarded her plane vowing that her time with Rudolph Ludlow as not over.

But it was.

Soon, her time would end altogether.

***

Lucy and Larry didn't have loud arguments. They had silent, brooding arguments, which were the worst kind. People who yell at each other at least air their frustrations. People like Lucy and Larry hold their pain in, willing the other to recognize it and apologize for his or her transgressions. The tension builds as they move about the house like strangers. And while they do damage to themselves and to each other, no one suffers more than the children. Zoe always retreated to her room when her parents were visibly angry with each other. Of course, she knew they didn't love each other. Love is one of the baser emotions and even children have an excellent sense of when it is absent.

On the night Lucy came home, Larry was out late at the gym. The gym was open until ten and he was out until eleven thirty. She didn't bother to question him when he came in. What was the point? It wasn't as if he was going to tell her the truth.

She spent the next week figuring out what she was going to do about Zoe when she finally ended her marriage. There were almost six weeks between then and her next trip. It was a good amount of time to settle into a new situation. She could take regular custody of Zoe and leave her with Larry when she went on business trips. Already, she'd decided that she was going to be a better mother. She would speak to her boss about taking fewer trips. If he didn't agree, then she would start looking for a new job. She was young enough to still be a desirable applicant, even at her salary. Someone would hire her.

She had just about gotten up the courage to confront Larry when she came down with the flu. It was mid September, early for flu season. The nights were chilly but the days were still hot. One afternoon, she'd felt so ill that she'd gone home from work early. Coming into the apartment, she'd practically collapsed on the bed. When Larry and Zoe had come home and found her like that, he had immediately started taking care of her. Did she actually see concern in his eyes?

At some point during the evening, she heard him in the other room coughing. Great. He was also sick. A while later, she heard Zoe coughing as well. Whatever she'd brought into the house, she had well and truly shared it with her family.

***

When Larry awoke the next morning, he couldn't tell whether Lucy was even still alive or not. He could barely tell about himself. Grabbing some sweat pants and a T-shirt from the hamper, he stumbled out of the bedroom. Looking in at Zoe, he saw that she was sitting up in bed.

"I'll be back soon, honey," he said to her through his foggy head. "I'm going to go and get some help."

She turned her head toward him and moaned. It was this mournful sound that cut through his haze and right to his heart. She began to move, but he told her to stay in bed and then wandered off down the hallway.

Grabbing a long coat from the closet, he slipped out the door. It didn't even occur to him to use the phone to call for help. Behind him, Zoe came stumbling out of the corridor just in time to see the door close behind him. Lost now, she curled up under a table and stayed there until an opportunity to eat presented itself.

***

Larry went downstairs, out the front door, and into the street. It was dark and there was little foot traffic. He found his way down the block, made a left turn, and started walking toward the gym. There was a hospital near there. It was about ten blocks away. He went about three before he made a wrong turn down an alley, and collapsed into the heap of garbage bags. It was there that he died.

It was there that he turned.

***

Rudolph Emmett Ludlow had grown up in a small town just twenty miles from Bristol. His parents had raised him and his two brothers and one sister with love and kindness. As a boy, his favorite pastimes had been soccer and mischief. Early on, his sister, Delia, had been the subject of his pranks but she made it quickly clear that she wasn't going to have any of it. Almost ten years older than he was, she was already eyeing the boys when he was just out of diapers and there would be no interference from a little brother. She was a classic beauty, his sister. She could have been an actress or a model or the poster child for just about anything. But she was also conventionally brilliant and had gone into politics. In fact, Delia had been instrumental in securing him his grants for the research that led to the zombie plague.

So it was her fault.

No. Diverting blame would lead him down a dark and dangerous path.

Andy was his oldest brother, older by eight years. In the Ludlow family, Andy was the black sheep. He was handsome but not drop dead gorgeous. He was smart, but not stone cold brilliant. He was charming but not the kind of man that swept a woman off of her feet. The result of his "hardships" had been that, out of all of them, Andy was the most normal of the lot. He'd married a good woman at twenty five years old and bought a house in Wales. They were raising two fine sons. Andy worked for the corporate offices of a coal mining company. Within his first few months, he had established himself by reorganizing their safety protocols. Within the company, he'd been hailed as a hero. He was well adjusted and happy. It was Andy that Ludlow admired the most.

His other brother, older by only two years, was George. George was a bit of a maverick. He was the best looking and the most charming of them all. He was a womanizer and a gambler and a drinker. He was also a con artist. In fact, he was the best kind of con artist. He was the kind of guy that conned you and, even when it was all said and done, you had no idea you’d been conned. Hell, he still kept in touch with some of his marks.

As the youngest, Ludlow himself had garnered a lot of attention from his parents. Both his mother and his father treated him as the baby and while that engendered mostly love and kindness from his mother, his father had little patience for teaching the lessons that he had already taught three times before. That didn't mean that the elder Mr. Ludlow didn't show him love and kindness. It just meant that young Rudy had to understand things a bit quicker and a bit better than his siblings before him.

Sometime during middle school, he'd discovered biology. That had been an exciting time for him. Even thirty five years later, he still remembered the taste of the learning. Every new thing that was revealed to him and the way that it fit into the spectrum was a brand new excitement. That feeling was addictive. That addiction was what had led him to where he was. Without ever having outgrown the need for new learning experiences, he'd set out to discover. Genetics, while a field widely explored in science, still held so many mysteries that it just beckoned to him. In England, his work had led to treatments for all sorts of rare genetic conditions. Like Denise Luco, he was a researcher first. He seldom met with patients unless they were part of a test group. Unlike Denise Luco, however, his experiences with patients had been positive for both him and them. His easy going demeanor set even those who were close to death at ease. That had helped him to ease the burden of his victims here in the States, but it did little to assuage his own damaged conscience.

Ludlow had worked with a fair number of bacteria during his tenure. Single celled organisms were, to him, some of the most fascinating organisms. Being a single celled organism did not belie complexity. Otherwise, there would not be such a variety of them on the planet. Ludlow remembered his early experiments with the genetically engineered bacterium. He'd tested it on sick animals. After all, it was designed to heal the sick. Unlike the zombie effect which presented itself as a bacterial infection, the animals exposed to the bacterium seemed to undergo some sort of metamorphosis. At no point did it appear that they were dying. Only when they became aggressive, feeding on those in the control group did Ludlow begin running some tests on the tissue. He had found that those animals, though close to death, were still functioning within the bounds of what we normally consider alive. Some parts of their bodies had shut down and were relatively free of the bacterium while others, such as the brain and digestive organs, were teeming with it. It had attached itself to the walls of the organs and successfully destroyed the creatures' immune systems. He noticed several physiological changes in the affected organs. Much of what he had discovered back then was evident in the human samples he was seeing now.

But the humans were dead. There was no heart beat, no circulation whatsoever. The blood in the body had been changed by the bacterium and was being used as an avenue of travel. The bacteria swam all over the body using the stale blood highway. Wherever it went, it would reproduce, rejuvenating those areas that were in decay. It was doing twice the work it had been designed to do. With the immune system gone in the wake of the person's death, it was up to the bacterium to fight off anything that might prove harmful to the body. It did so mercilessly. In many ways it had evolved. In addition to its enhanced functions, groups of bacteria seemed to work in unison with one another. Together they were very strong. The parts of the body were like molding putty to them.

In recent weeks, Ludlow had discovered an oddity in his patients. The bacteria seemed to congregate in different places depending on the person. He calculated that approximately ninety eight percent of the zombies were the typical walking dead variety seen in the movies. They had no sense of self preservation, little ability to coordinate their movements, and an insatiable taste for flesh. That remaining two percent, though, had him worried. Those zombies were atypical in one or more ways. So far, none of them had displayed the capacity for true intelligence. Their anomalous characteristics, labeled
personalities
, manifested in different ways. A good example was Linda. She had been brought in shortly after the police debacles in Brooklyn and New Jersey. She had been held at the zombie cop headquarters for a while but Ludlow still didn't know why nor was he likely to gain access to that information. Despite being the creator of the bug, his authority was very limited. Denise Luco was in charge and didn't take kindly to anyone invading her sphere of command.

From what Ludlow had managed to learn, Linda had been discovered in an abandoned construction yard. She was by herself and hiding under a table. There was also a sticker pasted to her shirt begging for mercy. The sticker was likely put there by someone else, either a prankster or a loved one looking to protect her remains. But the oddity was the coincidence between the sticker's sentiment and her behavior. She was completely docile. Even Dr. Mwabi, whose movements often appeared timid, would attack any live animal, including a human. But Linda seemed genuinely afraid. Ludlow was no behaviorist but he was beginning to believe that the brain held onto the last thoughts or sentiments felt by the living person. Perhaps even a suggestion could be planted.