Desert Angels by George P. Saunders Read Free Book Online

horribly contaminated, with a reading of over 100 Gy. Jack had deliberately expedited his examination so that his direct exposure to the corpse was as brief as possible.
    “But it’s not possible. No, not possible,” he said, his mind stunned by what he just discovered.
    Walter clucked.
    “I didn’t kill him, Walter,” Jack stammered. “He’s been dead for days. Over a week, to be somewhat exact.”
    Jack fought for reason, his scientific mind sucker-punched by the broken rules of life as he knew it and the pathophysiology of the human condition.
    “No heart beat, no brain activity for days. How could it move? How could it do anything?” Jack asked Walter, his voice rising in frustration. “It’s not possible!”
    Jack stood and looked at the empty ruin of the creature, its chest cavity wide open and stomach area strewn with the remains of large intestine.
    Jack continued to shake his head for the next ten minutes. At length, he stood and walked out of the exam room. He stripped naked and walked into one of the six shower stalls this laboratory boasted.
    Walter flapped to the floor near the shower and watched Jack silently.
    Jack racked his mind for any kind of precedent that could explain what he’d just discerned following the mutant’s autopsy. He came up empty; perhaps if he had access to the internet, he could have found some historical comparison.
    But he realized that what he was contemplating was ridiculous.
    There was no precedence for the dead walking.
    None. Except by now immolated Hollywood’s films on vampires and zombies.
    What was lying in his lab was an abomination to the natural laws of life as he understood it.
    Maybe this is an anomaly. I need more test subjects .
    Like any good scientist, Jack realized he needed further evidence for what he had interpolated through examination of the mutant. Forget that it had been dead for many days and had the audacity to walk, eat and attempt to kill him – but if there were others like it out there in the wasteland, then there was a case portfolio he could address when the time came for …
    … for what?
    “Screw it, I need more zombies,” he muttered to himself as he finished his shower and toweled himself dry. He’d deal with the walking-dead hypothesis conundrum later … after more dissections.
    Right now, he needed cadavers.
    Fuck the impossible physics of the universe right now.
    He’d get to the bottom of this sooner or later.
     
     

THREE – RECONNAISSANCE, THE NEIGHBORS AND LIGHT CLOUDS
     
     
     
    He had the good sense to wait until morning before implementing his new mission objective of killing Stiffers (as he’d decided to call the mutants), and assure himself of top-notch focus and physical acuity. He did not drink the night before though highly tempted. Rather, he downed a few melatonin and dreamed of monster butchery.
    He suspected that he would have to go beyond the immediate vicinity of the Dome and so packed a radiation suit, should rad or roentgen levels begin to change for the worst.
    His plan was simple: Find at least one of the undead monsters and capture it alive. If he could examine one of these things while still animated, more answers might be gleaned as to how the radioactive fuckers lived and moved (an anachronism already since all his tests on the Stiffer corpse in his lab showed no respiration nor cardiac sinus rhythm, hence dead, yet walking).
    He had a bit of a real human altercation with Walter in his quarters on the eve of his morning departure, which surprised and worried him; after the dispute, he wondered if he was slowly going insane.
    “No, I do not want you to come with me,” he pointed at Walter, who was cooing madly on his desk.
    He noticed there was no note from the Guardian Angel this morning, but his mind was focused on other things aside from that inexplicable piece of crazy magic. He wanted zombies, alive and under his dissection knife. The Guardian Angel was inexplicable, yet ubiquitous at this