Zombies! Episode 2 - Abby's Bad Day by Ivan Turner Read Free Book Online Page B

dumb
luck. I took a swing at the guy and hit him right in the teeth. It
would have been a great punch against anyone but a zombie." He
laughed and shook his head again. "I'm sorry I ran out on Sven. Is
he okay?"
     
    Heron made no move at all. Mayfield looked at
him for long moments, waiting for that confirmation.
     
    "Damn." He indicated his knuckles again.
"Does this kill me?"
     
    "I'm not the guy to ask," Heron said.
"There's a doctor down in the ER who's been working on this. Her
name's Denise Luco and she's brilliant. If anyone can help you, she
can."
     
    "But you don't think anyone can help me."
     
    Heron's radio squawked, saving him from
having to answer that question. Mayfield seemed stable enough so he
took a chance and answered it. It was a patrol cop on the outside
asking about someone named Martin Benjamin. He was Abby's husband.
After some garbled talk, Heron said, "Let him inside the perimeter
but not into the building. You can tell him his wife's all right
for now."
     
    Holstering the radio, he turned back to
Mayfield. "Are you coming?"
     
    Mayfield nodded, standing up. Flanked by
security, Heron led him back down to the ER.
     
     
    ***
     
    A WEEK before, Denise Luco had
been a successful, if not particularly ambitious pathologist. She'd
always been hardcore about her work but didn't really care about
making her way up the ladder of success as long as no one stood in
her way on the ladder of discovery. It was this devotion to the
science rather than the politics that had gotten her the call when
the Koplowitz family had been discovered. It was that call that had
changed her life.
     
    Luco was thirty six years old, but looked
older. She was tough but acted tougher. No one ever gave her an
inch and she was disinclined to be forgiving about it. Throughout
her time working for the city of New York, she'd seen mostly your
average run of the mill diseases. The flu was the most common.
Every year the flu claimed thousands of lives. And it would be that
way for ever more. Or, at least, it would have been. Now there was
this…this thing.
     
    In the first two days after the discovery of
the bacterium that caused the zombie plague, she'd learned a lot.
There was a flood of information. In the first place, the bacterium
was not at odds with the human immune system. That was what made it
so strong and so resistant to antibiotics. It actually strengthened
the immune system, making other, normal bacteria in the body
powerful. Antibiotics, which came with a whole host of side
effects, didn't really stand a chance. In fact, Luco had early on
hypothesized that a course of antibiotics actually had opposite the
desired effect.
     
    She had spent a number of nights awake
wondering if she hadn't in fact killed Heron's partner by ordering
the strong course of medicine.
     
    As she had told Heron on that first evening,
the germ had all the telltale signs of being manmade. Its lifecycle
and development were unnatural. Millions of them seemed to group
and actually work together to keep the body functioning. The normal
decay that you would see in a typically dead human being was slowed
to the point of being unnoticeable. Despite the grayish pallor and
vacant eyes, Zoe Koplowitz had shown little signs of change. Since
the immune system is largely responsible for keeping people from
decaying while they're alive, the bacteria essentially acted as
protection for the body. Even Detective Stemmy's body, never
animated due to the brain damage caused by Heron's bullet, was
decaying at the tiniest fraction of the normal rate. Luco still
didn't know how or why the germ activated the motor centers of the
brain, but she did know why it needed to feed. The germ was a hard
worker. And there were trillions of the little buggers. They ate
just about anything organic, even microbes in the air. At that
rate, a zombie could survive almost indefinitely. But it was
strongest when devouring live flesh. Animals, all animals,
were teeming with other