Escape From Dead City Read online

  “Now my dear,” Mary sat back deep in her chair, and the tone of her voice changed once again. “That’s the pleasantries out of the way so please, will you now tell me what the hell you lot are doing on my train.”

  “We decided it was our best, and probably our only chance to escape the city,” it was Pauline who answered her again straight away; she wanted to speak up before anyone else could butt in this time. She motioned her head over towards Gordon. “We saw for ourselves what this virus or whatever it is could do. We’ve seen people come back from the dead right before our very eyes and attack, and then eat, the living in our hospital. We’ve seen them turn into bloody zombies.”

  She then, very deliberately, looked around at the heavily armed men that stood surrounding them. “And going by the reaction of these nice army boys, I’d hazard a guess that it was not just an isolated incident.”

  “And how did you know about this train?” the head soldier now shoved himself into their conversation. “It was supposed to be top secret, who told you? You’ve got to tell me now; I don’t need any breach in my security.”

  “Colonel Page…Harry,” Mary held her hand up to the soldier. “Please there’s no need for you to scream and shout at our guests, I’m sure we can sort all this out in a nice calm and civilized manner. Now, can you please just let me speak to them for a moment without any interruptions?” She slowly turned back to face the four stowaways again.

  “I’m afraid that would be all down to me,” Arthur now took his turn to join in; his eyes however, kept glancing over to the obviously angry old soldier. “I’m, well I suppose I was, a duty manager back at the station. I saw the e-mails coming through on my Blackberry about a special trip and it having its own separate security, so I had a pretty good idea what was happening. That’s when I told my girlfriend, and in turn she told her sister.” He broke into a little, cheeky boy smile himself. “You see Miss Doyle, sorry Professor Doyle, I know the old station like the back of my hand, and it wasn’t too difficult to get us all on board.” Then his voice dropped slightly, “Even if we did get caught.”

  “They are not on my list, Professor,” Colonel Harry Page listened carefully but was still far from happy with the answer. “I’m sorry but I can’t let them stay on the train,” he was clearly struggling to keep his voice low. “We need to get them off now. I have my orders ma’am.”

  “Yes you have your orders, and you have also been told that you’ve got to do exactly what I say from now on, Colonel,” Mary stood up and looked right at the stern faced soldier who towered over her. “Did you not hear what they’ve said? They have had first-hand experience of dealing with the infected and have survived long enough to be able to tell the tale. I have no doubt they will be very useful to me in my work.” She gave him one more look, a softer expression was now spreading across her face as she sat back down. “Now please just leave us be for a while Harry, I want to introduce them to the others.”

  As the grizzled soldier turned and walked away, Mary quickly stood back up and beckoned both Pauline and Gordon to follow her.

  “Come with me please, your sister and her boyfriend will have to stay in here if that’s okay,” she said. Pauline looked over at Margot and got ready to argue but Mary was already talking again. “I promise you, my dear, they will be nice and safe in here. I just want you to see what my research team is doing. They would neither understand nor appreciate it.”

  “We’ll be back soon enough,” Pauline said to her little sister, quickly realizing that it would probably be best for her to go along with Mary for now. “Don’t you worry about us Margot; I promise we won’t be long.” Her hand dropped down and gave her right cheek a single, gentle stroke. Margot flinched; she seemed far from happy with that little show of affection. Pauline spotted her disgust.

  “Hey, I’ll be the one that’s looking after her,” Arthur said as he attempted to puff his chest out. “So listen up, you don’t have to worry about her either; I’ll be making sure that she’s nice and safe.” His big, brave pledge of course did nothing to make Pauline feel any better.

  “Why don’t the both of you just frigging piss off,” Margot spat back as she pushed herself deeper and deeper into the plush and padded seat. “I can look after myself quite well enough, thank you very much. You see, I’ve had plenty of practice over the years.” Both her glare from under that fringe, and that last bitter line were directed right towards her sister.

  “Now would be good, if you please,” Mary said, clearly unhappy at the time it was taking her to get them to move. Her hand was impatiently pointing off towards the next carriage. Pauline gave her a little nod as she and Gordon then got up and followed her directions. As the coach end doors slid slowly open, they saw that the large band of civilians they had seen earlier were already hard at work at some wooden benches. These worktops were laid out in perfectly straight lines under the wide train windows. Each of the civilians wore a plain white lab coat and seemed to be completely oblivious to these new arrivals.

  “Go right down to the very end please,” Mary said as she gently pushed them along, as they tried to catch a glimpse of whatever experiments and tests were taking place around them. It was like she did not want them to see too much, not just yet. “There’s something down there that I would like you both to have a little look at.”

  They could hear it long before they saw it; both of them instantly recognized those calls of the undead. It was a sound that they would, and probably could never forget. Then it quickly came into view too, perched, and chained high up on the back wall was one of the deadly beasts. It looked like it was once a ginger haired young man in his early twenties, but now its jaws twitched away at them wildly as it watched, and smelled some more fresh meat approach.

  “Please, can you go over and inspect the subject, tell me if the symptoms it has are the same as the infected had back at your hospital?” Mary politely asked as she kept her distance well away from the hungry looking beast. “This sample was taken off the street just a few miles north from your location. I want to know if the virus is acting the same way throughout the whole city.”

  It only took Pauline a few seconds to pull herself together enough to start to check out this still moving corpse. Edging even closer, she checked out the putrid infection marks on both of his legs; it looked like he had been bitten about a half dozen times. Her eyes followed them and she saw how they ran from the points of entry all the way up its body right to the very top of the head. Just as she was about to finish her ghoulish examination she saw something that made her sigh.

  “Yes Professor Doyle, it seems to be the exact same as ours,” she said as she turned and headed back towards the still distant Mary. “The rate of infection, its direction towards the brain and general appearance all appear to be completely identical to what we saw.” Glancing back over to Gordon for a second she quickly put her stare back to Mary.

  “So who was he?” she asked as she got almost face to face with her. Her eyes bored deep into the Professors. “I don’t suppose there is any chance you can tell me that as well?”

  “That’s of no matter to you, young lady,” the old leader replied, moving her eyes away from Pauline as she turned towards the window. “I’m just asking for your medical opinion on the virus spread.”

  “No, are you sure it doesn’t matter? Well I think it certainly does ma’am.” She pointed to a small plastic strap that was still fixed tight around the undead mans wrist and then at one of the Techs nearby. It was clearly the same as everyone else in the room was wearing.

  “I take it that’s got to be some sort of I.D bracelet for you and the rest of your team?” Pauline eyes went down and motioned to the same strap that was hanging way too loose on Mary’s thin wrist. “So Professor, I’d guess that he is one of your own people?”

  After a long silence, Mary eventually nodded back over to Pauline. “His name is, or rather I should say that it was, David Johnston,” Mary said as she glanced over to Gordon too. �
�He only joined me late last month, the poor boy got way too close to the first specimen that we tried to grab. As you can see, he stumbled and the undead beast got a good few bites out of him as he tried to crawl away. One of the soldiers shot the other one dead so we had to keep hold of David for the inspection. He was unfortunately already dead by the time the soldiers brought him back to me, and then of course he quickly reanimated, we barely had the time to tie him up.”

  All through her little speech, she did not once look at the young man that was, before this all started, one of her own staff members.

  “Okay, we need to get a move on,” she said, as she turned right away from where the specimen hung and walked over to the side. “I want you to meet up with a couple of my people, they will explain to you what we’re trying to do and then get you both to work. Once you’ve had a chance to speak to them, you can go back and see your sister for a little while. But then my dear, we need to get you both to work. I’m sorry but we do not have the time for any more niceties.”

  By the look in her eyes both Pauline and Gordon knew that this was not just a request for help. It was an order.

  Two people, a man and a woman, were called over by Mary and instructed to tell the new passengers what they were doing and to organize some work for these two doctors. The four of them sat around a plain, little square table that was placed far too close for comfort to the still moaning, and still undead David. Without uttering another word, Mary then left them all alone and exited the carriage.

  “Hi there,” the first one said as soon as she was seated. “I’m Chloe Yeates, I’m one of the research technicians.” She seemed to be far too young and bubbly to be on this little trip to hell.

  “And my name is Ben Holmes,” the elderly, almost totally bald man mumbled straight after he too slumped into a chair. “I’m the same as her, just another one of the research techs.” His worn down, deadbeat attitude was much more like what they had expected to find.

  “Before we get started,” Pauline, as usual, jumped in straight away. “Can you please tell me something, how the hell did they manage to get you all together so quickly? I mean within a couple of hours of this kicking off all you scientists and with all this specialized equipment are on a fancy train and setting off to God knows where. That somehow just doesn’t seem to be possible to me.”

  The two techs glanced over at each other for a few seconds before Chloe eventually spoke up. “Well we’ve actually been kept together for about a week, and it’s not just us, I hear there were quite a few teams made up and we were all sent off to different locations. It sure seems that someone knew that this was going to happen.”

  “Yeh, and can you tell me how the hell did they know that, Chloe?” Ben said, with the tangs of anger clearly sounding in his voice. “How come we knew so much about this virus before it even entered the public domain?” He turned back and nodded over to Pauline, “I agree with her, it smells bloody fishy to me too.”

  “So what are you saying then?” Gordon could not help himself; he kept his gaze over at the twitching body of the thing that was once called David. “That the virus is actually man-made, so you think that it was us who made it and somehow we let it get out? Did we unleash the zombies onto the world?”

  “I think you need to just calm down, you’ve all been watching way too many of those silly B movies and the X Files,” Chloe sniggered at him. “Not everything that goes wrong in the world is because of some dodgy government cover-up; most of these things are in fact made by good old Mother Nature herself. It’s just a really bad virus, you know like aids and bird or pig flu.” She too tried not to look at David, “But granted it sure is a hell of a lot worse than those.”

  “Well, who knows,” Ben said as he leant even further back in his chair. “And more importantly my dear, who the fuck even cares what caused it anymore. We’re never going to stop it now anyway, nothing can. It’s already way too late for anyone to do anything about it now.”

  “Come on Ben, don’t be like that,” Chloe tried to take a hold of his hand but he just pulled it away and grunted something unpleasant and low under his breath. Even so, she still kept on with her valiant efforts to keep up his spirits. “We’ll find something to stop it soon enough; we just need to keep on trying.”

  He forced a little, sarcastic smile in her direction and got up to leave. “You can carry on believing that if you want honey. And I’ll believe what I want to believe.” He never even looked at the new visitors as he quickly disappeared away into the next carriage.

  “What do you really think, Chloe? Can we beat it” Pauline asked her.

  “Yes, I honestly think we can,” she replied with that stupid cheesy smile still stuck on her face. “All I know is that we must find the cure. We just have to.”

  Gordon eyes were now glancing around at all the busy looking workstations that surrounded them. “So, can you tell us what have you found out so far?”

  “Well, we do know it’s a damn tough little bugger,” she said as she started to draw its complicated chemical structure down onto a piece of paper. “No matter what we’ve hit it with, it doesn’t even come close to slowing it down, never mind stopping it. We’ve tried everything from heavy doses of radiation to even high voltage electric shock, far more than any living body could even handle.”

  She proudly showed them her drawings. “It’s also one hundred percent transferable by even the slightest amount of body fluids, and as you’ve no doubt already seen, it also appears to be one hundred percent fatal. It only takes a few dozen of the virus cells for the infection to take hold of the victim. Even after the host body’s death, the virus somehow settles deep inside the brain and keeps simple, instinctive functions operating. It also controls its deep hunger; it still needs to eat for energy, but far more importantly is the apparent urge to spread itself to others by saliva and blood.” Gordon watched as her eyes widened at the thought of its power. “See it can’t possibly be man-made, it would have to have done by some sort of bloody genius.”

  “So go on then, tell us what does she want us to do,” Gordon was back to looking around at the busy desks, still very unsure how their limited knowledge of research could possibly help. All he knew was that for now, it was better to do just as they were told.

  “You two will be in charge of studying the physical effects on the host body itself,” Chloe said as she carefully folded up her little drawing. “We will deal with the micro biological research if you two can do the big stuff.” She even laughed at her own crappy little joke. “You need to see if there’s anything we, or to be more precise you two, can do to slow down the spread of the virus through the body, somehow find a way to fight it back from even entering the brain stem.” With one last little smile over to them she stood up, ready to leave. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to get back to my work, and the Professor will be waiting for me to give her an update. So let me say goodbye for now, but I’m sure I’ll be seeing the both of you a little bit later.”

  “Shit,” Pauline sighed deeply and closed her eyes tight for a few but long seconds after Chloe had left. “We’ve gone and left one mad house back at the hospital and have now ended up in a bloody another. Christ, this train is full of frigging nut jobs!”

  “Well at least they’re trying to do some good in here,” Gordon was for the once a bit more upbeat than she was. “Not just executing anyone who gets infected. While we’re on this little trip we can at least try and help them out, and listen to me, I bet it will be a damn lot safer for all of us if we do that anyway. Hey, I’d bet that Colonel is just waiting for a reason to chuck us all off.”

  “Okay, we’ll do that but what about all that stuff Ben was going on about?” Pauline said, as she looked right back at him. “You know, how it could have been us that made this virus? Well, if he’s right, it sure looks like we’ve really fucked up the world this time.”

  “And as that old bloke was also saying,” Gordon was now the one struggling hard to keep her spirits up. “Wh
o knows and quite rightly who the fuck cares about all that now. We just need to think about us, about the present, darling. You know, the here and now, and about how the hell we’re going to survive all this shit.”

  He grabbed a good, firm hold of her wrist to ensure he had her attention. “And most importantly Pauline, you have got to think about your little sister back there! We need to do whatever we have to.”

  A look of grim realization grew across Pauline’s face. “You’ve always been the sensible one, haven’t you? I knew there must have been some reason, something that made me love you.” She leaned across the table, pulled him ever so closer and kissed his cheek gently. “Come on then, Gordon, you’re right of course, let’s get back to my sister.”

  ***

  11:05 A.M

  In their own coach

  As they got back and entered their carriage again, they found Margot and Arthur were now sitting directly opposite each other. Both of them were perched over at a window seat as they watched the beautiful open countryside fly by. Pauline and Gordon came over and sat down next to them.

  “Hey sis,” Pauline said. “See, I told you we wouldn’t be too long.” All she got in return was a little, halfhearted grunt. Margot’s eyes never even moved away from peering out of the large window.

  “Hey there Pauline,” Arthur was however, still certainly in the mood for doing some talking. “Well then, what did the two of you find out back there? Come on, spill the beans folks, hopefully you’re going to tell us what in God’s name they’re up to.” He was acting like some over excited school kid out on a mystery day trip.

  Pauline glanced over at Gordon. She saw that he could not help but smile this time.

  7- It was a signal to stop.

  11:15 A.M

  Just outside the town of Maidstone

  Screech!

  Without warning, Pauline was sent flying into Gordon’s lap as the brakes of the train came on hard. Far too hard considering they were hurtling along at full speed. Whatever was happening, they knew they were stopping in a damn hurry.