Page 33 of The Black Rider
Going through these emails would take forever. My father requested daily progress updates like Doctor X could fix the whole immunity problem overnight. Isaiah had him working on two issues. He had to produce a new mutation, but he also had to find a way to get it to the rest of the world that was still alive in a way that people would line up to get it, and no one would be left out this time.
I was pretty sure even with zombie cannibals running around, there were still anti-vaxxers around who would refuse the vaccine. Aeron had already spread the word about water. Doctor X had all these grand plans of bombs and bioweapons. Maybe I was fucked up, but I saw a straightforward solution that wasn’t bombing an already bombed-out world.
People needed food. They had picked most of the shelves clean, and you had to live in an area the bombs didn’t hit to be able to grow your own food. Stick it in a protein bar or make more MREs. No one would turn that down. Everyone needed to eat.
I was awful at math, and I wouldn’t have known the first thing about what went on in any of these labs playing around with my blood, but I wasn’t stupid, even if I had to repeat algebra in college. I never used it again, and sometimes, the simplest solution was the one that worked. Then again, I wasn’t plotting mass genocide.
“I need your help, Ariel,” Leif said.
“Another blood sample?”
“Yes, but not from you. I have a little zombie patient in the back and getting blood from him is an enormous pain in the ass.”
“Youdo nothave a pet zombie in here. Why can’t I hear it? They always make that awful, wailing noise.”
“Well,Idon’t know what happens when one of those things bites an angel, nor a Nephilim. Even if it doesn’t infect us, I only like love bites, not zombie bites. I cut Jose’s jaw off so he can’t bite.”
“You named your pet zombie? You didn’t get him some lab nerd name like Patient 3445?”
“His real name was Jose Gomez. Aeron and a team went out to find me a Rage Head and found him locked in his car on the freeway. That was the name on his driver’s license. Giving test subjects random names is supposed to make you impartial. Still, it also dehumanizes people and gives unethical scientists the ability to abuse them without calling them by their first name.
“All the Rage Heads were people once. Jose probably had a job and friends he cared about. He had a totally normal life until this happened to him. Rage Heads are already dead, so the only thing we can do with them is killing the brain, so they die for good. I have Jose here for the greater good. He might be a walking corpse now, but at least this didn’t happen to him for nothing. Studying him will be how we end this.
“He might be reduced to just the urge to eat people now, and I might have taken some precautions to make him less dangerous, but I won’t strip him of his name. All of my notes on you have your name on them, too, instead of some lab nickname. They gave you a patient number when you were a child, and I’m sure you’ve seen even your father calls you that in emails. I’m not taking your name from you either.”
“That’s sweet, Leif. Do you expect me to hold Jose down while you take his blood?”
“Oh, god no. His fingernails are out of control, and I don’t want him scratching you. I’ve got a pole I use to take blood. I just need you to keep him distracted so I can stick him.”
“Did you just ask me to play zombie bait? What kind of online boyfriend are you?”
“The kind that knows if I asked anyone who didn’t name a blue baseball bat Smurfette to do this, they’d run screaming from the room.”
I shrugged. I mean, he wasn’t wrong. If it meant beating my father, I was totally dumb enough to play zombie bait. And I was pretty sure Aeron had done this before because he probably thought distracting zombies was fun and games. I didn’t even have to ask. Aeron was perhaps the one that cut off poor Jose’s jaw so he wouldn’t bite.
“Let’s go get zombie blood.”
“I’ll grab my pokey stick.”
“You need a better name for it than pokey stick.”
“Weapons get names. Medical tools do not.”
Leif went and got his pokey stick, and it certainly looked like a weapon to me. You could take someone’s eye out with that thing. We went all the way back to the lab, and I realized why I never heard Jose before. There was a massive metal door in front of his cell. We had to open the door to get to his glass cage.
The scene in the cage was pretty fucking gross. Zombie Jose had tried to break out by flinging himself against the walls, and he was pretty ripe. There were little bits of Jose dried on the glass, and some of it was fresh. It probably stunk worse than I did after we took down all those Rage Heads at the border because this was such an enclosed space.
“Please tell me you can do this quickly.”
“I ask people to bring back air freshener if they find it, and some people make scented candles with things that grow here, but this won’t take long. Zombies aren’t intelligent, and I’ve gotten taking his blood down to an art. It’s much quicker when I have someone to distract him. Can you go open that little door and let him smell you?”
“I suppose it’s only polite. I can’t get away from his stench right now. I should introduce him to my smell.”
I opened the glass door. Were you supposed to introduce yourself to a Rage Head like you did a new dog? Hold out your fist and make slow movements? I held out my fist like a total idiot. Jose definitely wasn’t some cute Pitbull with a wagging tail and that smile only Pitbulls had. He charged at the glass so hard, he just kind of splatted against it and left some of his face behind. Was that a tooth sliding down the wall? What I wouldn’t give for a wriggle butt Pitbull right now.
Jose’s arm shot out the glass, and he kept trying to grab me. He was so rotten I could see bones in his arm. I was trying to distract myself with cute puppies instead of the long, yellow fingernails that were trying to rip into my flesh. If I weren’t thinking about something cuddly, I would have noped right out of that room.
Zombie Jose was gross and stinky. I didn’t want those fingernails anywhere near me. But he was also pretty stupid. He was so intent on getting at me, and he didn’t even react when Leif jabbed him with his pokey stick. He was right. Leif did have stealing blood from his zombie pet down to an art. He was standing by my side pretty quickly.
