I needed to get that message to her on Survivor Radio but it seemed an impossible distance away now that there were nasties, soldiers and hybrids between us and the radio station.
“How does this affect our mission?” Jax asked nobody in particular.
“It doesn’t,” Tanya replied immediately. “We need to get the message out to the survivors even more urgently now. They’re in even more danger than they were before.” She looked at me and asked, “Based on what you know of this vaccine, do you think we should we inject ourselves with it?”
The three of them looked at me expectantly and I realized that I did have a role in this group after all. They were strong and fit and intelligent but they saw me as being smarter than them. While they had spent time in exotic places filming adventurers like Vigo Johnson, my life had consisted of playing video games and reading books, many of which pertained to exactly the situation we now found ourselves in.
Games and books were one thing and real life was another but my knowledge of a zombie apocalypse… even based on fictional works… was better than nothing. It allowed me to make guesses about our situation that were informed opinions… even though the information came from the thoughts and ideas of writers and game designers. I wondered how many of those writers and game designers were now dead and how many had lasted long enough to see their nightmares come to life.
I thought a moment about Tanya’s question. “There might be an advantage in vaccinating ourselves,” I said. “If we get bitten without the vaccine in our blood, we’ll die quite quickly and the virus will reanimate us as zombies. If we get bitten after we’ve been vaccinated, it takes around four days to turn. If nothing else, that will give the rest of us time to decide what to do with the infected person.”
“That’s easy,” Tanya said. “We kill them.”
“It might not be that easy. When vaccinated people get bitten, they try to isolate themselves. Wilder’s notes said Corporal Francis kept trying to wander away, saying he wanted to be left alone. The virus probably makes the host do that so the host isn’t vulnerable during the incubation period. So it isn’t easy to kill them. They might just disappear, go into hiding somewhere, then reappear four days later as a hybrid.” I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead, trying to reconstruct Corporal Francis’s transformation into a hybrid in my mind’s eye.
“I think that when a nasty bites a vaccinated person,” I said, “it stops after the initial bite. It doesn’t tear them apart like it would normally. The soldier we saw had a single bite on his neck. Maybe the nasty gets a taste of the vaccinated blood and stops. That means the host has a good chance of surviving. He goes somewhere remote and becomes a hybrid, infected with a mutated form of the virus. Either the original virus reacts with the vaccine or it mutates itself to turn the victim into a zombie despite the vaccine, the same way certain strains of bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.”
“Dude, you’re geeking out on us now,” Sam said. “I think we should vaccinate ourselves. At least that gives us four days after being bitten. And we get to stay alive. That beats death and reanimation in my book.”
Tanya looked at him with hard eyes. “You’re assuming we’d let you live for four days after you got infected.”
He shrugged. “Like Alex says, I’d get the hell out of Dodge and the next time you saw me I’d be a kick-ass hybrid.”
She rolled her eyes. “You sound like you want to be a zombie.”
“Nah,” he said, “the hours suck. But I’d rather be a living hybrid than one of those mindless dead fuckers.”
Tanya considered that and nodded. “I think we should all be vaccinated.”
“It’s safer,” I agreed. “If nothing else, it means we won’t get ripped apart by zombies. They’ll deliver one bite then leave us alone when they taste the vaccinated blood.”
Jax spoke up. “If that’s the reason the soldier only had one bite. For all we know, he could have killed the zombie that bit him before it could sink its teeth into him again. It might not have anything to do with the vaccine.”
I nodded. “That’s true. We don’t know.”
“If you get bitten, you’re screwed either way,” Tanya said. “The best course of action is not to let them bite you.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Sam said, raising his mug of water. He took a gulp then looked around the table. “I had medical training before I did the survival shows with Vigo. So I can give the injections. Who’s first?”
Ten minutes later, we had all been injected with the amber liquid. It hurt like a wasp sting as it went in and the area on my shoulder where the needle had gone in rose into an angry red welt.
Sam vaccinated himself last, then disposed of the used needles and empty vaccine vials in the kitchen trash can. “Man, that stings,” he said. “I wonder what’s in that shit.”
Jax, rubbing her shoulder, said, “You’d have to ask the scientists on Apocalypse Island. They made that stuff just like they made the original virus.”
Unwilling to listen to another political rant, I went out onto the sun deck and looked up at the stars. The rain had stopped for a moment and the night breeze was cool. I could hear an animated discussion inside as my three friends talked about their favourite subjects: the government, Apocalypse Island, and conspiracy theories.
What did it matter where the virus came from? It was too late for that knowledge to do us any good. When you were burning in the flames of hell, knowing who lit the match wasn’t going to ease your pain.
When the rain started again, this time as an insidious drizzle, I climbed up to the bridge and sat in the pilot’s chair. Thousands of raindrops streamed down the windows like tears, blurring my view of the coast and the sea.
It was only later, when I went back down the ladder to the deck after letting my thoughts about the apocalypse, hybrid zombies, Joe, and Lucy run in depressing circles, that I saw a soldier on the beach. He was alone, half-running, half-stumbling over the wet sand. He looked drunk as he weaved across the beach to the base of the rocky cliffs.
I went back up the ladder to get the binoculars from the bridge and brought them back down to the deck. Adjusting the focus, I watched the soldier as he dropped to his knees then curled up into a fetal position, shivering as if he had hypothermia.
He wasn’t shivering from the cold. He wore the usual army outfit, including a waterproof camouflage jacket, and the night was cool and wet but not cold enough to make anyone shiver. He was obviously infected. He had left his squad somewhere up on those cliffs and come down to the deserted beach to turn.
As he lay there shivering, I understood why vaccinated victims of the virus sought out a remote place to turn. They were weak and vulnerable while the virus and the vaccine fought a biochemical war inside their bodies. There was a risk that they could be easily killed so the virus compelled the host to find a safe place to turn.
If the host was sick like this for four days, maybe there was a good chance they would be killed before they turned. If the military knew about the four days downtime, they might be hunting down and killing the hosts before they had a chance to complete the transformation into hybrids.
Even if they weren’t being killed by the army, it was possible that not every infected host completed the transformation. Maybe in some cases, the vaccine won the biochemical battle and the host did not turn.
Maybe they lived through the four days and beat the infection.