Chapter 17
What's in these things?
The old man walked with a shuffle and half of a limp. Logan had noticed, but hadn't taken notice of the fact that a lot of the people here wore overalls of some color. Once he picked up on it, it was easy to tell. White overalls were worn by the crews in the fairground area. The ones on show. Blue ones must have been some kind of clean up.
Logan was puzzled why they were dragging the down and dead zombie corpses back to the fairground area, but there must have been some kind of explanation for it. They were good people. He was sure of it. So rare that he felt so good about something, or noted the good in people rather than the bad, that he just had to trust that gut feeling and go with it.
Black seemed to be the service people. The waiter upstairs in the library was wearing black for example. Maybe there was a color code after all.
'That was so far beyond cool!' Lizzie threw her arms around Logan in some kind of congratulation. He must have looked a right sight. Slugging and brawling it out with some half decomposed zombies. The people who slowly filtered out of the fair were happy enough with his performance.
They kept tapping him on his back and saying how he had done so well. It was getting annoying by the time the man in charge of the electrified fence let them back in, and by the time the old man with a limp had managed to walk up the stairs of the polished marble library staircase.
His hair was completely white. Not even a hint of grey or silver to be seen. He was thin, but not so bad that he looked undernourished. But that was when the alarm bells started going off. His face wore the test of time. Full of wrinkles and notches around his cheeks and bones. His eyes had sunk into his skull a little way but he looked happy enough. Pale as pale gets. There wasn't even a hint of color in his lips.
With a huge smile, he pulled out two chairs, one for Logan, another for Lizzie and then sat down himself. The bar was deserted. Everyone seemed to be outside but the reason wasn't too clear why. Maybe they were celebrating the victory or making sure the family who almost got caught out on what was probably just their usual route home were all okay.
'Morgan.' He introduced himself. His hand was frail but sturdy enough as Logan shook. He kissed Lizzie lightly on both cheeks, which made her blush a wonderful pink and red color. She must have been a little tipsy still, because she just couldn't stop smiling at him. 'But I already know your name.' He smiled a broad but thin smile, which just highlighted the dimples in his cheeks and shadows beneath his eyes even more. 'But, tell me anyway?'
'General James Logan, United States Air Force.' He said it almost habitually without thinking. He almost gave him a serial number too. 'Retired.' He remembered to add. But there was something different about his demeanor all of a sudden. Logan dialed back the friendliness as he felt something was wrong. Not sure just what yet. But something.
'We had a few imposters a while back you know?' Morgan began to laugh as he pointed to a few bottles of lager on the bookcase behind the same barman as before. Except he was really trying hard to listen in to the conversation. That was unsettling too simply because he just wasn't very good at it. He tried to look busy by polishing a glass and rubbing the surface of the oak table. But it was obvious his attention was on their conversation and not his jobs.
'You serious?' That was Lizzie. Logan wasn't even going to bother to entertain it. The lager was his favorite. He almost put it down. But couldn't resist. Italian, dry and the most refreshing drink any hard working man or woman could ask for. So he just drank it down, faster than he should have.
'Yeah!' Morgan laughed and clapped his hands together. 'That video of yours was huge.' He laughed some more and swiveled like a distracted child on his seat. 'You got it out just in time, just before all the networks went dark! Hell, James Logan, you were probably the last piece of entertainment most people ever saw!' Entertainment? Logan scoffed in his mind. Hardly.
Thinking about it though, people really were attached to their electric devices before all of this. It probably was the last video they all saw. Too bad it pushed him into the limelight. He feigned interest and pretended to smile. Lizzie held him in conversation. Unknown as to what Logan had been thinking.
The signs were all there. His mind cast back, first to the man in control of the crocodile clips that connected the generator to the fence. His attempts to hook the clips off had taken so long because his hands had been shaking. The young girl behind the ticket desk , when she took the beer from Lizzie, her hands had shaken as she took her first sip. And then again, as he shook hands with the seemingly frail and harmless old man. A constant shake in the wrist.
The shaking is related to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is best known because of an outbreak in Papua New Guinea in the eighties. Logan knew it all too well. He had been in the middle of it, young as you like, trying to train as a medic at the age of sweet nothing on his first tour with the Air Force. It was a transmissible disease, but after they traced back the root cause, they found that it was all because of the consumption of human meat.
Human meat that was infected with CJD, another name for the mad cow disease. Symptoms included headaches, joint pains and spasmodic shaking of the limbs. The incubation period is usually five years, but can be faster. It was a tell tale sign of cannibalism.
He was as sure as he felt he needed to be. And even though it pained him to do it, he had to make sure Lizzie was safe. This little drink and celebration might even be the start of it. They could burst in at any time and start shooting or hacking away at them. One beer would have to do. Could have been his last drink if he had another swig.
Without even a glimmer of forewarning he stood from his seat, launched the empty bottle into the barman's head, only to watch it shatter as he dropped to the table out cold in a pool of blood. He kicked the seat from underneath the old man but caught him before he hit the floor. He spun around on the spot and slammed him into the table. The Desert Eagles were drawn in no time at all, and pressed against the old man's chest as tight as he dared without breaking any ribs.
Lizzie was stunned but snapped out of it quickly.
'Get the door!' Logan barked at her. Even though she didn't know what was going on, she trusted him completely. If something was out of place, he would sniff it out. She rushed to the door and pulled it closed. It was heavy and made entirely out of solid wood. Once it was shut, she scraped the large table across the floor to press against it. The unconscious barman fell limply onto the floor but didn't wake up. She rushed to him and checked every pocket. He wasn't armed, so she put him into the recovery position and wrapped the rag he had been using to clean glasses around the wound on his head to slow the bleeding down.
'Do you want to tell me what your problem is?' Lizzie yelled at him with an accusing finger pointed at his face. He didn't even blink. He shook his head and dragged the man to the window so he could see what was going on. The fair was winding down, and there were only a few people wandering around.
He could see the chefs behind the trailers that served hot dogs of human meat stand back from their night's work, dusting at their blood caked aprons and trying to get the dirt from their shoes. A child walked on, over the street where there were no more defeated zombies, eating a bun stuffed with cooked black flesh. It almost made him sick.
'Did you eat anything?' He shouted at her, a thin layer of spit running down from his angry, gritted teeth. The rumbling in her stomach was so powerful that she wished she had. But her answer was truthful and showed her obvious concern.
'No.' She was much calmer now. 'Why?' She asked so innocently, but inside the rising intonation in her question lay the fear that she might already know the answer.
'We're not doing anything wrong damn it!' Morgan tried to protest but Logan silenced him with a sharp prod from the handgun. He didn't even know how much ammo he had left by this point. There was no way they could shoot their way out. They needed a hostage. Logan reached around the old man's neck and pulled him close, alm
ost lifting him off his feet. Logan was still as strong as an Ox, dispute age having slowed him down one or two shades.
'How can you say that?' He demanded of the old man, but started pulling him to the door. Lizzie had sobered immediately and had been breathing hard. She pulled the table aside as Logan half threw him from the room where the bar had been. He dragged him down the stairs, batting his heels on the hard marble unsympathetically as he did. There was no one around, but the whole ordeal simply wasn't going to be that easy to get out of.
'Hey... what are you doing?' Logan spun around on the spot while Lizzie drew her 9mm, still empty, pistol. It would have to do. Quite a strange sight it was for Logan, to be facing the man charged with acting as him in a play.
Two Logan's might not be better than one. The much younger doppelganger drew a weapon. It looked real enough, but the flaked paint gave the grey plastic away.
'Nice try kid!' Logan turned the gun from Morgan's chest to the terrified young man. 'You brought a water pistol to a gun fight!
'Listen... we don't want any trouble.' He put the plastic gun on the floor and put his hands behind his head before standing up. 'We didn't do anything wrong man...' He quivered, sounding even pretty genuine. He stated fidgeting and grasping for straws. 'We can... stop putting the play on if you're that pissed about it?' He even began to cry.
'You really don't know, do you?' Lizzie was always more human than Logan. She wasn't as battered by the years of experience as he had been. She still had empathy, something fast disappearing from the world, and from Logan's psyche.
'Are your hands shaking?' Logan demanded, rushing through every word. 'Hold them out! Do it now!' So he did, and they were. Badly.
'Do you know what causes that?' He said much more slowly. He was slowly walking towards the startled doppelganger, into the room he hadn't stepped so far into since he had shot the very first zombie. 'Well! Do you?' He barked again. A few men must have heard the ruckus.
He hadn't seen them yet. They were shrouded in dark red overalls and wore protective face masks. Lizzie's heart started beating but Logan was very fast to act. He threw the old man into the crowd of five new men, and made a lunge at his double. He threw him to the side, rushed his arm around his neck, and held him hostage instead. Lizzie ran to his side, still her useless gun pointed. The threat would have to be enough. They had all seen her shoot. They knew what she could do!
'Yes.' He finally answered. 'But it's not like we have any choice!' He tried to protest and cried even harder. Logan was damn near to breaking his neck, only letting go in increments to allow him to speak. 'It all started, everyone shakes, when we ate the first one.' He was confused and scared.
'We made it this far, and we've never touched a drop of human blood never mind cooked their flesh!' Lizzie sparked up and might have fired a warning shot into the ceiling if she had even a single bullet left.
'Wait.' Morgan's voice dropped a few decibels in shock and surprise. 'We don't eat human flesh.' He pleaded to deaf ears. 'I'd never dream of it.' He wasn't lying. Even Logan, through his cloud of rage, could tell that just from the sincerity in his voice. 'We don't eat human meat, we eat zombie meat.'
Logan relaxed his grip on the man charged with playing him as a character. Not intentionally though, more through shock than anything else. He managed to wrangle himself free, crying and upset, he stumbled to the line of men who had joined them in the library.
To be fair to them, they were all extremely calm. No weapons were on sight, except Logan's Desert Eagles of course. They were all smiling sweetly, which added ten fold to the surrealism of the scene. The men in red were covered, caked even, in thick black and dried blood. The blood of the dead.
Lizzie's mind turned to the children who she had seen eating scraps of meat in the fairground. Why didn't she see it before? Where could they have gotten so much of it from? Part of her mind had just wanted to ignore it, and just think that this place was pure when deep down it really wasn't. Her chest began to heave as she thought more and more of it. Her mouth began to water uncontrollably and no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn't keep it back.
Thick vomit heaved from her chest and spilled out all over the floor. It made her chest shake and tremor so violently that it hurt.
Logan glanced a sympathetic look her way. 'Let's hear them out.' He didn't want to. Part of him didn't anyway. He holstered his guns carefully but made sure not to fasten his jacket. He wanted to be able to get to them at the drop of a pin if he needed to. But that sixth sense of his, the one that sniffed out danger, was gone.
He felt calm. It did make sense. Those people dragging the bodies back to fairground, the atmosphere of the place and the shaking hands. It did fit. If they were eating a diet pretty much exclusively of zombie meat, then the effects might be the same if not exaggerated.
'Please... General?' Morgan had stepped a few inches closer and held his hand out in a welcoming gesture. It was at Logan's shoulder height, ready to wrap kindly around his back and lead him away. Logan just stared at him, blank in the eye, until the arm dropped away. Only then did he follow.
'I don't think this is a good idea...' Lizzie battled through her shivering chest and whispered in Logan's ear. He didn't reply in words. Just a long and unsettled sigh. The group of men dispersed as Morgan led them to a locked and bolted door. He hammered on it and the bolts slid away. The library must have had a basement level, or some kind of vault. The door swung slowly open to reveal a guard on the other side. He was a big guy, mixed race and as muscular as men came. The path led to a long and dark staircase.
Morgan had walked on, probably assuming Logan was following him. He wasn't, and Lizzie had hung back as well. Logan had that look.
He was a complex man deep down. He might have tried to project an air of simplicity with glimmers of an amateur philosopher, but it was skin deep. He was breathing slowly, looked calm on the outside, but the slightest changes in his face and his smile, made it clear that at the same time he was struggling with something deep inside. The monster that he might have been in another life wanted out.
The guard looked none the wiser. In fact he smiled and held out a hand to shake Logan's. It was odd how much he was respected around here. Not that he enjoyed his Z-list celebrity status. If anything he hated it. Logan smiled back, but it was a forced and sad smile at best. He grabbed the man's hand and slammed his head off the hard metal door. That dazed him, but wasn't close to being enough to knock him out cold. He swung his arm around, holding him at a pressure point and planted his knee right into the man's nose. Blood started pouring from his nostrils but still he wasn't falling.
He had to act fast before the shock wore off and he cried for help or started to fight back. A few square punches to the face saw him off. He fell to the floor in a slump. Logan used his limp body against the door to prop it open.
It looked to be a very hostile move. It probably was. But Logan needed to keep his options open, and that meant keeping his exist clear. Lizzie didn't say anything but totally understood and gently nodded in his direction. They rushed down the stairs to a totally unaware Morgan, who hadn't heard anything or even noticed they were gone. He was in full conversation, assuming they had been listening the whole time when they caught up with him in a few lunged steps.
'We had to eat it you see.' He was out of breath and not confident in his steps which made him slow. 'What would you have us do? We needed to feed our people and there was a good supply of meat. The side effects I guess we just had to live with.' They reached an open space, a vault as Logan had guessed, where there were a number of dim lights swinging in the breeze that the place seemed to generate.
The weak lights hung from the ceiling on chains, and cast long shadows across the darkened room. The floor was simply the old stonework from the original building, while the interior walls were hollowed out, still exposing their original brickwork of cobbles and pieces of different sizes, to form semi circles that led to different caverns of the vault
.
In those individual caves was a single man in each, dressed in red overalls, and a bench on which a zombie was laid. All shapes and manner of saws adorned the walls. The teeth upon them were thick and grisly, none of them totally clean, with tiny embers of flesh hanging in parts from those that weren't currently in use. The zombie right ahead of the doorway was the one Logan had ripped apart earlier on. The one where the jaw had to be totally removed so he could save his hand.
A red guard was sawing diligently into its leg while blood dripped out of open wounds. A drain cover in the center of the vault was caked with the blood from the slaughterhouse. It was coagulated and thick, clotted and hard to flush away. The smell was appalling. The scent of rotting human flesh and clotted blood. That sickly sweet smell with a hint of metallic iron, mixed in ways that were both confusing and disgusting to their nostrils, with the smell of mould and rot.
It was warm too. Very warm. To the right, a wood fired oven burned constantly. Steaks of meat and "zombie on the bone" were added to it near constantly. One man in red saw to the flames while another two rolled at large levers to pull a conveyor belt slowly through the oven. It was, if anything positive could be seen in it, at least an efficient system. Lizzie felt her head become light and dizziness settle in. But she held it together.
'How do you know that cooking it removes the infection?' Logan had to ask the obvious question. No one really did know what the infection was. He had studied it himself for hours and hours every day for weeks on end while secluded in the Alaskan lab that he used to run as part of the WDC. And he could come up with sweet nothing.
'You have to see General, that we did this out of desperation. We just tried it one day... it was that or face death for certain. We couldn't feed our kids, our sons and my sweet daughter.' Morgan became emotional and started to cry. He knew the horror they were committing. He knew the callousness of it. He struggled with the morality of it every day. 'We tried it first... the oldest of us.' His chin began to quiver and his tears glistened in the dim but functional light. 'Made sense for us to... but we didn't get sick, and the younger ones were crying every day for food... so we told them...' He could hardly speak. His tears overcame him and he was starting to break down. 'We told them...' He tried again.
'They don't know they're eating Zombie meat do they?' Logan was as cold as ever. His speech slowed down ,and took on a somewhat judgmental tone. He understood. He really did. But there was always another way. Though it was easy for him to say. The training he had, the experience to his name. The years he had spent in the military, so far away from the basic amenities everyone takes for granted. These people had a problem. And in some way, they solved it.
'The virus has to still exist in the blood stream... no matter how thoroughly it cooks.' Zamboanga in the Philippines. The case rushed back to him. He had come across it while trying to find a cure to the virus in the lab so many months ago. Seven people there had been diagnosed with Rabies after eating cooked dog meat. The virus, even though it was so easy to forget, had originally been based on Rabies fused somehow with a an aggressive strain of the Spanish Flu. There was no way to know that cooking the zombie meat, even to the point it was charcoaled, that it would kill the rabies element in the virus. How could he tell them? How could he tell them that everything they had done was for nothing?
He didn't want to. He really didn't. 'You need to stop eating it. 'He said slowly and calmly, hands on hips with his fingers tucked into the straps of his belt. 'You're all going to die.' The urge to be honest with them was stronger than the desire to just keep pretending. To just let them live out this fantasy world of theirs. A scream erupted from beside the fire blasted cooker. His eyes darted right to it.
The man in charge of the flames and fuelling the oven was being slowly pushed into the fiery pit himself. The two who had been pushing and pulling at the levers of the conveyor belt were ripping into his chest and flesh. The blood poured out and washed the old clotted blood down the drain just in front of them. The creatures became so strong upon turning. So ravenously hungry that they had the power to separate ribs and tear through layers of flesh. It was starting.
'Not again!' Morgan cried. So he knew after all. His panicked scream attracted the attention of one of the two so far to have turned. The other men were too busy, and the noise of cutting through dead flesh and bone was too overpowering, so they hadn't even noticed anything was wrong.
Logan rushed the zombie, grabbing it with all of the power he could muster by the rags of his overalls, and ran him into one of the caverns that lined the central room. There was an electric saw bolted to the bench. The butcher in that side cavern jumped for his life as Logan slammed the beast into the desk, knocking it clean off its feet. He held it down and slid all of the tools out of the way while it thrashed and flailed in a desperate and hungry spasm.
'Turn it on!' He screamed and forced the head of the monster under the sharp blade. 'Now!' The shaking butcher hit a button and the head immediately exploded. Blood and shards of bone sprayed the two of them. Logan had the sense and presence of mind to turn away. The warm liquid soaked his back and jacket immediately. It became matted into his hair while sharp edges of bone splintered across his face and the skin exposed at the back of his neck. As he looked the startled and terrified young man in the eye for the first time, the blood curdling and shivering thought occurred to him. He couldn't save any of them.