Existing Dead

adjusted the tuning knob until the voice became clearer then turned up the volume to listen.

The acoustics of the room made it sound like the people were broadcasting from a small conference room. There was a lot of noise and people interrupting others, talking over each other.

“If you all could please shut up and listen to me!” an authoritative male voice yelled over the crowd. The noise subsided as the voice continued, “Like I have been trying to say, my name is Doctor Theodore Greenly, and I was a former member of the CDC.” When he said that, the room went into an uproar. People began asking questions.

“Was this something that was created by the United States?” someone said.

“You’re from the CDC, so you’re saying it’s some sort of virus?” said another.

Doctor Greenly quickly calmed the room again. “Please, please,” he said, “let me finish. I will answer as many questions as I can. Let me get this information out first.” Doctor Greenly sounded out of breath and congested, as if he were either fighting off a cold, or he was an overweight man.

Kyle began to hear more static as he drove passed the town’s zoning lines. He didn’t want to miss what Doctor Greenly had to say. He looked around the terrain; there was no one and nothing in sight. He was out of the suburban area and began entering the small patches of desert that have not been turned into suburban neighborhoods. He decided to pull off to the side and listen. He left the truck running in case he had to leave in a hurry.

“There is no evidence to support that this is a virus,” Doctor Greenly continued, “but, in all honesty, we don’t know what this is. If it is a virus, I have never seen anything like this in my forty-year career with the CDC. What this is has to be something different, maybe something out of this world.”

“Do you mean like extra-terrestrial? A virus from another world perhaps?” someone called out.

“That was one of the possibilities we had in mind. We have been in contact with what’s left of NASA to see if there have been any larger than normal meteorite collisions or returning satellites within the past week. Scientists have reported that there have been no major collisions. On a hunch, we decided to see if anyone at SETI, The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, was still alive to tell us if they have made any form of contact. As of now we have no confirmation.”

“So if it’s not alien, what do you personally think it is?” the same voice asked.

“Our best guess is some bizarre paranormal phenomenon that we have never experienced before. This explanation was a little much for our team to swallow. But we still have zero evidence of any of this. It might very well be something viral. The only thing we know for sure is that anyone who has been bitten by one of them will die and come back to life craving human flesh.”

“But why? Why human flesh?” another voice cried out.

“We do not know why they feel the need to consume human tissue. We do know that they get absolutely no nourishment from it. They will continue eating flesh even after their stomachs rupture and their entrails hang out of their bodies. A cadaver that we experimented on managed to eat three entire recently expired bodies. On its fourth, the subject’s body was so bloated it could hardly walk. When the stomach ruptured it kept eating. Before anyone asks, the recently deceased bodies the cadaver was consumed were donated in the name of science.”

“After being bitten, did the bodies wake up at any point?”

“That is a great question. No, the bodies that were bitten after expiring did not come back to life. We believe that the cause needs the bloodstream of a living person to transmit.”

“So what about pain?” the first voice asked.

“That one is simple, they do not feel any. We had one of our officers discharge an entire M4 thirty round magazine into the patient’s mid and lower section. The shots did immobilize the subject, but it continued advancing toward the man using any means possible. It wasn’t until the officer gave it a quick shot through the temple that it stopped completely. On this first experiment, we let the body lie for twenty-four hours. It did not rise again. So yes, they do not feel pain, but they can be stopped.”

“That’s how you kill them? With a shot through the head?”

“No, no, no,” Doctor Greenly said in a fast triplet speech. “I said that they could be stopped. The body we neutralized was just a host for something, it still showed signs of microscopic life after the brain was destroyed. The host was no longer active, but the cause was more or less still alive. Think of it as someone in a coma. They are no longer active, but still alive. Destroying the brain only stops them, we don’t know if the cause could truly be killed. This entire situation is just baffling. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

“Do you have any evidence that these things can’t be one-hundred percent killed?”

“As a matter of fact we do. First we have to take a look at what I mean by dead. When a living person dies, so does every cell in their body. They begin to rot away until they are nothing more than a memory to the living. In one of these living dead corpses, after the brain is destroyed the cause that brought it back to life lives on. For example, after we neutralized the subject with a shot through the head, we …” The doctor paused for a moment then sighed into the microphone. “Before I mention this, the world needs to understand that our experiments are vital to the human race. That being said … forty-eight hours after we neutralized the original cadaver, we injected 5mL of the corpse’s blood into a living human subject.”

The room grew louder after that was said. People began to protest and obscenities blared through Kyle’s speakers. He was completely enthralled in the broadcast that he found himself yelling, “Shut up,” to the people who wouldn’t let Doctor Greenly speak.

Finally the crowd calmed and Kyle could hear Doctor Greenly’s voice again. “Like I was saying, we injected 5mL, which is about half of a standard syringe, of blood directly into the living subject’s bloodstream. After we injected the blood, the patient lapsed into a coma. A few hours later, he expired. A few moments after that, his eyes re-opened.

“The most interesting things happened with the second and third test subjects. We injected 5mL of the original cadaver’s saliva into one of their bloodstreams and the man expired within the hour. Seconds later, his eyes re-opened. Blood and saliva both carry the cause, but it’s the saliva that’s most toxic. As for the third test subject, we carefully extracted the brain from the second test subject. His body fell limp, just like the original cadaver that we shot through the head. We extracted the brain from the third living subject and attached it to the body of the second subject. For those of you who thought brain transplants were impossible, guess again. We were startled to see that once the human brain was attached to the brain stem of the living corpse, its eyes shot open and began to thrash. The cause lives inside of the human body, but the human body cannot move without the brain.”

“Are there any other ways to incapacitate an infected individual?”

“I don’t like the term infected. There is no evidence that we could see to support that this phenomena is caused by an infection. Yes, it may act like an infection, but we cannot see anything erroneous when we test the blood or saliva. A better term would be, Existing Dead. Let’s just call the victims that from now on until we could definitely identify them.

“But to answer your question, there aren’t many ways to stop one of the Existing Dead. We know that destroying the brain will stop them. We have also experimented with fire and other element-based attacks. Fire did work, but it became hard to keep the subject stationary while it was engulfed in flames. We nearly burned down our lab with this experiment. The average person will collapse within thirty seconds of combustion. It took the subject thirty minutes to an hour before it succumbed to the blaze. This is where the pain factor kicked in. It also brought up more evidence that it cannot be killed. When the Existing Dead was nothing more than a pile of ash, we mixed the dust with water and injected it into another living test subject. Two days past and we had another Existing Dead on our hands. We also tried the effects of freezing temperatures. It took the subject ten minutes to freeze solid in subzero temperatures, and half an hour to thaw to the point of being mobile again.”

“Where did all of these test subjects come from? The people have a right to know.”

“All of our living test subjects were donated by the Nevada State Penitentiary. The subjects were Death Row inmates, all of whom would have been executed within a few years. They were brought to our lab by a military escort.”

“Where is the military through all this? Has the entire country been overrun?”

“The military is currently in the north-eastern seaboard trying to repel the Existing Dead toward California.