Most of the far wall was dominated by a rectangular window through which I could see a large, padded cell. A little girl in a straitjacket huddled in the corner with her knees drawn up and her head down. I drew in a sharp breath, and even to my own ears it sounded like a hiss.
“Runaway,” Granato said, glancing at me. “Multiple stab wounds. Homicide. We picked her up before LAPD found her.”
“I guess it doesn’t bother you they won’t find her killer,” I said, my voice tight.
Granato shrugged. “Not my job, Riley. What is my job is figuring out why she can’t rest, and making sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
“How’s that going?” I asked. The words had a little more bite to them than I’d intended.
“Cindy,” Lowell said, speaking to the woman in the lab coat, “this is Ms. Riley. Tell her what we’ve got.”
“This is Subject Number Eighteen,” Cindy said. “She’s a Stage One-”
“What’s her fucking name?” I said.
Cindy’s mouth opened and froze. She looked at Lowell and Granato. “We, uh, find it easier not to think of them as people.”
“Easier for you, right? I guess it’s not easier for them.”
Cindy swallowed hard. “Gretchen,” she said. “Her name is Gretchen. She’s eleven or twelve years old.”
I nodded. “Go on.”
“She’s a Stage One. She died between one-thirty and three this morning.”
“What are you doing with her?”
“We’re observing the transition. Ideally, we’d monitor and record vital signs, but…”
“…Gretchen doesn’t have any vital signs,” I said.
“That’s right. Physiologically, she’s dead. No pulse. No brain activity. So there’s not much we can do except observe and record changes in her appearance, behavior. When she reaches Stage Two, we’ll do some tests, measure her response to various stimuli.”
“Sounds fascinating,” I said. I didn’t want to know what kinds of “stimuli” she had in mind. “Have you actually learned anything?”
“Her animation is completely nonphysical,” Cindy said.
“Um, it’s paranormal. I mean, there are absolutely no physical processes animating her body-no chemical activity, no electrical activity.”
“She’s running on juice.”
“We believe so, but it appears to be a finite source.”
“She’s burning it, Ms. Riley,” Lowell said.
“Right,” said Cindy. “They burn it very quickly. We believe this condition is responsible for the cannibalistic compulsions. As they burn up their own, uh, juice, they must feed to survive. It’s not a biological process but there are obvious parallels.”
“What happens when they don’t feed?” I asked.
“We could show you,” Granato said. “We can show you Stage Three, Four and Five. You probably won’t enjoy it.”
“Their condition begins to deteriorate,” Cindy said, “physically and mentally. Their bodies begin to decompose and they begin to present symptoms of acute psychosis. This acts as a kind of survival mechanism because the psychosis enhances their ability to find food.”
“Problem is,” said Granato, “the hunting and feeding drives most of them bat-shit crazy, too. Either way, they wind up insane.”
“Most, but not all,” said Cindy. “The transition’s time-line is different for each subject. Some animate immediately, while for others it takes hours. The original personality is intact at the time of death. Some are more successful than others at coping with their undead state.”
“And the cause of all this is that their souls can’t leave their bodies?”
“Their souls are not leaving their bodies,” Lowell said, “and that’s causing the undead state. We don’t know why it’s happening. We don’t know if the souls can’t leave or won’t leave.”
“Maybe hell is full,” Granato said, snickering.
“Fuck you, Granato.” I felt like saying more but he pissed me off so much I couldn’t think of anything.
“We do know a little more,” Lowell said, “based largely on your reports and our own efforts to control the out break.”
I nodded. “We can free the souls from the bodies. But they still can’t move on-the ghost remains trapped with the remains.”
“That’s the part we haven’t figured out yet,” said Lowell. “We haven’t identified the cause. We’re not even sure how to go about looking for it.”
“Not for lack of trying,” said Granato.
I glanced at him and narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”
Lowell drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We felt the only way to identify the cause was to observe subjects at the moment of death…”
“You didn’t.”
“We have, yes. Hospice patients. Their estates receive sizable settlements and they’re all volunteers. By the time we make contact, many of them have already pursued illegal end-of-life options.”
“Do you at least warn them they’ll turn into fucking zombies?”
“Not exactly,” Lowell said. “But we’re hopeful we can resolve this crisis and give them the rest they deserve.”
“They were going Zed, anyway,” Granato said. “At least this way we might learn something from it.”
“And did you?”
“Not yet,” said Lowell. “The fact is, it’s hard to observe a negative. At the moment of death, we observe all the physical changes we’d expect-cessation of life functions, basically. But neither Granato nor I can identify anything supernatural happening. Clearly, something is supposed to happen and it’s not.”
“So how is your little shop of horrors supposed to help me solve the zombie problem, Lowell?” I couldn’t see I’d learned much, and what I had learned didn’t seem all that useful.
“We’re sharing the information we have, Ms. Riley,” Lowell said.
“We’ve also modeled the contagion mathematically,” Cindy said. “We looked at multiple scenarios- unconstrained outbreak, quarantine, eradication. The scenarios are complicated by the fact that we don’t know why the phenomenon is localized-limited to the Greater Los Angeles area-or whether it will remain so. However, none of the scenarios produced markedly different results.” She tapped the screen on the tablet and brought up a graph. A green line showed human population and a red line represented zombies. The green line sloped downward, sharply, from left to right; the red line sloped upward, just as sharply. “As you can see,” Cindy said, flipping through multiple screens, “all scenarios end the same way.”
“Zero human population,” I said.
Cindy nodded and tapped the screen again, displaying rows of mathematical equations that meant absolutely nothing to me. “Since all the eigenvalues are nonpositive, the apocalyptic equilibrium is asymptotically stable. At least within the affected environment.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“We’re fucked,” Cindy said, and shrugged. “The biggest problem will be population clusters.”
“It will spread fastest in the most densely populated parts of the city,” I said.
“That’s right,” Cindy said. “The models depend on assumptions, and one of those assumptions is the reproductive efficiency of the zombies.”
“How quickly they turn humans into zombies.”
Cindy nodded. “This isn’t a normal outbreak scenario. A human cannot be infected. Only fatalities will produce more zombies, so we have to estimate the number of fatalities each zombie will cause each day. The bad news is that any fatality produces a zombie, even humans not directly killed by them. It includes death by natural causes and those indirectly caused by the zombies. The bottom line is that reproductive efficiency could be quite high. It will begin in the population centers, as you said, but even in the suburbs there are population clusters.”
“Like what?”
“Stay away from the shopping mall and multiplex,” Granato said.
