to hear it from her.
“Well he needs help,” Jackson said, circling Two-h-ee. “Nancy won’t let him work on them in the camp. It’s too much of a risk, so he brings them here instead.”
“That’s not how one got into camp then?”
“Nope. She’s been firm on that from the very beginning.”
Luke scowled and bent down to check Two-h-ee’s handcuffs. He couldn’t help himself. The damn thing was right there, just sort of looking at them. “That’s something, at least.”
“She’s been assigning him guards to go with him and wait here while he works,” Jackson continued, “but it is not a favored job at all. The smell for one thing. He’s run through mostly everyone, and I guess he thought since I’m new and all, that I’d be willing.”
And there it was. Luke tugged on the metal rope length, holding his breath while he did so. Maybe because of the smell, maybe because he knew what she was going to say to his next question. “And are you?”
She shrugged and tugged on the rope bindings. “It sounds like important work, Luke.” She paused and pointed to Two-h-ee. “He’s looking for a cure.”
Luke laughed. It really could not be helped. “Yep, I got that, Jack. It’s kind of fucking obvious. But you know he’s in dreamland right? There is no cure. The zombies are dead. How the hell is he gonna cure that?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said. But he thinks he’s on to something. He wasn’t a regular doctor before this. He was a biochemist or something.
“Yeah well he doesn’t exactly seem like doctor material, does he? He’d have a shit bedside manner.”
“Luke.”
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Luke said, though he wasn’t, not really. “But this is totally fucked up. You’ve got a weird doctor who thinks he’s going to save the world and you’re going along with it? People tried in the beginning. Did you forget that?”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“And they failed,” Luke added. “Hoping for something like this now, it’s…” He shook his head. “It’s wrong. Some things can’t be fixed, certainly not by some guy in a half-baked lab in the middle of nowhere.”
Jackson glared. “You don’t know him.”
“And neither do you,” Luke said. “You only just met the guy. For all we know he could be a complete nut job. Something this important, Jack, I’d need to know a lot more before I can even began to hope for it.”
“There is more,” she said, waving a hand around the room. “He has all sorts of research, from the beginning, when there wasn’t time to make a proper go of it. The zombies bit too many people and then they were either turned or were eaten. There wasn’t anyone left to have a go at finding a cure.”
“Jack,” Luke said, stepping back from Two-h-ee, who had now begun to groan and snap its teeth. “That’s my entire point. There’s no one left anymore to
Jackson looked up at him then, and of all things, grinned. “Well, that’s the point, Luke,” she said. “And brace yourself now. But the thing is…they’re not actually zombies.”
…
She’d never seen Luke look so uncomfortable. Throughout it all, for weeks and weeks, he’d been watchful, protective, easygoing, just about everything but this. He started at her words and ran his gun hand through his hair, the pistol pointing to the ceiling. A groan sounded and Jackson tore her gaze away to chance a quick glance at Two-h-ee. It surprised her to see that it too was looking at the pointing gun—maybe because it knew? Sebastian had said Two-h-ee was one of the “clever” zombies. The ones who had started to think. Could it recognize a gun and understand what that gun could do?
“You lost me,” Luke said slowly, pointing the gun back at Two-h-ee. It groaned and snapped its teeth. “Of course they’re zombies.”
Jackson thought about what Sebastian had told her and tried to work it through in her mind so she could explain it to Luke. Most of it was science stuff, and she knew fuck-all about that. Sebastian had gabbled on but it had got to the point where she had just nodded, feeling more and more stupid as the moments went by, but she kind of got the gist, enough to tell Luke anyway.
“No,” she said eventually weaving around the tangled thoughts, “not in the strictest sense of the word. Zombies are dead people reanimated, right? Like they die and then something wakes them back up.”
“When they were fiction, yeah, that
“And now they’re fact and they’re different. And we always thought, or guessed, that it was a virus. It infected them and when they bit other people it infected them and then they died. Sometimes they woke back up.”
“Yeah, because we saw it,” Luke interrupted. “They actually did die. No heartbeat, no nothing.”
“Well Sebastian says that the zombies might be reanimated but they were never dead.”
Luke shook his head. “Of course they are! Jesus, Jack. I saw people die, one after the other, and once they’re dead, they’re dead. Whether they’re still walking around now is irrelevant.”
“It’s not, though,” she insisted, trying to remember exactly what Sebastian had told her. “It’s a virus. Definitely a virus. It does something to the immune system, sends it into overdrive.”
“And kills them.”
“No. The moment it infects, it slows the heart and decreases brain activity in some areas, increasing it in others. Once the heart stops completely, and it depends on lots of factors for how long that takes, people either die or they come back to life. Only changed.”
“That’s impossible,” Luke breathed. “There’s no way that,” he pointed to Two-h-ee, “is still alive.”
“But he is,” she insisted and just like when Sebastian had told her this, a queer feeling snaked through her body. The fact that the zombie was just a very sick person. A person who was riddled with a virus that had changed him. As she looked at Two-h-ee she began to wonder what his life might have been like before he changed. And that shit just did not fly, because Jackson did
“Hold on a minute…we shoot them and they get back up,” Luke said. “They lose entire limbs and don’t give a fuck.”
“They don’t really feel pain and they have a highly increased rate of healing,” Jackson replied with a shrug. “So if we shoot them in certain places they can survive it…though Seb did say it’s likely those people, if they were ever to become normal again, would be damaged for life or something. But it doesn’t work that way at the moment and they can still try and eat us.”
“Serious?”
“Uh-huh.”
Silence held for a moment as they both looked at Two-h-ee. He quivered and snapped his teeth.
“Assuming I believe this,” Luke said after a moment. “Does the doctor know why they’re changing? Why they’re getting smarter?”
“He thinks it’s because the virus depresses certain parts of the brain. Kind of stops them working. But the brain is quite a clever thing. The synapses—is that the right word?—they can start moving around, regrowing and stuff. Sebastian says that you can trick the brain into doing things in one part that it used to do in another. So the part that the virus makes work better, the part that makes them fast and flexible and hungry, that’s picking up the slack.”
“But it’s not picking up the empathy is it?” Luke asked. “It’s not making them human again.”
Jackson frowned and walked across to Luke. His very blue eyes were full of confusion and maybe a little bit of anger. Her heart gave a thud and she sighed. Luke was so lovely and she was so glad he was here to share all of this with.
“No,” she said, the weight of the words heavy on her shoulders. “It doesn’t seem to be doing that yet. It makes them smart, but the things that made them human—the empathy and the feelings—they’re not back. Sebastian thinks those parts of the brain are not working at all.”
“And will they ever be?” Luke asked.
Like in the garage, when he’d just lost his bunker and he’d seemed so sad, Jackson reached out to touch him. Only this time she actually could, and she did. She pressed her hand against his chest, feeling his heart beat
