It was not the first time waking consciousness was a surprise to me. I had expected to die. Then reanimate as a zombie, most likely.
Was the consciousness of the former people that became zombies aware within the horror of their new existence? Did they feel pain? Did the things their bodies did drive them mad? Were they grateful to those that ended their torturous existence? Could they see and hear, or were they locked in a lightless, soundless void? That sounded likely to cause insanity. I did not feel insane.
Not yet anyway.
I did feel pain. My eyes blinked. I felt that, too. But my eyes saw nothing but darkness. I felt hot aches in my left thigh and lower back. My shoulder felt pinched and hurt to move at all. My chest felt tight where I’d been scratched.
Maybe more than scratched. I wasn’t sure. Everywhere else was sore, bruised, or both. I patted at my shoulder, lower back and thigh. There was dry, crusted blood there. And sharper pains everywhere I touched. I left my wounds alone.
I didn’t feel like a zombie. Zombies were wasted thin and wanted to eat human flesh. I was relatively trim, but not thin. And I was hungry. Ravenous, even.
But I did not feel like snacking on someone else’s liver. A meal bar, maybe. Or ten. My brain wasn’t up to functioning much beyond that.
Practice parkour in my lab hadn’t prepared me for maneuvering in microgravity with a gimped arm and busted leg in the dark. But I managed to find a surface to grab on to. Found it with my head, actually, slamming it into whatever this was with headache inducing force. I was not in good shape. Beyond my pains I felt ill for the first time in years.
That couldn’t be a good thing.
I needed to find food, and fast. Meds, bandages probably. I could stitch a wound shut if I had to. I’d done that before. Maybe not the one on my lower back though. I could feel my thoughts skitter and scatter.
I was forgetting something. But the pain, the headache, the sick feeling and just waking up in the dark, or just plain old mad scientist forgetfulness wouldn’t let me remember.
Exploring the room I was in took an unknown amount of time. Not a short amount. There were sinks. I didn’t risk them softening my wounds and making them bleed anew. I had the thought that was lightheaded from blood loss.
That wasn’t a sure thing. But it wouldn’t do to risk it. There were doors. They opened into shelves. Shelves were no good. I found a table. With my good knee. If it hurt I didn’t much notice. My pain-attention was focused elsewhere at the moment.
I never did find a light switch. But I did find the door.
I was in the morgue. The thought amused me, and I couldn’t help it. I laughed until it hurt. That happened too fast for my taste, but oh well. No zombies came to investigate my highly inappropriate humor.
There was something about the bodies in the hall that tugged at my mind but I couldn’t spare the neurons to think about it. Pain and hunger had me in their grip and I was powerless to resist. I had never been so starved in all my life.
The Hospital had foodstuffs to feed their patients. Where were those? They had to be here somewhere. Not in here. Somewhere where they kept live patients. Patients needed feeding. I needed feeding. My sense of smell seemed to be working overtime. I smelled blood everywhere. The tang of copper practically coated the inside of my nose.
There was a bed floating at the intersection ahead. I vaguely remembered jumping on that bed. Children jumped on beds. I was a grown adult. Maybe I shouldn’t be jumping on beds? Beds meant patients. Patients needed food.
I turned up the new hallway. It looked long. But there was something there, about midway up. A nurses’ station. Nurses fed patients. There might be food there.
The hall was littered with bodies. And junk. I didn’t remember killing so many zombies. Maybe they were already dead by the time I got here? They were dead either way. That was good. I couldn’t avoid all of them. Had to push some away, which made me spin around.
I only had one good arm and one good leg. Twisting around hurt. And every time a body or a bed or a cart bumped me I felt like all my wounds were reopening at once. I checked my shoulder. It was bleeding a little. Not as much as it hurt, though.
A zombie bit me on the shoulder. And I was still alive. I couldn’t finish the thought as my stomach pains occupied my brain once again. There were meal bars at the nurses’ station. In a cabinet behind the tall desk. Their shiny yellow wrappers were like an answered prayer.
Maybe that’s exactly what they were. In that moment, I was a believer.
I fumbled the cabinet open and ripped open a wrapper with my teeth. The wrapper tasted awful but I didn’t care. I didn’t eat it either, but I did swallow down the meal bar as fast as I could. I pulled the ration package out and secured myself to the desk, my good foot wedged under an open drawer. Four bars later I began to notice the world around me again, at least a little bit. And within me.
I felt bloated, but not full. I’d seen the signs before. Nanite bloat. My colony had replicated beyond its normal population and was lying practically inert. Even stilled, they drew a low amount of energy from my body.
That was part of why I was so hungry still. That and I’d used my nanites profligately lately. My brain shied away from what I’d actually used them for. That was for later.
That excessive amount of nanites could be put to work now, though. Sensing and using the nanites within my own body had been one of the first exercises I’d done to gain better control of them and train them to do what I wanted them to.
They would passively support me in maintaining my health, but there were other things they could do. There weren’t any circuits in my body other than my personal link and HUD, so investigating the damage I’d caused had to be done by feel.
The damage to my shoulder was surprisingly less severe than I’d suspected from how much it hurt. The zombie’s teeth didn’t appear to have penetrated much beyond the subcutaneous fat. It was still a messy wound. I didn’t know much about how wounds healed, but I could drag the edges of the wound together and hold them there, using the nanites like a scaffold and staples at the same time.
I whimpered weakly around the meal bar in my mouth. I was still eating. Still hungry, though not as cripplingly starved as before.
It took several minutes for the wounds to tug together. I wondered hazily if this was sort of what being tattooed was like. Those needles had to hurt, and you got poked a lot to get the ink in you. Then I pushed the nanites into the chest wound. This one was worse.
There was stuff in the wound. Stuff that wasn’t me. Dirt? It seemed like dirt. Silica, mostly. Some carbon compounds, I think. And... huh. Fibers. My tee shirt. There were bits of my tee shirt inside the wound itself.
My tee shirt was stuck to my chest and was stiff with flaky, crusty black blood. I thought blood was supposed to be red. Some of my shirt was red. Reddish brown. But the area over my chest was black.
If I wet the area down it might soften enough for me to detach it. There were water bulbs at the tall desk. I drank one and squeezed two carefully onto my shirt. It was cold and that hurt a bit. Taking off the tee shirt hurt a lot more. Bits of congealed blood came with it, and my chest started bleeding again.
I used nanites to grab the tiny bits of fabric, dirt, and other things and push them out. That took several more minutes. I’m not sure how many. But the bleeding stopped before I was done pushing things out. I zippered up the wounds with nanite scaffolding and groaned. My jaw clenched and tears leaked from my eyes.
The wound in my lower back was deep but narrow. There was dirt and debris in this one as well so I pushed it out. Whatever it was had narrowly missed my kidney, miraculously avoided my intestines as it ripped into me. Lucky, I suppose. Sealing this one up hurt a little less than my chest had.
The wound in my thigh felt worse than all the others. Deep and wide, it had only stopped bleeding because there was something still stuck in the wound.
It felt like something organic from what my nanites could tell. I guessed it was a bone shard. It had pierced all the way through the skin and fat layers, through the muscle missing my thigh bone and poked out the front of my thigh. It had cut into thick, ropey blood vessels along the way, but the bleeding inside was slowed by clotting and some of my own nanites trying to seal them up. They were unable to because the bone shard was in the way.
I could pull it out. But then all those semi-stopped blood vessels would start gushing anew. And it was right beside one great big one in my inner thigh. That was an artery, I think. If I cut that, I would die for sure. Probably. It wasn’t worth the risk to find out.
That meant I had to try something different. Possibly something new. I ate another meal bar and drank some water as I thought. Ideally, the bone shard would go away at the same time the damage was being fixed up.
I wasn’t confident in my ability to ever so slowly pull the offending bone out of my flesh at the same rate my nanites zippered things together. At all.
Nanite training was something I could do, but what to have them actually do? I could cut the bone into little pieces maybe. That would take energy. But I was sitting on a pile of meal bars and there was energy coming in steadily. Slowly. That didn’t seem like the right way, though.
There had to be a way. I’d used my nanites to push out the dirt and debris. Could I...?
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It turns out I could do that. The bone shard inched out a microscopic bit. I bit back a scream. Then I did it again, focusing on keeping the wound from getting worse. I put up a barrier of nanites around the artery to shield it from damage. It sort of worked. Inch. Stifle scream. Chew. Swallow. Check to see if I’m not bleeding out internally. Repeat.
It felt like hours. It might have been hours. My HUD was still dark so I couldn’t see the time. Have to fix that. I started to put a reminder on my HUD... to fix my HUD.
But I couldn’t do that, so I decided to feel like an idiot instead. The bone shard was out at last. My eyelids were drooping and I felt sleep calling me. But food and water and pain had awoken my brain again, and there were things that I had to do. Because there was no one left to do them.
I weaved my way back to the pod room. My wounds still burned and ached, but they were at last free of dirt and lodged objects. They would heal, given time. I had one good arm and one good leg. That would have to be enough. The bed at the end of the hall once again served to cushion me as I changed the direction of my velocity. Much slower this time.
Then I noticed the bodies. Zombie bodies, but not normal zombie bodies. These were practically skeletal. Bits of blackened flesh flaked off of them like ash. Like they’d been burned from the inside out.
That was from me.
I did this.
Memories that I’d been ignoring slammed back into focus. I knew what I did. When I’d used my nanites to pull on the zombie it hadn’t gone as planned. I had intended to pull out and isolate some of the zombie nanites to discover what had been done to them. To finally find out what instructions had been seared into them with the worm program.
It had to be something more than simply suppressing the body’s immune response. But I hadn’t simply excised a portion of the zombie nanites and contained them for a quick examination. Oh no. That hadn’t happened at all.
Instead, my nanites simply ate them. They consumed all of the zombie nanites. Then they consumed something inside the zombie. And then they came back to me, practically glowing with stolen energy.
That was not supposed to happen.
The stolen energy had felt good. I’d been beaten, bitten, and stabbed, but I felt at that point like I could run a marathon, get into a fistfight with one of the muscle bound Security officers and win, or bench press a shuttle craft. It felt better than good. It had felt awesome.
I don’t remember much of what I did after that. Just flashes that didn’t make any sense. Then waking up in the morgue, feeling like hammered crap.
Then I remembered the little girl in the pod. The one with the little doll. Adrenaline once again jackhammered in my veins and I bolted through the open door. Down the rows almost to the end and up to the top of the racks. W-026 was open and dark. And empty.
Had I... eaten the little girl?
I’d been so hopped up on whatever that stolen energy was I couldn’t remember what I’d done after, but surely not... that? I looked in the pod again. No girl.
And no doll.
I wouldn’t have eaten the doll. It probably tasted like meal bar wrappers anyway.
I looked around and down the row. Bodies. No girl. I looked over the top of the racks. Couldn’t see too far, too dark in there. Then I checked the pods in the rack. I checked all the pods. All the way down the row.
There were two more amber lights. Two more humans in them. I transferred them to blue pods. It wasn’t easy to do with one arm and one working leg but I managed. Somehow. One of the blue pods had a zombie in it. That’s when I remembered I was unarmed.
I placed the injured man in a different blue lit pod kept searching for the girl. Three more amber pods, one zombie and two more people. Swap to blue pods. I kept searching.
She was in a blue pod near the top of the row across from where I’d started searching. I remembered that little button nose and curly dark hair. The doll was clutched under her left arm instead of the right this time. I breathed a sigh of relief. I hadn’t eaten a child.
Or a doll. Which probably tasted bad. Almost surely. Not that I was going to test that. I began to question whether or not I was going crazy at that point. Then I decided to leave the question until later.
The pistol was floating in the middle of the row, not far from the bodies. One drained, a greasy looking skeleton of ash. Three dead.
The bit on top of the pistol that slid back and forth was locked back. It only did that when the magazine was empty. I wondered where the escape kit had gotten to, and if there were bullets inside it. The knife was nowhere to be seen.
Then I checked all the other pods in the facility after that. Had to. No one else left to do it. Found a few more living humans, all in critical condition. They were all dying, but not dead yet. If the power failed completely on Walker, they’d be dead fur sure.
I had to find a way off the station. And I had to somehow get the stasis pods off with me. Find a doctor somewhere or learn enough medicine to fix them up.
I didn’t want to do the latter unless there was no other choice. Too much room for error. And there had been too many errors already. I’d drained a zombie. Zombies used to be people. That meant there was a possibility that I could drain people. Good guys didn’t do that. And I was trying to be a good guy. But I’d probably failed already in that.
Without my HUD I couldn’t tell which pods had failed while I’d been passed out and then eating and fixing myself. If I hadn’t gotten bitten, I could have searched the pod room and saved them right then. Instead they’d died while I was sleeping.
I left the pod room. All the humans that were in danger that I could find were safely in blue pods now. Safe from dying from whatever they’d been afflicted with, for now. Safe from zombies.
Safe from me.
I shut the door. My knife was sticking out of a zombie. One of the drained ones. It came out with a small puff of ash. No zombie hunting howls chased me down the corridors. No withered skulls poked out of the open doors I passed along the way, hungering for my flesh.
The cafeteria was not silent. Cleaner bots hummed and clicked as they scampered about. One of the big processing bots was out of the bulkhead and churning away as the cleaner bots fed it trash to turn into raw resources. That was good enough for me. No zombies around.
The combat suit stood tall and proud, arms out like it would begin shooting at any moment. I already knew it was out of ammunition. I hadn’t put restrictions on ammo usage, so it had simply kept firing away while I was gone. Looking at it from the front I saw what the black scratch on the inside of the visor looked like from the outside.
The armor plate was gashed open like it had been struck by some unimaginably sharp sword. If it had just been armor glass, I’d have been a dead man already, zombies gnawing my face to the bone. Then I felt the twinge of the healing wounds on my chest and shoulder. Probably dead, anyway.
I headed back up to Security Medical through the Maintenance shaft. The quiet hissing noise was back, but I ignored it.
Some part of me welcomed the possibility of violence. That part was new. Another part said I didn’t deserve to live with what I’d become. I ignored that part. Still trying to be good. Had to. Nobody left.
Then it was into Medical and tap the decontamination cycle to start-
I will admit a moment of panic occurred just after I selected “Yes.”
Pain. I thought I’d known pain. Getting beaten, bitten and stabbed hurt a lot. Stitching up those wounds and slowly, ever-so-slowly pulling a bone shard that had gone all the way through my thigh out using just nanites was a level of pain I hadn’t felt before.
But all over burning decontamination that got into every open wound? Into my eyes, my nose, my mouth when I screamed? That didn’t stop and kept going even as the soapy water turned pink with my own blood?
That was a whole new level of torture.