 
## My Unlife: Rebirth

Written by Typhoid Marty

Published by Circle 8 Books at Smashwords

Copyright © 2013 Typhoid Marty

Cover Art Copyright © 2013 Pici

Digital Edition

This book also available in print.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

### Acknowledgments

I dedicate this book to my wife, Emily. She is my love, my friend, my confidant. Thank you for your unswerving focus and ideas – I survive by shamelessly plagiarizing them.

Emily is also a damned fine artist, which comes in handy for our combined webcomic, Hell Inc (http://www.hellinccomic.com). I write, she draws. Emily also makes her own webcomic, failytales (http://www.failytales.com) which she makes from our combined bizarre experiences.

Believe me, there are a lot of them.

I would also like to thank my editors, David and Sarah. Thank you for pointing out the obvious and subtle flaws that I had previously missed!

Lastly, thank you to the cast of the original webcomic that spawned this book; Emily, James, Cassondra, Paul, Jason, Charlie, Doug and Dan. Dan; I like that you stalk our comics, silently watching for any way to be of assistance. 

### Preface

I am quite possibly the last person I expected to write a book about Zombies. Maybe that is not an admission best made at the start of a novel but I feel like we have developed a bond in the last few lines, you and I, and you can handle the honest truth.

In my opinion, a monster is born in response to a stimulus or concern of the age. Vampires for instance were a response to an increasing trend towards godlessness – a concern among many people at the time. They were sexy and seductive and ultimately sucked the life out of a person until all that remained was a shallow husk, dedicated to nothing but their master's nefarious goals.

Frankenstein was born at a time that medicine was truly becoming an institution. Doctors were moving the craft forward for the first time in recorded history, traditional medicine was being supplanted and people were scared of man playing God. So along came Frankenstein and his monster, a mad genius who reached beyond the grave to create a sad frightened being - a thing who had lost most of his humanity.

So what does that say about us? Zombies hark from our fear of genetics – playing with our fundamental code we will in our foolishness unleash a disease that we cannot control. Zombies themselves are mindless automatons serving only to further the machinations of the virus that created them by transmission of body fluids.

A friend – staunch supporter of the Zombie mythos and proud owner of a Zombie escape plan – was discouraged by my frank admissions of apathy. When asked what I find so implausible, my answers could be dropped into the following categories.

1) Most of the Zombie propaganda material I have consumed suggests the virus almost immediately kills the host. The viruses then take a killed host and puppet it around to infect other people. If this virus ever gets bored of killing, it has a promising career on Sesame Street.

2) It is routine for Zombies to autopilot around even when large parts of their body are compromised.

3) Zombies rarely need any food and though the subject is often left unsaid, they will generally not just die of malnutrition.

4) The virus always spreads impossibly fast. Zombies are interested in eating Brains – how the hell are they infecting but not killing so many people?

My biggest problem with Zombie flicks though belongs in none of these categories – it is the age old wisdom of starting the movie with *hand wave* oh look Zombies! No-one seems interested in answering the Why, never mind the How.

When this friend asked how I would do things differently, I thought for a while and came up with the following answers.

1) Zombies are known for taking damage, to do so there would have to be a component of regeneration.

2) Bodies cannot operate by magic. Harm has consequences even if it is only temporary.

3) Viruses do not know how to carry commands from the brain and are not smart enough to control a life form as complex as a human. They are also boring at parties. Given these conditions, the host must still be alive but in an altered state of mind.

We talked about it further and they ended up really liking my ideas – later, drunk on my own persuasiveness, I began to write the book. Hopefully my alterations to Zombie lore will seem like a natural evolution (pun intended) to you too.

Oh and now we have become besties, I want to remind you of my other work, Hell Inc (http://www.hellinccomic.com) – remember, friends read friends comics (and possibly buy their merch). 

### Introduction

The victim's first memory after the attack was a wet sound, the sound of a ripe peach being dropped from five feet onto the sidewalk. To her, the sound was deadened, as if heard through five layers of fabric. It took her a moment to realize that all other sounds were similarly muffled.

A pain from the back of her head instantly dragged her attention from the vagaries of hearing loss - a jagged sawing sensation that demanded investigation, but for some reason her hands wouldn't move. Nothing would, with any reliability. In this time of crisis, she was weaker than she had ever felt.

In the end it was more gravity than action that did the work for her as her head flopped to the side, revealing a figure not ten feet away painted against the dark of the alleyway in patches of grey. More an impressionist painting of a man than an actual figure, he was currently engaged in brutally bashing some poor bastard's head against the curb in a sincere attempt to break it open like there was candy inside – this probably accounted for the wet noise from earlier. The knowledge failed to make the woman feel any better.

What little light there was came from a sign, proudly proclaiming in flickering lights that this particular pawn shop belonged firmly to 'Big Willie'. The little relief it gave to the scene seemed intent on highlighting fluid oozing out of the crushed back of piñata's head.

The looming figure coughed - a wet wracking sound – and flipped the ragdoll facedown with the effort normally associated with folding laundry.

With a lack of ceremony, he bent over the crushed cranium scooping a handful of unmentionable matter from within and began to eat.

She gulped involuntarily at the scene and instantly felt a reaction from her salivary glands and an overwhelming sense of nausea.

Lacking the control to turn – she vomited straight upwards. Emma felt her face wash in dinner's second performance of the evening. Given that it hadn't been so great on the first show, there had previously been no real plans for this second visit. If the feasting figure knew or cared, he gave no sign.

"You!" a voice yelled eloquently from down the alley and Emma struggled to see from the side of her eye the figure issuing the command. If she wasn't mistaken, it was a police officer, hand resting on his holster.

"Help," Emma tried to call out, her voice cracking halfway, making it sound more like she whimpered "Hep."

It was clearly loud enough, the figure crossed the distance to her in a blur and lashed out with a kick to the face, making her vision shake like an old television set.

Rather than clearing, her vision swam gently from side to side for a few seconds, before shrinking – like looking down a black tunnel at a grey curtain.

The last thing she heard - before passing out \- was a loud "Crack!" of gunfire.

* * * * *

"Miss, Miss!" a voice called to her, distantly. Emma tried to see who was calling – before realizing that she had yet to open her eyes. It was like everything was on manual control only.

Blearily she blinked and made out the fuzzy shape of a police officer standing over her. Experimentally, Emma tried shaking her head and almost cried out at the pain in the base of her skull. Flopping her head to the side bonelessly, she found herself staring directly at the ear of the murdered man. In a shock of realization she found her arm draped over his stomach.

This cleared the fog, somewhat, and she managed to sit up – dragging her body away from the corpse. This action enabled her to drink in a scene of pandemonium. The neon sign down the alley flickered and flashed, shooting sparks over the scene and illuminating sporadically. The first thing it illuminated was a crumpled body of another police officer opposite, red splatters over the wall behind it painting a horror tale of what could have happened in her mind.

"I need to take you to a hospital" the police officer mumbled, following her gaze. "And then.. get your statement" he added, gulping.

"But I – " Emma answered before pausing. "I –" _what? s_ he asked herself _was passed out while this man died?_ "Didn't see anything" she finished weakly.

"You still need to go to the hospital" the man followed, interrupted from saying anything further by a harsh buzz from his radio.

"Backup. Man down!" the voice on the radio crackled harshly. "South-East corner of Egleston Square!" it added.

The officer looked from Emma to the fallen police officer and licked his lips nervously. For the first time, Emma noticed he was very young – his cap obscuring all but a front shock of bright ginger hair.

"Wait here" he ordered, backing away "I will be back."

"What?" she said, stupefied. Even though moving her head was agony she looked from the man to her side to the downed figure of the cop in front. "No!" she answered, incredulous.

"Right here! I'll be back with a bus" he yelled, turning and running. To his credit, it was in the direction of Egleston.

Emma dumbly looked around, finding her way to her feet she staggered away from the horribly misshapen head of the man next to her. Turning, she dumbly was reminded of the crumpled body behind, crunching of glass beneath her feet informing her that some window had been broken in the struggle.

A noise echoed down the alley behind her and she span, nearly falling back over as she did so. Unable to see anything she slowly backed away towards the mouth of the alley.

"Stay here? Not likely!" she said out loud and stumbled below the wreckage of the flashing neon sign. Three of the letters from pawn briefly flashed 'pwn' in the space above her head before she was gone.

### Chapter 1

Emma was not having what she would regard as a good day. First she had to come to some lowlife's pawn shop to buy back her most prized belongings – courtesy of an ex-roommate and her newfound fascination with expensive narcotics. Then she gets caught up in some crazy lunatic attack. Remembering the pain in the back of her neck, Emma slowly raised her hands to feel the throbbing skin – pausing from concern before finally lowering her hands onto the wound. The skin was sticky from blood but felt mostly just puckered and bruised – maybe it was just laceration from some glass?

"Thank heaven for small miracles," she mumbled to herself, coming finally to a more major road and a nearby rank of taxis. Staggering a little she approached the first cab and was greeted by frantic waving to move along from the foul smelling driver.

Looking down, Emma almost cried out in dismay. Vomit stains all over her cashmere sweater. There would be hell to pay if they wouldn't dry clean out – Emma's mother had gotten her the sweater last Christmas and she would expect to see it on her next regal visit.

"Some drunk spilled lunch over me," Emma explained, as she was shooed away.

Moving to the second taxi, his look of disgust was no less but he grudgingly held open the door.

"You can pay?" he asked in slightly broken English - some sort of Slavic accent, she decided.

"Yes," she replied, sitting down heavily.

The journey started with a jolt that Emma would come to know as being characteristic on this voyage of discovery. Apparently, shock absorbers cost extra, as did actual knowledge of the city layout.

Emma zoned out during the trip, the frequent jolts the only thing connecting her with reality – they felt as if they were channeled directly into her damaged neck. On at least two occasions she looked up to see what appeared to be the taxi backtracking.

Emma frantically ran the incident through her brain, but it was all a blur. She couldn't remember much from before being woken up by the young officer, no matter how hard she tried.

_I was at the pawn shop she recalled but the damned place was closed early. I went around the side of the building to see if they were just out back smoking and..._ nothing. There was a gap in her memory filled with gore and panic from going round the corner to being called back to wakefulness by the officer.

Looking down, her gaze affixed on a tear on her arm – was it a bite mark? Emma started to shake – a sudden case of chills. The memories from the past hour were already foggy, possibly as a result of multiple head traumas. All she could really remember with any clarity was a terrible red spray of blood that gave her a greasy taste in her mouth.

Mother is always a fountain of advice, what would she say to all this? Emma wondered. Meth addicted roommates, shady pawn shops and strange attackers. Who am I kidding Emma answered herself She still wouldn't be past the state of the sweater she gave me. "A lady vomits OUTWARDS Emma, not down. Have I taught you nothing?" Apparently she had not.

The cab ground to an eventual halt. I guess I should be thankful he didn't have to brake suddenly with me in here Emma thought. Not without a good minute's notice anyway.

Paying extra for the state of the backseat, Emma departed with as much of her dignity remaining as possible. She no longer staggered - her mother had taught her better than that after all - but she ached all the way to her bones, maybe further. Entering an elevator, Emma stiffly pressed a button for her floor and was thankful none of her nosy neighbors had chosen to ride up with her.

Sinking back against the wall, Emma's vision swam. Little men had taken to sawing wood in her head and muscles she had previously not known existed were aching dully in a way that suggested whatever their function, they were highly annoyed at the recent spur of activities. More than anything though, Emma was tired – more tired than she could ever remember feeling in her short existence.

Getting out at the third floor, trudging and swaying slightly she came after a small eternity to her door. Sisyphus would be proud.

Fumbling a new key into a new lock – she did have the foresight to get a locksmith in after her roommate's escapades – she was soon past that barrier. She didn't take off her clothes - not even her shoes (an unforgivable affront to her well-bred ancestors) and collapsed into bed and a dreamless sleep.

* * * * *

Emma woke to a dull pain in her ear-lobes.

_It's going to be another one of_ _those_ _days_ she thought to herself. _Who does that? Wakes up to aching lobes?_

The lower part of the ear, as Emma was well aware, has one of the lowest nerve endings per square inch ratios in the entire body. She could have woken with a headache, a queasy stomach or shattered vertebrae yet nothing from any of them but her stupid ears – which she had secretly always hated – decided to wake with the dawn's morning chorus.

_Was it all a dream?_ she wondered briefly then discounted. She was still in her clothes and a colorful painting of blood, vomit, sweat and street grime adorned her normally pearly white sheets.

_Has my room always been this blue?_ she questioned herself. Even the pinks had taken on a slightly lavender hue. A high pitched hum threatened to reignite the gone but not forgotten headache of last night.

Searching around, Emma eventually found the humming to be emanating from the kitchen. Pointing an ear towards the fluorescent light gave no reward, nor did any of her other appliances until the fridge – a big door and a half arrangement that had never bothered her before this moment.

This close, it sounded like bee's re-enactment of hamlet. She toyed with the idea of shutting it off but eventually settled for dulling the noise with 10 layers of cling wrap, which she covered the back of the fridge with. _Hope that isn't a fire risk_ she thought with a mental smirk.

A sudden _plink!_ and an earring dropped to the floor. Examining the offending piece of Jewelry, Emma found the bar that bridges the hole had been bent to right angles and had eventually snapped. Feeling the hole in her lobe, Emma was rewarded with nothing. Her ear had no sign it had ever been pierced. Unlatching the other one, Emma pulled it free, it made a sickening ripping noise as it went through. Emma gagged. She would make a pretty poor doctor really, being very squeamish at the best of times. She was only going through pre-med because a medical degree was the only way to break into genetics.

Genetics - an illustrious career. Hopefully it would give her the medical skills to remove the parents from her ass. Rocket scientist would also work but she hated physics; genes had seemed like the logical choice. Honestly though, she would become a space doctor if it meant finally not having to hear any more about her wasted potential.

She had to admit, the classes she had taken on the theory of genetic code had fit nicely with her obsessively analytical nature – now if only she could somehow grit her teeth past all the disgusting practical courses necessary for her to break into the career as a lab jockey she might truly be at peace.

Finally an absence of something – easily ignored in her search for the humming quartet apparently set up in her fridge – clicked to the front of her brain. It was light out, but there was much less traffic noise than normal, rolling this around for a second she came to the only sensible conclusion - it was not early, it was late. And so was she. For Class.

* * * * *

Rushing into school, Emma didn't need to look at her schedule to know Neuroanatomy was the first class. She groaned thinking about it; her professor had a monotonous tone of voice that always put her to sleep. She basically did all the work again outside of class because the haze she entered inside the room was impervious to knowledge.

Thirty minutes later, she was digging her fingernails into her palms to stay awake. Did he miss his calling as a hypnotist? she wondered. Maybe that's how a talentless jerk lands a teaching job here. "You are getting very sleepy... give Professor Landon a raise."

Next thing she knew, her head had nodded downwards – Emma jerked it back up instantly. _I slept for ten damned hours_ she screamed in her head. _Why can I not keep my eyes open for an entire lecture!_ One minute after this impassioned self-analysis Emma was completely asleep.

Awaking with a start, Emma sat there dazed. The room had taken on the same slightly bluish tint she had noted earlier but everything else seemed very normal. To her right, one seat away, a guy she had a slight crush on was doodling idly on the wooden desk. Looking briefly behind, she noted a couple of other students had fallen under the spell of the lecturer's heavy monotone and were sleeping soundly.

Without a word, Emma slowly got up, to the quizzical looks of her classmates. Taking a walk to the front of the class that seemed to last forever, she at last arrived in front of her professor. He stared at her dumbly, waiting for the reason for breaking into his scripted sleepy time. Emma simply smiled.

Taking another step closer as if to impart a secret she instead bit into his face.

She awoke again with a shriek and realized the whole class was looking at her.

Bending double, Emma did the only thing she could and feigned stomach pain. Thinking on this lie further she weighed the dubious merits of pretending to have gas cramps over waking up from a dream screaming, but the lie was already told.

Letting herself be led to the medical center she told a couple of her more dutiful classmates she would be okay, really. They slowly sauntered out, as if they were missing an ideal chance for a case study. Ambulance chasers.

Emma forced herself to sit there for twenty minutes, mind furiously racing, before claiming the pain had gone away. Not daring to go back to class, Emma fled home. Crossing the room in a bound, she was halfway to the bathroom and a nice relaxing bath before she realized she had left the door open. Diving back across the room she slammed it and watched the wall shake.

### Chapter 2

Emma relaxed back against the still cool tub. This apartment was a bit overpriced – the main view from the living room was of the wall across an alley, after all. Ultimately she had rented it for two reasons – it was located in a safe, middleclass area of town and it held a deep, wide, claw-foot tub.

Putting a wet hand towel over her face she closed her eyes and tried to let go of the outright weirdness of the day. Feeling herself drift, she shifted her weight to lean her head back into the towel sitting there for support.

Awaking with a start, Emma realized she must have dozed off and sat confused for a second. Instead of her simple bathroom, she was instead lying on a bed in a disturbingly pink bedroom. Arching slightly to look at the light coming into the room from above her head she instantly recognized curtains she had not seen in over a decade – curtains that belonged in a room she had occupied while in middle school.

No stranger to lucid dreams, Emma had long since learned to enjoy the freedom they afforded her – the lecture this morning notwithstanding.

Relaxing, Emma looked around at posters she had long since forgotten with her conscious mind - she was embarrassed to note one of them declared her everlasting love for NSYNC.

Getting up - an act that often seemed to take a long time in her dream land - she was struck by the reflection of her pajamas in the mirror. It was easy to get lost in the scenery and think of this as a faithful reproduction of her childhood but her PJs clearly belied that. The material and style were not out of place but the pattern was clearly that of the rosebuds from a sexy nightie she had bought a couple of years ago to spice up the romantic interest of an old boyfriend, just weeks before he left her. The combination was creepy and twisted the whole scene slightly.

She resolved to throw it out when she woke up.

Seeking further anomalies, she walked over to the small round CD player she had in her room back when she was that age. Doing so took far longer than expected however, as the room seemed to stretch unnaturally, giving her a false sense of vertigo as her mind tried to resolve it into physical movement.

Finally arriving at her goal, she fought down the sense of queasiness for a moment before leafing through her disk collection. Sure enough, along with the favorites of the time were modern hits that didn't belong. She stopped at her Ke$ha album – a guilty pleasure she normally indulged while running at the gym. In her regular existence she had bought the tracks as MP3s and had no clue what the actual album cover looked like, so this one was just blank white with the bold emblazoning 'Ke$ha CD'. Imagination was never really her strong suit.

Hearing raised voices, Emma walked out of her room and stood at the top of the staircase. She remembered hearing this fight – it was the one of the last ones her parents had – after this they moved to the silent treatment, which they had employed extensively ever since.

Originally, she had crept out here – not daring to go downstairs and risk the ire turning towards her. Hearing only pieces of the fight, it was only the next day she found out her older sister had been killed in a car crash – an accident Emma's mother blamed on her father. He had given his permission for Michelle to go to the party, after all.

Emma remembered in a blur the days following the crash. Being dragged to the hospital to wait mutely in the car while her parents went in, followed by their numb expressions 45 minutes later when they returned. The funeral, trying to cram into a black dress that she had grown out of before finally being given one that had belonged to Michelle. She remembered that moment as the first one where it hit that her sister truly wasn't coming back. Michelle would never have let her borrow the dress.

Thinking back, Emma remembered how life changed after this for Michelle had always taken the pressure with her perfect grades and easy social graces. Emma had been happy to sit in the shadows unnoticed as she occasionally goofed off with her other socially inept friends.

With Michelle gone, all the expectations had transferred to Emma. Emma's love of languages was almost instantly deemed a waste of time and her goals realigned with something more fitting of one carrying the sole responsibility of the family line.

Being the quirky daughter, Emma had always been her father's unofficial favorite. He had even imparted his love of boxing unto her, a pastime from his younger days. These sessions were curtailed very soon after Michelle died as unbefitting the sole air from her family line.

A younger Emma had seen this as an excuse for mother getting what she wanted, though the young lady she was now doubted very much that losing her fair haired prodigy fit in any shape into the category.

Snapping back to the moment, Emma stood and slowly walked down the stairs in direct contrast to how she had acted back then. Emma knew that what she saw was the result of her mind making up the scene but she did not care. She longed to see their faces – assign some humanity to them in this most vulnerable of moments.

She walked into the kitchen and saw her father's face crumpled in despair. He had lines that the version of him from 12 years ago had no place owning – though this night was almost certainly the genesis of most of them. Her mother on the other hand looked as youthful as Emma ever remembered her; a cold hard statue of a woman, incapable of feeling. Emma longed for the face to soften but as her mother turned slowly to look at the intruder her visage became even harder.

Every nuance to her stance, her expression and her eyes all said the same thing. _Why did they take the good one?_

"Well?" her mother asked her.

"Well... what?" asked Emma, confused.

"I said, 'Why did they take the good one?'" her Mother reiterated, cold as deep space and about as filled with humanity.

_Oh_ thought Emma _I guess she just went ahead and said it. That's pretty direct._

"I don't know," Emma responded at last, weakly. "I missed her – miss her – too."

Her father sat, an impotent figure to the side as Emma's mother said this in her mind. Emma was sad to discover this was how she saw him, a figure robbed of whatever gusto that had once belonged to him. Secretly, she had always thought she took after her father so the realization was even less welcome.

It made sense though, Emma's mother had always been the dominant force. This was the night that took the little bit of fight left in him away.

"Couldn't you be more like her? Less like this?" said her Mother, motioning up and down her with an outstretched hand. "Awkward. You are an awkward child." The fact that Emma knew this was her brain making up words she thought her mother wanted to say made it no less painful.

"I have spent my life trying to do precisely that," answered Emma, letting uncharacteristic anger push her to the point she could actually respond to the accusations – an event not appearing in real life. "Michelle was the one who was good at sciences. I liked French and I longed to be a translator somewhere in Europe - yet here I am becoming a doctor."

"I have studied all my life - becoming an adult didn't make it any easier. I cram my nose into a book more now than when I lived here, all for your approval. Even if that happened and suddenly I filled Michelle's shoes, I doubt it would make me happy."

"I loved my sister and yet now I hate her – not for what she did in life but for leaving me to fill this position that I just cannot. Michelle died but her dying wasn't what took her from me – it was you trying to cram me into her life."

It was wonderful being given a chance to voice her frustration, Emma could never manage even a whole sentence in her defense in real life and here she was dumping all her hurt out. Her mom looked down at her but her face didn't soften – Emma didn't know what it would look like if it did – they just stared at each other; disappointed parent and child. Both of them were sorry to have been dealt the other but this was Emma's first chance to say so.

Looking past her mother, Emma saw out of the window hoping to see the beautifully crafted grounds of her parents' house – anything to relieve the tension.

She was surprised therefore to see nothing but water – like a reverse aquarium. _Why would I imagine that?_ She teased herself with the question, rolling it around inside her mind. As all the windows started slowly leaking simultaneously, rivulets trickling down the expensive wallpaper before suddenly exploding, showering water and glass over everyone in the room.

Bursting from below the waterline in her tub, Emma heaved and coughed, sputtering the water from her lungs. Looking up, Emma thought for a brief moment that she could see her mother's face, sadness in her eyes, in the mist around her. The young woman blinked and the mirage was gone.

Finally heaving the last thimbleful of water out of her lungs with a coughing fit, Emma draped herself over the side of the tub like shipwreck survivor. Try as she might, she just couldn't recall exactly what her sister looked like.

### Chapter 3

Emma was soon out of the bath (one near drowning a day, please) and hitting the fridge, she first had a yogurt then whipped herself up a bowl of soybeans. They clearly did not pass muster, as no sooner had she finished than her stomach growled at her again. In desperation she microwaved three bean burritos and when even that did not silence her wayward appetite she dragged some chips that she had been hiding from herself at the back of the cupboard into the dusk light and ate them hunched over while staring at nothing.

Every time she started to feel comfortable some small flash of the previous night came back to her – starting with intense irritation on arrival at the pawn shop, only to discover they had already closed with her beloved laptop hermetically sealed behind the steel bar encrusted exterior.

Vaguely, she remembered the pain and torn agony from her head, words dropping around her prone form from her mysterious assailant but their order remained a mystery - like figuring out the order of droplets in a rainstorm.

There were police officers there that much she could remember – along with the spray of arterial blood.

When she was a child, Emma had loved kicking around a red ball – it was the reddest thing in her entire memory. She had played with it that it until her mother took it away and replaced it with a blue doll. Previously they were the reddest and bluest things she could remember – and secretly the reason she had always loved red and hated blue.

Now though, when she thought red all she could think of was the thick wet drip of draining blood.

Shaking her head, Emma resolved to look later for news articles or posts online about an incident around Grove Hall – maybe the report would fill in the blanks that her memory would not. She knew one thing, if she was going to try again to retrieve her laptop it would be during the bright light of day.

Her stomach continued to growl even as she ate the fatty kettle chips but somehow that didn't seem like the problem. Her brain gnawed quietly at her sanity in its frustration. She was craving... something. Not ice cream, chips, or anything she could verbalize.

Emma had never had any form of drug more potent than caffeine – not even a rogue puff on a joint handed around at a college party. If she had, the craving would have been more obvious for what it was – withdrawal. Her skin started to slowly crawl over her tightened biceps, like the leisurely lap of waves at the ocean. Rubbing her right upper arm hoping to release the tension, Emma was shocked to discover a steel cord of muscle mysteriously buried beneath her flesh. Flexing, it tightened even further – a feat she previously would have believed impossible.

Emma felt trapped - in a body that barely felt like it was her own, in the apartment and in her life.

"A run, yes. That's what I need." Before she left home Emma's refuge from her parents had been her daily runs. When she moved to Boston Emma had purchased a gym membership, the parks seemed much too sketchy for a relaxed jog.

Today though, the thought of being crowded in a hot room practically shoulder to shoulder with other sweating beings was much more than she could take. She could almost smell the perspiration from her apartment.

Throwing on some sweatpants and a now ridiculously loose top – _have I lost weight?_ Emma pondered, with excitement - she decided to ignore her paranoia and go for a jog through the Esplanade Park. Coughing lightly into her hand, she failed to notice the red smear this left on her doorknob as she locked up her apartment.

* * * * *

The cool night air felt good, the trees and water flowed by, a yin to each other's yang. Even the insects – an ever-present hum – did not seem fit to interrupt her commune with the great outdoors. Surprising, seeing as she normally attracted them from miles around.

Her run took her past a baseball diamond and Emma wondered why she had trapped herself in a gym for the last few years.

Emma's skin had not ceased to crawl but now it almost felt good - a gentle tide as opposed to a storm – almost natural. Her body was the ocean and the world around was a stone peak for her to crash against, wearing it down. She flowed around the stationary object that was the universe and dizzied it with her speed and relentless energy.

_Is this what being high feels like_ she wondered to herself, not overly concerned – and it was. She was high from a vast, bottomless serotonin deficiency in her brain.

"Yo! Stop darlin'," called a voice from the side. In her cosmic oneness with the universe she had failed to notice as baseball diamonds had given way to a thinner route – the path having wound away from the water and now surrounded at a medium distance by trees either side.

Here I am, achieving oneness with the universe and along comes a man to fuck it all up she thought idly to herself like usual she added with an internal giggle.

Even in her altered state, stopping seemed like less a good plan and more a one way trip to venereal disease station – she kept on running, mildly concerned at her lack of concern given her perilous situation. _Does being concerned about not being concerned qualify as a paradox?_ she wondered to herself.

Three more youths appeared ahead of her - they less materialized more oozed into existence on the path, she felt this was in accordance with their appearance.

Glancing over her shoulder, she confirmed the talkative member of their posse had moved to a position of blocking the path behind.

Her misfiring brain saw the three men ahead as bowling pins as she rolled quickly towards them. She smashed through, scattering all three - clearly a strike.

_Why then am I slowing down?_ She asked herself, perplexed but giggling out loud.

Another glance backwards confirmed the presence of a rogue hand with a handful of the back of her shirt. The appendage belonged to a white man of slight build in his late teens. His dark brown hair was cropped close in the inimitable style of the fauxhawk but mysteriously it still seemed to hang limply.

She kept running with her hitchhiker dutifully clinging along for the ride - though he soon lost his feet and his journey quickly turned into a bumping, swearing and scuffling affair as he bashed along the path. Somehow through exceptional application of bloody-mindedness he failed to lose hold.

A second, larger, freeloader used her decreased momentum as an excuse and jumped over his friend – and was seemingly surprised when his weight did not bring her down. Though he did succeed in stepping on her previous passengers face.

It did however completely arrest her forward momentum which was clearly not acceptable.

His smelly, sweaty arm was around her neck and his moist ragged breath in her ear _. He is already out of breath? Pathetic_ she thought idly, her mind bitchy in its disassociativity.

"Don't... struggle," he panted, his stubble rasping unpleasantly against the side of her face. Running footsteps proving his even less healthy friends had at last decided to join the party. "It will.. go easier on you that way." His hand found the back of her head as a warning, as if he could twist and pop her head off like a Russian Doll.

The effect though was not what he hoped as she stiffened in memory. Instantly, she was transported to the previous night.

She remembered suddenly her head being picked up with ridiculous ease and slammed back into the pavement – the blow that had left her temporarily paralyzed while he finished off the poor man she had found when she went around the corner.

Then she remembered something else. Need. Crawling. Hunching over the butchered man as his attacker and the police officer fought. Then she recalled a taste, cold and greasy. Her head buried in the smashed cranium.

_I'm a monster!_ she screamed in silent condemnation, a voice inside her own head as she replayed the snatches of violence she could remember in slow motion, pieces of it clicking together.

In the real world, the arm tightened around her neck and a hand punched her in the ear, making it ring - if her head had not been spinning before it almost certainly would be now. Anger at last welled up in her from a pit in her stomach. Hot and burning. Emma had long thought the pit filled in and buried beneath a pleasant but dull patio, her inability to buck existence forcing her into the mousey form she had come to accept.

Here it was, however, a red hatred that burned her insides but still left her whole - unearthed by chemical deficiency and circumstance.

Her last thought – before she lost control – was _I am not a monster!_ Emma thought this and then watched her hand take the arm wound around her throat and snap it like a twig.

### Chapter 4

The man with the broken arm screamed and Emma's body did too, much to her surprise – causing the other would-be attackers to back off a step. Hers was not the scream of a victim but a warcry; a violent, bloody, raw growl that rose in intensity and volume.

_Shut up!_ thought Emma to herself. Her body seemed disinclined to take her suggestion.

_I just broke his arm – the police would probably arrest me as soon as them._ Still her body showed no sign of obeying, as it was seemingly hooked directly in to some primal survival instinct. Twirling around, Emma watched herself jump onto and bring down the smelly thug with a broken arm. She wasted no time in gnawing hungrily but ineffectively at his temple as he screamed in horror.

Her subconscious clasped her hands together and brought them down in an overarm strike powerful enough to cave in the tricky cranium and she fell onto the spilling mass of tissue and bone, scrabbling the larger chunks of his skull aside to gorge on his brain as the body twitched.

One of his friends – a medium build man with sandy brown hair - yelled in anger and ran forward, caution forgotten in the face of this new horror. He looked out of place with this group, like a stupid kid who lost his way. Emma's opinion of him soured slightly during the next few seconds as he landed punch after punch to her face.

_Hey, hey!_ Emma tried again to wrest control of her limbs but completely failing _That's my face! I need that face and the brain behind it._ A sickening crunch told the story of her jaw being broken.

Another fist smashed against her cheek and her ears rang once more, Emma's vision wobbled and she knew she was close to blackout.

The pain almost restored her control. For a second, she felt human again - a lonely young woman who had never had a life of her own, just a debt of responsibility that had been shoveled ever more deeply on her. How stupid her quest to become a geneticist seemed to her now, a doctor who hated blood with a passion and squelchy pulsing organs doubly so.

Pulsing organs, reminded her of .. something. A kick to the kidney? No that was external, it wasn't part of her needs.

Pivoting Emma distractedly smashed a hand above the knee and grabbed the ankle with the other. Yanking upwards the leg's owner suddenly became extremely double jointed. He screamed, an obvious case of buyer's remorse. After market modifications are always so bothersome.

Emma resumed her meal if you could call it that. The brain was already getting cold and it had chunks of bone sticking out of it, like a macabre version of operation. Whatever was in control of Emma did not care at all as it shoveled the greasy meat into her mouth, small shards of bone slicing painfully down her throat as they were swallowed.

With a small jump, the force controlling her moved to its next victim – the man with the broken knee. Her mouth was on his face, it would almost look seductive for a second to an onlooker before they saw the teeth. Her teeth were tearing divots out of the cheek and ripping his mouth open all the way up the left side, giving him a freaky one sided smile like he was in on the joke.

Emma felt her lungs rasp as she took in a ragged breath, which led to a brief coughing fit. Blood sprayed lightly with each cough, onto his good cheek, into his eyes and mouth. The thug sobbed lightly as he lay there on the path, his blood mingling with hers as she smeared it over his face as she ineffectually tried to bite her way past his flesh. The end effect made him look painted with her blood like it was war paint, applied by Van Gogh.

Arms circled her from behind and started dragging her off of the fallen man, her body flailed wildly and found this latest target's windpipe with the side of her hand. The invisible assailant immediately dropped her and began gasping for air – his gasps became screams as a second later Emma was tearing with her nails at his face and eyes.

Emma hooked her fingers into his mouth, stopping to smash the lower half of his face to pieces when he bit her. She resumed and pulled until the front of his skull gave way, his eyes falling free as it hinged above the forehead and then came clear completely. Emma instantly fell into the feast of flesh, eating as if bobbing for apples. An eye got in the way and was popped as squeamish Emma squealed to herself, trapped within her own brain.

Looking for the fourth man, Emma saw him sprinting way down the path but the recently doubly fed young woman seemed disinclined to run after him. If necessary she could probably follow the fresh trail of urine later.

Stupidly, Emma sank to her knees beside the bodies, screams fading to low moans as pain caused the man with the broken knee to pass repeatedly out of and back into consciousness.

Halfheartedly, she tried banging his head back against the ground, bit his face and the back of his skull but her heart wasn't in it. The demon within was temporarily sated.

She sat there, control slowly returning as she swayed gently back and forth. Her first act as newly reinstated president of her body was to heave. Yet again though, her body refused to relinquish its newly found supply of chemicals. The memory of the eye popping haunting her mind, playing again and again but try as she might, nothing beyond a little bloody bile would find its way to her mouth.

The serotonin she had just ingested slid slowly through her torn blood brain barriers and entered her CSF – Emma felt cold in her stomach but warm everywhere else, her skin flushing from renewed blood flow. She sat there rocking slowly and felt the fire as her body renewed itself. Emma's breathing became more normal as her lungs, which previously rasped with each breath, did the necessary fixes to her pulmonary artery to restore normal function. The pain that had been building in her chest with each cough slowly faded into nothing.

After what seemed like forever, Emma got unsteadily to her feet and wobbled in the general direction of her home.

While the jog out had seemed like a breeze the stagger back home seemed to take forever. By the time she finally made it in, Emma was convinced she could sway for her country.

Her sea legs barely under her she swerved through one room after another until she victoriously stumbled into the bedroom. Shoes still on, blood and more caked head to toe, she once more made a concerted attempt to stain her sheets in perpetuity. The results of her neglect would have to wait though, for she was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

Back on the path, the man with the broken knee was awoken by an irresistible urge to cough uncontrollably, culminating in a big wet spray of blood straight from his lungs. Rolling over he felt his lungs filling with blood and instinctively coughed until bright red blood splattered the pavement. Experiencing a powerful hunger that he had no control over, he slowly dragged himself the few feet to his nearest friend, his left leg trailing stupidly from one side to the other.

The man had no chance to pause, his instincts forcing him to hungrily shovel leftover cold gobs of brain, pieces of bone and scalp down his throat. Finally, hunger temporarily sated, he flopped back onto the path.

Beside him where he lay sat Emma's college id, shining slightly in the light from a halogen lamp illuminating the now dark path.

The photograph that Emma had always hated smiled into the night, an unreadable expression. If the hated picture had any problem with the difficulties she posed for Emma Prime, she was not letting on.

### Chapter 5

Channel 4 WBZ CBS Morning News

A man has been killed in a bizarre cannibalistic attack outside a gas station in Mattapan. Reasons for the attack are still as yet unknown. Though it is thought to be related to the death of two men in Esplanade park last night.

The attacker has been tentatively named as Steve Kerchak, who has been previously convicted of armed robbery and aggravated battery.

Members of the public are warned not to approach this suspected gang member as he is thought to be extremely dangerous.

"Okay this is definitely bluer." Emma looked around in frustration, taking in a vase her mother had given her. In fact, everything looked hospital bright, the whites were outstandingly white and everything had a tint of blue. The sunlight streaming in the window looked almost hazy, like waves of light blue smoke were dissipating from it.

Following a hunch, Emma looked into a large ornamental mirror that had been in her family for generations. Etched flowers surrounded her face and uttered questions perfectly.

"What the fuuuuuuucccck?" Emma questioned, earnestly. Her Irises were tinged yellow. She had always had deep brown eyes yet here before her she could clearly see light brown eyes with a hint of yellow.

She had been up not half an hour and things were already weird.

On the good side, her lower jaw had mostly healed itself while she slept, though it popped painfully when she rotated it from side to side. A not so minor miracle considering before she went to sleep it had been completely disconnected on the left side.

"So, swings and roundabouts I guess," she spoke to herself – seeking the most intelligent – and only – conversation available.

Noticing another difference in mirror her, Emma peered deeper. The difference was the damned wrinkle that had blighted her for the last couple of years - a long, semi-fine horizontal rule she had been fighting with anti-aging creams, balms and salves. They had been applied and discarded serially and all had proven completely without merit.

Today it was completely absent.

Two years of fighting the march of time and stress had yielded precisely no result. Now one day as a monster saw it completely vanquished – it was almost anticlimactic.

Picking up her iPhone, Emma flicked through her calendar for a full five seconds before she realized it was Saturday and her schedule was almost completely at her own discretion. For once, she was not inclined to head into school and catch up on labs – her oft-practiced Saturday morning activity.

Moving to the living room, she chose from the wide array of furniture available to sit on. There was the old but semi-comfortable chair of her grandmothers or the – well that was it really.

Her roommate had provided most of the furniture in their arrangement so now the house was very bare.

_Does my inability to so much as accommodate a second person's buttocks in my home make me a hermit?_ She wondered. _Probably._

The fact was her parents – especially her mother – had taught her early that trusting others meant inevitable disappointment. To her credit though, Emma's mother had never read her diary – because Emma had never kept one. Some things even as a child you just know, and her lack of privacy was always a given. Consequently, Emma had always been most at comfort inside her own mind.

Her lack of trust extended to the opposite sex as well. She had enjoyed a few trysts but always lacked the ability to truly trust anybody. To make it worse there was the ever present focus on school and eventually her career – the few boyfriends she had soon figured out they came second.

Sitting, she turned on the TV and was rewarded with Spongebob. Clucking her tongue she hunted around the cushions on her old chair for a remote. _A ghost of a child or a pothead must inhabit this tiny apartment she thought because every damned time I turn on the TV, Spongebob!_

Finding the remote after what must have been twenty seconds of furious searching, she switched to the news with a flourish.

Where she was greeted with a grainy video of herself annihilating/emasculating/masticating the thugs come would-be rapists from last night. Even with the terrible camera quality they had to stop the footage before she managed to truly do any damage, choosing to blow up a near unrecognizable grayscale side view shot of her face. To think she had signed a petition for better cameras in the parks a few months ago. _Guess I chose the wrong side of that debate_ she mused sarcastically. _Thank goodness for blazing fast governmental response._

Emma sat back, remembering smashing her hands into a man's face until his skull gave way. She did not feel bad for what she did – given her victims choice of social activities - but was disturbed at how she had felt so alive when she did so. She then remembered leaning down and – _No!_ Thought Emma, clamping her eyes shut, refusing to remember.

Opening her eyes, Emma refocused on the T.V. \- and started coughing as she inhaled sharply, taking spit into her lungs. Fumbling with the remote through her coughing fit, she paused the live footage leaving the screen frozen with an image from tonight's advertised movie.

There on the screen was the vacantly staring, mid-shamble figure of a Zombie - reaching directly for the camera as though electronics were the new dish du jour.

"No!" said Emma aloud, a little too loudly. There had previously been little cause to test the thickness of the walls in this apartment.

Thinking frantically, Emma started ticking off properties of Zombies from her very limited knowledge on the subject. _Slow (or fast?), Unable to think, Able to take tremendous damage, Eat Brains..._

Deciding she needed this iterated more clearly, Emma reached to the side table and a just out of reach notebook. Stretching she brushed it with fingertips on a couple of passes before finally pulling it her way.

Carefully, she removed the attached pen and write down in clear lettering the word "Zombie" and then delineated the page into two with a quick divider. Pausing at the top of the second column, Emma finally wrote "Me".

In the Zombie column she wrote down the items she previously iterated through, each as a different bullet on the Zombie list of shame.

Moving over to the other column, she tried to answer each one with a frank description of her own state of affairs – a checklist of her condition.

Next to where she wrote "Sometimes Slow, Shamble" in the Zombie column she paused before writing a tenuous "Normal" under her own area. _That means nothing_ she answered herself. _Zombies are slow or super fast, depending on the movie._

Moving on to the next bullet, she remembered being unable to control her actions. That seemed pretty Zombie-ish.

"But!" she said out loud again, trying to persuade the air to give her another chance. "I am thinking now! I would like to see a Zombie make a list!" she finished triumphantly and put "Normal" into her column for that as well. Part of her hindbrain raised a hand at this, a child in class who is unsure if the answer on the board is actually correct. The rest of her brain, playing the role of teacher perfectly, chose to ignore her.

Moving to a more worrying part – taking damage. Emma sat with the pen in her mouth for a minute, remembering how badly her neck had hurt after the initial attack, lacerations easily accessible to her questing fingers. Feeling her neck now, it was smoother than ever. Another flash of last night and being punched in the cheek repeatedly and yet when she just studied herself in the mirror there wasn't even a sign.

_Zombies don't heal_ she thought, outraged. _They decompose._ In a fit of annoyance she went to write "Normal" in her column but paused. Choosing a slightly less disingenuous answer, she simply wrote "Heals Fast" before moving to the final bullet.

Emma stared at the list for a while "Eats Brains" stared back at her, accusingly. There was no denying that one. With a shaky hand, she slowly wrote "Eats Brains" under her own column too and stared at it for a moment.

Her mind empty from shock, unable to process the implication, she picked up the remote and clicked back to live T.V.

Emma found they had returned from break to regular programming, the news anchor was now showing much clearer footage of a different scene, apparently taken around dawn outside a gas station.

"Mmm mrrr marr meen mmtmmmt a munomo mmms mmrmmn," the anchor reported, very quietly. Fumbling with the control, Emma restored the TV to a more audible volume.

The video continued with someone running away from a limping man who changed target and fell into a hapless bystander who had previously been pumping gas. Though the camera was somewhat distant, Emma thought she recognized the assailant as one of the attackers from last night – _wasn't he the one whose knee I smashed?_ she asked herself and then in a moment of clarity remembered an item she left off of her list. _Infectious_ thought Emma, a cold chill walking slowly down her back. _I forgot that one on my list..._

Had she left him alive? She barely remembered. Given that he was up and meeting new people in a variety of exciting settings seemed to suggest so.

_Oh my god, I'm infectious_ Emma thought numbly. _I bit him and he went on to kill that poor old guy by the gas pump_ she realized with a start, the consequences of her actions hitting her like a hammer.

The weight of her self-accusation forced her back in the chair.

_Tiredness be damned, I have to go to college. They have facilities where I can... what?_ She questioned. _Test any fluid I can think of_ she answered herself firmly. _Saliva, blood, even my spinal fluid if I can somehow take a sample._

Grabbing her coat, Emma was heading out the door when she caught a glance of herself – this time in a full length mirror. She had dried blood and – ooze – caked in her hair and over yesterday's clothes which she was still wearing.

"But first a shower," she said out loud.

"A quick one," she added, under her breath.

* * * * *

"Rob!" Emma said, for once actually excited to see another human being. Rob was another of the power students, he was often in the labs weekends and late, and consistently was top three in all his classes.

His successes in grades were duly paid for in other ways though, he was overly harsh in his manner of speaking and always very guarded in his speech. The effect of these mannerisms had already taken their toll on his face, keeping his lips mostly pursed. In Emma's opinion he looked more rat than human.

He must have picked up on the uncommon bout of friendliness, his guard was up full force as he answered.

"Yeeeeesssss?"

"Could I get you to take a sample of my spinal fluid? I am doing a study for extra credit," Emma asked, handing Rob a syringe.

"Oh right – well uh I would but I have never uh done so before," he replied hesitantly.

Emma paused, taking spinal fluid was not like taking blood. To do so a practitioner had to insert a short syringe – she had two in her hand, ready – and insert it into the spinal column, normally at just below where the cord ends. The process was painful and - if done poorly – dangerous.

Emma weighed the risk – she seemed to heal incredibly fast but did that healing extend to everything? _How badly could Rob screw it up?_ She asked herself.

"I am sure you will do fine Rob," Emma answered smoothly, evidencing a smile that she did not feel.

"Right, sure." Rob answered, fumbling one of the needles from Emma's outstretched hand.

Emma's lack of preparation soon became evident as she scanned around the empty corridor for some kind of gurney to lay flat on – there was absolutely nothing.

Giving up, Emma finally settled for leaning forward with as much spinal curve as possible in an effort to separate the discs. Rob tentatively lined up with Emma's back slowly as she hiked up her shirt enough to reveal the area to puncture.

"Down two disks," Emma advised with outward calm. _Fuuuuuuuuuuuuccccck!_ She noted, inside her head.

Rob adjusted the needle and pressed it to her spine, tentatively waiting for any further advice. When there was none he went ahead and pushed the needle in, to a slight accompanying crack. Emma felt the needle pushing through with an almost unbearable pressure that radiated up her spine.

"Nnnn," Emma noted.

"Sorry," said Rob - finally handing her a tiny vial of fluid.

"That's fine," replied Emma, straightening back up and forcing a smile. "Could I get a CSF sample from you – for comparison?"

"Oh umm sure." Rob lifted his shirt to let Emma slip a needle into his back. Maybe she had learned something from having the procedure performed on her own back but the process seemed to go far more smoothly when she performed it.

"All done," said Emma with a smile.

"That was okay," he commented almost begrudgingly, rubbing his back and straightening up. "Barely felt a pinch."

"I thought you were squeamish?" he added turning back, looking almost suspicious "I remember you nearly vomiting at a dissection?"

Actually, Emma had vomited – though she saw no reason to correct him.

Emma thought for a second. "I have been doing a lot of practical work recently." _Very practical._ "Really pushing my boundaries."

"Well, it is obviously working," said Rob, forcing a smile as he started to make his way once more down the hallway. "Let me know if you need any help with your special project. I could always use more credit."

"I don't think you want part of **This** project, Rob," Emma answered when Rob was out of earshot.

_One thing about becoming a Zombie,_ Emma mused and found herself still uncomfortable using the word _biting into someone's brain gives a very unique perspective on the foolishness of being squeamish._

Remembering the texture of greasy brain and slick bone in her mouth, she felt bile rise. _Within reason_ she added, to herself.

Looking down at the tube of her own spinal fluid she was disgusted, thick blood swirling around in the mixture. Though it could possibly be a sign of Rob's poor syringe work, she somehow doubted it.

Blood in her spinal fluid meant Emma's blood brain barrier – the thing keeping larger red blood cells (and viruses, and bacteria) out of her CSF was probably impaired.

_The next infection I get could kill me_ she pondered with a _gulp a simple cold and my brain could swell, giving me brain damage._

Holding up the other bumper size tube filled with Rob's clear fluid and allowed herself a small smile. She had a crazy theory that the compulsion she had felt last night really revolved around this - the spinal fluid - rather than the brains of her victims.

Pocketing her ill-gotten gains, Emma headed for the lab and, hopefully, some answers. 

### Chapter 6

Channel 4 WBZ CBS Morning News

Four dead in an unprovoked attack. Part of the attack was captured on a local store camera and show a lone man physically assaulting two tourists and two local residents at approximately the same time.

Following is a five second clip showing the attacker. The footage is of a graphic nature – some viewers might find this disturbing.

<Pause for Clip>

The man is as of yet unidentified.

Any members of the public with information are encouraged to contact the bureau investigating the attack at the following number.

_Sitting at a computer which does not have a ceiling camera viewing the screen is paranoia_ thought Emma _and I am above that._ No matter how much the picture was enhanced, she doubted anyone would be able to read it unless the resolution was impressive. With a sigh she chose the computer with the back to the neck-freezing air vent but no overlooking camera. A cloud of shame settled around her as she booted the software tied in to a microscope.

As luck would have it, no one else was in the lab she chose this morning so it was a simple thing to take a sample from the vial of her spinal fluid and analyze it.

_Stem Cells, Stem Cells everywhere_ she thought. The concentration of cells was amazing, she had never seen anything like it. Looking for any other tell-tale signs, everything else though looked... normal.

Changing slides, Emma queued up a blood sample. Cracking open a book to a section on antibodies, Emma started identifying anything in her blood stream - looking for anything unusual.

She was not disappointed. Checking the head of the most prevalent antibody in her system she could not find it in any of her books.

Taking a larger sample of her blood, Emma loaded up the SMAC (Sequential Multiple Analyzer Computer) and settled in for a long wait.

Deciding to use the time wisely she daintily loaded up a slide with some spit and looked for the same unidentified antibody. She found it.

_So my host range is blood AND saliva_ she thought _just perfect. I can't even kiss without giving someone a raving case of Zombie-itis_ she thought. _No public health risk there at least_ the pragmatist in her added, detestable bitch that she was.

Getting back up and walking over to the SMAC screen, Emma found her results were ready and her worst fears confirmed. Her blood contained the three enzymes essential for retroviruses – viruses that insert genetic code into the host. Whatever this virus was, it was changing her at a fundamental level.

Sitting down at her own monitor again, Emma spent some time staring into space. Presumably it was right now replicating into her organs, bone and brain. Would she even be herself when this thing is finished?

Emma was not a huge believer in the concept of a soul. When someone suffered brain injury and their whole personality changed that, to her, did not say great things about the possibility of being controlled by some higher force. Would that be her? Look like Emma but inside hollowed out by a monster?

Deleting the tests and scrubbing the equipment, Emma was in a dream world. As little as 72 hours ago she had been on track with her life, such as it was. Now she seemed destined to live as a hermit or a monster, sneaking fluid samples from classmates or going crazy and bludgeoning strangers in the park.

Checking the news from the lab computer before she left (her laptop still being ensconced in the remains of Big Willie's Pawn Shop, downtown) Emma was searching for any further mention of the park incident. What she found was even more disturbing, a local news clip of the thing she had created - the would-be attacker from the park - had attacked yet again. Even though he had half of his face covered by a scarf like a less fashionable Dick Turpin she recognized him instantly. Emma doubted she would ever forget the way he walked when he sidled into place to block her path last night.

This time he had killed four people. Fortunately for Emma no-one had yet connected this to the earlier murder by the gas station but she assumed that would be only a matter of time. Meanwhile the blood on her hands felt like it would never come off.

_What had they called him before?_ _Steve Kerchak_ her memory supplied – _Russian descent? So generous of me to give him superpowers_ Emma thought sardonically.

_Why would he be feeding again so soon?_ Emma wondered. _Maybe his body is tearing through the fluid he is consuming?_

Try as she might though, Emma couldn't guess at why.

_Either way, I am sure he is not as torn up about being infected as I am_ she pondered.

Emma was not as a rule given to the habit of making snap decisions – she was cautious, someone who weighed her choices carefully. Maybe it was the virus talking and her brain was already altered – or maybe it was the terrible waves of guilt as the monster she created went on to destroy the lives of any number of others but she made her choice in an instant. She would find the Zombie, Kerchak, and she would kill him.

The thought alone made her queasy. _KILL someone? In cold blood..._ if she thought back a couple of weeks, even the idea of setting a trap for a mouse made her uneasy. _How could I possibly manage to voluntarily extinguish a life. What gives me the right?_ She added.

The analytical part of her mind supplied the answer readily – if this Steve was not stopped he would murder more innocents. When weighing his life against any number of other Bostonians there was no contest.

Also, there was the small matter of self-preservation. She could – maybe – manage to keep her own infection under control. Getting to first base or beyond was out for the rest of her existence and she would spend a life trying to sneak infusions of spinal fluid but she was going to become a doctor, after all, so maybe this condition was manageable.

Steve on the other hand seemed to have no wish to manage it and as a collection of bad cells (albeit a big one) he had to be excised, in order to keep the host (in this case, Boston) healthy.

_Healthy-ish_ Emma amended. _Let's not go crazy here._

Mind made up, she shut off the PC. She didn't even notice turning off the light and starting the walk home, she was so wrapped up in her thoughts. Emma also completely failed to notice the lack of fear at walking the 10 minutes to her apartment alone by herself, cutting down alleys she would have once avoided. Her entire life she had been riddled with fear and self-doubt yet now when given an unfamiliar sense of self-confidence she completely failed to notice it.

All in all, she made excellent time.

* * * * *

There was a serious letter to be written to the people who make Law and Order and Emma was going to be the one to do it. When the police do a stakeout on a TV show it was Emma's experience they got a cup of coffee and sat in the car for about two minutes before the perp. shows up.

_Real life, as usual, sucks_ she decided. Sitting behind a bush for two damned hours had quickly dissuaded her of her Law and Order pretentions. _The show went downhill after that original cop whats-his-face died_ she decided.

'Stakeouts' (if that is what you could call her amateur version) were cold, damp at best and - despite it being October - there were still insects who were not too timid to take her blood. _I hope it kills them_ she thought sourly, coughing into her hand. Turning it over slowly, she looked for blood flecks and was relieved to find none. She had yet to figure out what part the coughing played in her losing control but at the least, it seemed to be a sign that it was fast approaching. Nonetheless, she now wished that she had not left the canister of her classmate's spinal fluid at home. She started to feel a phantom of tightness at the back of her jaw, though she was unsure if her mind was making the whole thing up.

Looking back to the path, Emma sighed. She knew from her psych classes that people were creatures of habit but was this one of the monster she herself created, this Steve Kerchak? Maybe he had been in this park by chance when she bit him and now he would never return - he could be anywhere right now killing and infecting others.

A squirrel chattered in the tree above her and Emma had a thought. _Vampires can drink the blood of animals to survive, right? Couldn't the same thing work for me?_

She spent the next 5 minutes chasing squirrels into trees. When they had all taken refuge she even tried climbing one but she soon found out the branches were thin and she had a surprising weight concentrated into a small area. The branches snapped like twigs, depositing her firmly on her ass.

Looking up at a potential snack angrily chattering down at her from a branch twenty feet above, Emma concluded several things.

1) Squirrels are fast little bastards

2) Vampires are fictitious

For good measure Emma swore back at the bushy tailed little rodent – even this was something of a departure from the demure creature her parents had raised.

The verbal/non-verbal match of wits continued for a full moment before the squirrel hopped off to a different tree either satisfied its point had been made or convinced that there was no cure for crazy.

Putting her back to the tree, Emma wondered what the hell she was doing out here in a park, waiting for the man she had bitten. He was a full on thug, what would she do even if he did show up? She doubted the result would be tea and a chat.

Mind made up, she headed out of the park and back to her place, temporarily defeated.

Getting back to her apartment, Emma was about to slide the key into the lock when she noted something amiss – a groove in the door just to the side of the lock. Trying the handle without even attempting to unlock the door, she watched as the door slid silently open.

Emma fought a quick urge to run away and call the police. _You're a big bad Zombie now_ she admonished herself _You can handle whatever two bit burglar lay within._

_Who knows_ she added to herself _I might even get a free lunch out of this._

Sliding quietly down the wall of her hallway, Emma headed slowly towards a rustling she heard in her bedroom. Picking up a candlestick that had belonged to her grandmother – a solid brass affair that felt more like a mace than anything to do with light – she prepared to take the step that would lead her round the doorframe to confront whoever was in there.

"Hey Boss," a voice called out from within and Emma flattened her back against the wall once more.

An answering grunt from across the way in her kitchen snapped Emma's head around. _There are two of them!_ She thought frantically.

"Check this out," bedroom voice blurted and a figure flounced around the corner.

The man was white, about six feet tall and fairly heavyset. His face however was currently obscured by a pair of her sensible undergarments, which he was wearing over his head like a ski mask – the crotch region pinched together between his eyes so he could see.

"I'm Queen Granny Pant-" he stopped mid-sentence, seeing her flat against the wall. At that moment, the proclaimed boss and a third figure appeared from around the other corner and followed the underlings gaze. It was none other than her monster, Steve, who was looking much better thanks for asking.

_And look! He even bought playmates. HOW NICE_ she grumbled to herself, entering into a run towards the only direction that made sense, right for the idiot who was currently wearing her underwear on his face.

Steve for his part made a dive for her but was too late, her trajectory taking her out of his reach and directly shoulder first into Queen Granny Panty's stomach. She felt the impact but kept running – her destination being the giant window about three feet behind his back.

He realized too late her intended destination and had only just grabbed her shoulder as his back made contact with the glass. A quarter of a second later they were both through it and flying screaming out of the fourth story window.

When she was a child – after Michelle died - Emma had dreamt constantly of falling. The woman couldn't help but wonder if it was some kind of premonition. The glass sparkled around her even in what light made it into the alley, looking like fairy dust from Peter Pan.

The images of Never-Never land dissipated as they smashed into the wall opposite and slowly ascribed an arc as both her and her royal visitor fell towards the cold, hard pavement below. Wasting no time, Emma buried her shoulder deeper into the Queen's gut as they dropped, in an awkward attempt to ensure that when they landed she wouldn't bounce into him – effectively using the meat of his intestines as an airbag.

Miracle of miracles, she landed with him squarely below her and her plan worked - sort of. The impact was still harder than anything Emma had ever imagined though; it jarred every inch of her and dislocated the leading shoulder instantly.

Emma rolled off of the airbag and kept rolling. Everything hurt, from her jaw to her legs. Her shoulder was sending awful shooting pains down her arm and across her back.

The pain was too much. She couldn't think, she couldn't properly even breathe. All she could think about was the waves of agony.

While she couldn't stop moving he by contrast was perfectly still. From the little she could see, he had absorbed a lot of the impact with the back of his head. Worse still, her panties were clearly ruined with cross dressing thug blood.

The sight of him bought her back to reality. Steve and another of his crew would be down from the apartment within minutes, she knew.

Grabbing her shoulder with her left hand, Emma nearly passed out from the pain it generated. Still though, she managed to start roughly yanking it forward in an attempt to put the ball back in the socket.

Anger fuelled her and Emma grabbed on to her shoulder even more tightly – with an almighty tug she felt the ball roughly jam back into place.

Looking up, vision still swimming from the previous waves of agony, she saw Steve rounding the corner into alley less than one hundred feet away.

"Give me a break," she yelled at him, exasperated, and staggered to her feet, turning unevenly towards the other end of the alley and the park beyond.

Still groggy from the pain, Emma loped rather than ran back in the direction of the park. Her muscles were like jelly and she felt like she would fall with every step but sheer bloody-mindedness kept her on her feet and running. How long that would last though was anyone's guess.

Turning a bend, Emma saw a panacea ahead, a police officer clad in the customary blues walking down the path at a sensible pace towards her.

"HELP!" she screamed, and his gaze instantly snapped towards Emma and the two men closing the gap behind her.

In a quick motion, the policeman had pulled his gun and pointed it at her attackers, who were unfortunately directly behind her. With two thoroughly pissed off, vicious thugs chasing her and the formal end of a 9mm pointed directly at her face Emma did not like where this morning was heading.

It was then that Steve did Emma the massive solid of tackling her, taking her down and out of the potential line of fire. The policeman didn't hesitate, putting a round into the shoulder of the other man who had been chasing her.

Unfortunately it barely slowed the bull of a man. He rammed into the policeman with a move stolen straight from a football lineman, sending the officer sprawling. A kick to the big cop's side was the last thing Emma saw before a twisting Steve rolled, throwing her out of the line of sight of the other fight.

Down and tumbling on the ground, Emma quickly realized she had at least one advantage working for her, one of weight. The slender Steve felt lighter than her - normally this would be fuel for an early New Year resolution but right now she would take it and thank her lucky stars and birthing hips.

They ended the roll with her on top. She gave a sharp jab to Steve's face and watched satisfied as his head snapped back. _Oh yes this is much more like it!_ She thought to herself and punched him again across the cheek.

Steve wasn't defenseless though, he was not the biggest of men and was used to being outweighed and outmuscled in fights. A leg came up, snapping into Emma with astounding force that left her with no recourse but to let out an awkward squawk. Using the distraction he rolled her off of him and - still lying on his back - snapped another kick into her side that left her defensively rolling away.

Getting to her feet winded, she found Steve had beat her to it – a roundhouse slipped past her half-hearted guarding forearm and smashed her cheek followed by a punch into her stomach that winded her even further.

Emma noted Steve's shift to offensive but was unable to respond effectively to it. Up close her sloppy style had been forgivable but standing and fighting he could counter anything she threw. The proof of this was immediately evident when she lashed out and had her wrist grabbed. He slammed a fist into her elbow that bent it so far forward she was amazed it didn't break outright, as was he if she was any judge of expression.

As it was, it just hurt like hell.

Steve contented himself with twisting and sending her flying through the air. As she sailed majestically, Emma regaled herself at the missed opportunities to learn Karate. When she landed – on her face - she mused that Judo would also have been fine. A crick in her shoulder chimed in that yoga would have been a start.

Kicking wildly backwards she managed to connect and half trip her attacker but he recovered so quickly it barely slowed him. She rolled over preparing to fend off whatever kicks she could but was surprised with a gunshot.

Arching her head backwards she saw the police officer standing awkwardly, blood staining his torn jacket and shirt, over the downed body of the second attacker. His second shot had been much more effective – it was to the head.

"I said - " he intoned, pointing the gun a little shakily at Steve, sweat beading on his forehead "Freeze!"

Steve paused for just a second then jumped at the cop, crossing the five feet before he could even take a shot. The blooded policeman tried to bring the gun down on Steve's head but was rewarded with nothing but air as the slippery zombie side-stepped. This left the perfect opportunity for Steve to lean forward and bite ferociously into the stupefied cop's shoulder.

A look of surprise came over his face as he sank to his knees, the deadly virus working its way through his veins and robbing him of any strength he had. The gun fell from his hand and skittered to a halt a foot away.

Steve, victorious, gave a knee to the policeman's face and then turned to find the gun pointing at him once more for Emma had scrabbled instantly across the ground and picked it up. Firing wildly, a round carved a furrow into Steve's upper arm, not a big wound but carrying just enough force to throw the arm backwards.

Wasting no time, he turned and ran. As much as Emma would have liked to riddle him with bullets, she was just relieved to see him go. Her experience with guns extended a full twenty seconds in the past and frankly she was astounded to have hit him at all even from only three feet away. If her Carnival Game experience was any judge, she should have missed repeatedly and then drowned her sorrows in funnel cake.

Down on his knees with his legs spread out uselessly at angles, the man in blue looked scared. Emma remembered the sensation well, the nausea and vertigo. She had honestly thought she was going to die and she could see the same range of emotions crossing the man's face. Painfully taking a knee beside him, she rested her forehead against his shoulder.

"Thank you for saving me," she said earnestly, closing her eyes. "I wish there had been someone to save you."

After a moment of silent comfort, Emma got up and strode (limped) over to select a big rock from the landscaped area separating the path from the grass.

Circling behind the body of the policeman, Emma could almost pretend he was already dead.

"You deserve better than this," she stated awkwardly and bought the rock down on the back of his head.

### Chapter 7

Emma was a homebody, pure and simple. Every day when she came home from class, she would walk through the door and feel a portion of her cares melt away. There was something magical about returning to her apartment, her safe-house against the world outside.

This was not one of those times.

Scuttling through the door, Emma stopped moving and listened intently for a few seconds - listening for creaking floorboards, intake of breath or anything that said Steve might have returned here after their recent outing. She doubted it though – both times he had attacked her had been with superior numbers. She suspected this was because he didn't take chances.

Her elbow gave a warning throb, a dash of pain that radiated all the way down to her wrist and almost up to her shoulder. The newfound pragmatist in Emma insisted she hurry, in case Steve discovered a wild streak and came back tonight, flunkies be damned.

Moving first to the bathroom, Emma had a moment of panic when the floorboards creaked. Ducking she scuttled to flatten herself against a wall until she realized a second later that the creaking was because of her. Feeling foolish she straightened back up – had they always made so much noise?

Looking in a hallway mirror, Emma didn't think she looked any different - the same mousey face looked back at her as always. Finishing her trip to the bathroom she risked a quick step on the scales to play out the hunch.

"Twenty five fucking pounds?!" Emma yelled, indignant at this massive weight gain. Running back to the mirror she looked at herself again, her eyes searching for pouches of fat. Fat that just wasn't there.

Thinking about it though, her arms felt heavier. Her muscles felt tighter too, not bigger just more dense - everything felt more dense actually, not just her arms. That explained the park though; she had been surprised to feel that she had the advantage weight-wise against Steve.

She resolved to completely abuse her college's facilities to get an MRI scan at the first opportunity.

Taking a last inventory of herself in the mirror, Emma quickly bound the elbow Steve had bent backwards with a bandage to restrict movement and give it a chance to heal.

Looking around the apartment, Emma grabbed a bag and started to pack the essentials she would need for who knows how long. She knew now without a doubt that Steve would not go quietly into the night.

### Chapter 8

Emma woke, looked up and saw a crack in the ceiling. _The ceiling is giving way!_ She thought and rolled out of bed onto her weakened elbow.

Yelping and holding her arm to her, last night slowly came back to her. She was staying in a cheap yet surprisingly uncomfortable hotel across town from her clean and convenient apartment – all because of that dick, Steve.

Emma was tempted to try for "Sleep II – the Sleepening" until she remembered this morning held what was previously her least favorite Biology class – Forensic Science. It was only the sixth week of the semester and she had already thrown up twice.

Now though she doubted it would affect her the same way – and more importantly she might learn some skills she could use.

Unwrapping her elbow to look at it, Emma was almost surprised that it wasn't broken. There was a big, ugly bruise but the pain had mostly subsided and her range of movement was much better – though the joint popped with each rotation.

Re-wrapping her arm with more first aid supplies unearthed from their previous final resting place in her apartment, Emma was suddenly tempted to wrap her head in bandages and pretend she was a Mummy for the day.

_Not only is that the wrong form of undead_ she chastised herself _It is also very odd. Being a Zombie is a big enough flaw for a girl on the dating market, you don't have to compound the problem by having a weird sense of humor._

* * * * *

One hour and eight Tylenol later and she was watching an actual autopsy. Standing only a few feet behind the Doctor performing it she was able to see everything and was frantically taking notes – though she was not at all helped by having to take them left handed. Her elbow was bound too tightly to write.

"So how do you crack the ribs open like that?" she asked the instructor, Professor Wilson – or as he insisted, Dan. The cadaver had come in what she mentally referred to as 'Open Box Item' condition – meaning the ribs were already parted and the organs were jumbled like the pieces of a particularly morbid jigsaw. _Probably the result of an earlier class_ she added mentally. Obligingly, the Doctor performing the autopsy showed her a crank which could be used to spread them open.

"I can't believe you peeled yourself from the back wall," Stacy – one of her bitchier classmates – quipped. Emma shot her a glare.

"Well," replied Emma "I couldn't very well learn from back there. I am actually thinking of changing my focus from Genetics to a more practical application."

She turned to the instructor. "Is there any way to earn extra credit by helping assist autopsies?"

"We do those programs from time to time," the Doctor nodded while talking. "Honestly, we do not get many undergraduate applications," he laughed.

"Honestly I can't believe Heaving Emma is the one asking," Rob joked. That annoying bitch Stacy laughed hardest. Emma added her to her emergency food source list before remembering that she shouldn't have one.

Walking back from class later, Emma reflected on her change of priorities. She had not been lying about her newfound interest in becoming a practicing Medical Doctor as opposed to a lab monkey. It was weird that she now held no fear for the messier aspects of medicine – though she resented her classmates for bringing it up. Was it fear that had held her back before?

Confronting death always led her back to memories of her sister. She suspected it was the fear of confronting these shades that kept her away from the subject altogether. What lengths do I go to, just to not feel or think about anything sad? She wondered.

That was a lot of baggage. _How have I survived carrying that around? By not truly allowing myself to be a person_ she decided, sadly. _I have been an automaton, drifting through existence. Living just to obey the commands of my master, the ghost of someone long dead. Living up to the ideal set not by my awesome sister but an unrealistic memory of her._

Now though, Emma felt the strings had been cut - or if not cut at least loosened.

Plus while working as an assistant during autopsies there HAD to be opportunity to swipe spinal fluid from the cadavers. Her unique dietary requirements might never be a problem again!

Emma's phone rang and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Mentally shoving her heart back down out of her throat she answered it – it was a local number after all, less chance of bullshit telemarketing.

"Hello?" asked the voice from the other end, posing the question like they had managed to contact the other side and were tentatively ready to talk to some spirits about this thing called Death.

"Hi!" she answered, injecting a note of the upbeat into her answer "Who is this please?"

"This is Professor Wilson, you just left my class." Emma mentally facepalmed for not recognizing his voice. "I don't mean to jump on your offer of assistance almost immediately but I just got called in to perform an emergency autopsy and the postgrad who usually assists me in these things has Strep. The patient might be beyond worrying but I am not, so I was hoping for someone a little more able bodied."

* * * * *

Thirty minutes later, Emma was walking up to Professor Wilson outside a big glass building.

"Glad you could make it!" He said loudly, the wind taking his words and throwing them back towards him.

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," Emma replied, shaking his hand "I must confess I am confused though, why are you performing autopsies for the police and why aren't they using their own coroner?"

"Because being a professor pays bupkis," answered her teacher honestly, using a word Emma had not heard since childhood. She was so amused rolling it around in her head that she nearly missed the rest of the sentence.

"I am doing the autopsy because the body is being held by the CDC, not the police," he finished. "The CDC is headquartered in Atlanta, so they tend to hire local whenever they have suspicious materials that need examining."

"Whoa! The Center for Disease Control?" Emma asked, forcing concern into her voice – she had a feeling deep in the pit of her stomach that she knew what disease they were hoping to control. "Is everything okay, should I be concerned?"

"Doubtful. I get a few of these a year and they have yet to be anything serious. Standard MO is the suspicious body is transferred to a quarantine area in the nice FBI building."

He dutifully pointed to the glass building "and an outside consultant is bought in. Taadaa," he finished with a flourish.

"One time, they had me dissect a duck," he confided.

Noting her incredulous look he shrugged "They can't transfer a diseased bird – contagion risk – so even with an animal the autopsy has to be done locally."

"I still think mentioning over the phone that a Hazmat suit was appropriate attire would have been courteous," Emma grumbled.

"And scare the patient, are you mad?" asked the professor, a trace of Scottish accent in his voice as he held a scandalized air. For a moment, Emma could see the Celtic heritage but just as quickly it was gone. "Come on," he added, putting an arm around her shoulder and hugging her roughly, as one might a good friend. "This is work experience that means something. You've been on the job for one afternoon and not only will you get to see your first fresh dead body but it could have something exciting and communicable too!"

"I thought you said these always turn out to be nothing," Emma replied, still suspicious.

"Well I can always dream can't I?" Dan said wistfully, opening the door to the building and leading Emma through.

Within minutes, a stony faced FBI officer led them to a room and stood impassively. Looking through a small porthole on the door Emma could see three bodies lined up for them to inspect - though it was hard to make out details through sheets of plastic that ensconced the center of the room.

"In all seriousness, should we be suited up?" asked Emma. She had wanted to say suited up since she watched Ghostbusters as a small child. _Dreams do come true!_ She squealed inside with glee.

"We have tested the air, the contagion does not seem to be airborne," the agent replied in a calm voice. The man could be stoic for his country.

"But yes," added Dan, glaring at the agent. "You always wear a suit when there is risk. That is why numbskull here -" the agent had the decency to look annoyed " - is opening doors and not doing the autopsies himself."

"Because the contagion – if there is one - could be gestating, or liquid contact or only present in a certain organ. What if he had a mutated Ebola virus and his entire insides have liquefied to the consistency of a milky paste?"

"Good lord could that happen?!" asked Emma honestly, genuinely horrified for the first time in DAYS. Well a day anyway.

"Fortunately it hasn't yet," Dan replied, pulling a couple of suits from a locker.

Turning back to the agent, he asked. "Well shouldn't you be opening doors or something?" and the man left without a word.

"He is one of the ones with a sense of humor" Dan annotated, hiking his thumb towards the slowly closing door. "True story."

* * * * *

Emma had never worn a Hazardous Materials suit before. It took her a surprisingly long time to get it on and everything situated. Of course no sooner was she fully into the thing than she got the wicked urge to pee. _Where is the catheter version of this getup?_ She wondered.

_Gross!_ She added as a mental afterthought.

Joining Dan back in the main room after, she felt like she was going to travel to space. Or perform a hazardous autopsy cynically. _OR_ she thought finally with glee _SPACE AUTOPSY_. Okay that sounded awesome but a little too intense – she hadn't had her shots yet. If she could still catch Malaria, Emma reasoned she wasn't vaccinated enough to head out of the gravity well of our planet.

Dan nodded to her and pushed open the thick metal door separating them from the three bodies. Following him into the room, Emma was instantly struck by the cold. There were no billowing clouds of frosty air because the entire room was still and dry as the desert. Emma thought about this for a second and nodded to herself – it made sense as that would keep the bodies in the best condition.

Slowly Dan walked ahead of her in his awful glowing yellow suit and pushed aside the plastic, also allowing her admittance.

Looking down at the first body, Emma gave a noticeable start out of shock. The man on the slab in front of her was the taller man from the night in the park, the man whose arm she had broken and then smashed open his head.

"What is it," asked Dan "Do you recognize him?"

"No," replied Emma "it is just .. his head. It is so awful."

_When in doubt, pull the weak little woman card_ she thought, self-satisfied for a second, then back to appalled. _They are onto me_ thought Emma wildly, thinking of ways to escape. She didn't even have a passport, a glaring omission on Plan "No-Extradition."

"Difficult to believe the attacker was a small woman about 5'6" isn't it?" asked an FBI doctor in a hazmat suit of his own, pushing past the plastic from the other side of the room.

"Dr Seneca," the FBI man added, extending a hand in greeting. "I am here as your liaison, I have all the details we are releasing and can act as a consult to the CDC."

"Dan Wilson," answered her professor "And this is my assistant Emma. What details can you give me about why the CDC was called in on this case?"

"Two sets of murders, in all cases the assailant gave every sign of being highly medicated or intoxicated but blood recovered from the scene came up mostly negative."

"Mostly?" replied Dan, Emma could imagine a raised eyebrow inside the plastic suit but that was just hearsay as he was faced away from her.

"The second attacker was under the influence of alcohol but mmm a minimal amount. Certainly not enough to account for the impairment in control" the doctors studied the body in front of Emma for a second, Dan pushing the head first to one side then the other. "The most suspicious thing however – the reason my director called the CDC – is the attacker from the third homicide was gravely injured in the initial attack."

"How do you know that?" asked Dan. Emma could just make out that his head was tilted slightly to the side inside the suit.

"Initial workups of blood taken from the two scenes. We also have video footage – of varying quality I am afraid but certain details can be made out. The video from the first attack was extremely poor but some details were pieced together."

"There were four men initially at the first crime scene, attackers turned victims. Two dead."

Dr Seneca pointed to corpse two and then one in order "Another had his knee broken and severe head trauma – though apparently not fatal – and the last one ran off."

"I don't fucking blame him," answered her professor.

"So that explains these two bodies," he added, putting his hands on the first two tables. "Tell me about this one," he motioned while walking over to the last gurney.

"Attacked outside a gas station by the man from the park where the initial attack happened – "

"The one with the broken knee?" added Dan.

"Yes - we matched DNA from the blood samples at both scenes."

"Are you sure the evidence wasn't contaminated?" asked her professor.

"Positive," answered the FBI Doctor, his eyes narrowing. Emma had very limited knowledge of such things but her initial guess was he had been the one to collect it.

"Hmmm I am rarely positive about anything," Dan absently remarked, looking at the bite marks from the gas station victim. "But I am not here to question your methods," Dan added, banging his hands against the plastic suit with an awkward motion.

Even with her complete lack of experience, Emma was getting the impression that her forensics teacher was more than just a professional academic. Inside her suit, Emma was sweating. If they connected the four people Steve had killed in the convenience store or – worse still – the two bodies outside her apartment to this fine collection it would be a very simple matter to follow the trail back to her door.

_My broken front door_ she thought sourly to herself.

"Very well, let's start chronologically," he said, flipping a brake on the second gurney – Emma's first kill - and rolled it to the slab. The harsh white light making it look like an alien was going to spirit the body away.

Finishing moving the body, Dan turned to Emma in full lecture mode again. "I find establishing a timeline helps smooth out any mental wrinkles I might have. By constraining whatever parameters I can I am less likely to encounter problems matching any other facts I discover to the model of possible infection we have before us. In this case, suppose the third corpse is infected but the blood we run from the man with the broken knee comes up negative that is an instant red flag and highlights that errors have occurred somewhere in the bagging and tagging process."

Emma nodded mutely. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the FBI pathologist shift in his suit at the further implication that his process was in question.

Putting his index fingers together and bringing them to his mask in a position that Emma could only assume was in line with his bottom lip, the Professor walked around the corpse.

Turning to the FBI Doctor, Dan asked "Can I see the video footage of this homicide?"

"Afraid not," the FBI man answered, not seeming to be deeply moved.

Dan sighed. "Looks like we will have to do this the old fashioned way then." The Professor took a moment to rearrange and examine limbs of the naked figure.

"The break in his right arm makes little sense within context of the other cranial blunt force trauma - I presume it happened first. The break is angled outwards, which doesn't tell us much. It could have happened with a military style hold – Punch/Grab/Break."

He demonstrated quickly by having Emma reach out her right arm, grabbed at the wrist with his right and pretended to smash with his left. A cold part of Emma's mind noted it for future use.

"I doubt it though. For one thing the M.O. doesn't fit - this is a frenzied attack. Not at all calculating and military. For another I think the break is too low – almost to the wrist."

Dan circled the body like a shark "I think the attacker was in a choke hold, submissive position. Given that she is female this makes sense to me – this victim thought himself in power."

He demonstrated again on Emma, holding in a position not dissimilar to the one employed by the man on the table two nights before.

Feeling an acute sense of déjà vu, Emma was almost in a dream, feeling herself reach up and grab the arm just like she had a day ago.

"Yes, like that and – snap! Yes that would be just right. She exhibited a surprising amount of force from that position." Dan nodded to himself and noticed Emma still had him in a hold. "Could you let go of my arm please?" he asked pleasantly.

It took a second for the cordial request to reach through the sudden haze clouding Emma's mind. When it did though she instantly spread her fingers wide.

"Quite a grip," said Dan smiling. "That first break has little bearing though so let's move on. Obviously the man" he indicated their silent visitor on the autopsy table. "Let go at that point. He was bought to the ground soon after. There is a complete lack of cuts or bruising on the legs though so my guess is the mess of bruises on his chest conceal how or with what that contact happened.

Let's look at the main cranial trauma, the line goes right down his body – The attacker was either above him or standing on him."

The professor looked back at Emma who nodded, internally disturbed to see the scene calculated piece by piece like a jigsaw.

"Now look with me at the damage," Dan requested, drawing Emma back to the present. Peering into the skull she felt momentarily queasy – the remains of the brain looked more like a thick soup than anything else.

"It is hard so see with subsequent hits but the most of the force seems to point towards the top of his head. I think the woman who did this was standing on him. And yet the angle is shallow – if this was say a baseball bat it would smash in at a heavy angle because of distance but this is sloping in. Close up. Like... this" he said, clasping his fists together and bringing them down in front of him with a chopping motion."

"Hardcore," Emma breathed, astounded that he had worked all of this out from a few observations.

"I know!" answered Dan, a fire behind his eyes. "This is one of the bloodiest struggles I have ever fantasized about witnessing!" Looking down again he frowned once more "It doesn't quite make sense yet though. If the hits were done with fists, why all these cuts towards the side of the wound?"

"Maybe they were done before?" Emma offered, not wanting to give anything away but needing to appear clued in.

"I think so!" he replied. "But... she had nothing in her hands. What would she have used to cut his face?" he asked, bending down before receiving a look of surprised intuition. The Professor surprised Emma by grabbing a swab with a swift motion from the table and started applying it to the cuts to the left side of the main chasm.

"They're bites!" He said, his excitement muffled slightly by his facemask. "She bit him!" he added, peering closely at the clammy flesh.

"I'm right aren't I!" he said, turning back to the FBI pathologist.

Emma could see through the facemask the pathologist's lips become a tight line. "It's possible," he finally admitted.

"Damn straight," replied Dan, going back to swabbing.

* * * * *

Dan moved on to the second body she had created – the man whose face she had pulled off. It didn't take long for him to get into the scene and again his take was too close to reality. Pantomiming the action, Dan noted the semi-crushed windpipe and moved swiftly past it, discounting it as trivial.

The Professor was soon looking for stress points to see where the force had been applied to pull away the front of the skull - Emma noted from the corner of her eye that the FBI pathologist was now looking on with interest. Quite a different attitude than when Dan had started.

_Just my luck_ thought Emma sourly. _My professor turns out to be some kind of forensics Rembrandt._

Waking from her musing, Emma saw the canny man studying the victim's upper jaw – what was left of it. When the front of his head had separated it had taken half his mouth along for the ride but the back molars were still in place.

"There is a lot of blood around the teeth," Dan commented, thoughtfully drumming a staccato rhythm on the metal table while he thought.

"There is a lot of blood everywhere," the FBI home team countered.

"You are right, most all of it his own," Dan agreed. "However see how it worked around the gums? I bet he bit whoever did this and that is why they smashed his lower jaw."

"It was an aggravated attack!" exclaimed the FBI man in exasperation.

"True, but even in such an attack there is still purpose isn't there?" Dan answered "Someone has lost their mind, they attack the first target possible."

Within seconds he had a scalpel in hand and was cutting open the esophagus. Sure enough, blood lined it – Emma's blood.

"Couldn't it be his as well?" asked Emma, trying to derail this train just a little.

"I doubt it," Dan answered as he turning towards her, the mask over the lower half of his face making him look positively apocalyptic "The first hit took his lower jaw clean off - that's a lot of blood for someone to swallow with only half a mouth."

Dan looked around at the bodies again "I hope to god that mystery woman was just high as hell on PCP," he said. "Somehow though, I doubt it."

Dan turned to the pathologist "What do you think it would take to pull apart a human skull like that?" he asked.

"Assuming no skull defects? 150lbs of pull I would guess," answered the FBI Doctor, being drawn almost against his will into the energy of the scene Dan was painting "And digging their fingertips into the soft pallet would mean they did the whole thing without a firm grip – they would have to use just their fingertips."

"But don't mountain climbers pull themselves up by just their fingertips?" answered Emma, still playing the role of devil's advocate to curb their enthusiasm.

"Yes, I grant you it is within peak human capability but a mountain climber certainly doesn't fit my profile of someone hopped up on glorified horse tranquilizers," replied her professor, the man who would be exposing her as a monster.

"Anyway," he added "we will know for sure when we examine the fluids."

Moving on to the next body – the first of Steve's kills – Emma managed to temporarily push back her misgivings about her fate. Right now the focus wasn't on her but instead on Steve, maybe the two pathologists would be able to turn their spotlight on him, giving her vital information or at least a little insight.

Looking over the body, Emma noted the first bite she had seen on the news a couple of days ago – to the old man's right shoulder from behind. He had been completely oblivious to the danger until too late. Strangely he seemed fairly untouched apart from the chunk torn from his shoulder though, a fact that Emma didn't understand.

Taking liberties she walked over to the head and turned the corpse slightly, a yawning hole greeted her inspection. While there was massive trauma to the brain inside, Emma could easily see some was missing. _Looks like Steve got his CSF_ Emma thought, noting the chunks of scalp caught into the jagged skull edges, their meaty underpinnings looking like worms struggling out of sodden earth. Despite her experiences in the last week, Emma felt her stomach turn.

"Go on," prompted her teacher, prompting momentary confusion – did he mean she should vomit?

"Go on... what?" asked Emma surprised "I didn't say anything."

"I know, I am inviting you to run through the events preceding this man's death, like I did the others. You are looking particularly for any sites of fluid or tissue samples from the attacker" he reminded.

Emma's first reaction was to be annoyed, here she was hoping to get a profile of Steve's movements and instead – just her luck – she was the schmuck doing the assessment. The petulance eroded though, maybe she could learn something while doing the inspection – she might even be able to keep key details to herself.

"Well... " replied Emma, gulping. She felt like a kid again. Scanning the corpse she decided to start with the familiar and work outwards.

"That," she pointed to the shoulder "is a bite - although I saw that happen on the news yesterday. He had his back turned as the attacker ran in, didn't see it coming."

"Okay, so that's what you know," answered Dan "and what then?"

"If you look at the back of the head it is caved in cleanly."

She turned the corpse on the side and looked again at the hole in the back of his head, the hole almost seemed to come to a point.

"I am guessing that isn't a gun wound... if it was I would imagine a hole of that size wouldn't leave him with much of a face. So... he hit him with something," she mused for a second remembering the 5 second clip – he didn't look like he was carrying anything.

"Or hit his head against something," she added quietly. She turned the head to look at the hole again, it had an almost teardrop shape, pointing towards the crown of his head.

"Maybe after biting his shoulder, the attacker grabbed his face and smashed his head into an edge? It was at a gas station so... a curb maybe? Or the edge of a square pillar – those are normally concrete."

Emma turned to look at Dr. Seneca, almost pleadingly. He had seen video footage, presumably the gas station camera could confirm her take on events. After a moment he nodded.

"He left a fingerprint on the victim's glasses arm which was used to identify him" the FBI pathologist replied.

An emboldened Emma turned back to the body.

"So where did all the brain go?" asked Emma idly, taking a move that her mind screamed was too risky. Sometimes though she reasoned with herself _the only way forward is through._

"Three head injuries, I mean what's the chances of that? Did anyone weigh the grey matter left in the other two?" she asked the FBI pathologist innocently and was both gratified and horrified when he shook his head no.

_Sure hope this doesn't come back to haunt me_ she thought to herself.

"Honestly, the other body had bites to the face - I think that if I swab the sides of this hole, I will find saliva," she continued.

"Only one way to find out" answered Dan, picking up another vial and opening it. Emma took it from him and began swabbing the jagged scalp edges that had made her stomach turn earlier. Prolonged proximity was doing nothing to further endear them to her digestive system.

Almost done, Emma looked into the cavity in the poor old man's head and narrowly stopped herself from doing a double take. Visible from around the side of the Parietal Lobe was the sharp corner of a business card.

Picking up another vial with what Emma assumed must have been the most artificial calm expression ever, Emma pretended to be carefully collecting a sample of the victim's CSF for comparative study. Reaching out with her ring and little finger, she managed to lightly tug the card free, palming it as she removed her hand from the conspicuously consumed head.

_And mother thought I would make a lousy magician!_ Emma thought to herself with supreme satisfaction.

### Chapter 9

About an hour later, Emma and Dan were both awkwardly removing the bio suit in the same glorified locker room they had used earlier. A faint surrounding body odor did nothing to dissuade the lecher in her from taking a good hard look at Dan's boxer clad ass when he was turned wiggling out of the full body covering. She was not disappointed.

"Now comes the boring part," commented Dan, turning back around to find Emma nonchalantly checking her hair in a mirror.

"Hmmm?" responded Emma, the master of disguise.

"Comparison of the various fluids we took in there. We took blood and spinal fluid from the three corpses," he added ticking off a finger "then there was saliva and blood belonging to the two attackers taken from the bodies," he said, brandishing a second finger.

"Firstly to confirm our view of events," Emma knew her professor was being kind, describing the analysis as a combined effort. Dan had masterfully managed all the heavy lifting.

"And then to compare the virus elements. We will be looking for infection vectors such as airborne versus contact and communicability."

Blank look from Emma.

"How infectious they are," Dan added.

"Oh that's not the boring stuff to me," replied Emma. She wanted to know exactly what the CDC got from the bodies and the only way she could figure to do so would be to ingratiate herself into this process. That the samples could inform her later incarceration and/or medical disposal helped inject an element of excitement into the proceedings so she wasn't even technically lying.

"Oh, I forgot you were hoping to become a geneticist!" Dan remembered "How good are you?" he asked, eyes mock-narrowing.

"I am still pretty green," she answered truthfully "but I would really like to take a look at a virus that could potentially effect subject disposition or even healing rate."

_Again_ she added mentally, thinking to her recent lab work.

"I have some lassitude on my choice of colleagues for the analysis," replied Dan thoughtfully "It wouldn't hurt to have you there – who knows, you might come up with something."

_Or in this case, down with something_ Emma thought _Down with a virus that could make me into the worst curse on humanity since the Black Plague._

"I would love to!" she replied out loud.

"In that case, to the lab!" Dan reiterated pointing dramatically, with just a hint of his Scottish brogue.

* * * * *

Dan had all the samples lined up by person. Victim 1, Victim 2, Victim 3, Attacker 1, Attacker 2. It was funny to see her entire identity boiled down to the words "Attacker 1". But not haha funny.

Knowing what to look for on her turn with the Victim 1 - the first man Emma had ever killed – she spotted none of her telltale antibodies in his saliva. No surprise there, given she had brutally murdered him less than a minute after the first bite.

Emma tried to summon up some form of contrition at the act of murder but try as she might, failed completely. His unwashed odor splashed back over her in her mind and she shuddered involuntarily. People should give me an award for taking out that rapist-in-training trash she thought unkindly.

Taking the blood sample, Emma booted up the SMAC just as she had on her own blood previously. She pretended not to notice Dan watching her.

Waiting patiently for the answers, she leaned forward as she noticed the screen change. Just as she expected, traces of the three enzymes indicating a retrovirus.

_In less than a minute, the virus had replicated enough for its enzyme production to be detectable by the SMAC,_ Emma thought gloomily _so I guess I am well and truly boned by now._

"Dr. Wilson," she called - forcing herself to sound cheery, though a cold ball of fear had taken up residence in her stomach.

"Yes?" he replied, instantly appearing at her elbow. He must have been watching from across the room.

"I am seeing PR, RT and IN enzymes in this blood sample – I suspect victim 1 to have contracted a virus – specifically a retrovirus. I ran these tests in response to seeing an antibody I was unable to identify so it might also be previously unidentified."

Emma hoped this gamble would pay off, she was distilling hours of research on her own blood into this analysis. Hopefully it would make her look good enough to keep around.

"I didn't find the antibodies in his saliva so either he had just contracted this unknown pathogen and it had not spread yet or the host target is blood only," she continued smoothly.

"Not that I doubt you but I need to verify your findings" Dan replied, stepping over to her lab computer. Bringing up an App on his iPhone, he started comparing the sample on the screen with various virus traits.

Finally sitting back, Dan looked stunned.

"I think you are right," he said finally, looking over at her at last. "You might have just been the first to diagnose a brand new virus, I doubt any other undergrad could say that."

Emma stood to the side - pride filling her chest, her own contagion forgotten.

"This is huge," Dan added, getting up and starting to pace.

"We need to examine these other fluids quickly" he said suddenly, turning to Emma then moving to get a slide ready from victim 2.

As Emma expected, everything came up negative. She had butchered the man, ripping his skull apart before she had fallen into his grey matter.

"Maybe the first virus was unrelated?" asked Emma, playing along like she was 14 again and roleplaying with her friends.

"No, if anything this just confirms the virus isn't airborne in nature," replied Dan, sounding frustrated. "If my prediction of events was anywhere close to accurate he wasn't bitten until after death."

"Sod this foreplay," he added, his accent the strongest since she had met him and rolled his chair over to the vial containing the swab of her saliva, labelled attacker 1 saliva. Carefully, he scraped it against the slide. After splitting the sample with the team at the FBI there wasn't enough to afford waste.

Almost immediately, the slide was covered and under the scope. Dan was peering through the tiny window but the results were broadcast onto a 22 inch screen right in front of Emma.

She watched in mute silence as her antibodies slowly wiggled across the screen. Dan focused in and soon the distinctive head was clearly visible.

"So the host target is Saliva AND Blood," he muttered to himself. "Which means the first victim was newly infected."

He spent another minute slowly following an individual cell before looking up. Seeing the screen he blinked in momentary confusion – obviously his mind was elsewhere.

"I would give anything to know what DNA changes it does," he commented at last, his brain at last focusing on the present.

_So would I_ thought Emma darkly. The virus RNA could literally do anything to her genetic structure, make her superhuman or turn her into a thing.

_If I am not one already_ she added mentally, before dismissing the thought _. I have to believe I am still a candidate for salvation, else I might as well throw myself through the window right now._

The plan was not without faults - the lab was back at the college and only on the third floor. Emma suspected she would live through such a descent.

"This is interesting," said Dan, pulling Emma from her reverie – she had apparently been looking at the window.

_Spoilers!_ She thought.

Turning back, Emma found he had queued up a slide of what seemed to be blood. Steve's, she soon found out.

"This is blood taken from the first scene," Dan explained "We see signs of infection in the blood and thiiiiiiiss.." he drew out the this while he slid in a second blood slide "Is blood from the second crime scene. Look at the increase in infection. According to the times the FBI provided this was less than an hour later – this thing replicates incredibly fast."

As he spoke, Dan had moved over to the computer and was quickly creating snapshots of portions of the video. Scrabbling around in a drawer he pulled out a checklist and compared numbers on the screen with bullets on the list, ticking one off occasionally.

Sitting back after a couple of minutes, Dr. Wilson looked back at her, his neck making a slight click (accompanied by a wince) as he looked over his shoulder.

"The rate of infection combined with the risk of contagion makes this officially a class 1 emergency. I have to call Atlanta," he added, looking around for his cell phone while patting his pockets.

"Is there... nothing we can do?" asked Emma stupidly, for the moment more concerned about the fact that teams of experts would now be looking for patient zero – her – than the risk to others.

"Only be famous," Dan answered "we just discovered an entirely new virus with a close to unprecedented infection rate. This is going to be big."

_With my luck they will probably name it after me_ thought Emma glumly.

* * * * *

The Emma Virus (or EV as it was commonly called) did indeed bring people running from Atlanta. Within twenty four hours they had set up camp inside the biology department right there in her university. Emma was involved in the whole thing, making calls and consulting with her CDC experts using her meager knowledge whenever Dan was unavailable. By the time she walked out of there the next day – with a promise she would be back early the next morning - she was so tired that she couldn't tell if her swimming head was the first sign of exhaustion or if she was having another attack.

Returning to her crappy motel for some much needed sleep, Emma laid down flat on her back in bed and took a deep exhale. She lay there for a few minutes and turned to the side. After a few more minutes her eyes popped open. All she could see in her mind's eye was the tiny card she fished out of a man's brain, where it must have slipped during Steve's frenzied attack.

Within minutes, she was sitting at the edge of the bed flipping the card over slowly, the information memorized.

Nonetheless, the words flashed in the crappy motel lighting with each rotation though her distant look had long since ceased to notice them.

David Hoon

Proprietor of the Pelham Arms

32 Hampshire St, Cambridge, MA 02139

Emma sighed, so tired she couldn't think. Regardless, she headed into the shower to try to wake herself up for her journey out to the Pelham Arms.

_You could say I have a thirst for knowledge_ thought Emma, entering the shower and then groaning at her pun. _Never do that again_ she admonished.

* * * * *

It took Emma 30 minutes to make her way across town, taking the T train to a stop a few blocks away she emerged from the underground into the light of the early evening.

Emma sincerely doubted she would catch a glimpse of Steve but just in case she had decided to change her makeup and wear her hair up in a tight bun. It was a feeble disguise, she had to admit to herself, but without the supplies of her apartment at hand it was about the best she could manage.

Walking up to the quaint little bar, made out in the style of an old English pub - _or should that be 'Olde'_ Emma wondered idly.

She had difficulty imagining someone like Steve coming to the place and realized she knew little about him, apart from his obvious attempts on her life.

The black oaken doors stood before Emma and looked like something that should belong on a keep rather than some fake pub but nonetheless they breezed open with a whisper to some boozehound staggering out into the chilly Boston air.

Stealing her courage to be at this place that might be enemy territory with no-one for company, Emma slipped inside and took a seat off the side of the bar. Smiling and accepting an offer to order from a passing server she selected a half pint of a local pale ale, which she settled back to nurse like it was purchased with her last two farthings.

Unlike her highly successful stake out in the park (verily, many squirrels were vanquished with the power of strong language that day) Emma's quarry was soon identified for Mr. Hoon took great pleasure in proclaiming his name whenever he answered the phone. David Hoon was a short balding man sporting a waistcoat who lorded over the bar like court was in session with him playing the King. The miniature proprietor took great pleasure in managing every aspect of the bar and – Emma noted with some disgust – also managed to put his hand on not one but two of the waitresses asses in the short time while Emma was watching.

Taking her beer over to the bar, Emma caught the eye of the serial ass-grabber and smiled. This was a role she was ill fitted for, the chubby lab rat felt like she would have to give up her nerd card in shame. She was not in the habit of smiling at random men and even less so for those with Mr. Hoon's... qualities.

"Can I help you lass?" he asked, moving over to the opposite side of the bar from her nonetheless. Emma was not a good judge of such things but if she were, she would call his English/Irish accent 100% fake.

"Oh I am just holed up here looking for a friend – I haven't seen him around recently," she replied, smiling again.

"Who is your mate?" replied Hoon, wiping an imagined stain off of the bar with a cloth. Tens of not imagined stains took offense.

"Steve Kerchak," she replied, trying to appear nonchalant "he said he is in here all the time."

"The name doesn't ring any bells," replied the owner, looking down at her from the raised platform behind the bar as he wiped the counter "Are you sure this is the place?" he asked easily. Emma couldn't help but feel she was trapped in a game.

Unable to play the part of lady admirer any longer, Emma decided to lay her cards on the table and drop the act.

"You really don't know him? Because he dropped this card when he was butchering a man outside a gas station," Emma answered, trying to put on her hardest voice. She tossed the card out onto the bar, where it slid into the bar cloth right by the plump man.

"Landed right on the victim's brain," she added, hoping the gory detail would jog loose some details from him.

"So? I give these things out a dime a dozen," the barman protested, pointing to a stack of cards just a foot off to the side and then presenting them with an exasperated palm. Clearly from the sweat present the palm was not used to all this work.

"And you expect me to believe he has never been in here?" asked Emma, raising her voice. She was attracting attention from the rest of the bar now, judging from the sphere of silence surrounding her.

"He probably has!" replied the owner, his accent completely gone as he raised his own voice in turn "But I don't recognize the name. Probably just came in one day and took a card!"

Emma turned around, frustrated. She found herself staring directly into the eyes of Steve Kerchak, who was standing in the big black-framed doorway just a few meters distant \- a friend on either side of him and a look of utter surprise on his face.

"Oh fuck," said Emma, and for the second time in as many days she dashed past Steve Kerchak, scattering him and his drinking friends as she made off into the night.

### Chapter 10

Emma had studied for as long as she could remember. She was the kid in school with her nose always in a book, the student at college who knew the answers because she had pre-read all the chapters and discussed them online. How then was it every day recently she discovered a host of really useful abilities that she had previously not realized were even skills, never mind paid any attention to improving her performance at them?

The latest failure was asking questions in such a way as to not make a scene or arouse suspicion. She was reflecting on her basic lack of any aptitude for tact while hiding on the flat roof of a building.

A ragged cough sounded from the alley below, she could just about hear steps but they were faint enough that she couldn't tell if they were getting closer. Another wet rasping cough, close to the ladder if she was any judge. Definitely closer.

She risked a peak and ducked again when one of the figures below turned around.

"Oi! What you playing at, following us now are you?" called the thug from below, to no-one in particular.

_Ahh international color_ , she thought, _just what was missing from the underbelly of Boston._

Emma had taken a few turns down smaller streets while sprinting from the Pelham Arms. Skidding around a corner she instantly noticed a fire escape ahead but it was way too high, easily three feet out of reach.

Out of nowhere, Emma was struck by a sudden vision of the man who attacked her leaping impossibly far and through the pawn shop window. Not stopping to think for fear she would lose her nerve, Emma piled on the speed and made the leap for the ladder.

She easily made the bottom rung, grabbing the bar with both hands. Momentum was as always an unkind master however and a split second later she hit the wall face first.

Dangling stupidly from the fire escape while blood dripped from her cut forehead and bleeding nose, all down one of the few shirts remaining in her possession, Emma almost didn't gather her wits in time to be useful.

When she heard shouts from somewhere outside the alley, she immediately came back to her senses though and swarmed up the rattling metal of the fire escape as quick as a monkey.

Vaulting over the low roof wall, she heard voices from the end of the narrow passage almost immediately. She lay there, struggling to quietly catch her breath while the disembodied voices talked in soft tones below.

Risking a second look, Emma noted that one of the two men below (neither of which was Steve) was moving to the base of the fire escape. Patting her shirt, Emma wondered if there was blood on the ground at the base and if it would be enough of a clue for one or both of the men to choose to investigate it.

Emma was looking around for an alternate exit – maybe there was another ladder at the other side of the roof – but saw nothing.

Hearing yelling below, Emma took another sly look and saw the two associates of Steve jogging to the end of the alley, where another man was calling them. Following him they quickly walked out of view.

Seeing an opportunity that might not be repeated, Emma lowered herself back onto the fire escape and scampered quietly down the stairs. Dropping the last ten feet she smiled to herself as she struck the ground with very little noise – just in time for her monster to round a corner to the left.

_Jesus my luck sucks!_ she thought to herself, preparing for another run. _Where would I go though? I doubt he will let me push past again and I know his two lackeys couldn't have gone far the other way._

Emma stopped scanning the ways out and let her gaze fall fully back on Steve, the predator she had helped step up to a whole new level.

It had been just a few days since Emma had half butchered this man in the park but his expression had changed dramatically. Before, he had seemed brutish - a man easily led. A follower. Now though a deeper understanding sat behind his eyes, staring at her, searching for weakness. She had turned this thug into a thing of monstrous needs and his attitude had easily switched to match. His gaze held malevolence, a word Emma had never had cause to use in real life before but here it just fit.

Whatever atrocities he had committed as a human had already been far outweighed by the ones he had made as a thing that eats humans to survive. He had made the devil's bargain and embraced it.

Their expressions still locked, Emma took the time to think about that for a second, not as a Human but instead as a predator – which she now was by her very build.

_If I am a monster, maybe I should be the best monster I can be_ she thought. _Like him. I can smell the book deal already – if I call it 'Positive thinking for the undead' I can probably even get into the self-help section._

"So you look... well," Emma said, wondering if she could talk her way out of this.

"You won't after this," said Emma's monster, lashing out with a right hook. The blow was impossibly fast and caught Emma full on her cheek neatly snapping the Zygomatic bone underneath her eye, causing her to partially turn and drop to one knee. The pain was intense.

Emma was getting used to discomfort though. She had never been weak from a physical perspective and the last week had toughened her to a point beyond bullet-hard. On a scale of one to having someone rip a fucking hole in the back of her head, this one rated low.

Turned as she was, her attacker didn't see the short wind up for a quick rabbit punch forwards into his nuts – dropping him in short order, gasping, to his knees also. The drop was so quick it was as if his tendons had been cut.

That's when one of the missing henchman showed up, with a lump of metal to the back of her head. Emma's vision swam but she blindly reached out and grabbed some part of the man's jacket. Pivoting she fell onto her back but succeeded in throwing the man into a wall headfirst. He got an arm up to protect himself but his head bouncing off his forearm still disoriented him.

The extra weight Emma had packed on ( _in?_ she wondered in the back of her brain. _Are my bones growing denser?_ ) was coming in handy; she was about the same mass as an average-ish man, even if her body was smaller in size.

Emma got up quickly and staggered his direction. As the follower turned, Emma planted a hand on his chin and rammed his head back into the wall – once, twice, three times for a satisfying snap as the back of his head split open.

Any satisfaction she felt at her latest atrocity was instantly gone at the realization she was in peril. Previously, she had believed she had another 12 hours until she had to eat – had planned on hitting up her new connections for some autopsy work and a syringe of spinal fluid from the recently dead. All the healing had blown her Serotonin much sooner than anticipated though, her elbow alone (which was doing great now, thanks for asking) was enough to need another Serotonin infusion.

She decided this absently as the smell coming from the broken skull tore through her control like tissue paper.

The Emma Zombie dropped the man and began prying the shattered skull as he lay twitching. It took her frantically scrabbling fingers seconds to rip a portion of skull off and then she was nose first into the grey-pink brains beneath.

The slimy meat sliding all over her cheeks and forehead as her mouth bit in again and again – she didn't chew, just swallowed like she was some junkyard dog.

_Look out for the Zombie_ she yelled to herself from inside her head, completely oblivious to the irony. Her limbs however were dedicated only to one purpose – feeding her craving.

"Let go of him!" came a yell behind her and a scuffling noise of someone running while limping. The Emma Zombie was having none of it though, by now shoveling big wet greasy chunks of brain into her mouth as her teeth could no longer easily find meat within reach.

Shoved into the same wall as her victim, Emma smashed her broken eye arch into a smear of her victim's blood. Her legs came up and kicked off the wall hard, throwing her and Steve backwards, landing hard with him beneath her. A "Whoof" of air on her neck proved she had winded him but Emma couldn't enjoy her victory, her own demon was still in control and it was still interested in the open skull in front of her.

She crawled hands and knees to the minion and began again to ladle grey matter into her mouth but was interrupted a few seconds later by a kick to the ribs, which responded with an audible cracking noise.

Zombie Emma, infuriated by pain was up on her feet in a moment and she ran directly at the man. He sucker punched her and she went down again.

Emma rolled a couple of times but was lifted back to all fours with a kick to her right boob. Another kick to the stomach was strong enough to lift her to her feet. Emma's Zombie started lurching at the thug again but he easily caught and pinned her outstretched hands with one hand and grabbed her throat with the other.

"What are you going to do - Infect me again?" he sneered.

He looked into her soulless eyes – because Emma truly thought of her soul as being unattached to the body right now.

"You tore us apart in that park. You were like some kind of avenging God. Now I look at you and you just look sloppy."

"You are like chaos randomly running from one place to the next fucking things up," he added, shaking his head.

"What about all the people you have killed," Emma answered, as surprised as Steve. Control must slowly be re-exerting itself.

"Ah well you see, I am like order," he answered "Every kill I make has purpose."

"You? Law? Don't make me laugh, I have a cracked lip."

Emma barked her derision in short laughs but ended in a gulp as Steve started to crush her throat.

"It is a bit different now isn't it," he spat the words "On an even playing field."

Letting go of her arms to swing a powerful punch – Steve was incredibly surprised when Emma, in turn, caught it.

"I might be a bit more even than you," she answered with a sneer.

_This talking is great_ she thought to herself. Her vision was back to normal and the pain in her ribs and eye was slowly diminishing.

Experimenting, she pushed against his grip and felt him slowly give. He leaned down into her and the progress stopped. Her muscles had been altering for twice as long as his, but he still had two inches height on her - the result was pretty much stalemate.

That's when they heard the yelling, the other man who left the alley was calling out to find where his boss had gone to. A look of triumph crossed Steve's face but was replaced with confusion then pain as Emma relaxed her grip suddenly and Steve stumbled forwards into a headbutt.

It was poorly executed, slamming the bridge of Emma's nose against the tip of her Monster's and splattered both of them. Leaving both of them instantly blinking through pain and involuntary tears.

By the time Steve could see through his, Emma was gone.

* * * * *

Seeing the alley was proving difficult, Emma's re-broken nose was making her eyes stream. Nonetheless, she didn't dare to break her pace – she was jogging along as well as she could though each step jostled her healing ribs a little more than she would like.

Hearing a noise, Emma turned wildly blinking again and again to try and clear the water long enough to get a clear picture. Seeing nothing, she turned back and picked up her pace a little more. She had to get clear of this little corner of hell long enough to properly heal before Steve threw any more members of his gang at her.

Hearing another noise from the side, Emma spun wildly – and ran straight into a big green dumpster.

Sliding down it, she could barely make out a slowly moving patch of black from among the shadows and through her slowly drying eyes.

The patch of black began slowly clapping which proved too much for Emma, she had a hard day and the last thing she needed right now was to be mocked by a color.

Levering herself up using the dented dumpster Emma managed to get back on her feet. Though she wasn't really ready for anything more strenuous than a slow limp to a bath, she managed to manhandle her body into something approximating a position of readiness for whatever new attacker she faced.

The anonymous applauder chose to move forward just far enough to leave the shadows and Emma gasped despite herself.

It was the man who did this to her, the man who had bitten her outside the pawn shop, infecting her.

Finding strength she didn't know she had, Emma ran at him looking to grab his head and ram it into the wall. Nothing mattered, not the infection or Steve and his merry band of hoodlums. All she wanted to do was grab this man's head and ram it into the wall.

One side step though and Emma found herself flailing again, her already battered shoulder taking the charge once again as the brick of the alleyway proved once again just how intractable it could be.

"Gah!" Emma yelled, frustrated and impotent she slapped her palms down on the grimy cement, a petulant gesture of a child as she was once again left helpless. She started the long climb back to her feet, a mountain that felt it would take some time to fully scale.

"Really, don't bother," the man said casually "You will probably just fall over once more anyway."

"I will keep getting up," replied Emma, pushing on a knee to ascend to her full, modest height once more.

"Why, so you can take your frustration out on me?" he asked, studying her.

"You caused all of this!" she accused, stepping towards him, more carefully this time.

"I no more caused this than Adolf Hitler's parents caused World War II," was the quick response.

Emma paused "You made me into this abomination" she tried, more careful about her allegation this time.

"You were in the wrong place, blundering around the corner." The man shrugged his shoulders, dismissing her in an instant.

"It... wasn't purposeful?" she asked, a little more vulnerable than she would have liked. She had stopped moving towards her attacker, internal conflict sapping all forward motion.

The man scoffed. "Of course not, I was there for that idiot 'Big Willie'. Who the fuck calls themselves that anyway? He deserved to die for tackiness alone."

"So what now? How did you find me anyway?" she asked, curiosity getting the better of her.

"Found you at the park – I saw you on the news there so I hung around for a bit and saw you hiding in the bushes the next day. You were swearing at squirrels." he offered with a raised eyebrow.

"They had it coming," Emma murmured, internally cursing the fuzzy rodents again. "Wait, so you have been following me ever since?" she asked.

"You had a-" he started, but Emma shushed him, looking around and crouching as she heard the noise of a can skittering along a pavement as if it had just been kicked.

"Shhh!" Emma whispered desperately.

"Why?" questioned the man, tilting his head slightly to the side as he started walking along a curb like a tightrope walker.

"Because they will hear you! That might be Steve!" Emma replied.

"But I have nothing to fear." He replied easily. Emma suspected he probably didn't at that. He might as well be made of Teflon, she thought enviously. Everything seemed to be sliding off of him.

On cue, the noises seemed to get further away as if the creator of the sound had taken a different turn and was sliding down another path.

Emma looked back to the man – her creator - he was still engrossed with walking the straight curb line, an impossible distance above the imaginary crowds below. Surely if he fell, his life would be forfeit. Emma was somehow inexplicably disappointed.

"So to what end? Why follow me?" Emma asked.

"Maybe the same reason you did, to see if I had fucked up by accidentally letting you live."

"And?" she answered, pensive.

"Jury's still out," he answered with a smile.

"I have had enough of these tests" Emma replied and turned haughtily to walk away down the alley. To her credit she hardly limped.

* * * * *

Emma was in better shape by the time she got home an hour later – in fact she was almost ready to head back to find the real patient zero. She wanted answers – was there any way to reverse this? How could she undo the damage she had done by accidentally infecting Steve?

She entered the hotel and slammed the door, ready to take a shower then head out. Instantly, all the fight left her. Carved on the inside of the door in very neat letters was the following:

"We are all tested, sometimes the tests are of our own creation. If you need to talk call me (John) at (617) 353-3036."

_How the hell did he get here before me?_ Thought Emma.

_And how did he get in?_ Emma contemplated this for a moment.

_How much will they charge me for the scratches on the door?_ she concluded, sadly.

### Chapter 11

Emma woke up with a groan – not a good sign. This whole double life thing is exhausting she concluded, pulling her legs off the side of the bed.

The first thing that caught her eyes was the message scratched into the door and she found herself pursing her lips.

Twenty minutes, an inadequate shower and a rushed coffee flavored with powdered milk later she was ready to call the mystery that had scraped his number into her door. Being who she was, Emma had already contacted the front desk with a theoretical question about the door getting scratched and yes – it would cost her.

Emma picked up her phone. Again. Looking at the number grooved into her door she punched in the first two numbers before pausing, staring at the phone for a few seconds and hanging up. Again.

_Do I really want to get more involved with this John 'person'_ she asked herself. _The man is obviously Schizotypal. He put me in this predicament in the first place, stripped me of my humanity. I used to be good old plain, reliable Emma. Now – now I eat people. Poorly at that, or I would not be saddled with a nemesis who is getting ever better at trying to kill me._

That led Emma back to the point of calling John. Not only could he potentially have a way to stop the inexorable march of her need for Human brains, he might eventually be persuaded to help rid the world of her monster. Not that he seemed inclined to be of help.

John's apathy aside, Emma knew she could not pass up this opportunity. The stakes were too high to not know everything possible about her condition. Resolve bolstered, Emma picked up the phone and dialed John's full number.

Nodding to herself, she waited – brazenly daring him to answer the phone.

"Nyyyelllo?" came John's sleepy voice over the phone. Emma panicked and hung up.

_Not my finest hour_ she thought to herself, burying her face in her left hand from shame.

Her phone started buzzing in her hand and Emma's stomach dropped as she looked cautiously at the number – it was the one she just called. Willing herself to action, Emma answered the phone.

"Hello?" she asked politely.

"Yeah I thought that was you, Park Lady," the bleary voice confirmed its suspicions. "What is your name anyhow?" he queried blearily.

"It's Emma. How – how did you get this number?" she inquired, planning on suing someone for the obvious breach in security.

"*69" John answered, still sounding sleepy. _Why did I not block my outgoing number?_ Thought Emma, annoyed at herself. _I am really not any good at this._

"Am I interrupting your sleep? I can call back later.." she offered, honestly hoping he would take her up in it.

"Nah it's okay," he replied "I am just trying out a new schedule of sleeping. Polyphasic something or other."

The last sentence was accompanied by lip smacking noises. Emma, who had always been funny about food and eating, found it to be unbearable.

"Are you eating?" she asked. "I thought you just woke up?"

"I did," he answered. "I was eating this bowl of cereal before I went to sleep." Emma would later find out this was classic John.

Realizing she had been silent for too long, with John just patiently eating his soggy cereal, Emma finally broke the quiet.

"So what now?" she asked.

Pause. "I never infected anyone before and let them live but you are here now so I decided I shouldn't just kill you."

Wait, was that really an option that just got taken off the table?

"But I obviously need to talk to you about stuff, give you some ground rules and tell you what I know about why this happened," John continued, not seeming to sense Emma's belated panic. "Can I come over?"

"Better not" replied Emma earnestly "Given the quality of my current surroundings, they might think it is a professional arrangement."

"Oh? Ohhhhhhhh" answered John, getting it. "Well how about my place then?"

_Fools rush in where angels fear to tread_ thought Emma to herself, but didn't see a lot of choice. _He probably could have killed me a half dozen times just in the week he has been following me._

Looking over at the simple digital alarm provided by the motel, Emma quickly removed the phone from her ear to double check it. "Crap, I am late for work!" she exclaimed.

"Is that the one where you are helping to catch the menace that threatens our fair city?" John the omniscient replied with just a hint of humor in his voice. "Yeah I can see why you would hate to be late for that. Good luck, hero."

* * * * *

Entering the biology department it didn't take Emma long to locate Dan who was standing beside a short, dark skinned man Emma had met yesterday - the Director for the Office of Infectious Diseases. Together they were talking with a man in army fatigues while following along on an outstretched map of Boston. He was a Caucasian in his late 40s with a thick but trim build - his short hair hid a slightly receding hairline.

As Emma walked shyly towards the trio the man in fatigues stopped talking, his demeanor was polite but the message conveyed was clear – she was interrupting.

"Oh this is Emma, a student at this university and my assistant. Emma, you remember Dr Hakkesh from the CDC and this is Brigadier General Toby Ludlow from the National Guard." Emma was not familiar with military rankings but that sounded pretty high up there.

"Sorry to interrupt Dr. Wilson," she said smoothly, opting for Dan's honorific given the current company. "What do you need me to do? I can run blood samples from recent homicides and look for the new antibody we found."

"No need," replied Dan with a grin. Turning to his colleagues Dan excused himself from the planning and, taking Emma by the shoulder, led her to a small lab. A number of recently unpacked boxes still lay on the floor among a smattered of Styrofoam peanuts. Sitting on a table in the middle of the room was a new piece of equipment that Emma had never seen before.

"The CDC has all the best toys," he said confidentially with a grin. "Meet the Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy machine – this bad boy cost millions of dollars so treat her with a reverence you would normally associate with the Turin Shroud."

Emma just looked on flustered. "The Surface Enhanced what?" she asked confused. What if this thing could detect her kind by proximity? Through an act of will, Emma did not run from the room screaming.

"Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy – or SERS. It actually uses nanotechnology to... to ping viruses. It can show the genetic composition of virus code almost instantly – letting us not only easily detect infected samples but also see the exact code this thing delivers to the host."

"Ooooo," said Emma, genuinely intrigued.

"Ooo you should," Dan replied, molesting the machine with his eyes. "Because it will be you initially who is using it. I am going to be busy with Hakkesh and Ludlow making emergency contagion plans so I need someone on the ground looking for further signs of outbreak."

"All my Postgrads are hopelessly pissed at you, of course," he added. "But as the person who first identified the virus, you should be the one who is an integral part of the team."

Dan went to walk out "Oh I sent the first sample of the genetic code over to a few people to look at," he said, turning back around with a grin. "See if you can beat them to figuring out what it does – somehow I have a feeling you can do it."

* * * * *

Running samples was truly exciting, for the first few. It took less than half an hour for the process to turn to tedium though – after all, it wasn't that different to the SMAC machine she usually used. Now though, after a brief deliberation by the computer, she was delivered a file of genetic code instead.

Comparing this against the against sample DNA for known viruses it was pretty easy to see when someone was carrying say a common flu virus as opposed to EV.

Within three hours, she had run samples from twelve recent murders. The two men Emma killed in the park (good), Steve's first kill at the gas station, the four people she read about that Steve killed at a convenience store, two more of his thugs outside her apartment, the police officer who saved her and two (as far as she knew) unrelated deaths.

Further than the people they had identified earlier, it seemed that only the police officer had been infected.

Feeling the net tighten around her, Emma wrote a report and delivered it to Dan. Her one consolation was that local law enforcement had the case and in true BPD fashion were not sharing details with the outside agencies.

Out in the commandeered hallway was a map of known infections, fortunately quite sparse as of the moment. A red pin had already been stuck in the map close to her apartment.

Sighing, Emma went off to a side lab containing only 4 computers to try comparing the EV Virus genetic code to known constructs and tweaks being considered in the private sector. Her working assumption was something that altered human healing so greatly must have been man-made but she couldn't find any scientific journal entries detailing anything close to this adventurous.

Sitting back, Emma remembered John's promise to give her whatever answers he possessed. Emma was a long distance from trusting the man but she had to admit, if she wanted to move forward before this situation was out of control he was probably her best bet.

* * * * *

"Starbucks," intoned John, in a manner completely bereft of feeling. "I still cannot believe we are meeting at Starbucks."

He looked much the same as last night but was carrying a jaunty little purse under one arm – she felt sure that he would charitably refer to it as a satchel.

"No offense John," replied Emma while sipping a Soy Latte (some habits die hard, her soy addiction apparently one of them) "But I just do not feel ready to sit in a room somewhere God knows where ALONE with the guy who actively tried to kill me a week ago."

"Fine but the coffee is on you," he answered, a bastion of chivalry. Waving pleasantly towards the barista, he furthered – "Well, pay the nice lady."

Emma did, aware that she was an idiot for doing so. Finding a couple of seats at the back, away from any other customers, they both sat down with their drinks. John had opted for a hot chocolate with such a copious amount of whipped cream Emma was unsure how he could possibly drink it without lathering up his face like he was about to shave.

"So tell me about how all this started," she asked. She couldn't help a feeling that time was about to be a precious commodity so she was disinclined to waste it.

"Mmm that's good," replied John, a dollop of whipped cream on the end of his nose. "Don't give me that look, any story worth telling deserves at least the price of a good hot chocolate."

### Chapter 12

"The virus – aren't they calling it the Emma Virus now? That's so cute. The virus was man made. The man's name is – was Derek. Crap should I have told you his name? Fuck it. Derek grew up a WASP outside Boston."

"What?" he furthered, seeing her questioning look. "Oh WASP means White Anglo Saxon Protestant, yeah?"

"I know what a WASP is, I am one too," Emma answered exasperated "I just didn't know I was going to hear a life story."

"Good stories deserve a beginning," John answered primly, his feathers obviously ruffled. "His family was nice - bit distant though. He had every opportunity in life but most of the warm squishy feeling of love in his childhood came from his maternal grandmother. They used to play cards together, and he would 'win' pennies from her that would later get turned into delicious tooth rotting sweets."

John made wiggling movements with both hands to illustrate the point, seemingly to simulate the tooth decay damage.

"She would love watching golf on television and he would sit on her lap and suck on these god awful sugar balls for hours on end."

"Until she got sick. She slowly wasted away while he watched over I dunno probably a couple of years. A couple of years where he watched as his world slowly crumbled and collapsed. Before she died, he had amassed well over a lifetime's worth of crippling fear at the very thought of death. God was right out, because God doesn't make sweet old ladies suffer."

"After she died, he spent a lot of days and months alone in his room, contemplating stuff like oblivion and the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. Things no child should have to wonder about."

"Fast forward thirty years."

"Derek was happily married with a son aged eight. On this particular day the sky was beautiful, birds were chirping besides the road leading into his place of work and the brisk spring day held the promise of a gorgeous summer. Derek was walking as he always did having parked in the furthest lot so as to enjoy as much of the outside as possible before being cooped up in a windowless lab for the rest of the day."

"Did you just roll your goddamned eyes?!" asked John, a little too loudly – obviously incensed.

"Not purposefully" Emma whispered back. "I might have just been falling asleep."

"I am trying to show you that he was a normal guy!"

"Let's take that as read," answered Emma "and move ahead."

"You've had a busy week so I will humor you but seriously, way to ruin the story. So Derek was a geneticist, as you might guess. He worked on meaningless stuff, strawberries that held properties of other fruit I think it was. Taste the same, many more nutrients beneath the surface. That is how it is with medicine \- rather than work to create a better immune system or nerves that reconnect after damage your lab gets funded by private corporations and you find yourself cooking up – well a super strawberry."

"Getting to the building, Derek nodded to the security guards as he passed them – as he always did. Today though on the inside he was sweating. Today was the day, after all his planning, finally today he was going to try his own concoction on the only test subject he could find – himself."

"You see, for years Derek had been cooking up a custom virus. Originally influenza, he had scooped out a large portion of its own DNA and replaced it with his own custom code. Derek's Virus would infect a host and rewrite their DNA, changing a host of items. Lifespan, regeneration, boosting mental speed, he had loaded this thing down with all that and more."

Emma carefully mentally noted all this. The virus was a modified Flu virus, as they had surmised and they had also rightly guessed it was a retrovirus, seemingly. What they had not previously known was some of the payload. She had obviously noted the regeneration but didn't know it actually affected lifespan. By how much?

_Am I smarter?_ she wondered _Have I been doing better at the lab because I am retaining more?_

Tuning back in to John, she caught the tale mid-sentence.

".. Carefully simulated piece by piece he had put this together quietly by himself because he knew as soon as someone found out he would be shut down. What he had created went against every guideline in the book. Not to mention the mass hysteria if word got out. Humanity would be torn instantly into two groups, one wanting to live forever crazed that a solution was sitting in a lab somewhere and the other convinced in the wrongness of thwarting the natural order. Aside from that, how would such an item be distributed? How do you prevent overpopulation when suddenly NO-ONE is dying?"

"Derek knew all of this so he had worked slowly and diligently, using the only virus he could get his hands on – influenza. Not the perfect candidate but when he changed it to no longer allow airborne contraction it proved suitable enough."

"Taking the elevator up to his lab on the sixth floor, Derek's nerves had him seeing all the small details he had long since stopped noticing. A slight smell of oil permeated the elevator, which he could still detect even over the overpowering scent of Dr. Hayes assistant, who was also riding the elevator."

_John seems intent on telling this story in its entirety_ Emma thought to herself _I wonder how long he has been practicing it? Is this the first chance he has had to tell the tale of Derek?_

Emma settled back a little deeper into her seat, there seemed little point in interrupting as so far it had just made the telling take longer.

"She got off again on floor four and he noted the number flickered slightly as it stayed on. Was it due to power fluctuations or a faulty bulb? Do they even still use bulbs or are they all LEDs now? He wondered about this for a couple of seconds as he passed five and then his mind was all business once more. First off on his floor, he moved swiftly but not hastily to his lab, nodding occasionally to colleagues glimpsed through glass windows. He was struck by how they all looked like specimens at a zoo - or lab rats. How suitable."

"Reaching his lab, Derek sat in his comfy chair and reviewed notes on small mutations to his fruit DNA. Nothing unexpected under the circumstances but further testing would be required. Still, very promising. If things continued like this they would be undergoing testing in about a year to get their products on the market. He set up a meeting for later in the week to discuss the developments and pushed his chair back from the desk. Careful strides, insides bursting against his ribcage, he moved to his specimen fridge and pulled out from the back an unlabeled sample. Pulling out a syringe he pushed it through the rubber cork and drew a sample. Not pausing for a second, he injected it into his arm and put the sample away."

"He had to go home sick within 30 minutes. Though it is worth noting he did not suffer anything like you did. From what I gather though it was still unpleasant and lasted for about two days."

_His was different?_ Emma thought, curiosity piqued again. _Why would that be?_

"Derek took the next two days off work but by the one following he was mostly better. By the one after that he felt the best he had in years. By the day after that better than he had felt ever. His experiment was a success. I know you are surprised, frankly I was too when I heard it. Within a month he had to wear makeup to give the appearance of age and say he had taken to dying his grey hair."

"Now he was faced with several dilemmas. He hadn't dared tell his wife of his plans, knowing she would not approve of his self-experimentation. Further he was not sure if she would agree to the same treatment. He had never dared to bring the subject up; for fear of tipping his hand and now he was concealing all this from her too."

John snapped out of storytelling mode long enough to look Emma in the eyes. "She was the better part of him you know?"

Against her will, Emma was moved.

"That's how he always saw it. He was the brains, she was the heart. Thing is she was the brains too and he often overlooked that. She was a theoretical physicist and in my opinion as brilliant as him. Anyway he now had new problems. Should he tell his wife and ask her to take his serum too? Or should he infect her slyly and ask forgiveness? I think the second plan an incredibly bad idea personally. If you are altering someone's fundamental structure you should ask them first. It's just polite."

He seemed to think about that for a moment, putting his head to the side. "Well maybe I can understand after all."

"In the end the choice was not really his to make. Companies that do genetic testing operate under the strictest of rules and regulations. Nothing gets out. The public would settle for nothing less. There was no way to safely smuggle out his little package, especially as it had to be kept very cold until minutes before being introduced to a host."

"He spent days trying to think of a solution. He could strap a pack to his arm but he was not sure it would be invisible to the pat down. He could drop it out of a window but the windows didn't open. It was one day when idly looking at a sample from the antibodies in his own CSF that he came upon a solution, the virus was seemingly alive and well – he could just inject her with that!"

"Now that he had a plan, he told his wife about his self-experimentation. She was at first less than understanding. Over time though she came around and he offered her the same gift. She thought about it for a couple of days and finally agreed. That night they carefully put their son to bed, had a relaxed dinner - and then he injected her."

"It did not go as well as he had hoped. Her reaction was unlike his, much more akin to your own so the nice steak dinner went entirely to waste. She changed within an hour though she looked positively gaunt when finished. They had another dinner and she ate three times as much as he did, her body desperate for calories to turn into muscle and flesh."

"It was another day before madness started to manifest - a postman never knew how close he came to death as he strolled back down their path while Derek desperately tried to hold his wife behind the front door. This posed something of a problem as she was quickly becoming much stronger than he was. Calming words managed to break through her instinctual needs though and she eventually let him sit her down on the sofa while he took a blood and CSF sample and rushed it to the lab. Luckily for him security is focused on people coming out of the building so he snuck them in without any difficulties and raced at an unseemly pace up to his lab."

"In his hurry to give Mary his gift, he had overlooked something - you remember how I said the virus was originally based on a form of influenza? Modified to not be an airborne pathogen you will recall. Well it still retained most of the other traits of flu and this is the interesting part. Each year they take the three most virulent strains of flu, make a vaccine to those and that becomes the year's flu shot. Did you ever wonder where all these strains come from?"

"I can't say I ever did but it turns out they come from within us. Flu mutates inside living hosts to make the new strains. Well that is exactly happened with Derek's virus. It mutated. Still gave all the positive effects, more so actually they were all amplified, instead of peak condition his wife would soon become beyond peak - superhumanly fit. "

"The down side though was pretty bad. Checking the composition of his wife's spinal fluid, Derek found close to no Serotonin."

Emma was winded from the mental hit. She felt confused for a moment, remembering no such deficiency when she tested her own blood but remembered she had eaten the brain of the thug the night before – it must have replenished her own Serotonin.

"When I tested my spinal fluid it had blood in it," Emma asked, remembering the moment when she was first presented the sample of her own CSF by Rob "was hers like that too?" It seemed like an eternity ago.

John nodded "Normal humans have something called a blood brain barrier."

Emma of course knew this all too well.

"It is a bunch of tight junctions around capillaries that stop the diffusion of bacteria and large molecules from entering the CSF. The mutated virus absolutely destroys that, which is why by the way you had that awesome seizure before passing out after I bit you."

A wandering passerby gave John a weird look before heading in to the bathroom.

"Anyway, Mary's spinal fluid was polluted which at first he took to mean she was dying. It took him a while to realize the same sort of stasis had been created in the spinal fluid that he would expect in normal blood. White blood cells polluting the fluid were killing bacteria and in fact everything seemed rosy apart from a complete lack of Serotonin and ummm several other chemicals. I really am no biologist," John confessed.

_I would never have guessed_ Emma thought, uncharitably.

"That lack was what was causing his wife problems – Derek knew it in an instant - so he slammed shut his laptop, left the office and rushed home without saying a word to anyone."

"When he got there he found Mary crying hysterically on the floor of their son's room, a bloody V of arterial blood sprayed up the wall over little John's bed."

"John?" asked Emma.

"It is a common name," he answered. "Rest assured, I am not the dead child, some ghost here to haunt you."

"It wasn't Mary's fault. When you run out of Serotonin, nothing will matter to you except bashing people open for their brains. No matter how strong or smart you are the need is complete, it will happen. It would be like holding your breath underwater until you die of asphyxiation. Eventually everyone will take that deep inhale of burning water."

"Our brains no longer make serotonin or any of the chemicals critical to survival. On the other hand, feed your addiction properly and you could live forever – healing to perfect condition every time your body needs to."

"Mary of course was never quite the same, she remembered every detail of biting madly into her own son's head. Felt his blood pump over her face and yet still she cracked open his skull and ate. Slowly all those chemicals she needed worked their insidious way into her bloodstream and brain and she began to regain control."

"Derek forgave her - he had done this to her, crippled her with an addiction much more debilitating and dangerous than any drug on the black market. Yeah he forgave her but he never forgave himself. He buried himself even deeper in his work, looking for a virus to fix the changes his Mutated Derek Virus had done to her."

"That's how their next two years went - every morning, an injection of his CSF. He was making some progress, slowly working out what had to be altered. Until the car crash that is."

"It was a cold February Saturday morning" he started.

"Rain from the previous day had frozen overnight and provided slick conditions. Derek and Mary were taking a drive to a local coffee shop while talking about work. They had recently started doing more stuff together again. It was too early to say they had forgiven themselves for their son's death but they were at least coming to terms with it."

Looking over from Mary, Derek moved cautiously out and across a four-way stop. Then his world exploded as he was knocked unconscious by slamming his head against his door frame.

"A delivery van had t-boned him on the driver side."

The car skidded sideways on the ice until his tires took grip and the car vaulted and rolled one and a half revolutions before coming to rest on the roof.

"Good solid van it was too, older model, steel frame. An unaltered human would not have survived; Derek's head was still cracked open, his brain exposed when the emergency services arrived. Mary – who had not borne the brunt of the collision – was already completely healed and awake. And hysterical for her stricken husband. The police and emergency services had to peel her away from the vehicle, and it took three of them. They were big, or it would have taken more."

* * * * *

Slowly, Derek opened his eyes. In his stupor it took him a moment to realize he had even done so.

Eyes focusing, he saw a big window opposite. A bunch of flowers fought for his left hand peripheral vision and slowly he turned his head to look at them.

"Get well soon" they proclaimed. _I was sick?_ Derek blearily thought. Like a tidal wave, the car crash came back to him. _Mary!_ He quickly raised his hand to his head and was rewarded with a swell of dizziness and little else. His skin was smooth beneath his hand, completely unblemished. The only telltale sign of anything untoward was a long patch of shaved scalp.

What about Mary though? She didn't have the pure form of his virus – there had already been differences, side effects. _Was she okay? Did she heal?_ How Derek wished they had experimented to check.

His brain tried to grasp how long he had been out but in his haze he failed to find any clues. The missing stripe of hair – had he needed stitches? It might have been a nasty gash and a concussion but wouldn't they have kept him awake in that case? _How long would that take to heal?_ He thought, again rubbing his perfectly smooth temple. With no frame of reference, he did not know. He had not sustained a serious wound since he had performed the experiment.

At that moment a nurse walked by and Derek called frantically for her. Middle aged and frumpy, she showed her disapproval for his lack of decorum by looking down her nostrils at him.

"What is it Mr. Jones?"

They knew his name so they must also know he was a doctor. Derek ignored the slight. People like this ignored titles only when it suited them.

"How long have I been here, where is my wife, is she okay?" There was a subtle but audible sigh.

"Your wife is fine; she escaped the accident completely unhurt." Her tone suggested that miracles like this should not happen to the undeserving, such as Derek. "You have been here for five days. As to where your wife is," she looked even further down her nose "I could not say, I am not her keeper. She was here for the first few days but I have not seen her recently."

The disapproval of Mary's disappearance must be the cause of her attitude Derek decided as the news settled like a lead weight into his stomach. Nodding he settled back into the bed and his thoughts. Peripherally, he watched as the nurse left.

_Mary is squeamish_ thought Derek. _There is no way she could have brought herself to draw off some of my CSF while I slept. She has gone the better part of a week without Serotonin._

Instantaneously making his mind up, Derek stood up. The expected wave or nausea, dizziness or pain never came. Resolve set, he quickly found his clothes and put them on.

* * * * *

The cab pulled up to his house and instantly, Derek knew something was wrong. It was the middle of the morning and all the curtains were shut – something Mary would never tolerate. Getting out he quickly paid the cabbie too much money and started walking up the driveway.

_Get a shower and change of clothes then go out and hunt for Mary_ he thought to himself. _Where could she have gone?_ Looking up at the house he was struck with his love for the place, this house was his sanctum from the world. A bit further out of town than most people would have liked, the peace and lack of immediate neighbors were absolute musts for him. Mary had originally been a "live in the city" kind of girl but she had quickly converted. It took longer to get home each day but when you were there you didn't worry about noisy neighbors or walking around the house naked.

_She would never voluntarily abandon the place_ he thought, even more scared for his wife than before.

Hand shaking, he could barely marry his key with the lock. After a few seconds of fumbling he used his left hand to steady his right and finally pushed it home. The door opened with a creak he never remembered it having.

Immediately in front of him the hallway went for 10 feet, ending in a wall with a door in the middle, with the hallway making a 90 degree turn to the right. In the slightly waning mid afternoon light Derek could see plainly a large smear of blood on the wall.

"Mary!" Derek choked out the word and ran forward the only concern being his wife. Reaching the doorway, he burst through the door and was rewarded with nothing out of the ordinary. Going back into the hall he looked now to the left and saw the smear of blood continue after a few feet then move to the floor. There were spots everywhere, like a dog had shook furiously after taking a bath, but all of them were red.

All the doors to the hall were closed and it was quite dark – the dark hallway had always been a pet peeve about the house and now it became a very real fear. He darted back into the previously explored living room and came back out with a hammer, discarded untidily after a recent project to fix the bookcase. Hefting it, he pressed his back to the wall – the one without blood – and sidled down the hallway. The spots of blood lessened as he crab walked - back still sliding along the wall - down the hallway. He could still follow the trail to the last door on the right. His son's old room.

Derek slowly opened the door to see Mary sitting on their son's old bed. Two barely recognizable bodies were piled in a corner, while Mary cradled lovingly the bloody carcass of a child. She looked up at Derek as he entered a hopeful expression in her eyes.

"Derek I found him!" she said "I found our John!"

* * * * *

"There is a point at the base of the skull where you can pull with these wonderful new muscles." John gripped Emma's forearm and felt the corded wiry muscles beneath the surface.

"You jab your fingers in," he made the jabbing motion, palm upwards "Severs the spinal cord, you hook your fingers under the base and pull. It sounds grim," he admitted, seeing the look on Emma's face. "Mary had performed nothing that genteel on the two smashed bodies. Driven mad by her hunger, she had clawed at them, bitten them, smashed them. You know what it reminds me of? Someone trying to open a can of beans with no can opener."

* * * * *

Dried blood and more was all over her face, the false light of hope made her face momentarily beatific.

Derek dropped to his knees and held his wife. He was suddenly aware that although she was still the same shape as she had been when he first met her, she was now solid as granite - a corded mass of muscle and dense bone. He gently took the child's hand and looked up into his Mary's eyes.

"Mary," he said "Is that... are those people his family?" he was making a devil's bargain inside his head - knowing that if they were, he might be able to bury them all and hide his wife's guilt. If they weren't the child's family, the best Mary could probably hope for was some form of insanity defense. Looking around the room, he suspected a judge would see it his way.

"What are you talking about silly?" she answered "We are his family." Derek felt his heart break in two.

"No sweetheart," he heard himself say "This isn't our John. Where are his real parents? I have to take him home before they worry about him."

Mary was not budging. "Stop playing around Derek, you will hurt John's feelings."

"That isn't John," he repeated.

"Yes he i-"

"NO HE ISN'T," Derek yelled. He hated himself for it. Momentary recognition fled across Mary's face from wherever she had buried it. "Where are his parent's Mary?" he asked again.

"I don't-"

"Where are they!" he spoke, roughly.

"They're," her gaze flicked to the two corpses in the corner "Gone."

At least that was one worry gone. If no-one could trace them here maybe he would have a chance. He could bury them in the woods not far from here, maybe Mary wouldn't have to go to jail. She hadn't meant to do it after all, it was her body defying her, making her mad.

"Can I take him please Mary? I have to hide these bodies."

Her madness instantly returned. Derek suspected it would take a while for the chemicals to work their way fully through her bloodstream and into her brain.

"No!" she screamed "You can't take my John!"

"He's dead, Mary," Derek replied, compassion making his voice crack. God he wished it could be their son, and that he wasn't dead.

"No! No!"

It was then that the boy started to convulse, just as Mary had done two years previously.

* * * * *

Despite her earlier protestations, Emma was really getting in to the story - which made the ringing of her phone all the more abrupt.

Local Area Code, with a prefix belonging to the university – it must be from Dan and the CDC. She made the universal 'Just One Second' motion to John and picked up.

"Hello?" she asked, still tentative.

"Emma?" asked Dan on the other end "Lunch time is over, we have an outbreak and need all hands on deck."

"Be right there," Emma answered, shrugging to John and making a little finger walking sign to indicate she had to go. He seemed to get it and put a little imaginary phone to his ear, over exaggerating talking motions to fully get the point across.

Emma got up and started the short walk back to her University and the temporary offices of the CDC.

### Chapter 13

Channel 4 WBZ CBS Morning News

No-one has claimed responsibility for this morning's brutal mass murder in and outside of City Place - a downtown mall. A spray painted sign – or tag – at the scene has police concerned this might be the start of a gang related turf war unlike any seen in the last two decades.

Local leaders are calling for increased police presence on the streets but police insiders say they are ill-equipped to deal with violence of the magnitude we have seen in the last week.

Gang experts have declared the attacks 'Atypical' citing a lack of clearly defined territory, priority targets or obvious goals. It is thought however that the recent outcropping of this tag is likely related to their activities but what – if any – intents this group has are yet to be clear.

More updates as they become available.

"Revolution," said Emma flatly, looking at the tagged wall. It was next to one of the shadiest mall bathrooms Emma had ever seen – she wondered if the mall owners had circumstances like this in mind when they made the bathrooms accessible by token only.

Emma hoped she would not need to take a pee while she was here as she doubted anyone was handing them out right now.

"You are not doing it justice," replied Dan, walking up behind her. "[R]evolution. The square parentheses are silent," he added sardonically. "The parens and the R are red and everything, shame if they went to all this trouble just to have you mangle the pronunciation."

"Does it mean Revolution needs Evolution?" asked Emma.

"That would be good! I heard on the news the official translation is 'Revolution through Evolution'. They should obviously have hired you for PR" he added.

"My rates are reasonable," Emma replied, deadpan.

"Today, the voice of the Zombie revolution, tomorrow you could be the mouthpiece for the uh... who is revolting nowadays?" he asked earnestly, turning to her.

"Rednecks?" Emma felt she was getting the hang of this humor thing. She had never been what people would call funny, though she enjoyed listening to funny people. Her brain felt sharper recently – maybe a result of Derek's virus.

"Hah!" barked Dan in surprised laughter. He turned around to the scene inside the tiny mall and the humor instantly left his face.

Emma didn't turn around, she already knew there were seventeen bodies back there, unlucky shoppers who had not managed to escape. They were beaten and in some cases partially digested.

Emma couldn't put her finger on it, but something was off about the whole scene.

"Something isn't right here," said Dan, still standing to her left, lips pursed.

_I swear he is a mind reader_ Emma thought to herself, followed by a stream of nonsense _Pandas, Unicorns, Rumpelstiltskin, Roughage, Pompei, Gobbledygook_ she listed, looking for a reaction from Dan – just in case he actually was a mind reader. The half expected reaction never came, however, as he continued to take in the scene, a perplexed expression across his face.

_It isn't paranoia if they actually are out to get you_ she reminded herself, comfortingly.

"I think it's the property damage," Emma answered slowly "I mean the people must have been desperate to escape - I can get windows being broken, tables thrown and broken but what is with the scattered registers?"

Risking a look off to the side, still skirting the main scene of carnage Emma looked at the partially torn off shutters on a Dunkin' Donuts.

"I mean look at that," she said, inclining her head in that direction "Was there even anyone in there? Why would it have been broken into?"

Turning back to Dan, she was in time to see him politely stop a passing police officer and ask him to pull the video footage, to be sent to the CDC field office.

"I agree with you," Dan commented, turning back to her "the looting is amazingly callous but that's not what I meant. Where are the surviving virus carriers?"

"Huh?" asked Emma, intelligently.

"No carnage out on the streets. Remember the other frenzied attacks? The thing we didn't consider was what happened afterwards. The people infected with this virus are driven so crazy they attack anyone in their path, right? And yet there was no path of destruction leading away from either scene and now we seem to have the same thing here. Massive violence, infected people driven so insane for whatever reason –"

_Serotonin deficiency_ answered Emma in her mind.

"- but then – nothing? Here we see exactly the same thing. Seventeen dead, did they all kill each other? I am having the police get the surveillance camera footage but you know what I am expecting to see? People who minutes ago were smashing the heads of these poor fools, running away with absolutely no visible symptoms," Dan finished, chewing his lip and looking into the middle distance.

_And there it is_ Emma thought, giving a visible sigh _in a second they just came a huge step closer to finding me out. I wonder if I could technically plead insanity?_

She looked at the bodies head on for the first time since entering the building.

Or if they will just put me down like a rabid dog.

"You knew, didn't you?" asked Dan, snapping her from her thoughts in an unpleasant second.

"Knew? No!" she answered, full-on knee jerk reaction.

"There was no surprise on your face, just a release. You figured it out before didn't you?"

To her credit, Emma barely paused as Dan took the wrong conclusion – one of his first in their recent history.

"Well," she answered carefully "I didn't understand how someone could kill all those people in the park and then we didn't hear anything else."

"You have good instincts," replied Dan. "You should have trusted them and mentioned it."

_Not a chance_ thought Emma, smiling and nodding. _My instincts would have me rooting around in your head like a pig at a trough._

"I will try," she answered, trying to appear slightly bashful.

"Good," said Dan "good," he re-iterated quietly, distractedly looking at the bodies in front of him. "Well, we had better get started – we need to look for anything else amiss before we move them."

* * * * *

Emma was pacing like a trapped tiger up and down the meager length of her motel room. She had cited the need for a shower as an excuse to get away for an hour following the City Place mall crime scene. Really she just wanted privacy to call John, not giving a flying leap about the sheen of blood and dirt that covered her.

_And I used to be such a clean girl_ she thought to herself.

"Seventeen dead huh," John replied calmly to her initial fact-blurting.

"He's going to expose us, the little asshole," she hissed into her cellphone "I am just getting a handle on my life again, I don't want that prick to be the end of me!"

"Yeah he is really pissing in the pool," John answered earnestly but still thoughtful.

"Most likely people were infected, fed and ran away looking normal – all in front of cameras. He might as well have been putting on a fucking show."

Emma paced some more after dropping her rare f-bomb and lashing out at the first thing that caught her eye - a nearby alarm clock. It spun though the air into the opposite wall, where it had the good sense to explode into pieces.

She felt no remorse, it was hard to see the red LEDs on the crappy little battery operated clock anyway. Emma suspected she was going colorblind to red in addition to her increased sight into the blue spectrum.

"It might be a good time to leave Boston," John speculated, his voice inscrutable.

"And do what?" answered Emma "Live like a hobo? I have almost finished my degree, I will be damned if I let him drive me from town. And what if this goes national? There might be nowhere safe. They have a new machine that can analyze a sample of blood for viruses within a minute – we have to kill this thing now."

Silence down the line.

"I am going to go back in" continued Emma after a few seconds "it might not be a great idea but I have to find out what they have on video from the mall."

"Good luck," John replied earnestly, not fighting her decision "don't forget to sneak yourself some spinal fluid."

"Thanks – I will try and get a doggie bag for you too. Last thing we need right now are more bodies" she added and hung up.

Briefly sniffing at her armpit, Emma decided to take a quick shower first. Old habits die hard.

* * * * *

Things had not gotten quieter at the CDC campus. Armed men in camouflage were running up and down the hall – they were surprisingly agile, performing impromptu dances with rushing biologists traversing the tight halls.

Finding a cluster around the section used as a command area earlier, Emma politely pushed through to find Dan and the Brigadier General. A gurney had been co-opted into a map table and Ludlow was pointing to key intersections throughout Boston while Dan provided commentary born of his local knowledge and (Emma was sure) police experience. On a screen behind them was a frozen frame from a security camera in the City Place mall.

"First priority should be evacuation of the healthy," Dan replied, with an air of someone repeating himself for the nth time.

"You said yourself that identifying the healthy is not clear cut," Ludlow answered, calm but decisive.

"We can test blood samples," replied Dan.

The general turned and picked up a remote. In a few seconds he had rewound the video to the point when four men entered the mall, Emma instantly recognized the man in point position as Steve.

"Event started at 9:12 AM," he said.

The general fast forwarded so Emma had only the briefest glimpse of Steve and his three people turn and bite hard into the nearest customers before running off camera. Ten seconds later the video stopped again.

"Event end at 9:15 AM," he continued "Three minutes. Seventeen dead, seven presumed infected fled the premises – that's in addition to the original four. We cannot evacuate potentially infected people with that vector. The test takes a minute per sample and there are over 600,000 people in Boston. Dividing Boston into sections is the only way to minimize contagion."

"But as you said," replied Dan. "The infection spreads quickly, parts of the city could be mass slaughter zones."

Her professor outwardly looked cool but Emma could see the signs, he was getting frustrated and angry.

"We can set up a cordoned off area for the uninfected – supposedly uninfected," the general corrected himself "then we can administer tests before releasing them on the world." He held up a hand to forestall protests "Stopping spread of infection has to be our primary concern."

"With respect Brigadier General, I have to disagree" countered Dan, crossing his arms over his chest.

"I respect you for doing so," replied Brigadier General Ludlow "but any military decisions are mine and that is my final word."

And just like that, the conversation was over. The military man turned to a subordinate and started making plans to set up blockades at key points – bridges and narrow streets. Dan waited semi-patiently for ten seconds or so without regaining the general's attention and then quietly excused himself to go check on some imagined data.

"What happened back there?" asked Emma, matching pace with the rejected Doctor.

Dan barked a short, unhappy laugh.

"Exactly what it looked like, looks like my advice on how to handle this epidemic is no longer required," he replied, a hint of a Scottish accent once again intriguing Emma, making her wonder about his past.

Dan turned to Emma mid-reverie, a fire behind his normally placid eyes "but that doesn't mean we cannot continue to tackle it from a medical point of view."

Dan continued his walk towards a small office – Emma quickly realized that this was his normal office as a professor for this university. It was little more than a closet and the only photo was of a black lab – Emma couldn't help but feel a little sorry for the man.

_I've always been more of a blond Labrador fan myself_ the little voice in her head quipped, unable to self-regulate even after the last week.

_Mother is right_ she thought sadly _I am awkward._

Sometimes Emma couldn't help but wonder if the voices in her head actually were hers, or some spirit interloper just along for the ride. A ghostly equivalent to the Critics from the Muppets.

Sitting himself down behind the small desk across from the only other chair he had managed to squeeze into his room, Dan fished out a dark rimmed pair of glasses and perched them on his nose before picking up a printout of the genetic code of the virus to pore through. Almost immediately, he dropped it again in frustration and pinched the bridge of his nose before removing the glasses again, dropping them to rest on top of the printout.

"So... how is the whole sleep thing going?" asked Emma, eager to break the tension.

"Sleep and I have a tenuous arrangement at the best of times," replied Dan, leaning back in his swivel chair "I am afraid that talks have broken down under the current circumstances and rest has gone on strike. It is even picketing outside the building in case I hire scab workers."

"We are still talking about getting rest right?" answered Emma with a smile.

"Hah yes, sorry – should have ended that tortured analogy long before I did." Looking back down to the printout, Dan dared a quick point at it "Have you made any progress with the code? Anything we can use?"

"You do know these things take time right?" answered Emma with a smile – in truth, the rush of her double life meant she hadn't even looked at it. "I can make broad generalizations though," she added, seeing his look of disappointment.

"Generalize away" he gestured wildly.

"Obviously based from Influenza" she started "we can guess that from the shape of the antibodies. Man-made" she added.

"Why do you say that?" he queried, sitting forward in his chair curiosity piqued.

"Really just deduction. It isn't airborne, which is the first thing geneticists do when modifying flu virus."

Emma decided to go out on a limb, basing her next finding solely off the story John had told her about Derek.

"Also while I haven't looked at much of the code yet the first thing I saw is it turns off a gene commonly associated with aging."

"But why would anyone manufacture something that gives a benefit like that but turns the infected into a raving maniac," answered Dan, throwing his arms up into the air.

"Well I doubt that was intended!" replied Emma, earnestly.

"Any clues yet as to why?" Dan asked.

Emma paused, weighing how much to give up without giving herself away but Dan – good at reading people as he was – instantly picked up on it.

"What? Come on, any half-baked theory at this point – I'm desperate" he pleaded.

"Well... I did notice one thing in common across almost all the infected bodies" Emma replied tentatively. Obviously, she hadn't but was ad-libbing with her inside information again. Randomly Emma thought of a mad-libs book, _When Emma was infected with ____ she instantly reacted by chewing the ____ off the first ____ she saw._

_I missed my calling_ Emma lamented, before dragging herself kicking and screaming back to reality.

Weighing the need for containment against her own personal safety, Emma was forced to give up more information than she was really comfortable imparting.

"They had depressed levels of Serotonin. If I was to guess, how depressed would probably directly relate to how quickly they were killed after being infected."

"What that's... but that's huge!" replied Dan, half-standing in victory. A thought occurred to him though and he sat again, perplexed. "No... it can't be that."

"Why not?" the young Zombie answered.

"Well, by your theory they would be eating brains by some kind of need to replenish that Serotonin but that wouldn't do anything. It would go into the bloodstream but would be blocked from ever entering the spinal fluid by thinning capillaries – which it would need to cross in order to replenish the brain."

"About that," answered Emma, intent on damning herself apparently "Most of the victims had brain damage of course. A few from the most recent attack however were relatively unscathed. Even in those with no brain trauma, there seemed to be some pollution of the CSF – I am guessing here but I **think** the virus destroys the blood brain barrier, allowing the –"

"- Serotonin to enter the spinal fluid from the blood stream" finished Dan, now leaping from his chair. "We were right to call this your virus," he added, flushed.

_You have no idea_ Emma's little head critic answered.

"I have to go check your theory," Dan added "but if you are right, you just found a really easy way to test for the virus – check the spinal fluid for blood."

_No good deed goes unpunished_ thought Emma sourly, leaving the office behind Dan.

### Chapter 14

A few hours later, Emma peppered Dan with excuses to get away from the lab. Given her recent "finds" he was more than happy to let her. Her promises of going to retrieve more bodies were all the excuse he really needed to hear – sample size was critical in proving common traits of a killer virus.

So it was that Emma and John stood in the street, looking gloomily at a barrier that was being erected. The thing was made of metal and came in sections; it was astounding to see how quickly the National Guard assembled it. As a section was finished a van pulled in behind it with an attached platform and ladder.

"Your friends really work very quickly don't they," John commented offhandedly.

Emma didn't reply, staring intently at the platform. This was the third road they had tried – it seemed there was just no leaving South End. The military presence was setting up temporary mass accommodations in each zone for all the people unable to return home, Emma was very glad right now that she would miss that debacle by virtue of the crappy motel she was staying in.

"Remind me why we are here again?" John asked off-handedly. This was the third time he had asked the question in the last hour and it was starting to get on Emma's nerves, the call of the small child from the back seat of the car saying "Are we there yet?"

"We are here" answered Emma through gritted teeth "because I am hoping that if we can go over the most recent crime scene again we will find something that was missed earlier."

"Oh you mean like track their footprints with my heat vision?" asked John.

Emma stared at him for a moment. "Can you actually do th-" she started to ask querulously.

"Of course I can't fucking do that, dipshit" he answered, frustrated, before she could finish "you must be mistaking me for someone else. Possibly a Puma. We are not trained forensics people but you know who are? The team of people who – according to you – swept over that shitty mall with a fine tooth comb earlier."

"So you have a better idea to find Steve then?" she asked, turning back to the barrier.

"No," answered John sulkily.

"Then we go with my plan," answered Emma, looking thoughtfully at the barricade as she added "but I can't risk bluffing my way through the checkpoint with my university credentials."

"Yeah it sucks," commented John easily, crunching into an apple produced from the backpack he bought with him.

"Do you have any ideas?" she asked turning to him with an exasperated expression. John's cheerful ennui was wearying after a while.

"Sure, we could take the train," he offered between bites.

"They shut the T Train down. It was the first thing they did, stopped the subway and locked the stations," she proved the point by gesturing exasperatedly at a nearby locked station.

"Not that train," answered John, putting his hand on top of Emma's head. Turning her head lightly by about 45 degrees, she found herself looking out over the bridge to an oncoming coal train that was passing by.

"That isn't a passenger train," she answered, unsure of herself.

"Which is why they haven't shut it down. All these poor assholes need supplies."

Emma looked around to a number of disenfranchised citizens who were like her staring at the hastily erected barriers – doubtless a number of them were wishing they could get home to their families.

"Well wouldn't they be checking the trains for stowaways?" she countered.

"Maybe at some point he answered," easily leaning over the side of the bridge to look at their latest mode of transportation. "Not yet though. If you are fixing a pipe with leaks you take care of the big ones first. They will spend at least a couple of days properly shoring up all the barriers they are erecting."

Emma tried to think of a reason why John was wrong, of how they would get caught – but it sounded no worse than anything she could come up with.

"Okay," she answered finally.

* * * * *

"I must confess," said Emma, fighting to raise her voice against the wind. "When you said he had to catch the train, I was most worried about the smell of hobos. I hadn't envisioned that you were psychotic enough to have meant this."

John was partially turned away from her, ten feet away - his idea of catching the train was riding on top of it. A slight curve of the line set Emma stumbling – looking up she saw John staring into the distance at a boarded up old building. He was standing as naturally as she would on pavement. _He always looks completely at ease. I hate that about him_ Emma thought churlishly to herself.

"I swear I just saw some people over by the old state hospital," he muttered absently.

"Maybe they are – eep – sightseeing," Emma remarked, not at all comfortable traveling roof class.

"Doubtful. It has been closed for decades and is falling to pieces," returned John, still not looking away.

"Well maybe you should check it out – anything to get off this deathtrap," Emma said.

"Oh would you RELAX," replied John, finally turning back to her. Even his mild annoyance made her uncomfortable, her mind replaying mixed snatches of the initial attack. It seemed so long ago.

"We can't be going over 30 miles an hour," he said as he stalked her way.

"I still don't understand why we are up here," Emma replied, squaring off to John and developing a case of backbone - though her overcompensating for the train movement ruined the effect a little.

"We are here because your balance is embarrassing. Didn't you take ballet when you were a child? I thought females with breeding often send their girl children off for that."

"No and even if I had, I doubt it would prepare me for this," whined Emma.

"For what? Falling off the train when you can heal most injuries in a day or two? Yeah that must be do scawy wor woo," John sarcastically answered and he pushed her, in the chest. Not hard but enough that she stumbled briefly.

"I could land on my head or something!" Emma retaliated.

"Oh please!" said John and pushed her again a bit harder. Emma stumbled backward, over-compensated and toppled forwards and right off the side of the train, banging her shoulder on the side railing as she did so.

"Oh now you are just being difficult!" yelled John after her. "And what, you landed on your head to prove a point? That's just childish!"

* * * * *

Twenty minutes later they were on another train – Emma sitting and John pacing. Her shoulder was sending occasional stabbing pains down her arm, reminding her to level occasional "drop dead" looks at John – who had the good graces to occasionally look sheepish. He started talking and Emma sensed it was as much to ignore the cloud of unspoken _fuck-you's_ in the air as to impart knowledge.

"I am trying to get you a little more prepared for if we do find Steve. You fight like a bruiser."

"I do all right," Emma countered defensively.

"Only because you seem to have some affinity for pain. Some of the hits I watched you take should have made your grandchildren wince," he answered, turning away.

Emma heard him mutter "If you live long enough to have any," under his breath before he turned back.

"You don't have the weight for fighting that way – oh sure against normal humans you do," he said, staving off her retort with a wave of his hand before she even made it. "But Zombies are going to have hardened up too; so you don't want to go toe to toe. Finesse, that's what you need to learn. At the heart of finesse is balance."

"When you say hardened up..." asked Emma, not really wanting to leave her angry place but her inquisitive nature temporarily winning out.

"One of the side effects, maybe from constant healing?" said John and held out his arm. Emma took it and was amazed, his flesh felt hard, somehow. "As time passes your flesh gets harder and so do your muscles."

"What happens long term?" asked Emma "Do we just seize up?"

John shrugged "Dunno," he answered. The idea sent chills down Emma's spine – could she one day be mummified in her own flesh? "So are you ready to give it another try? I promise it will help."

Regretting the decision as she made it, Emma put out her good hand and John pulled her back up.

A couple of miles of track later and Emma felt like she was starting to vaguely get it. She wouldn't make a great skateboarder any time soon but reacting to the bumps and turns of the train was slowly becoming easier. Looking up at John, she felt a sense of pride – which instantly gave way to panic. Over his shoulder she had spotted a hastily erected wall across the tracks – apparently the response was to plug all the big and little holes at the same time. As if on cue, the train started to slow down.

"Oh fuck," she articulated intelligently.

John spun around to see what she had seen, an act that would have likely made Emma lose her balance.

"Oh – ah. Crap" said John, obviously at a loss for words himself just before he pushed Emma from the train, again.

_I have fallen off a train twice today_ Emma thought bitterly as she sailed backwards with rare grace into the air – her eyes narrowed as she watched John take a little hop off the side himself _both times because he pushed me_ she added mentally.

This time at least she had managed to awkwardly roll, which beat her first (now firmly rejected) method hands down - landing hard on her head, neck and shoulder then flopping bonelessly backwards was not the way paratroopers were taught after all. Despite being flush with the minor success of not landing directly on her spine, she still wanted to smash John's face into wood repeatedly until he thought he was a door knocker.

"So what is the plan?" she asked getting painfully up off the hard, rocky, sandy ground. With an effort of will she swallowed the surge of anger in a fit of practicality - her mother's training had been thorough enough to survive even her current circumstances.

"I guess we wait for dark before sneaking past," John answered honestly with a shrug "It can't be more than a couple of hours away."

"Well what are we going to do in the meantime?" Emma asked.

"I have a couple of ideas," answered John with a grin, to which Emma blushed. In a rare fit of perceptiveness – not normally his strong suit – John picked up on it. "Oh not that – ew. I know a warehouse not far from here – I can give you some pointers about fighting."

Emma – not knowing whether to be relieved or miffed that John had described the thought of carnal acts with her person using a one word descriptor of disgust - agreed.

Reaching their destination a few minutes later, Emma wondered if it had been worth it. An old warehouse off of the older harbor, it had obviously fallen out of use sometime in the last few years. The colors would doubtless be drab if not for the insane spider scratch scrawling over near every inch of surface inside and out. Various people had proudly proclaimed in sprayed word this place as theirs – using three feet letters to do so where necessary. Emma just couldn't for the life of her figure out why they would want to.

"I believe they still make gyms for people to train to fight in - why are we in this shithole?" asked Emma politely. "Look, even the spiders have abandoned it – that cannot be a good sign," she added. The spiders did indeed seem to have left for sunnier climes, but not before constructing a silky city in this one. Emma had no problem with spiders, but spider webs were a different story – feeling their gossamer on her small blonde arm hairs had always made her freak out.

"What's wrong with this place?" answered John defensively - Emma hoped he had not bought into the timeshare. "I have always liked the docks - they combine sea air with a lack of inquisitiveness from the locals."

"Besides," he added "I doubt gyms like to see guys hit women in the face."

"I am completely behind them on that policy," answered Emma, taking a step backwards.

"Oh shut up and put your guard up," John countered, verbally. "It isn't anything you won't heal in a day anyway. Maybe two."

Emma stood in a stance she had not really employed for at least 10 years, a basic boxing position that her Dad had taught her. It brought back a lot of memories, a lot of which stung a little to remember. She had really loved her life back then, when her father was more of a friend than a parental figure.

John for his part circled her, clucking his tongue. He obviously didn't approve of her up close and personal style but couldn't really dissuade her of it. A quick flick to her right elbow reminded her to tuck the arm closer to her side – which she promptly did.

Finishing the circle, John took up position in front of her, a simple martial art pose. Emma wondered idly what formal training the more experienced Zombie had undergone?

Feinting a quick punch, Emma backed up a step nervously. She had not purposefully entered a fight in quite a number of years – right now she felt out of practice and somewhat ridiculous. John did not press the attack though, moving slowly to the left and forcing her to turn with him – she did so with short halting steps, not really comfortable in her balance or position.

"Widen your legs a little" John commented as he continued to the left. Emma did, finding it easier to move in time with him.

John finally lashed out with a direct punch which Emma blocked on her forearm. The pain of doing so made her wonder if she wouldn't be better off letting him hit her soft fleshy side instead. He followed up by stepping in and to the right, smashing out with an elbow which ironically found her side – Emma instantly decided that yes, she would prefer to block his punches.

Emma was not one to back up for long, however. She flailed a quick jab that john quickly ducked under before raising a counter punch, again aiming for Emma's exposed ribs.

Awkwardly turning, Emma managed to put an arm in front of the punch. She immediately backed up a step while shaking her left arm in an attempt to regain feeling.

"Try to make more circular motions, rather than just putting your arm in the way of my fist" John prompted, making the appropriate motions in the air.

He tried an exploratory jab and Emma blocked – by putting her arm in the way. A couple more jabs and Emma did the same a couple more times – to her increasing frustration. For some reason her old training just seemed too ingrained to easily discard. When working fast, her instincts took over and they seemed hardwired to the way she was taught so many years ago.

"Okay," said John after a while of him punching and her (mostly) blocking. Emma's arms felt absolutely black and blue. "Would you like to try punches?"

"I thought you were," rejoined Emma, with a lot more bravado than she felt.

"Uh huh," answered John. "Write your name and then I will concede that I can't punch."

Emma was momentarily confused until she realized – she couldn't ball her hands into fists. The crappy job she had done of blocking his fist-anvils had pulverized her forearms.

"Let's take a break for a few minutes," he said "Give your body a chance to heal the worst of it."

Emma sat down on the floor gratefully. Today definitely had not gone the way she expected – she felt an odd sense of diversion within herself. On the one hand, her human life and her medical degree were both going great. Dan – previously known to her only as a lecturer – was obviously very well known within his field and he trusted her. Hell it seemed like he was even growing to respect her.

That knowledge and her newfound ambivalence towards blood and gore led her to the other side of herself, however. How could she possible define something that had at once put her in so much danger while freeing her completely? It was like standing at the edge of the universe and looking out into nothingness but the nothingness was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

"Okay let's pick this up," John said, checking the dwindling sun through the window. "We can't have more than an hour of light left and I want us to get moving as soon as it gets dark. Time to get some basic attack combinations though," he added.

Emma got up slowly, not least to mask a wince – she was far from 100% still. Her arms ached like she couldn't believe and her neck and shoulders were still shooting pain down her back from the earlier sudden encounters with the ground. Something in her moved though, an indomitable spirit that no-one who knew her would have suspected lay below the surface – no way was she going to show John weakness, not again. Dusting off, she stood opposite her sparring partner, legs slightly apart one in front of the other. Her arms were up in position she had come to feel semi-comfortable in – her front (left) hand in something approximating a boxer while her right was drawn in tight to her side, ready to make a straight line for punching. She had learned that much at least.

"K," said John, pacing from side to side "well it isn't terrible." He came to a stop directly in front of her and widened his stance, putting his hands in a more traditional karate first position. "Let's see what you've got," he said and instantly took a step back to avoid a wide left handed hook. Emma was coming out fighting.

"Sloppy," he summarized.

Emma led with another left handed punch, this time trying to jab directly rather than take extra time winding up for a circular hook. John responded by stepping right – her left - putting himself instantly out of range from her right hand.

"See what I did? If your opponent leads with their forward hand by stepping that direction you block them from using their more powerful second and also," he added giving her a light punch to her exposed left side "can use the fact that they just opened their side."

Emma retreated a step, not from pain but to rethink her strategy.

Coming in again she surprised John by attempting the same left jab, when he stepped right again to illustrate his previous point he found a quick right hand hook waiting for him. Narrowly blocking, he stepped back – only to find Emma had already advanced a step to attempt a meaty punch to his stomach. He again blocked with a circular motion and pushed her hard enough to stumble backwards.

"God you are such a bruiser!" he said, stunned "Where is your finesse? You fight like a heavyweight."

"I am what I am," Emma responded and stepped forward to start another round.

"I keep telling you, you aren't equipped to fight this way," replied John "but I can see you will need a more object lesson," he added stepping forward and into the fight for real.

John wasted no time striking out at Emma which she blocked (painfully) while moving forward. John slipped a leg behind her ankle and pushed, sending her sprawling. Emma rolled to the side which allowed her to narrowly miss a kick for her side – she lashed out with her leg at his knee making him step backwards, giving her long enough to stumble to her feet.

Stepping forward, John made a quick punch to Emma's face but was surprised in turn when her elbow met his nose – she had elected to take the punch to bring him in closer to a distance she was comfortable with. His head barely snapped back from what she would consider a very solid connection – more testament to his increased density. She followed with a punch to the side and was almost surprised when it actually connected, drawing a slight grunt from her sparring partner.

A second later, John connected with a left handed open palm strike that caught her completely unawares, spinning her and depositing the shocked Emma firmly on the ground.

Looking back up to John, she was somewhat surprised to see he had been replaced by her mother. Looking at the expression on her face, Emma felt she would much rather be back to facing the Zombie.

### Chapter 15

"Let me help you up dear," said her mother, offering a hand. Emma had a surreal moment where she wondered if she was experiencing someone else's dream and decided she didn't care if she was. Hearing these words from her mother was worth a little personal delusion.

Memory came in a flash a second later - Michelle had been in a huge horse riding kick at the time and they would regularly go to these stables to take care of her horse. It had seemed to a young Emma that riding horses should involve a lot more riding – the tasks to keep the animal happy and clean seemed endless to the impatient eight year old her.

Looking around as the scene froze, Emma noticed the stables had meshed with the warehouse she was undoubtedly unconscious in currently – solid wooden panels were now tagged with bright scrawl and the usual bright yellow surroundings had taken on a blue cast of concrete even though the walls retained their oak texture.

To the side Emma saw Michelle frozen in a huff, her back arched haughtily as she stood arms crossed over her chest.

"Why are you mad at me?" Emma asked in wonder – something she never asked at the time she was sure.

"You bit me, you little freak!" replied Michelle turning towards her. "You were always doing weird things," she added turning away and freezing again. Emma supposed thinking back on it that Michelle was right, she had always felt a lack of attention and acting out had become her way at this age.

"It's just her way Michelle, you know that," her mother said gently, turning to her oldest daughter. Emma was stunned to hear her mother defending her but remembered that happened, while Michelle was still alive.

"She is too old to go around biting people," her sister offered, still turned away "I didn't do that when I was her age."

"That's true," answered Emma from the ground. "But you did run away." It was not the eight year old Emma speaking but the fully grown one - as she said it, she remembered the police at her house. Her sister had been found at a bus stop a mile away with nothing but a cookie in a handkerchief and her favorite teddy bear clasped under one arm. When found, she had snuffled that no-one would care as her little sister – an energetic four year old Emma - got all the attention anyway.

Thinking about it for a second, Emma supposed not much had changed. She was still biting people and her sister had run away again, this time successfully.

"Was that why you paid her so much attention?" Emma asked the statue of her Mother.

"She needed it more than you," she replied honestly, without turning "you were content with your books and your weird friends. Michelle needed approval or she would have self-destructed, you were always the independent one."

Emma had never really thought of herself as independent before, but she supposed it actually fit. Weirdly, she suddenly related to her mother better than she ever had – they had that in common after all.

"Get up, we have to get going," her mother said.

"What, why?" answered Emma, accepting the hand stretched towards her.

"Because it is getting dark," replied John, pulling her up and out of her dream.

### Chapter 16

"There are people over there on the other side," whispered Emma to John as they crept along beside the slowed train.

"Quick, let's get on it so they can't see our feet," he whispered back. Emma couldn't help but feel that he had warmed to her somewhat along the way – their interactions were more ones of friends than a teacher forcing their way through talking to a slow student.

"Let's go catch a train!" he added and clapped her on the damaged shoulder as he passed.

_Of course_ added Emma to herself as she winced _that isn't all good news._

Hopping up a small ladder, the two flattened themselves against the wall of a large container.

"Sneaking, Sneaking, Sneaking," said Emma out loud. She had felt different since her recent dream about her mother and sister, lighter somehow. _Probably just the concussion talking_ she reminded herself breezily with a mental wink.

"Shhhhhh!" hissed John, a little too loud himself.

"Sneaking, Sneaking, Sneaking," answered Emma softly, drawing a look and a lopsided smile from John.

"I can't help but feel," whispered Emma, flat against the wall but intensely aware this still projected a her shaped mass in blackness "that this is about the worst camouflage ever. Six year olds would probably stop to laugh from the vaunted platforms of their hide and seek skills."

"Don't worry. I doubt they are looking very hard for people trying to sneak IN to the infected area," replied John.

As if on cue, the train slowly rolled by a man in camo gear. Emma supposed that she could see better in the low light than he could - thanks to her recently improved blue tinged eyesight - but really even if he was similarly equipped he would not have spotted the duo. He didn't look their way once – his gaze was affixed in the distance to where their train was laboriously heading.

"Wait," answered Emma, as they left the guard in the middle distance. "If they aren't looking for people trying to break in to the infected area hence our easy infiltration then how the fuck are we getting back out again?"

Silence.

"I didn't think that far ahead," answered John honestly.

"Fuck me," answered Emma honestly, waiting for the train to pass fully by the bridge before hopping off and breaking in to a jog.

Looking around as they ate up the distance until the mall, Emma was instantly struck by how quiet the streets were.

"Where do you think everyone went to?" she breathlessly panted as they jogged down the deserted streets.

"I dunno," answered John calmly as he ran beside her, about as winded as someone taking a leisurely Sunday stroll.

_This is downtown Boston_ she thought to herself _and it is.._ she looked up at a billboard flashing the time _only 8:30PM. Where are all the people?_

Thinking about it, she supposed not many people actually lived in this area – in all likelihood most everyone got out when the attack happened, or at least before they started erecting barricades.

_It is funny, but this might be the safest part of the city_ she continued inside her mind _lower population density, plenty of very secure buildings._ She thought to the couple of times she had lost control and became a monster – did she have the presence of mind in that basic state to do things like operate elevators?

Possibly.

_So find some multistory building, shut down power to the elevators and blockade the stairs then._ It sounded like as good of a plan as any to Emma. _Until I run out of Serotonin and go mad myself of course_ she reminded herself.

Waiting was not an option for her; it would never be an option. From now on, if she wasn't pressing forward she was slipping backwards – possibly into madness.

"We're here," John stated, slowing down and giving Emma a start. She had been so enmeshed inside her head that she had no idea how much distance they had travelled.

John walked up to the door of the mall, idly throwing aside a streamer of police tape. For a second, as it fluttered down to the ground Emma was struck by how much it looked like a streamer from a parade - some welcoming celebration, where life and community were honored. Looking around at the dead streets, Emma supposed no-one would be partying here anytime soon.

Looking back, she saw John winding up to bash his shoulder into the glass of the door.

"Whoa Stop!" she yelled, too loud. Her voice echoed in the streets. "Stop," she reiterated more quietly.

"What? It is locked" he answered with a smile. Emma instantly got the feeling that breaking into a mall was some kind of bucket list item for the weird man.

"Key," she answered simply, presenting a simple key from one of her pockets. "I swiped it earlier, when everyone was investigating the scene."

"Oh... " replied John sadly "yeah I guess that works too. A lot more subtle certainly."

Opening the door slowly, Emma and John were instantly hit by a coppery smell. All the bodies had been removed but the blood was everywhere and it had settled to give off the slightly acrid smell of an old tomb.

"Home sweet home," said John, smiling and walking inside.

"You're weird, man," replied Emma, but she followed him anyway.

Emma wouldn't have said the mall was worse without the bodies but neither would she have said it was better, bright swishes of red made the scene look like a painting that she just couldn't understand. She heard a _thunk thunk thunk_ of a door and looked up with a start.

"Seriously?" asked John, seemingly to himself before coming back into view. He had discovered the pay bathrooms.

"Do you have a token?" asked John, Emma merely shook her head in the negative.

"Fuck it," John replied thoughtfully and went back around the corner. A second later a crash announced he had converted the washroom into a more free-for-use model.

Looking down at the blood, Emma tried her best to get in the zone like she had witnessed Dan do when performing autopsies. Try and pick out any details that didn't fit in this scene. She tried to imagine scenarios – remembering the footage from earlier, she couldn't easily identify any obvious target which was her first thought, that this was a focused attack made to look like mass murder.

She walked around the closest blood spatter. Was it a religious thing? A survival thing? Did he just like killing? Emma wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the last was true.

"I did them a favor, the door was bent I kid you not. At least now they can claim it on insurance and get something that doesn't look like it was made out of cardboard."

It was at that point that a part of her hindbrain that had raised a tremulous red flag earlier when looking at the scene with Dan meekly managed to make its presence known.

"Wait what?" she asked, brightly.

"Urgh I know, how the hell does the top half of a door bend like that even?" he answered, taking her intelligent inquiry for interest in the door situation as presented a few minutes ago.

"Not that you idiot," she answered, jogging over to the Dunkin Donuts whose bent metal shutters she had noticed earlier, thinking it was done by looters after the fact.

"You said insurance," she reiterated "like no-one would pay attention to the door because the insurance would cover it blindly."

Moving the broken metal Emma found she could now slide over the counter of the Dunkin Donuts and wriggle beneath the bars.

"Do you think the same applies to looting?" she asked, moving over to the cash register. It had been pried open and emptied.

"Ohhhh yeah I see what you are saying," he replied "Yeah my guess is they would just pay. I can't imagine the police would spend much time trying to solve the identity of the Dunkin Donuts bandit, especially during an emergency."

"That's it then," said Emma, wriggling back beneath the shutters and to freedom. "Then that is why Steve perpetrated this massacre – to mask the robbery."

She looked around the room and suddenly the world opened around her, as she saw the whole plan unfold. "And it was a test. Seventeen people. Seventeen people died for the contents of a donut shop register." Emma was stunned at the callousness, _what cost a human life? Twenty dollars each? If that?_

"Wow," answered John simply "If Steve would kill that many for a cash register, I wonder how many he would shuffle off to take a bank vault?"

"I don't think numbers matter to him very much," replied Emma grimly.

"Except maybe the ones on the bills," replied John.

"Yes," answered Emma, walking out of the mall. "So his next target will probably be somewhere with a lot of people and banks."

"I am not sure that narrows it down enough," replied John, following her.

Emma was listening. A noise in the distance reminded her of a moment from her childhood when she held a large shell to her ear, and listened for a full minute to the sound of waves. Strange that now, standing in downtown Boston with a man who infected her with a deadly virus she would be hearing the same rushing noise. It ebbed and flowed just like the distant roaring of the ocean.

"Then maybe," said Emma as she took off running, identifying this noise at last "we should just follow the sound of yelling."

### Chapter 17

Channel 7 WHDH Urgent News Update

Armed forces have been summoned to the scene of a recent riot in a historic downtown area of Boston. Citizens have been advised to clear the area as we have been advised the National Guard have been authorized to use deadly force against the rioters.

Initial outrage against this military action was forestalled when a deputy from the mayor's office leaked the riots were being investigated by the Center for Disease Control - or CDC – leading to speculation by analysts that the rioters are a danger to the community at large. All inquiries have been forwarded to National Guard liaison Amy Bishop but she has as of right now declined further comment. The office of the Mayor has also declined further speculation on the nature of this latest scene of violence or any preceding events.

A curfew has been issued and all citizens are compelled to stay indoors. Individuals without appropriate credentials found outside will be summarily incarcerated pending evaluation by CDC officials.

More updates as they become available.

Having heard a summary of her lack of rights, delivered by military-grade speaker to the crowd in downtown Boston, Emma rocked back on her heels. _So the end of the world begins on a Thursday_ she thought to herself. Secretly this confirmed several long held beliefs about the day in general. Pretending to be Friday but still entrenched in the week, she had long thought of it as the most duplicitous of days. Most people's money would be on the start of the week, Emma would bet. Monday and Tuesday have a different deal though; their job was to be a shit sandwich dedicated to maintaining the soul crushing status quo, not breaking it.

"What tests do you think the CDC will be performing on anyone unlucky enough to be caught," she wondered aloud.

"At a guess, dissection. But hey, what do I know? If they haul us in, maybe they will make you minister of Zombie defense and appoint me as the next pope. Who knows how government works?"

"I didn't know you were catholic."

"Never said I would be a good pope," John answered, digging in the satchel that he kept buried under his right arm.

"Binoculars, really?" Emma asked incredulously as John produced a pair. Emma was not a great judge of binocular quality but she would bet the catalog selling them had once described them using terminology that implied edginess - they had little bits of blue trim on them and reminded her vaguely of a stingray. Describing a set of binoculars as edgy was probably one among countless reasons why she was not currently interested in becoming a judge of these things.

"What? Too dorky?" he answered, suddenly looking defensive.

"No, no it's fine. Just didn't take you for someone who owned binoculars is all. Especially ones with blue trim on them." She responded.

"The blue bits are lighter than water," he said, looking into them once more and focusing on the street below. "Makes them float."

"Oh? Do you have a boat?" Emma couldn't help but be a little impressed.

"No. But if I ever get a boat, you can believe I will not be losing my binoculars overboard. Take a look at this."

Emma shuffled slowly towards the edge of the building – they were on the belfry of the Old North Church, a historic building 5 blocks away from the mall they had revisited earlier. Getting in had been ridiculously easy. The convenience had saddened a small part of Emma - the mousey her from the recent past \- at the deplorable lack of security on a historic building. The fact that two characters such as herself and John could just walk in the unattended door and hop the two foot barricade nominally barring entrance to the winding spiraling set of steps leading to the room and other non-public places deserved a sharp letter.

She took another slow step forward; just enough to put her within arm's reach of John and his ridiculous floatie binoculars.

_It's odd_ Emma thought _I jumped through a fourth story window not a week ago._ Without a stream of near-death induced adrenalin, she seemed unable to reproduce the same level of daring.

Emma reached out and carefully took the binoculars from her fellow Zombie, who handed them over with a smile at her timidity. Focusing on the large gathering in front of the East bridge – only a couple of blocks distant – it didn't take Emma long to determine the cause of the ruckus.

Here was a sizable chunk of the North End and Chinatown population, trying to get out from a section of the city where confirmed attacks had taken place. For their good sense, they were rewarded with a military barricade in front of the bridge denying passage to all comers.

Logically, Emma could understand the point of trying to keep her virus contained. Witnessing this throng of people, all in a perilous position, Emma was struck by the lives behind the statistic. 5% losses sound acceptable when talking about a natural disaster. That is, until she stood here on the ledge, watching them milling about, trying to figure out what to do next. These people knew on some level that they had been deemed expendable and it was tearing at the collective psyches. Kids were crying, parents holding, angry young men arguing. In all the sound officially qualified as bedlam. An uncharitable part of Emma's mind qualified it as bleating but she corrected herself – these people were trying to protect their humanity for once rather than act like the sheep they were for the other 99% of their lives.

To their credit, the military men were not treating the teaming mass like the enemy – they were in fact traversing the crowd and helping where they could. Despite the apparent kindness, the barricade still stood like an insurmountable monument – it painted the concern as a half-truth.

"So should we go back, keep a watch on the banks?" asked John.

"I don't think he will make a move against them now – look at that," answered Emma and pointed to a patrol of ten soldiers heading up the street. "He never makes a move unless he has numbers and a strong position," she added.

"So... we win?" asked John, confused.

"So," replied Emma, not unkindly, turning John's head to look at the huge crowd of people in the floodlit square "He will attempt to make another distraction."

"Should we tell someone?" John countered, sounding unsure.

Emma lifted an imaginary phone to her ear and put an index finger out to John, signifying for him to hold for this deeply important imaginary call.

"Hello, government? This is Emma. Some local thug named Steve Kerchak is going to try and infect mmm," she pretended to count the crowd "a thousand or so people to commit a bank robbery – can you find him in a group that large and detain him please? How do I know all this? Because I gave him the virus, silly!" She then hung up her invisi-phone.

She turned back to John, a grin on her face.

"Is that how you pictured the exchange going?" she asked him.

"Not exactly. So what do we do then?" he asked, frustrated with the choices.

"We wait," Emma answered "and maybe take turns getting some sleep."

"Bagsie first sleep," answered John immediately, to a mental dammit from the exhausted Emma. With a smile on his face he settled back against the wooden building and closed his eyes.

* * * * *

Seven hours and one turn for an uncomfortable 3 hours of sleep later, Emma was idly scanning the crowds in the pre-dawn light with the stupid floating binoculars. This put her in the perfect position to a) be feeling grumpy and b) see trouble as it started. And of course, it started with Steve.

Hearing a scream above the din, Emma focused in on a man sinking to his knees. She instantly kicked John awake.

Behind the man, even in the low light she could see the villain Steve – the man whose background evil she had empowered with the force of her virus. Switching quickly back to the downed man she had no doubt he had been bitten and that the families sitting near him were in immediate danger.

Making an instantaneous decision, Emma damned her brain for being afraid of heights and with only slight difficulty stood up.

"HEY!" she yelled as loud as she could, waving her arms. Miraculously, she was heard above the other noises, several faces turning upwards towards her – including a couple of men in military uniforms.

"INFECTION!" she yelled, pointing down at the unfortunate man shaking uncontrollably on the ground. People around him, were grabbed and pulled backwards and one civic minded citizen stepped forward and shot the unfortunate infected man in the head. Emma sure hoped she had been right in her diagnosis – apparently the Boston crowd were disinclined to allow second opinions.

Sweeping back across the crowd, Emma was instantly disheartened. Seeing three widening circles at different places in the crowd she didn't need the smattering of small arms fire to tell her what had happened. Steve had outplayed her again, spreading out his lackeys and coordinating the attack so that the chances of stopping the infected would be lessened.

She wordlessly handed the binoculars to John, who was peering into the crowd with groggy eyes from past her shoulder. He took in everything for a full minute before turning to her.

"We should probably go," was his professional assessment of the scene below. Emma nodded, defeated. Taking a last look over the crowd with just her naked eyeballs, Emma could see pandemonium beginning. Riot shields had been deployed and gunfire was continuing from within the ranks of the mob. All these brave people – military and civilian alike – were facing the same problem, however, the enemy was all around them. Military men were falling back to the barricade, protected from an increasing number of snapping teeth and clawing hands from the cover of the thin plastic. Some of the worst offenders were rammed and beaten when down on the ground – tactically this proved a very effective move as the beaten creatures would then prove as a new focus for the growing number of monsters – they would turn and set upon them, which further covered the retreat of the national guardsmen.

The Zombies were in a feeding frenzy – they were tackling and biting the closest people only to be distracted by another potential victim. The infection was spreading like wildfire – thanks in no small part to Zombies coughing continually, slicking the crowds with their infected blood.

The pavement was red and slowly undulating as so many bodies groaned, writhed in agony or fed on those less fortunate. So many victims would descend into madness, their eyes dulled, and wake sometime later with the fresh blood of their family caked around their lips.

"You're probably right," replied Emma at last, gulping. A group of zombies had broken away from the growing host and – having seen her standing in plain sight – were running their way.

"Oh fuck!" she said, eloquently. Turning back to John, she found a coward shaped hole in the air where he had been, swiveling to look at the door they had come through she was just in time to see his metaphorical yellow streak exit along with the rest of him.

Darting the same way, she started pelting down the stairs – they were so small she felt more like she was sliding down them than running. Up ahead she heard thumping of frenzied feet coming up to meet them. John used his forward momentum to swing using the banister and planted a neck breaking foot in lucky contestant number one's face. Any smugness he felt was probably cut short when the bannister gave way under his extreme density and he rolled through the remainder of their adversaries, bowling them all over through strategically planting his face into the staircase again and again.

Emma wanted to yell strike but doubted he would see the humor when he got back up. She instead opted for using every Zombies head as a stepping stone on her remaining trip down the stairs – she doubted the damage would take long to heal given what she had seen previously, but maybe it would slow them down for a few crucial seconds.

Emma grabbed John and dragged him to his feet "God it is like picking up a statue," she grunted.

"My face is aware of that, thanks," John answered, still a little stunned. He had planted with his full weight a number of times.

Exiting through the small front door, Emma swung erratically at the sound of automatic gunfire chattering in the distance – it was coming from the barrier as the National Guard must have finally received permission to open fire into the former civilians. From the top of the stairs, Emma could just see the outlines of the retreating military police, drawing slowly back toward the barrier as their comrades tried to keep the growing numbers away from them.

Turning back towards the soon-to-be path of their retreat, Emma was treated to a second surprise - walking out of an alley with four other members of Boston's seedy underbelly was Steve. Emma was incensed to note they were laughing.

Steve turned in time to see Emma staring at him but his gaze slid past to something behind her – by his widening smile she doubted the object of his attention was set to work in her favor. With a small flick of his hand in a wave he turned and started to run up the street away from the barrier.

With all due dread, Emma turned. The barrier was offering no quarter to the newly turned monsters – and the frustration was showing. Fighting was breaking out among pockets of the creatures. One of the nearest groups – Emma counted five active participants and one trampled less active member - had apparently decided John and Emma looked like snackie smores and were barreling down upon them at an alarming rate of speed.

For a brief second, Emma wondered if they could take them. _Probably... maybe_ some hidden mechanism in her brain offered. _On the one hand these hapless bystanders have not had long to firm up and develop extra muscle mass_ she thought to herself in the blink of an eye. _On the other hand, however, they also feel very little pain, are completely relentless and outnumber us 3 to 1. 2.5 to 1 if I don't count the guy crawling towards me behind his fellows._

"I say we run," said Emma turning to John, only to find him gone, again. Turning, she found him jogging up the hill in the general direction that Steve had gone, away from the Zombies formerly known as People behind them.

"Stop leaving me behind!" she called after him as she ran to catch up.

"Stop being so slow!" he answered, still keeping up his pace.

Turning a corner on the cobbled street, Emma intelligently noted "Awk!" as a hand grabbed her by the throat and shoulder to roughly drag her into cover behind a concrete barrier.

"Shhhhhhh," asked John politely, and seconds later the drove of Zombies tore around the corner, almost on all fours as they ran hunched forward.

Emma sat quietly as they rocketed past, breath held almost melodramatically. Within another thirty seconds they were out of sight, past yet another bend in the road. Part of Emma felt sorry for them, knowing that the people they were yesterday were still trapped inside somewhere. The pragmatist in her hoped they ran into another barrier manned by people with heavy weaponry. They were too dangerous to just be rolling through the streets of Boston.

Getting out of his cover John walked into the street, leaning slightly to peek more fully around the same corner the Zombies had disappeared around.

Satisfied, he turned to Emma, a dark look upon his face.

"Now we just have to find where that idiot Steve went," he told her, just seconds before being bitten on the ankle by the semi-incapacitated Zombie, crawling around the corner to attack under the radar.

A cracking of bone accompanied the event. Apparently, this Zombie was following the crowd at a more sedate pace.

"You're wasting your time on me pal," John said, before kicking the unfortunate creature's jaw into its brain with his spare foot. Eric the half-Zombie rolled peacefully to the side, worldly considerations permanently forgotten.

"Are you okay?" Emma asked, steadying the bleeding John with an outstretched hand.

"Yeah I – ow," he said, limping over to momentarily sit on a barrier. "He really got in deep there."

Looking at John's ankle, Emma did not like what this represented for their chances of survival, should the remainder of the Zombies that had previously chased them around the corner double back there was no way they could now outrun them.

Emma looked up to see – right on cue – the group of five Zombies lope back into sight, obviously looking for their missed prey. Emma's eyes locked with the lead member for just a second and something passed subconsciously between them. _But for the grace of God,_ she thought to herself _our situations could be completely reversed._

Here stood a hapless bystander transformed by the same virus that had so altered her. Yet by a single week's difference in their conception, here they stood as absolute enemies.

The moment passed as she knew it must, the crazed people facing them had no choice but to seek whatever Serotonin they could eke from her brain. They broke out into a run towards Emma and John, the intervening 50 yards would not grant much preparation time but the beleaguered duo tried to ready themselves as best they could.

Emma was surprised therefore when a few seconds later a couple of people blundered out of a bank right in the path of the Zombies. Emma instantly recognized them from the hard faces that had surrounded Steve not moments earlier.

The thugs were only momentarily startled though. The leftmost of the Steve's men – a rough looking black man wearing a close fitting black skully – punched a slender female Zombie hard enough in the chest to break her ribs and collapse her lungs. The Zombie, a petite thing, crumpled to the ground and lay gasping for a moment before slowly dragging herself after whichever set of legs was closest, her breaths shallow as befitted someone just had her oxygen capacity cut by about 80%.

"It's nice to finally catch a break," Emma said after a few seconds of watching.

"Speak for yourself," replied John, leaning back on the barrier and re-inspecting his ankle and re-aligning a broken bone by hand - for quicker healing. He had the good grace to wince as he did so.

Emma watched as a heavier Zombie, a white man who looked halfway between linebacker and couch potato, broke through the guard of the other henchman of Steve's, clawing at his face to the sound of screaming. This was enough of an entrance for a different member of the pack to jump on the distracted man, bringing him to the pavement with a wet sound from his head. He and the heavier zombie instantly set to the exposed cranium with shoving and hissing.

Surprisingly, the other henchman was able to hold his own against attacks from the two remaining members of the pack – their seeking hands met air or firm blocks. Another slight Zombie, this time a man who had the aura of graphic design about him, tried jumping at the thug in frustration but found himself redirected headfirst into a wall. He lay crumpled after the impact so Emma could only assume the impact had been enough to render serious damage.

Without knowing why, Emma broke into a run towards the conflict. As usual, she had no plan for how to handle the situation or this new highly competent foe.

Hearing her running footsteps, the man turned to face the latest attacker. Emma pulled up short, unsure if she should try barreling into him but some hidden voice of common sense told her not to, that he could potentially misdirect this momentum against her so the two circled warily for a moment neither throwing a punch.

When the attack came, it was from an unexpected vector, a grabbing Zombie – the one whole lungs he had smashed earlier – grabbed his ankle (Emma mentally noted to pay much closer note of downed Zombies after these two close calls) setting him temporarily off balance.

He put a toe into the struggling downed Zombie's temple – ending her grasping as Emma stepping in and delivering a hefty hook directly into the surprised man's throat, making his eyes bulge.

Emma once more locked eyes with the previous leading Zombie, a seemingly Indian man with hefty stubble. He grabbed the choking thug and punched him repeatedly in the back of the head until he was able to claw his way in.

Hearing a wet sound from behind her, Emma turned to see John awkwardly hobble away from the smashed face of one of the feeding Zombies.

As much as Emma hated the necessity, she knew that stemming the Zombie population was necessary. She didn't even look away as he performed a similar action on the other feeding attacker.

Walking over, Emma saw him ready to perform his finisher one last time, this time on the feeding Indian man.

"Not this one," she told him, surprising herself as much as him.

"Why?" he asked, emotionlessly.

"Sometimes you just have a feeling, you know?" she replied.

"Not really," he answered, looking around "But no problem, I can't see this situation getting unfucked anytime soon."

Emma had to admit he had a point. Looking around herself, she spied a bag the first thug had dropped as they entered into the conflict. Unzipping it, Emma was unsurprised to see it filled with an untidy mess of cash.

"Don't you get sick of being right at times like this?" John asked, peering over her shoulder.

"You know, I really do," she answered earnestly, rustling in the bag. Eventually she threw it onto the top of a bus stop – to be collected later.

* * * * *

Roaming the streets under the circumstances seemed like a bad idea. To get a better view, Emma and John had broken into a theater and gotten onto the roof. A sign close to their position proudly proclaimed in 5 feet high led letters that the ballet was coming soon. Somehow, Emma doubted it.

"Any sign of that punk?" asked John, Steve had obviously rubbed him the wrong way with his shenanigans. He had to ask because he had foolishly parted with his binoculars once more.

Emma didn't answer, intent as she was upon a large group of police, deployed with riot shields, backing slowly up the street. They were backing up under the sheer press of Zombies pressed against their plastic shields – the disparity of numbers was somewhat jarring, hundreds of them were pushing, trampling, snapping their jaws driven by raw need. Seeing so many of them in that state, together, was just plain weird.

The front of their line was like a meat grinder in slow motion, every so often a Zombie – face pressed against the hard clear plastic of a riot shield – would trip and go under the feet of the next eagerly awaiting customer.

They didn't seem to get back up; instead they were lost among the dark tide crashing against the humans - slowly the police were being pushed back to Emma and John's position.

"No sign of him," she finally answered, her brain finally taking the time to replay John's question from a minute before. "It seems like they have things.. I guess sort of under control." Emma added, cautiously "If they get people with guns up here," she added and John nodded.

"How many do you think there are?" John asked, signaling that he would like his binoculars back but as of yet not receiving them.

"At least three hundred, maybe four," she answered. Looking at a face pressed against a riot shield, she saw it draw back and cough violently. Blood spray splattered the plastic.

She trailed off as she saw another Zombie cough and this time it went through a crack between two shields and splattered the face of a cop, who instantly turned and dropped to one knee then fell to the ground, rolling in agony.

"Oh shit," she said, intelligently. John reached for the binoculars and instantly found his hand slapped away "No take backs!" she said before thinking.

The squabbling instantly reminded her of her sister and injected a degree of melancholy into her day. She handed the binoculars back to John without a word – he didn't question the good fortune and focused in on the scene.

Even without the binoculars, Emma could see in broad strokes what was happening. The weakened spot in the shield wall became a leak, which became a rupture. Soon, Zombies were pouring through the gap and jumping on anyone in their way – the whole scene was a bloodbath.

"Why are they – why do we cough up so much blood?" she asked, remembering her own cough and red tinted hankies.

"They haven't had any Serotonin so they aren't healing. One of the genetic time bombs the virus delivers is a propensity for pulmonary embolism – the arteries in the lungs are weakened and explode. Of course if a Zombie has enough Serotonin in their system they will be making a supply of stem cells that keep it healed."

That explained everything neatly to Emma. Every time she got close to losing control her lungs started grating and the bloody cough would start.

"I can see at least ten down there with blood pouring out of their noses. If they don't feed in the next ten minutes or so they will be dead anyway," she commented, wondering if one day a vein in her lungs would flat out explode instead of rupture.

John whistled, looking at some scene through the binoculars. Emma waited patiently but when he didn't expound, she gave a small cough.

An unfortunate reminder, under the circumstances.

John jumped before handing the binoculars back to Emma, pointing so that she could follow.

Focusing in, Emma could see a set of three distinctly military helicopters flying directly towards them and the carnage below.

"So what do we do now?" she asked him.

"I suggest," he offered "That we ambulate. I recommend we shuffle off as far and as fast as our legs take us."

"What about Steve?" she asked.

"Fuck Steve," he answered with appropriate gravity before loping off towards the door that had led them onto the flat rooftop.

Barging out through the front door, they were instantly in chaos – she couldn't see any sign that the police had ever been holding this mob back just a few moments previously. Emma coughed briefly into her hand as she looked around – to see a group of Zombies looking their way.

Not wanting to chance it, Emma started to run. Glancing behind, she noted the Zombies were running after her – and catching up quickly. "I miss Zombies being slow and shuffling," she screamed out in frustration.

John stopped and ripped the circular top off a public trash can and turned, throwing it like a discus into the group following. The lid was bent, poorly balanced and twisted in the air but still sheered a leg off of the lead pursuer – most of the group went down in a howling heap.

"There you go – slow and shuffling," he answered, turning and running again. The solution was elegant but short lived, however. Most of the screaming mass was up and chasing them within seconds.

A swooshing noise announced a helicopter passing overhead. Looking up briefly while running, Emma saw something black and very army issue. A machine gun chattered to life somewhere over their heads and Emma turned just in time to see the back half of their pursuers disappear in a spray of red. Emma idly wondered if they could heal from something that devastating.

Turning a corner, they both stopped short in horror at the site of a bloodbath.

Apparently a group of humans had decided to hole up in a small corner Starbucks. Zombies had smelled their prey and cracked open the hiding place not unlike an ant hill.

Furthering the analogy, humans were tumbling out, seeking alternate shelter. Some were not content to go quietly into the good night and the crack of gunfire held off the hungry monsters from a hardened group of four or so men and women, who headed back for an alley.

Given the abundance of alternative food sources, the hungry monsters were mostly okay with letting the pricklier group go, focusing instead on the less organized men and women trying to make a break in ones and twos. The result was a slaughter.

"Uhhhhh," said Emma intelligently, chopper blades thumping overhead and blood thumping in her ears. She coughed and felt sticky red blood on her lips.

"What?" prompted John.

"Did.. did I mention I hadn't eaten in a while?" Emma answered, looking at the mass of striving humanity in front of her. All she could see was red.

"Fuck not now!" yelled John in frustration but his words were lost on Emma. She was running at a speed she had previously been unable to muster towards the growing pile of groaning, screaming humans – some had managed to escape but the growing majority had been beaten, torn or maimed into submission. The feasting second wave of Zombies showed no discrimination, they ripped into the mass whether the humans in question were dead or merely stunned.

Even more disturbing to Emma – trapped inside her head - was seeing the ones who had been left for a minute or two. So many of them were infected just by blood spray in the area – about half of them would roll over, suddenly oblivious to their pain and fall onto another hapless survivor where the ripping would begin anew.

A chattering from above hailed the start of the machinegun attached to the helicopter as it sprayed indiscriminately into the mess, felling Zombies and Humans alike. Part of Emma was outraged but the pragmatist knew containment had to come first at this stage.

Into this mess of flesh and bullets, Emma's body dove - pushing and clawing at the nearest wounded and unwounded Zombies to get to the prize. Finally she caught a glimpse of the fresh meaty layer of humans and her mind was instantly sorry she had. The mass of pushing, shoving Zombies had practically turned them into a pulp - the fleshy underfoot was practically unrecognizable from a bubbly carpet with occasional human characteristics of hair, tooth or bone.

Emma was lifted backwards by an impossibly strong hand around her neck, her body hissing in primal rage though her mind was grateful to John for rescuing her from the nightmare - still, her body struggled because she lacked any form of dominion over her own form. Partially dropped from the imbalances created by her flailing limbs, Emma twisted and saw her rescuer was not John as she had surmised but a Zombie intent on his own kill.

The confused look in his eyes spoke a clear story – his mind was unable to grasp whether she was food or adversary. The smell of serotonin was all over the scene but on closer investigation he had probably realized less of it was from her. Seemingly semi-disinterested he began to choke the life out of her – she might make a poor meal but any relief from his agony was undoubtedly better than none.

Emma's inner monster for her part clawed stupidly at his hand, leaving Emma incredibly frustrated at her inability to defend herself incapacitated as she was by her own need for CSF.

Feeling her reinforced neck bones finally start to give, Emma mentally closed her eyes. She had always struggled against focus and if she was to identify an enemy – apart from the one throttling her to death – she would believe it to be the control over her own mind that she had always lacked.

She took a deep breath and found her lungs mimic it a half second later, as if on a delay. Her vision cut out and then was restored - but hazy like she was seeing underwater. In her mind, she raised her arm and was once more rewarded by her body shadowing the movement. Bringing the dense mass of her limb down in a motion that was half chopping, half bludgeoning blunder she utterly smashed the forearm of her attacker.

Shaking and sweating from the effort of control, Emma dropped back to her own feet. Stiffly squaring her shoulders to the maimed Zombie she managed a final punch, her fist shattering through the ribs and pulverizing his heart.

She didn't even have time to gloat before dropping to her knees, her body tearing at pink carpet for scraps of sustenance.

A moment later when she had just eaten enough squashed mess of oily brain to come to herself again, she was once more dragged backwards – this time by John. He had large ragged wounds along his left shoulder – the wound had sealed itself already but he was incredibly pale, suggesting he had first pumped a ton of his blood onto the street. He must have been caught in the line of fire from the chopper, bullets that had missed her entirely, somehow.

_Yet more proof it is better to be lucky than smart_ she thought to herself, dazed. Realizing it was taking more than John had to pull her away from the mess, Emma signaled that she was once more in tenuous control and hobbled to her feet.

Hearing the thumping of blades get nearer, Emma and John looked up and were rewarded with the sight of the black hawk's nose rounding the corner. Without a second thought, Emma dragged John around a different corner where they could both still see the pile of writhing feeding Zombies. A few looked up to the whirring of a minigun cycling to life before the relentless splatter of bullets mowed through the pile again and again.

When the sound finally stopped, everything was still.

### Chapter 18

"Gaaaahhhhh!" John exclaimed, arching his back.

"Oh quit being such a baby," Emma commented, sympathy was out for a coffee break at the moment.

"Wait – wait! give me a moment I need a few seconds to clear my head," John asked while pushing aside Emma's hand.

Three of the bullets that had torn through John had in actuality not torn through him and were consequently lodged deep inside. The worst part of extracting a bullet of this size was that they had a tendency to ricochet when they hit bone and travel up or down the affected limb. This particular bullet had ripped through his bicep but ended in his shoulder. This discovery had involved a lot of cutting, and she did not have access to pain relievers.

"Sure thing," Emma said and started to turn away. As she saw John flop back to relax she swiftly turned and jabbed the knife she was using in place of a scalpel in a swooping motion. The bullet fell to the cement floor with a ting and an accompanying squirt of blood that Emma just avoided.

"JESUS!" shouted John, half sitting up to flop back again, exhausted.

"Well what do you want me to do? Do you want to heal around them?" the question was slightly disingenuous – he had already healed around them three times. She had to take time every 15 minutes to re-open the wound so she could continue digging. The rate at which he was healing was phenomenal – way faster than she did.

"Take 5, we still have one left up there somewhere" she said turning away, this time without duplicity.

Looking around, she took in the walls of the warehouse they had trained in earlier. Emma had half dragged John back the way they had come earlier, only to find the smaller barricade overrun and abandoned. Only a few corpses barred their way, arranged over some of the barricade's metal sheeting.

Looking back at John for a moment as he lay back against the table, good arm over his eyes, she smiled slightly. It seemed so odd to think that not long ago she had hated him.

"You never did tell me the rest of Derek's story," she prompted, as much to take his mind off the pain as for any actual curiosity.

"Because you had to go," he answered, incensed. _Mission accomplished_ Emma thought to herself, smugly.

John paused for long enough, arm still draped over the top half of his face that Emma wondered to herself if he was going to continue. Just as she was about to check if he had drifted off to sleep, he dispassionately started talking – adding to where he had left off like the intervening time had just been long enough for him to take a sip of water.

"Mary was really fucked up in the head after that night. Her serotonin levels regulated quickly enough of course but the grief was way too much for her. She had already been pushed beyond breaking by killing her own son and the up and down of her condition. Adding the pressure of killing an innocent family and thinking however briefly that her John had come back to her snapped her like a twig.

Having nowhere he could safely put the child Derek took him in. The boy cried day and night, his wailing echoing down the halls of their small house like a banshee. At one point the neighbors came over to make sure everything was okay – Derek lied to them and said he was looking after his mentally disabled nephew for a few weeks and god bless them, they believed him.

Mary went into a near catatonic state. Derek had to feed her, bathe her and put her to bed. In between doing that, he tried to do the best he could to calm the child – telling him whatever stories he knew and more. Anything he could talk about just to try and quieten him down. Sometimes, it even worked.

After - I don't know – a month or so? Mary started to slowly take care of the basic necessities again, she was sleeping better, even eating and bathing. When she weakly smiled at him over some breakfast eggs he decided she was well enough that he could run out to the grocery store for some much needed supplies – they had been living on whatever supplies Derek could order online, which made for interesting meal planning. He sat Mary down in front of the TV and locked the now sleeping boy boy into his newly inherited bedroom. His last image as he went out of the door was probably Mary sitting and quietly watching some meaningless infomercial on TV, her eyes focused intently on the past.

It was all a ruse. He had no sooner pulled out of the driveway than she ran to her John's bedroom, smashed the door into splinters. Within two minutes she had him in the warmest jacket she could find and squeezed the boy's feet into a pair of his shoes that were now easily two sizes too tight. Without a glance back they were out of the front door and gone, never to return.

"Whoooa – she ran away?!" asked Emma incredulously.

"Yep. She had developed a wicked case of paranoid delusions – in her mind she still thought this child was her John. She now believed that Derek was systematically trying to confuse her so that she would give up her own son."

From the couple of Psychology classes Emma had taken so far, she could kind of understand it. The core of Mary's belief was somewhat founded in reality – Derek **had** imbalanced her with his experimentation. His interaction had led to the death of their son. A mind unwilling to accept that death could easily look past its own responsibility and blame the original progenitor of the whole situation.

"So where did she go?" Emma inquired.

"She drained the bank account of the few thousand dollars she could take out in one day and then trashed the cards and her cell phone. She was sure Derek could track her by them."

_He probably could have_ Emma thought to herself.

"She rented a car and drove the boy to New York – a city that size she figured there was no way he could find her. She rented a hotel room when she got there and that lasted a couple of months before the money ran out. She didn't dare use her own name or credentials to apply for a job you see so there was no way in her state that she could find work. Within 3 months of her leaving, they were living on the streets."

"What about her Serotonin deficiency? How did she handle it?" asked Emma, genuinely curious.

"Poorly," replied John. "Her condition didn't fit into her world so she would go as long as she could until she went crazy and killed whoever got in her way. Then she would pretend nothing had happened."

"Didn't she ever attack the child at those times?"

"No... I suppose he smelled wrong or something. Who knows, maybe it was some vestige of motherhood."

"What about him? Was he immune from Serotonin deficiency?" prompted Emma.

"Of course not," John replied. "Whenever she bludgeoned some poor passerby, he was there. The smell would drive him over the edge and he would pile in too, fighting for scraps like a dog."

Emma was silent for a moment, almost afraid to ask the crazy thought that came unbidden to her mind. Finally, plucking up sufficient courage, she asked "Were you the child?"

John didn't answer, looking up at the dirty, cobwebbed ceiling as if lost in a different time. The silence was answer enough.

"Why take the name of the dead child? Why keep it now?" she asked, unable to hold the questions in.

"It seemed... fitting. I guess I felt like the old me was dead. She wanted me to be John so much that over time I just... took on the role."

"So what happened? They – you – were homeless," she asked, completely unaware she was now the one prompting the story.

"A couple of years had passed. One day she saw this family walking past the alley - a mother, a father and a boy. He looked much more like her John by then. The look in her eyes was of hunger, but it was a different hunger."

John shook his head, to Emma's surprise he genuinely looked sad. "I hopped a cargo train that night, ended up here," he finished quietly.

"How many years ago was that?" asked Emma sympathetically, understanding John so much better at last.

"Years? That was nine months ago."

"NINE MONTHS? THAT WOULD MAKE YOU – WHAT? TEN?" Emma screamed.

"Twelve," John corrected, indignantly.

"If you are twelve then I am the tooth fairy!" Emma answered, still loud and exasperated.

"About time you came. Can we talk about some back payments?" quipped John. "I thought you got it. When you contract this virus it 'heals' your body which includes of age. You got slightly younger, right?"

Emma said nothing, navel gazing as she remembering the wrinkle on her forehead disappearing overnight.

"In my case," John continued "It aged me. It took just short of three months to get to peak age and it was awful. My remaining first teeth were pushed out in the first week and I grew daily – my bones ached so bad that Mary had to steal pain relievers for me. None of them completely eradicated the agony. If you are ever in the position of knowingly changing someone, I recommend against making it a child."

"Twelve," Emma replied, still shell shocked. "You are just a child. I got turned into a monster by a kid. I have been TRAINING from someone who isn't even eligible for middle school!"

"Think of it in dog years," he replied. "Then I am ancient."

"But you don't talk like – like some kid!" Emma answered in frustration.

"How should I talk, like a teletubby? I might not have finished school but I like to read and the virus makes us all quicker mentally. I am sure you noticed that you get new concepts more quickly now?"

"Well I-!" Emma blustered, remembering in an instant multiple occasions when she had wondered if she was linking more quickly – always assuming it was nothing. "I still don't believe you are just some pre-teen!" she finished angrily.

"I lost my parents when I was eight. I then spent nearly three years living homeless with a crazy woman. I have had to kill and steal my sanity a week at a time for nearly four years. Do not call me a child again, it is insulting," he warned.

Emma remembered watching a documentary about children – suddenly made orphans - who had to grow up fast living on the streets of Japan during WWII and paused. _Pseudo- John is right_ she thought _he has earned the right to my respect._ She simply nodded in response.

_It is funny_ she added _but however old he is – in a weird way he set me free._

What an odd reality, where becoming a monster had made her a better human. The old life where she never fit in had been shed from her like a bad dream.

"So what now?" John asked; his voice far less strained.

_Crap_ thought Emma, snapped from her train of thought. Looking at his shoulder it has almost completely healed over once more – time for more cutting.

"I think we need to go to the library," she answered. John lifted the arm over his eyes to stare at her, incredulous.

"Hey don't look at me like that," she answered. "Cell signal has been down ever since the outbreak and my laptop is still in a seedy pawn shop."

"But first," she added, lifting the scalpel "I have to get that last bullet. If you are really good, I will tell you a story after."

"Ugh I am never going to hear the end of this," John said, collapsing back onto the table exasperated.

### Chapter 19

"Did you ever try to find Derek?" Emma asked as they were walking. John's step was improving almost every block, yet again proving how surprisingly fast he healed - yet he seemed to need far less Serotonin than her. She resolved to ask him about it, later.

"I am not sure I would want to and even if I did, I don't really have a way of tracking him down. My parents were just passing through wherever Mary and Derek lived when Mary bludgeoned them to take me" he answered.

"I might have better luck with my real parents - we were originally from Philadelphia, I do remember that. I don't particularly remember any extended family though so I am not sure who I would look for or ask about."

"If I could find them though, then I might be able to track where they would have gone to. Even if I did manage all that – Derek Jones? I might as well be looking for a David Smith."

"He was a Doctor," Emma answered "That would make it easier."

"I suppose. I don't know, I guess I am just afraid. I still remember the stories he told me, all the things he had hoped. But then I also remember Mary raving about him trying to take me away from her. I know she was deluded but I still have dreams about the man who wants to kill me because I was not the son he wanted."

"And I thought my childhood was bad," Emma muttered to herself.

"Mine wasn't bad, just short," replied John. The moment had passed and though they were still talking about a sensitive subject, Emma could tell his wall was back up.

"So why was yours bad?" he asked, as much to pass time as for genuine concern.

"Oh I .. suppose because too much was expected of me," Emma answered, feeling thoroughly stupid. "My big sister died, which was – well awful of course. She was supposed to be the Doctor and suddenly I was the one who had to carry on the family legacy."

"I know it is tough to believe but I was a vegan before I got the virus – I would vomit at the sight of blood!" She turned to John to find him starting to laugh and she couldn't help but join in.

"A doctor who vomits when she sees blood? What kind of use is that?" he asked while laughing. "Were you a tree doctor?"

"I wish," she answered, grinning.

"Well I am glad you toughened up," he answered. "You were bad enough at getting the bullets out as it was, didn't need you hurk'ing in the wound as well."

Instead of a grin accompanying his jibe, Emma saw John duck into a doorway and frantically motion her in. She ran/dived the two steps and was up in a trice to check around the corner.

In the distance over Boston Common was a running figure. Even at this distance, Emma knew they were infected, bent impossibly forward as they were. Rolling over a small knoll a Humvee with a mounted gun swerved sideways and a passenger opened fire onto the figure. It dropped instantly and ceased all movement.

"Why are we risking being outside anyway?" Asked John quietly, obviously afraid of the army people trying once more to turn him into a fleshy colander.

"I want to try and dig more info on Steve," Emma answered in a similar sotto voice, despite the vehicle being a good hundred yards distant. She followed the statement with a light cough, drawing a suspicious glare from John. She waved it away - her lungs were still healing.

"At the library?" he asked incredulously, voicing concern with her methodology for finding a gang-banger.

"They have computers – if the internet is not down. They also have indexed every newspaper for the last 15 years, we can do a search to see if he has been mentioned in the local papers. He's a crook, so it stands to reason he might have hit print."

The only problem with this brilliant plan, she reflected later as she stood sadly outside the library, is that it kind of requires the library to be open. She half-heartedly tugged the door again to see if it had changed its mind on the matter of being locked. It sadly had not. Libraries closing because of a small state of emergency, what was the world coming to?

Looking around, she saw John's feet at her eye level and rapidly raising upwards. He had started scaling the ironwork – it wasn't more than a few minutes of Emma anxiously checking behind her to see if anyone had appeared before he had vaulted over a balcony onto a small stone shelf outside of a window, 30 feet or so above ground level. Looking down at her he winked cheekily, as if to prove how easy this is for someone who isn't afraid to travel on top of a moving train.

Turning his head away he bought his elbow into sharp contact with the glass. There was a smash but the glass indented only slightly.

"Plate glass," she offered, raising her voice to be heard but quickly and anxiously checking around for intruders at the noise. In honor of their surroundings, she briefly shushed herself.

John grunted and stepped up onto the balcony he had previously leapt over. A grimace was discernable on his face even from the distance but it didn't stop him from launching shoulder first at the glass, which gave way before him.

A few minutes later he was unlocking the door and letting her in, rubbing his shoulder the whole time.

"I swear I am getting beaten up a whole heap more since I have known you," he said with one last twist of his arm. Apparently it passed whatever test he had mentally asserted on it because he quit fussing with the limb and let it finally drop to rest beside him.

Carefully locking back up, Emma and John looked at the huge empty room before them. Emma thought with the large high windows and stonework that it resembled a shrine to knowledge.

"So... what is Steve's full name again?" asked John awkwardly, breaking the silence.

"Kerchak... Steve Kerchak" replied Emma. John just nodded and headed back in to the library, his fingers dusting the spines of books on one shelf.

Now that she knew John's real age, this was one of the moments that she could truly see him as the child he was, rather than the adult his body made him. His fingers trailing lazily he could have just as easily been trailing them in a stream as he lay on the bank, or running them along a railing of the school yard he should have been playing in.

He turned around at an intersection and catching her gaze quizzically pointed one arm each way; he looked like an Egyptian hieroglyphic. The moment was lost in his goofiness but Emma smiled anyway then in an over-exaggerated gesture shrugged her shoulders so he could see them. She had never actually been in this library before, normally going to the one at her college when she had something to look up.

She could just make out his return shrug – he took a step right, did an about turn and went left. Emma walked over to where he had been and took the right instead.

The Boston Public Library was big, an edifice to learning from before a time of computers and easily accessible knowledge.

It took them just less than 20 minutes without any help to locate the small bank of three computers on the second floor close to the microfiche area that were dedicated to newspaper archive and indexing.

Typing in Steve's name, Emma was within seconds rewarded with a couple of hits. He had made the papers a couple of days ago, about the time she had seen him on the local news, and Emma discarded this almost instantly.

The older hit was from a few years previous. Scanning the article, Emma gathered Steve - at the time enrolled in college – had been arrested for battery.

Two arrested, one in hospital

Two local youths were arrested for battery at a Cambridge bar, the Windsor Tap, on Tuesday the 15th. The aggressors, Steve Kerchak and Singh Patel were said to have punched another man and bashed his head into a wooden column leaving him unconscious. The man, whose name has not been released is still in hospital with a concussion.

The Windsor Tap has seen more than its share of violence, according to city officials. A discussion on whether the Windsor should be allowed to retain its liquor license is still underway, a prudent precaution given its history.

Switching to a web browser Emma had a moment of finger crossing that the library still enjoyed internet access in the pandemonium and then Google loaded, silently asserting its search engine dominance. With a small whoof of expelled breath she didn't know she had been holding, Emma typed in Singh Patel.

Singh gave no results in the Boston area, which she guessed meant he had changed location or it was a different Singh. Patel was a common name; she seemed to remember, so it was probably the latter.

Going back to the newspaper archive, Emma did a further search on the Windsor Tap and was rewarded with a second article - apparently the city council had followed through with the threat and closed it a month later. The owners were mentioned by name when they condemned the decision – a Ron Smith and David Hoon.

_Ron Smith and David Hoon, two of the owners of the Pelham arms._ Emma doubted that was a coincidence. Remembering David Hoon, Emma was struck with a feeling of annoyance – she knew at the time that the short little man had been lying to her.

_Seems like leopards don't change their spots after all_ she thought to herself with a quiet chuckle _. So Steve took to drinking at their new bar, what is the chance of that, if he didn't know them on some kind of level?_

Doing a quick Google search, she quickly discovered an awful page dedicated to the Pelham Arms – whatever they had paid for the atrocity in black was too much. Reading the 'About' page Emma quickly discovered they had been joined by a third partner (presumably so that he could be the licensee) named David Tate.

"Hey John," she said finally, breaking her silence.

John was on a seat down the bench, good naturedly rocking back on a chair's back legs by holding his feet under a table.

"Hmmmm?" he answered, looking over to her, completely failing to return the seat to its upright position.

"I think we are going to have to go visit the Pelham Arms," she answered matter-of-factly.

"Because that worked so well last time," he retorted and returned to his rocking, using the toes on one foot to balance this time.

"It is only a couple of miles from here..." she responded.

"Across the Charles River. So we will be taking a narrow bridge filled with either a bunch of Serotonin deprived nutbags or military types vigorously enforcing martial law. That sounds like fun."

"I have no choice! I think the people who run it know Steve. They might have a clue where he is hiding!" she replied, emphatic in her conviction.

"Face it Emma," he answered. "The genie is out of the bottle. Smart thing to do is get as far away from here as possible. Maybe we could try and find Derek and see if he is cooking up a cure for the more extreme symptoms of his virus."

Emma was stunned, she hadn't imagined John would cave so easily on the subject of finding Derek but here he was suggesting it. She remembered how she had forgiven John though and understood – we are all slaves to the urges that drive us. Both John and Derek had tried to channel them for good, in their own way. It was hard to not respect that.

"That is a smart course," she responded carefully, genuinely feeling the wisdom in John's words. "But suppose we can stem the tide of this single-handedly? What if we do nothing and Steve decides to take his show on the road. His gang could split off to all four corners of the globe, spreading this everywhere. If we take out Steve we could stop that, within a day."

"You are right, we could. But we could also buy the farm – those military people are not playing out there, and neither is Steve. I didn't sign up to be murdered by some Zombiefied street gang. I don't know... I just get a really bad feeling about it." It was rare to see John not joking around. He looked different somehow.

"I promise if it looks too dangerous we will go with your plan, exit Boston as fast as we can," she re-assured him.

John thought for a moment then nodded swiftly and rocked forward to using all four legs of the chair again "Then we had better get on it, I doubt things are going to get better with time."

### Chapter 20

_John might as well be a prophet_ Emma thought to herself darkly. The bridge was absolutely littered with bodies in various states of dishevel. Looking to the far end about a half mile in the distance, Emma could just make out in the late afternoon light a military blockade made of several serious looking dark vehicles. She doubted any of them were the welcome wagon.

Looking down, Emma noted a meaty jawbone chilling by her foot. She kicked the grizzly reminder a few feet further away.

"Maybe... we could commandeer a boat?" Emma posed the question.

"I don't swim," replied John.

"That's the point of the boat," replied Emma, enjoying the chance to stick it to John for a change.

"Right now? I could easily see them," he nodded his head in the general direction of the blockade "sinking it, you know, **just in case.** "

"Why the hell would you own binoculars that float if you can't swim, anyway?" answered Emma, frustrated at the latest roadblock. No pun intended.

"I don't know," replied the 12 year old, turning brightly to her. "I guess I just never found the time."

"Shut up," Emma replied, noting his sarcasm and yet another damned exchange lost. It was embarrassing having a pre-pubescent kick her ass linguistically and physically on a daily basis.

"I say we just play the innocent survivors," John commented, trying to cancel out his earlier pessimism. "It's not like we have any bite marks."

"Do you think they are letting people through?" Emma asked.

"I should think so... they probably can't cold bloodedly mow down regulars, right?" he didn't sound convinced.

They looked speculatively at the blockade for a moment.

"I love this plan," said Emma, taking off her light jacket and dropping it to the bloody ground. "Very excited to be a part of it!"

"Well, that makes one of us," answered John staring at the blockade, mentally daring it to make a move. It just sat there, defiantly.

"No time like the present," Emma recited, then took off at a jog for the barricade. As she did so, she waved her hands above her head _. Best not to be taken for a regular Zombie_ she derided herself mentally.

A couple of minutes and about a fifth of the distance later, Emma heard a megaphone kick into power from the barricade but she couldn't make out the following words – they were still a good 500 meters distant.

Turning to John, Emma asked "You don't suppose they are trying to tell us to go back do you?"

"No clue," he replied, jogging easily.

A chatter of automatic fire seemed to answer the question for them and they came to an abrupt stop.

"Well that's rude," said Emma, indignant.

"The standards for rude have probably shifted in the last couple of days," he answered, not at all out of breath. "Rude right now is probably more in line with shooting someone before giving a warning. I am just happy they are not trying to aerate us, let's head back and try a different bridge. More of a detour but maybe a better reception," he said, turning.

"Oh fuck," he added.

Looking behind, the source of his consternation was clear. A tribe of Zombies was on the bridge racing their way – they couldn't be more than a hundred meters distant.

"Don't look, hoof it!" John said, taking off toward the blockade.

"So," Emma puffed "the gunfire was to warn us?" She felt justifiably nervous about running toward the guns.

"It worked didn't it?" he answered.

Looking back over her shoulder, Emma could see the pack had closed the distance by 10 meters.

"Why are they so god damned fast," she yelled, aggravated.

"Shut up and run faster!" John answered over his shoulder, he was already 10 feet ahead of her.

_It's funny how single moments can define your life_ Emma thought to herself, putting her head down and pumping her legs as fast as she could.

Visions passed by her eyes. The night Michelle died. The day she was ambushed by John and changed into her current configuration. The day she freaked out and killed the punks in the park, accidentally creating Steve and everything that had followed.

Now she was running for her life from a group of Zombies, afraid of being torn apart for the scraps of spinal fluid in her system. She could feel the muzzles of rifles pointed her way, waiting to put her down if the Zombies caught up.

John was now about 15 feet ahead of her, the blockade was about 300 meters distant. Emma risked a glance behind her, risk being the operative word as she had to slow to be able to look. Three of the pack had sprinted ahead of the rest and were less than 50 meters behind her now.

_Damn my short legs!_ Emma screamed inside her head, put her head down and tried to drag any extra speed she could out of her body. The silver lining was most of the twenty or so strong pack had fallen further behind but Emma was not feeling bright and sunny at the moment.

Back in the gym before any of this started she would run for 25 or so minutes and cover an entire 5K. That means on average it took her 2.5 minutes to traverse the length of this bridge.

By contrast this run was undertaken at nearly double her usual speed. To evade her pursuers, Emma would have to make this run in nearly 90 seconds.

Ninety seconds does not sound like an unreasonable amount of time to run flat out in order to stay alive. Emma, if asked previously, would have thought it very possible to sprint at nearly double speed for a minute and a half. She would have thought this while calmly running on a flat treadmill, in an air conditioned gym, wearing appropriate clothing while totally not being afraid of being eaten or shot.

To not put too fine a point on it, Emma was right now panicking her metaphorical balls off.

The seconds ticked down as she ran, more slowly than any other time in her life they passed by. More slowly than when she was first infected and lay on the road, arching in agony. Soon her lungs burned and her sides presented her with stabbing pains as her shallow gasps inflated them too fast.

200 meters passed and then 100 meters. She didn't dare another look behind it was that close.

"Open the Barricade!" she somehow gasp-yelled as she got to 50 meters.

"Open the way-Erk!" she eloquently followed as she was tackled from behind by a Zombie who should have run for Kenya.

They rolled over and over on the concrete, scraping and bumping as they went. The end result had the Zombie on top of her with her face down into the bridge.

Within a second, she felt his teeth break into the flesh over her left shoulder blade – a sickening steady pushing/burning sensation – just before her right elbow flew back and broke the Zombie's jaw.

The force rolled him off her back, she scrambled up and tackled him in return, her heavy structure easily bringing him down. A second later her forehead smashed his nose as she head-butted him. Her fist provided the coup de grace, smashing through his already weakened skull and into his brain.

She looked up to see a second Zombie bearing down on her – she almost closed her eyes but something primal took over and she rolled to the side, missing the collision by a quarter second leaving the new equally crazed assailant to scrape his face along the tarmac before rolling into a heap. When he jumped up his right cheek was exposing bone and his whole face was ragged and missing skin and sinew.

It didn't slow him even slightly, he stepped purposefully towards Emma, stymied only by John grabbing his head from behind. With a vicious twist he broke its neck.

The third in the Zombie three pack stepped up – a big brutish looking man with cuts on his arms from struggling through god knows what in search of food. His lower face was covered in blood and Emma suspected it was all his own. It trickled out of his nose and mouth and a whuffing noise accompanied each inhale and a rough cough on each exhale, mists of blood spraying with the air. The virus had done an incredible number on his lungs, so how he managed to run as fast as he did was anyone's guess.

With one more step he lashed out with a slow but incredibly powerful haymaker, a punch that had the force of his entire body behind it. Emma blocked and felt a crunch from her arm, possibly a small fracture. She couldn't imagine what that would have done to someone's arm that lacked her newfound density.

While the shambling man was off balance, Emma lashed out once, twice, three times – quick powerful jabs to his chest. The third one rewarded her with harsh snapping and her assailant went down as his already weakened lungs proved a prime target for puncture.

Looking up while gasping for breath herself, Emma saw more of the pack running in. _No time for breathing!_ She thought to herself and broke into a run towards the barrier, John beside her.

The hastily erected blockade was fashioned out of a number of barriers attached to black vans – possibly liberated from the Police. As they neared it a van scraped forward just enough to allow them passage through. If passage meant bouncing from one hard, dented, metal surface to another repeatedly like an ill formed pinball. After the two had passed, the truck that had moved slammed back with a crunch of metal and an agonized scream of a partially trapped Zombie who had made a dash for the gap.

Boxes piled next to the stationary van allowed two officers in full riot gear to clamber onto the top. The chatter of rifle fire tore through the air a second later. Wailing and screaming quickly accompanied it and spoke the fate of the remaining infected.

Emma turned back around to the muzzle of another rifle, pointed directly at her face. John was standing to the side, bemusedly transfixed by another two such muzzles pointing his way.

"She was bit!" the officer covering her yelled. Emma idly wondered if he would have time to shoot her before she knocked his gun out of line and practiced experimental dental surgery on him. She doubted the other members of the National Guard would take such an event lightly.

"I wasn't bitten!" she called back, looking him in the eye and lying her ass off, buying time.

"Bullshit!" he spat. He should have been a poker player this one, with instincts like that. "It was on your back. Prove you weren't bitten or I shoot you now."

_Where is the trust?_ Emma bemoaned, silently. She turned around, exposing her back to him. _Plan_ she thought to herself _Must have a plan._

She felt a scrape on her back as one of his compatriots removed the generous coating of blood her wound had provided.

"Rich, you paranoid asshole" the second voice admonished the screamer as he started to walk away.

"But I saw her get bit..." Rich trailed off, talking to no-one in particular.

_Got to love the quick healing!_ Emma thought to herself in mental triumph.

### Chapter 21

A couple of hours later Emma and John were warming their hands around a brazier with a couple of off duty military personnel. Darkness had come pretty quickly and with it the fall evening cold.

"I don't understand how I nearly die daily since I met you," said John calmly.

"Are you the reason why?" the one to the left – a thin black man named Carl asked with a laugh "Shit I nearly died twice today too, you **are** bad luck." There was general laughter.

"Trust me Carl," John answered easily, a smile on his face "If you knew her longer it would have been at least three."

"Oh man oh man," the other military type said, holding out a hand – his name was also John so Emma and John had taken to calling him JFK. "When that second Zombie dived for you and you rolled out of the way leaving him to skid on his face down the road... I nearly peed myself laughing. I swear; he actually looked pissed off when he got up."

Emma thought about it and laughed for a few seconds too "The first candidate for America's Funniest Home Videos, Zombie Edition," she added. More laughter.

"Get the audience Zombies. Bitches love Zombies," Carl said. Somehow there was something charming about the way he said it, making it even funnier.

When the laughter died they stood in silence for a while, the fire crackling as it consumed; a hunger that would only abate on death.

Clearing his throat, JFK said "I just want to say ma'am.. it was impressive how you took down that Zombie. I been fighting them all day off and on, seen plenty of good men taken down when fighting one on one. They hit so damned hard."

"Like fighting an army of junkies high on PCP," Carl responded, darkly.

"Yeah..." replied JFK, trailing off and looking at the fire.

"I ain't never heard of a Zombie being taken out by being punched to the chest," said Carl.

"He was breathing badly," answered Emma "Blood was pouring from his nose and on his breath; I figured his lungs would be pretty easy to puncture."

"Shit those are the worst!" Carl replied "Any of their bloody spit in your eyes or down your throat and you done for.. I seen several people go down that way."

"Me too," said JFK "What is the deal with them? Are they alive or dead?"

Emma and John looked at each other briefly wondering how much info to safely give up.

"Alive I think," John replied finally. "You can put them down by hitting the heart, or the lungs or with massive blood loss. They heal though."

"They heal?!" answered JFK incredulous.

"Yes," said Emma, feeling like she was giving the army men a diagram of how to kill her "So you want to make sure you do enough damage that they can't heal past it before their body truly shuts down. If you want to be sure they can't come back though, aim for the head."

"The more things change..." started Carl, imprinting the ending to the phrase into everyone listening's mind. _The more they stay the same_ Emma finished, wordlessly.

"Well even if his lungs were damaged it was still impressive," repeated JFK, moving back to the earlier subject. "I know this will sound strange but... care to arm wrestle? I would kinda like to know if I have what it takes."

Carl barked his laughter "That's our Jo- JFK. Asking the pretty girls to arm wrestle."

Emma laughed for a minute and decided to show off a little. Sitting down at opposite sides of a nearby table, they stared at each other. A couple of other nearby grunts laughed and gathered round to watch the spectacle.

"1... 2... 3... Go!" yelled Carl. A slam accompanied the word go, the slam of the back of JFK's hand hitting the table.

"Man," said Carl, kind of embarrassed for his JFK "You are weak as shit."

"Fuck ow fuck fuck," JFK was holding his hand, the knuckles had taken quite a bang against the metal table.

"Damn man," said Carl, "she has no muscles at all – holy shit." He had grabbed her bicep to illustrate the point and felt the corded sinew. It didn't look like much but was hard as nails to the touch. "Let me try this."

"How about we make it a little more interesting?" asked John off to the side, a big grin on his face.

Emma became quite the circus freak over the next 30 minutes, taking on all comers all with the same result. At the end, the more or less good naturedly disgruntled soldiers dispersed, leaving just Carl and a happy John counting his money – JFK had wandered off to grab some chow.

"How did you get so strong anyway?" he asked, rubbing his shoulder.

"Yoga," replied Emma, an earnest expression on her face.

"Fuck," replied Carl, "the wife was right."

* * * * *

Twenty minutes later they were sitting off to the side of the brazier in a couple of borrowed bedrolls, both of them perched up on an elbow. The commotion had died down and their benefactors had all dispersed to their various circles.

"Am I going to see any of that money?" Emma asked.

"Oh Emma, no," replied John, smiling. "That would be like admitting I fixed a horserace."

Emma scowled at him until he offered her a crumpled fifty, he offered it between two fingers as if it smelled bad.

"Is this the note the guy gave you after running it through his buttcrack out of disgust?"

"Treasure it," he answered with a grin.

They sat for a while in easy silence, the side towards the fire a little too hot, the other a little too cold.

"How do you feel about killing so many people infected with the same thing we are?" asked Emma softly. It had been bothering her, as she remembered the look on the burly Zombie's face when she punctured his lungs.

John took a moment before answering "It is pretty much like a war I figure.. you don't have to be a terrible person to be on the other side and the situation makes you enemies."

Emma wondered if he had taken the time to ponder questions like this before the craziness had hit or if he just bounced between situations.

"I guess we have to kill them," answered Emma sadly. "Can't have a million Zombies needing brains every few days, the Human race would be extinct in a year."

"Well that isn't necessarily true," John said, settling down deeper into his sleeping bag.

"Wait, what?" asked Emma, confused. "Which part isn't necessarily true?"

"Well what if Derek could make a counter virus that took away the Serotonin deficiency?" John answered, shrugging.

"HE COULD DO THAT?!" she yelled, then glanced around nervously. "He could do that?" she reiterated in a whisper.

Recalling John's story, she remembered Derek was trying to make an anti-virus for Mary when she went crazy and stole John. He could cure her, hell with a bit more time he could probably cure the other Zombies too.

"Yeah I mean I suppose," he answered tentatively, like he didn't know what the right answer was to the question.

"And you .. you still don't remember where he was from?"

"Afraid not," he answered "but I did recall something else. You remember I told you my parents and I lived in Philly?"

It was Emma's turn to nod mutely. John had stopped and seemed to be deep in thought for a second before answering.

"We were going to Richmond, pretty sure of that. See some Uncle or other. So Derek probably lived or lives somewhere between those two."

John nodded once to himself and laid down, satisfied with his mental investigation. After a moment Emma did too. Philadelphia to Richmond was approximately 300 miles, Emma guessed. Still a lot of ground to cover but they were in much better shape than they had been before. Maybe she could even get a cure. Maybe all the Zombies could.

* * * * *

Emma woke early the next morning to frenetic activity.

"Hey what's going on?" asked Emma hurriedly to JFK, who happened to be passing by.

JFK looked around for a second, just to ensure Emma was talking to him "We are being redeployed," he answered simply "This place has been getting pretty quiet but Somerville is being hammered – guess they are redeploying troops there before that zone breaks like Cambridge did."

_Somerville – that place is pretty exclusive,_ she remembered. _A couple of weeks might see more reasonable rent there_ the opportunist in her added.

Nodding her thanks, Emma blearily got up and walked over to a still warm coffee pot that was sitting by the embers of last night's fire. Kicking John's sleeping bag in the foot-ish region as she walked by, she served herself a cup and almost immediately wished she hadn't.

The coffee had more in common with sludge than beans. In peacetime it probably doubled as high grade all natural fertilizer. _By which_ the little voice in her head piped up again _I mean to say that it's shit._

_Thank you for clarifying_ she answered herself mentally. Seeing John had barely moved she went over and treated him to some vigorous shaking. She laughed as the voice in her head reminded her that this was only a step away from shaken baby syndrome.

"What's funny?" asked John peeking at her with one open eye, obviously wishing he hadn't. "The apocalypse sure is bright," John added.

"Ugh I stink," Emma volunteered, as she checked her pits for fugitive B.O. "Do you think they have any showers at the Pelham Arms?"

"Aaaattttt the bar?" John inquired, looking at her incredulously.

"Well obviously not in the bar area," Emma tapered off. John had succeeded in making her feel pretty stupid.

"I mean, I was there and didn't see anything like that. I meant upstairs or uh yeah. Upstairs."

"It's possible," shrugged John. "I just hope we can get in."

"You really need to think positive," Emma suggested, before turning towards their destination and striding confidently off.

"EV Positive, maybe," mumbled John and collapsed back into the sleeping bag.

* * * * *

JFK had been right, the Zombie infestation was barely in evidence anymore. John and Emma wandered slowly down littered streets. Occasional puddles of blood spoke of the violence that the roads had seen just the night before but anything more grisly than that had been removed.

Emma wondered if they wore hazmat suits to do so.

Tentatively the people who had stayed inside had let out onto the streets, though Emma doubted in their position if she would be coming out yet. Looking to the windows of houses they passed, it seems she was not the only one to mistrust this newfound peace. Plenty of people were peering past their curtains, as if the scene was a put-on for their benefit and any moment now half the fools who dared folly outside would fall in terror as Zombies ripped off their masks and set about making a light lunch. _You are 100% right!_ she grinned to one such shut-in. _We are wearing flesh suits and walking among you!_

About thirty minutes later, Emma was walking up to the bar she had visited previously, following the lead of a business card fished from a man's brain. The rich oaken doors that she had noted before were now firmly closed. They looked like they could take a battering from an angry knight in full plate armor, so she doubted she would be breaking in through them. The only accompanying window was too small to fit through, leading her to compare it to a slit for an archer to fire through, leading her to imagine Steve inside defending the mini castle. _If I had managed to stop Steve on the night I was last here, would everything have still gone to shit?_ She wondered.

"If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a merry Christmas," John piped up from the right of her, causing Emma to shoot him a puzzled glare.

"You were obviously navel gazing," he answered the unspoken question "So I thought I would offer up one of the few pieces of wisdom from my childhood that I remember."

"Yeah you caught me," Emma replied with a sigh. "I was just thinking how it went down when I was first here – wishing I could have taken down that asshole right away."

"If it is any consolation," answered John "I wish I had helped you."

It actually was.

John tried the door, even briefly trying a half-hearted experimental shoulder ram. The portal was still firm in its conviction.

"But that's dangerous thinking isn't it?" he said, as much to himself as anyone else. "How much of your life can unravel if you start wishing to change only the bad events."

Emma was instantly transported in her mind to the night her sister had died – where would she be now if Michelle had lived? Suddenly she felt like a shade, one unlikely version of herself in a whole continuity of Emma's – John was right, her life quickly unraveled if she took away the bad events that formed her. Emma fought off a sudden chill at the thought of fading to nothing.

"You're quite smart for your age," she said, forcing a sarcastic smile onto her face as she reached out to tousle John's hair, then walking around the side of the bar to look for alternate ways in.

"I should have left you to the Zombie horde!" John called after her.

Walking down the alley that led behind the Pelham Arms, Emma looked for any cellar entrances or accessible windows a story up but was disappointed. _This has to be the most secure bar ever built_ she decided to herself gloomily.

Turning another corner leading to the back of the English style pub, Emma was rewarded with a thick looking door.

"Please be unlocked," she iterated out loud.

Trying it, she was rewarded with the door exhibiting a complete disregard for her wishes as it smugly stayed shut.

Looking around for any witnesses, Emma was gratified to find none. Taking a step back, she smashed her shoulder against the door confidently with a solid thump and found give – in her shoulder.

"Uhn!" Emma commented intelligently bending over and holding her right shoulder with her left hand. _Damn that hurts!_ she exclaimed in her mind, kicking a mental pebble.

Looking up from her shoes, Emma's gaze was drawn to a brick that seemed to lack mortar around it. Reaching out she found it slipped neatly from its peers – and revealed a key hidden in the slot behind it.

Grabbing the Key of Opportunity + 10, Emma tried it in the door and swung it open. It didn't even have the graces to creak after her attempted shoulder bash.

Stepping into a dirty kitchen Emma instantly heard strains of 'Don't Stop Me Now' by Queen, playing somewhere in the distance.

_Nice Touch_ she thought sardonically to herself. _I wonder if they have that sucker playing on loop or if it is just random?_

Dirty pans were in a giant industrial sink, grease smeared the walls and it took Emma all of 2 seconds to spot her first bashful cockroach taking the opportunity to sneak a peek at the new guests. _Good to see the health inspection system still works_ Emma noted sarcastically to herself, nodding at the proud B grade staring down at her from the wall. _I am definitely not eating anywhere that gets a C_ she added.

Carefully creeping to the door of the kitchen, Emma stopped herself short. _What am I afraid of, Zombie attack? I AM the Zombie attack!_ She reasoned with herself.

Straightening up and pulling her shirt a little straighter around the waist, Emma strode confidently towards the kitchen exit and the front door.

\- and ducked at the sound of a creaking floorboard, just in time to be half deafened by a resounding clang by her ear as a frying pan smashed into the doorframe roughly where her head had been not a second previously.

Turning in outrage, Emma was surprised to see the short sweaty, balding mass that collectively identified itself to her previously as David Hoon.

He drew back the frying pan for a second crack when a flash of several emotions crossed his face. The first was embarrassment, as he realized he was trying to flatten the face of a woman, causing a slow lowering of his cast iron pan. This rare moment of chivalry was chased almost immediately with recognition as he remembered the face of the woman opposite him as belonging to the troublemaker who had asked awkward questions then scattered patrons out into the night.

"Scared people rarely stay for another drink" had become a motto of his after his first liquor license was taken from him, so people who made trouble were rarely tolerated.

Any attempt to re-engage his kitchen implement of door shattering was sadly dashed as Emma swung a lazy paw to smack the pan out of his hand and send it flying across the room.

It floated - almost defying gravity as it sailed slowly – until it encountered a table leg. The two inanimate objects held a brief discussion, which the frying pan won, then parted ways again, ships that crossed in the night. The table leg sported a sizable groove to forever mark their tryst, however brief.

Emma stared down her nose at the short man, saying nothing. She was a statue whose eyes stared into his soul – or so he seemed to think as he nervously backed up a step.

Finding some measure of dignity one step further from her reach, the man planted his feet and boldly proclaimed "G-g-get the fuck out of my bar!" in a weak, stammering almost effeminate voice.

Emma considered for a moment. "No," she answered simply "I am going to let my friend in and we are going to ask you some questions. Attack either of us with anything – pans or otherwise – and things will go badly for you."

Her attacker was definitely reconsidering his stance re: protecting his investment. His eyes started darting towards the not too distant kitchen door and he took a haltering step in that direction.

"If you run I will catch you and kill you," she warned "Tell me the police would notice the differences between your bloody corpse and all the others littering the streets of Boston right now."

The balding man slumped, knowing better than to try anything. With a nod, Emma turned and strode confidently over to the front door and three deadbolt locks _. For some reason the proprietor seems to think his bar might be insecure_ Emma scoffed to herself.

Undoing the final latch Emma opened the door and peaked outside, making a quick motion through the open portal to suggest John should speed his pace. Emma walked back into the room followed by John who was scanning every surface with enough diligence to look like a tourist – every knick knack or picture in the place was cause for a quick visual inspection.

After looking sideways at their hostage, Emma decided that it was completely ruining her hardened professional impersonation and subsequent interrogation.

"When we last spoke, you lied to me," she started, an ice queen.

"W-W-What? But I –" John cuffed him pretty hard around the back of his head.

"Don't bother with the lie you were about to say," he added, eloquently, while also stopping Hoon's stammering.

"Jesus! I wasn't going to lie. Who were you looking for again?" he replied.

"Kerchak. Steve Kerchak." John answered for her.

"Yeah well I sort of know him," he answered evasively.

"Where can we find him?" Emma replied, taking back control of this interrogation.

"I don't know, you scared him off with your winning personality," answered Hoon, receiving a cuff from John around the back of his bald pate for the trouble. A lesson on common courtesy and a brief glare later, Hoon was focused back on Emma.

"I don't know what to tell you," he added with a smile devoid of humor. "I don't know him on a personal basis," seeing John raise his fist he continued quickly "Been coming to my bar – this and the old one – for four years now."

"And yet you don't know anything about him?" asked Emma, incredulous.

"No" replied Hoon – and received another cuff round the back of his head. "Hey, Ow. Fuck you man!" he barked back at John, some of his effeminate manner disappearing in a second "I am telling the truth - I didn't know where he lived even before he dropped off the grid. I see him still from time to time but he runs with a different crowd now and I know better than to ask a bunch of questions."

"Come on!" yelled Emma "The guy nearly bashed some guy to death in your place – causing you no end of trouble – and you let him back in after? You seriously expect us to believe you would do that for anything else than a friend?"

"Yeah I let him back in, that whole charge was bullshit! The guy Steve punched had been pushing Singh's buttons all night - doing little bullshit Indian accents and all – Singh was born 10 miles down the road for Christ sake. He's more of a native Bostonian than half the guys in the bar any given night and the fucker would not let it go. In the end, Steve gave him a little love tap and the freak goes down like a sack of bricks. Steve and Singh ended up in jail for 3 months because of it."

Despite Hoon's defense, Emma was not moved. She could easily imagine the temper of her Steve making him take the situation too far – taking the righteous defense of a friend and turning it into an absolute massacre.

"Oh boo hoo," Emma finally vocalized, before realizing her WASP upbringing was showing. She cleared her throat. "3 Months? I bet that really taught him a lesson."

"It made sure he never got taught a lesson again more like," replied Hoon, still angry. "He had a full scholarship to Northeastern U that he lost. Then his Dad disowned him – good for nothing prick that his Dad is. Steve lost everything."

"I remember" Hoon continued, his gaze turned inwards. "He used to go photograph abandoned buildings. Took some amazing shots – I wish I had some of them for the wall, no lie. Very bold kid, it just saddens me to see him become nothing more than another banger."

Emma knew this story was the truth and that it pained the proprietor to tell it. She felt a moment of empathy for Steve, it was a bad situation, one where he would have been easily lured by the promise of quick cash from.

_Maybe he fooled himself at first_ she pondered, _telling himself he was just making some money to get back into school._

Her compassion only went so far, however. Steve's then friend, Singh, had gone to jail too. Yet he hadn't turned to this life. Plus, she remembered Steve from her first encounter – he was already a predator, whatever innocence he might or might not have once had fully burned away.

"And there is nothing else you can tell us?" asked Emma outwardly to the cowardly small proprietor.

"Nothing of interest to you, I am sure," he replied, looking up. "I saw his confidence finally coming back recently and you know at first I was really glad. It didn't take me long to see though that his spirit didn't make the trip back. He comes in surrounded by thugs and instead of him being the butt of the jokes I now see them looking at him almost like a prophet. It's creepy."

Emma got up and for a surprised moment John just looked at her before jumping to his feet as well.

"We won't take any more of your time" Emma politely stated and walked out towards the front door, John in tow.

"Why are you after him?" Hoon called after her, his gaze still at the floor.

Emma thought for a moment, why was she chasing Steve when he was just the same as her? _Not the same_ she answered herself angrily. _I played a part in this mess but I did so unwittingly, while he is just out for what he can get out of the deal._ It felt like such a small distinction, was it enough? Was she really any better than him?

"He stole something precious from me," she answered while walking out – she didn't turn back as she added quietly to herself "my humanity."

When they were out of earshot John spun Emma by the shoulder.

"Don't you think you just went light on him? That could have all been lies and even if they weren't who knows what other stories he might have to tell, any of which could give us a clue to where Steve is."

"No need," replied Emma, turning back to her walk and coughing lightly – no blood yet "I already know where he is."

### Chapter 22

"Did you gain second sight when I wasn't looking?" asked John, perplexed, jogging to keep up with Emma.

"No, I just put a couple of things together. Steve likes exploring old buildings right? What about the Lakeville State Hospital, think he ever explored that one? When we were on top of the train I saw all these people swarming around the place. Of course I then instantly forgot about it because some sadistic asshole pushed me off a train."

"But why would he want a place all the way out there?" John asked himself, to the tune of Emma's best 'Do you know what you are saying?' look.

"I don't know, why **would** someone want a place way out there? Person who is squatting in a warehouse not more than two miles away from this same abandoned building?" she asked, incredulous.

"That's different," replied John haughtily, head held high "For entirely reasonable reasons which I will carefully iterate later."

Emma couldn't help but snort back a giggle and it became a harsh bark of laughter a second later when she saw his eyes swiveled sideways, carefully trained on her watching for a reaction. His mouth broke into a grin.

"I admit it wasn't my best observation," he explained "but I still think it is kind of weird taking over an old nuthouse. It just sounds creepy."

"We are in perfect agreement on that one," Emma replied, nodding. "I remember seeing those Ghost Hunter programs when I was a teenager and being scared senseless by those old places, paint peeling off the walls and old metal gurneys laying sideways on the concrete floors," she suppressed an involuntary shiver.

"But hey at least this one is just filled with Zombies instead of Ghosts, so there's that," replied John.

"There you go, making me feel better again," sighed Emma - shoulders hunched, walking with slitted eyes.

"We should call the police, let them handle it," said John, pragmatically.

"Do you think they could handle Steve and his minions? They would just think he was some crazed thug who attacked some people on the street."

"Maybe, but they have guns – oh and training. That gives them a better chance than us," he added.

"Are we okay sacrificing them to try and take out Steve?"

"Mmmmm yeah," replied John, not morally stretched at this conundrum. "'Cos it's their job, not mine."

"And what if they succeed?" asked Emma.

"I guess they get medals?"

"What about Derek?" asked Emma, seriously.

"What – what about him," asked John, his eyes wide with surprise at the question. For one of the first times since she had met him, John looked seriously concerned.

"They are bound to trace this back to him. So far this has been surprisingly well contained. If Steve tried to make his private army and fails they will trace this back through him to me, you, Mary and then Derek."

"That's a lot of backtracking," John answered tentatively.

"We found Steve with no resources or experience. How easy would it be to track me to that park? I think I have bled over half this city so the chances I left no DNA evidence anywhere seems... remote. Plus there are cameras like everywhere in this city. Same back to you and then the people who saw you in New York with Mary."

John walked thoughtfully, his footsteps slower than normal his stride less confident.

"Strange as it is to admit I never thought about him being connected to any of this," he admitted at last.

"Are you angry at him at all? He was indirectly responsible for the death of your parents," she asked earnestly.

John said nothing for a moment as they walked, to the point that Emma thought he had declined to answer.

"No, I guess not. His intentions were good - his execution sucks though," he answered sadly. "He is also the closest thing I have to family anymore."

Stopping abruptly, John looked down a side street. Looking down, Emma noted a severed finger lying in pavement crack by his foot but stopped herself from saying anything and inadvertently ruining John's moment.

"We should go this way," he said, pointing down the street. "Quickest way," he added and took off at a light jog.

Emma wondered briefly if she was right and this could be traced back to Derek – whether they were safer in every sense of the word to let the professionals handle this. A second later she remembered John could run faster than her. Thought temporarily displaced, she raced after him.

* * * * *

Considering the difficulties of moving around town for the last few days, getting to the abandoned hospital was shockingly easy. Most of the National Guard were apparently redeployed to Somerville in an attempt to quell the massive outbreak there, so John and Emma were just left quietly climbing deserted metal barricades.

There was no-one on the streets and the military men had been efficient at clearing bodies, so apart from the occasional patch of dark coppery red in the sidewalk, Emma could almost convince herself that everyone just... left.

About two hours of walking later, Emma at last sighted the hospital – and instantly abandoned the ideas she had about the town being deserted.

_THIS place truly feels empty she decided like a mausoleum, a place where the dead rest uneasily. Everywhere else was simply silent right now_ she added.

From the train Emma had previously seen a number of people in the grounds, coming and going. Not now though. For a second Emma almost missed the activity – before she remembered they would be people John and her would have to sneak past.

Previously Emma had planned to sneak around the back and go in through one of those windows. Now, however, she decided to skip the case of Tetanus and splinters and carefully tried the front door. It swung open with a push and a minor creak.

"This is just sloppy," commented John, stepping over a pile of peeling paint and rotten, wet, drywall.

"Stop complaining," answered Emma and stepped in behind him.

"Also," whispered John "Why am I leading the way? This is your stupid idea – I could be home watching Rikki Lake giving paternity tests right now.

"Please," answered Emma "I bet you don't even know where babies come from."

"Oh so I am too young to know about sex and stuff but old enough to kill Zombies armed with nothing but my hands and a disarming smile?! Do you want to make up your mind before dragging me into this?" answered John, peeking around a doorframe and leading on into the next room – an old activities room if the smudged and moldy paintings on the walls were any sign.

"It's a Zombie eat Zombie world," answered Emma and turned away to hide her smile.

"Oh my god," John answered, incredulous "You actually have been saving that chestnut up haven't you?"

"No!" Emma whispered harshly at this blatant (yet accurate) slur.

"Uh huh," replied John, turning back to the matter at hand, re: infiltration. There was obviously sign of recent activity here, burrito wrappers littered the tables and floors. Without any form of electricity, takeout was apparently order of the day.

Making their way through a few more rooms, Emma was soon despairing that Steve had already left and her chance had already passed.

She imagined him skipping town with his loot, settling down somewhere out of scrutiny – until he got bored. Emma imagined he would try exactly the same trick again, sending another city straight to Hell.

Besides, with Steve out there she felt she would always be looking over her shoulder. As much as the guilt she felt for infecting Steve and setting him loose on the city of Boston compelled her to try and find him to end his threat, his contempt for her finer sensibilities seemed to push him to do the same. Neither would fully rest until the other was dead.

_Emma Rosetti, locked in a life or death vendetta_ she thought to herself. _It does have a certain ring to it. I expect I'll be approached by the Lifetime channel any day now._

Creeping down another hall – blood smeared on one of the walls – Emma and John checked each of the doors but were disappointed. Some of the beds showed sign of recent-ish wear but everything was still now.

Finally reaching the door at the end of the row Emma peeked in and instantly held her breath, slowly withdrawing from it again. It was a big room, probably once a cafeteria though it was hard to tell now. Piles of debris marked holes in the ceiling, some of which gave direct access – through a similar hole in the roof of the second floor – to the darkening dusk sky. Down the other end were 6 figures, clustered around a downed form.

Emma and John crouch-shuffled to the side of the room and started carefully making their way forward behind rubble and ruined metal tables to eavesdrop on the conversation.

"Stop playing with him," cautioned one of the concerned citizens standing around the moaning body. "Every time I smell his blood I almost lose control." To punctuate the point, the man entered a coughing fit, raising his arm to his mouth. The elbow of the grey hoodie he was wearing came away red from the effort. As if on cue, two other members of Steve's gang started coughing themselves – this group was underfed and their lungs were protesting.

Having stealthily covered half the distance between themselves and Steve's gang members, Emma could now make out that the body they were crouching around belonged to someone from the military – probably taken in the confusion after a military post was overrun. The writhing man had a number of slashes across the back and arms, doubtless inflicted from the bloody blade currently in Steve's left hand. Judging by his grey hair and leathery complexion, Emma guessed him to be in his 40s, though his bearing and muscle tone made it difficult to know for sure.

"Besides," said another, checking his watch "We are supposed to meet with group 4 in just under an hour – we had better hurry if we want to get there in time."

Steve sighed and Emma could just hear it from her closer position.

"Look, ingrates," Steve started, drawing a number of confused or blank gazes – Emma didn't suppose ingrate was a word in their limited vocabularies. "We need information, what is the best way out of the city, are any areas out of bounds for the National Guard?" His words punctuated by coughing from one of his underlings.

"That's your cue," added Steve, applying a liberal dose of boot to the prisoner. "Feel free not to answer, if you don't like living."

It was already too late for that though, the man had started to shake wildly, to Steve's momentary horror.

"You fucking IDIOTS," screamed Steve, turning and punching one of the previously coughing cohorts in the collar bone. "What the fuck did I tell you about covering your mouths?"

The etiquette lesson seemed incongruous to Emma, until she realized that the reason for his anger was stray blood mixed with sputum had evidently entered the man's wounds, infecting him. If Emma was counting (and she was) she would mark Steve as equally guilty for the slip – he had caused the wounds that allowed him to get infected, after all.

_So much for gathering info_ thought Emma grimly with a smile.

The new Zombie was not going gently into the night, thrashing as he was like a madman. Emma could imagine the Serotonin deficiency driving him mad inside his head as his body frantically consumed everything it had to complete his transformation.

Emma jumped as the camo clad man sprang onto one of Steve's henchmen, instantly sinking his teeth into the thug's shoulder. A detached part of Emma noted it wasn't one of the men who had been coughing, so the likelihood of his brain containing appreciable quantities of Serotonin was higher.

The surprised look on his face was soon accompanied by screaming as the newly minted Zombie pushed him backwards while frantically tearing into his shoulder and neck. A sickening noise marked an exposed iron bar penetrating his other shoulder as he fell backwards and his screams sank to quiet gasping and sobbing, marking his descent into unconsciousness.

"You have to watch out for the old ones," John commented to the tune of Steve and his cronies jumping on the military man to pull him off. "They change faster," he finished, going back to watching.

"Wait what?" answered Emma intelligently, transfixed on Steve attempting to kick the Zombie to pieces - he was proving remarkably resilient. "Why?" she asked finally, turning to John.

"The young have more stem cells, which the virus is working hard to make in order to complete the transformation. It needs a steady supply of Serotonin and the older the subject the more stem cells it will have to make," he replied, not taking his eyes from the fight. Out on the floor, Steve was now holding back the Zombie as he hissed and spit at the four remaining men.

A pool of blood stemming from the impaled thug was making footing on the concrete floor tenuous at best. The military Zombie hissed, spat and wildly coughed blood as one of the other men tried to line up a hit from a wooden baseball bat.

At last the henchman of Steve managed to take the hit, crunching the Zombie's right eye socket and momentarily stunning him.

Steve took the opportunity and grabbed the lightly struggling Zombie's head to twist, finally managing to snap the spinal column. He dropped the 200 pound guy with little thought and the burly figure fell like a puppet whose strings had been cut. After a second, Steve turned and almost thoughtlessly kicked the downed figure in the head, finishing the job of staving in his skull.

Emma looked back to the member of Steve's crew that had bled out so effectively – it looked like an earnest attempt to paint the floor a coppery shade of red. He was moaning softly though Emma couldn't imagine how he was still conscious.

Steve apparently took notice of him at the same time, swiping the bat from the henchman who held it. The man moaned louder, shaking his head slowly to quibble with Steve's intent.

"I don't much care for his retirement plan," Emma commented to John "but there is no denying that his method for letting someone go is effective."

"Yeah not much room for repetitive faults," John answered.

"Steve!" one of his other cronies called. "At least do it quickly – I grabbed three guns, they are just over there," he inclined his head to indicate a table holding the loot by the door that Emma and John had entered. As everyone in the room looked over to it they were all treated to a view of Emma and John, peaking over rubble.

"Son of a bitch!" offered Emma, running back towards the table – a bullet pinged off a leaning stone column to her right – apparently one of Steve's gang was a quick draw.

Jumping at the table, she managed to grab a handgun, making her insanely proud of herself for the brief second before she bounced off the tabletop and into a wall. She slid downwards and fumbled off the safety, firing off a round that hit no-one in particular but sent their pursuers scattering. John picked up an assault rifle as he ran by, ducking behind a solid looking pile of stone.

Emma peeked around the doorframe watching John for a full twenty seconds – a gunfight equivalent of a lifetime – as he struggled with the weapon, trying everything to make it fire.

His actions included but were not limited to \- pulling the trigger, shaking the rifle, accidentally ejecting the magazine and finally actually looking down the barrel to try and locate the problem.

"It's the fucking safety on the left you dipshit!" she hissed, hopefully loud enough that he could hear but not enough that their opposition would detect the gross incompetence facing them.

Covering for the delay, Emma poked around the doorframe, only to nearly have her face shot off. Chips of stone in her eyes, she still managed to fire off a couple of rounds at an advancing black man with close cropped hair. He yelled incoherently and dove for a pile of rusty metal tables and rocks, making it by bouncing off the former and getting covered by the latter. Another three bullets ricocheted by her and Emma drew quickly back, to the sound of two more thudding into the plaster on the other side of the wall.

A chatter of automatic fire, and Emma looked over to see John awkwardly kneeling behind the wall, firing the rifle that had stymied him for so long. A squawk from the other side of the room indicated that he had hit... something. A giant parrot or oversized coward, probably.

She watched one bullet sting into the rocks in front of John and a second hit him in the exposed shoulder - he half fell, half ducked back into place behind the rocks. He looked over at her and nodded, indicating without words that this was not the worst wound he had yet sustained following her stupid plans.

Emma risked a glance around the doorway, noticing a blonde youth nursing a gushing leg wound as he tried to pull himself to safety. She saw parts from two of the four remaining men peeking from around various works of debris and wisely ducked back into cover, in time to hear two bullets thud into the plaster and another whistle by.

"I'm out!" she heard a deep voice call.

"Don't tell them, you fucking moron," she heard Steve hiss back. She hoped her earlier outburst did not carry as far.

"Hi," said a voice behind them. Emma swung around in surprise and was treated to a hit from a baseball bat not entirely unlike the one employed so effectively moments before, wielded by a man with black hair and a chiseled jaw.

The world exploded into stars and Emma fell back, her jaw disconnected for the second time in a couple of weeks. Fighting to retain consciousness, her mind clawed around the edges of the dark pit of nothingness that opened before it. Try as she might, a few seconds later she slipped back and into unconsciousness.

* * * * *

Actually being knocked unconscious is normally very different from the way it is portrayed in the movies – a fact with which Emma had bored people at parties in the past (a performance she was seldom invited back to reprise).

Being unconscious for more than two minutes generally means brain damage, so the fact that Emma woke up not 15 seconds later would normally be treated with relief - if she wasn't completely disoriented and groggy to boot. Her ears were ringing, her eyesight double and her jaw was agony at even the slightest movement. Blinking rapidly to clear her watering eyes, she was able to still roughly see the surrounding nightmare, painted in fading tones and fuzzy lines.

John was standing, back to the rocks and rifle discarded, frantically holding off everyone else in the room with a mixture of speed and stubbornness. At her side was the stocky brown haired idiot who had brained Emma, bleeding profusely from a massive bullet hole in his neck.

Emma was incredibly hazy but not so hazy that she didn't vaguely look down to see if she had any unexpected holes. To say her confidence in John's ability with firearms was low would be an understatement. Completing the check, she seemed to miraculously still be whole.

Looking back briefly to the man missing a large part of his throat, Emma noticed his eyes were unfocused and he was staring up at a hole in the ceiling to the sky beyond, his black hair floating around him like a halo made of crows. His breath came in little gasps and the frantic expression in his eyes said clearly that he was unready for a transition to the great beyond.

Seeing the discarded baseball bat to the left, Emma made a grab for it – it took her two attempts before she managed to make sense of her double vision and roughly fumble her hand onto the smooth wood of the bat handle. Putting the head on the floor she managed to prop herself upright – and slipped. Her already sensitive head smacked lightly back into a piece of concrete but it was enough for her world to explode into pinpoints of light and black.

The pain was becoming overwhelming, Emma couldn't think past the blackness enveloping her brain. Vaguely she saw John swing wildly at a cap wearing, knife wielding lackey of Steve's. The swing was slowed by the bullet he had taken to the shoulder but the intended target was jostled by one of his friends at the last minute and he completely failed to dodge - the resulting hit must have felt like a freight train because the target's head snapped back and he instantly crumpled.

Emma tried to get back to her feet but her body was unresponsive.. all the effort she exerted bought her a feeble rocking to the side.

Her eyes focusing on the object in front of her, she once again saw the stubbled head of the thug that John had dropped when she was unconscious. The beginnings of hunger stirred in her and an oily taste came unbidden to her mouth as she started salivating at the imagined greasy texture. Pulling back to herself for a second, Emma regained control. The craving wasn't strong enough to take her over, thankfully.

Looking to the side she watched John surrounded by the remaining three of Steve's cohorts, each of them bigger than himself. Steve himself was ignoring her for the moment, a wicked curved knife in his hand as he stalked the semi-circle looking for an opportunity to stab her beleaguered friend.

Seeing John bravely fighting against all odds, Emma tried again to get up. She managed to find a knee but slipped forward, barely managing to prevent a faceplant. Flopping like a fish, Emma drew up a leg to provide push but it slipped to the side, her left knee splaying to the side and landing her roughly back on her ass.

Steve found a small opening and stabbed John just above the kidney, the wound was fortunately somewhat shallow but the curved teeth on the blade ripped again as it came back out, leaving a wicked gash and more importantly the pain distracted John leaving him open to a solid punch to the right cheek. He managed to get an arm up to prevent a follow up but the effort was definitely showing. He was a couple of solid hits from going down and knew it. His gaze flicked to Emma, beseeching, before focusing once again on the people in front of him.

Emma knew she was no help, the baseball bat to the back of her head had ensured she was out of this fight. She had no doubt that given time it would heal but the pain and probable concussion made it impossible for her to respond to the situation. It only made it worse that they were here at her insistence, as a result of her stupid attack on Steve in the park.

Thinking back to it, Emma was reminded again of the feeling of losing control – the strange mixture of helplessness and invulnerability and in an instant, she knew what she needed to do. Her legs were weak and her head was fuzzy but looking at the close cropped hair of the expiring man John had shot, Emma felt the hunger returning. The oily taste built in her mouth, the need in the back of her mind. It was easy to simulate, she had taken a lot of damage and her body was already crying out for stem cells to fix the mess. As the craving grew she felt the point of no return looming.

This time, she rushed past it.

Each time that Emma had lost control in the past she had spent the entire duration frantically trying to become herself once again. There was something almost Zen about just giving up that illusion, she thought, as she watched through her own eyes as her body stumbled to its feet. Concerns of head wounds were distinctly secondary in this state. Unburdened by such things, her body didn't seem to have the same problem with movement.

Steve and the remaining three minion were completely focused on John and his weakened defenses. His arms showed no less than three severe jagged cuts where he had obviously defended himself from Steve's wicked knife. To his regeneration's credit, the older two wounds were already closing up. Steve stalked like a wolf behind the wall of sinew that assaulted John, all of them were completely unaware of the new challenge behind them.

Emma felt herself start to run, watched a surprised Steve turn around in time to see her leap at the leftmost thug, the big black man she had shot at before. Emma watched in satisfaction as he partially turned while she was in the air, saw the angry scar on his forehead and his mouth form into an O of panic. She smashed into him and they rolled into the debris to the side of John. Emma's Zombie landed on top, her hands instantly grabbed her victim by the sides of his head and started smashing it back into a chunk of masonry. In seconds his eyes had rolled up into his head and she twisted harshly to the left, her victory complete as the back of his head exposed his brain. She stooped to chew frantically at the spill as one of the other thugs – another young white man with black hair and poor skin - yelled, incoherent with fear at the atrocity.

John used the opportunity to level one of his slowed but deadly punches at the other man – a being too fair skinned to have ever seen the sun. John's remarkably heavy arm conspired to crunch the side of the man's jaw but to his credit the thug didn't fall. A follow up punch from John to the gut set him sprawling though and as he vomited the product was red with blood.

Emma's Zombie turned and continued to chew at the cooling brain of the dead man. Instead of being frightened or disgusted, Emma reveled in the feeling of success as her body chewed the unfortunate follower's grey matter. A full body flush instantly took hold of her as it increased blood flow. Endorphins were simultaneously released and the feeling of wellness was palpable.

_I get it_ thought Emma to herself. _This is truly what it feels like to be at the top of the food chain._

The thug who yelled just a moment previously turned and leveled a devastating kick to her side while she chewed, her jaw popping with every bite. Her body turned and hissed at him, almost disdainfully. He kicked out at her again and she leaped, her hand catching him under the jaw and the force of her sudden jump lifting him into the air before smashing down head first into the concrete. Her satisfaction was complete when he took the turn to roll around on the concrete, all sense knocked out of him.

The fight wasn't all going their way, however. Steve had used the opportunity and distraction to hack wildly at John's neck. He fell backwards avoiding the worst but a spray of blood splattered the scene as he hit a metal table and rolled.

As Steve stalked forwards, John scrambled backwards on the ground trying to put some distance between himself and the dangerous knife man. His left hand was clamped to his neck as he tried to stop the fountain of blood looking to escape him yet still it trickled between his fingers and mingled with the remains of blood flowing from his shoulder to drip thickly to the ground as he slid across the wet rough floor.

Emma knew she had to help and expected a struggle from the primal urges which had kept her alive, to her surprise though, it was like passing a baton - suddenly she could move again under her own volition.

_The stem cells must really be working their magic today_ she rationalized, stunned that she was once more in control. _I would have said there is no way I would be here after the hits I just took but here I am, standing and once again under my own volition._ The fact that she just thought the word volition made her feel confident she was fast coming back to herself.

Grabbing a chunk of concrete the size of a cantaloupe, Emma ponderously began stagger-running the ten feet towards Steve – her speed increasing with each poorly placed step. Steve became aware of the uneven pitter-patter pace just before Emma reached him, managing to move just enough that Emma's swing of the rock at his head instead impacted his shoulder. It was still enough to cave his collar bone and send him sprawling with a gasp, the smug look of superiority that Steve tended to wear vanishing in an instant to be replaced by a look of terror.

With a scramble Steve had flopped over an upended metal table stuck out of some debris, an old wooden beam and some concrete – an effort to buy himself time to get his feet beneath him.

Emma was just about to jump over the barrier in an effort to keep the pressure on the head thug when she was tackled from behind. Turning roughly at the hip she turned the rough momentum back on the thug – the man John had previously shot in the leg – and sent him flying. He narrowly missed John and instead made an abrupt and bone jarring stop a second later as his back slammed back into the same barrier Steve had just clambered over.

John meanwhile had stemmed the flow of blood from his neck long enough for the wound to partially close. Roughly he once again stumbled to his feet, again surprising Emma by his toughness.

Looking at each other, both were taken by how very rough the other looked. They were back on their feet but they were definitely members of the walking wounded. Knowing the fight was yet to be over though, they nodded at the same time – turning back to the barrier and jumping it with the help of the shoulder and head of the man Emma had just thrown.

Landing with a heavy thump, Emma noted creaking of timbers in the waterlogged building – if it wasn't due for demolishing nature had avowed it would take the job on itself.

Mentally resolving to not linger a second longer than necessary, Emma and John turned to face the Steve, the man they had chased through Hell to stop. He was back onto his feet but his right shoulder was still out of alignment from where Emma had smashed it with the rock, his arm hanging near useless at his side.

He still somehow had hold of the nasty knife he had used to cut John but now it was awkwardly gripped in his left hand.

Emma made the first move, feinting in to test Steve's reactions using his off hand with probable pain radiating up his right arm.

Pulling back she watched the knife drift inches from her cheek. If she had committed to the move she would have had her face cut wide open, possibly even taking out one of her eyes.

Her respect for Steve grew again. He obviously could keep his wits about him under duress.

John bent down carefully, achingly, and picked up a discarded baseball bat. Standing back up he brandished it like he was lining up to a pitcher and Steve licked his lips nervously. John pulled the bat further back taking a half step towards Steve, who backed up a half step in return, his feet pushing trails in the dust as he slid them slowly across the ground.

Steve raised the knife slightly and John swung, pandemonium breaking loose again in an instant. As Emma stepped in Steve ducked below the hit, swiping awkwardly with the knife and scoring a low graze across John's stomach.

Emma threw out a rabbit punch, looking to score any hit as even a relatively small punch could prove out to be a fatally distracting hit if it created enough confusion for John to follow up with one of his massive hits with the baseball bat.

She was quite surprised when Steve raised his seemingly inoperable right arm to block, only grimacing slightly at the impact.

John was still way out of alignment from his hard swing, Emma cursing his impetuous need to connect with everything he had. Steve meanwhile was in perfect position to put his knife directly in John's kidney. Throwing her left arm out, she just deflected it sufficiently to send it skidding past his side.

Steve kicked out to the side - a largely ineffective kick that still caught John off balance and sent him stumbling into some rubble where he lost the grip on his bat. The wood hit the obstruction and half bounced half rolled over the top and started to roll down the other side.

Her attention split, Emma almost too late saw Steve sweep the knife down across her face, just sidestepping and ducking enough at the last minute to get beside it rather than in the path.

To the side she saw John jump forward onto the rubble and gain the end of the handle, then in horror saw the man they had stepped on to jump the table rise up and grab both his arms. His face already looked like it was swelling, a big ugly welt on his cheek oozing blood and forcing his left eye closed but he was still big - if lanky - and John looked small and in a dangerous position.

Focusing again on her own battle, Emma stepped close and pushed while Steve was somewhat off balance, using her additional weight and low center of gravity to throw him backwards – though to his credit he stumbled for step after step on his heels but did not fall. Moving in she still watched John from the corner of her eye, saw him break the hold and bring the baseball bat up in a sharp motion that saw the thug's head snap back hard before he fell backwards, straight as a tree.

Stepping too close, Emma instantly regretted the decision. Steve never stayed incapacitated for long and now was no different. As soon as he managed to get a foot properly placed to reverse his backwards momentum he instantly pushed off and hopped back towards her, knife leading the way. With a noise that sounded like "yipe!" Emma put up her left arm and watched in horror as the knife sliced deeply through her forearm, skidding off the bone and over to her right hand side.

Something must have been severed because she instantly lost the ability to flex her fingers. As she was now leaning heavily left forwards, she bought her arm back across in a boneless backhand across Steve's face, stunning him. The follow-through turned her now wildly to her left where she was once again face to face with John – presently in the middle of another of his powerful swings, this one backhanded.

It might have connected to an unaware Steve if Emma hadn't with perfectly terrible timing turned his attention back that way in time to see it. Steve stepped out at the last minute and watched smugly as John again blew the follow through, glancingly scoring a hit on Emma's left shoulder (that arm was getting no love today) and sending her into a half turn spin. She stumbled forward a step, her hand flat against a table that miraculously was still on all four feet though covered with masonry. The extra step had been a calculated move, putting distance between herself and Steve in case he saw fit to make an opportune hit while she was distracted. Turning back, Emma saw she was right in the guess. Steve was once again within range and about to shank her kidney.

With a quick motion facilitated by her turn, Emma released a handful of grit and dust from her right hand that she had scraped from the top of the table directly into Steve's eyes and was rewarded with a yell as she scored a direct hit.

A second later she almost got stabbed in the neck with a wild swing as Steve frantically stabbed and waved the knife with his left hand, aiming for where she had been as he whipped his right sleeve and then fingers over his eyes, trying to remove the blink inducing blockage.

John took the opportunity to step in from the side and level another of his crazy hard swings, right into Steve's back. Steve made a noise, half squawk half expelled air from his lungs and went down - rolling on the ground as he lacked air or sight to get up.

The thumping in Emma's ears was palpable, probably a side effect of the blood pumping out of her left arm - it was practically all she could hear. John stalked over the fallen foe - swinging to get a shot to the head but instead catching a variety of protective limbs.

Finally he kicked the rolling Steve in the side and the surprise opened him up. John bought the bat down in a sharp motion, quicker than a lot of the haymaker swings he had been making so far but nonetheless effective. Steve's head made a sharp cracking noise and he was finally, mercifully, still.

The thumping noise in her blood was now penetrating her bones, Emma saw John say something but couldn't make it out. Looking up from the still figure of Steve, Emma was treated to a perfect silhouette of a helicopter through the window over John's shoulder, against the reddening dusk sky.

Still half deafened from her earlier head trauma everything had seemed muffled and booming, so her racing heart had been the natural candidate for the thumping in her ears – at this moment Emma would have sworn its blades matched her own heartbeat perfectly.

John looked up at her, the very first inclination of danger starting to pass across her face. He didn't even have time to react though as a rattling blast sounded and John staggered forward, a bullet hole straight through his head.

Emma didn't have time to contemplate – a hail of bullets tore through the walls sounding like hard rain against a tin roof. Emma took a round to the right of her chest and twisted through the air as she went down, immeasurable pain deep in her right boob and lung.

Merciful blackness eluded her. Somewhere the animal in her brain would not allow her to lapse into unconsciousness again despite everything in her screaming in agony. Crawling forward, each arm-hold of dirt, concrete and tile felt like it should be her last as her chest throbbed in pain. Shock must have settled quickly in though because despite having every reason to stop she kept in pulling forward pace by pace as bullets ripped above her. A creak to the right and an already strained load bearing pillar collapsed, taking a large section of the roof with it, the weight of the debris slammed into the floor and kept going, revealing a basement. For a second, Emma contemplated trying to fall into it but knew such a move would only serve as sealing her into her tomb.

This whole place was coming down and if she wanted to live her it would be better if it wasn't onto her.

Reaching out again she looked up, searching for any hope in the situation and found it. One of the walls had fallen outwards perforated as it was by bullets, poor maintenance and time. The roof was already sagging down to fill the hole but for the moment there was a gap. Summoning everything she had left and more, Emma made for the gap among creaking shifting building. An explosion wracked the building and the floor shifted alarmingly beneath her – her feet were left feeling like they were lower than her head. Risking a glance over her shoulder, Emma saw the floor was indeed sinking towards a hole more or less in the middle of the room where the large chunk of roof had pierced it.

Half dragging herself half crawling in her haste, Emma made the last five feet to the gap in the wall and flung herself through it – only to be reminded that the building sat high, raised about two feet from the ground. The blessing and the curse was the wall that fell out had not disintegrated completely upon impact so at least instead of falling onto loose sharp rubble she hit with a crunch of her wrists onto a more or less solid surface.

Rolling away into the long grass, Emma knew she could not afford to stay in the vicinity. The soldiers had already lost numbers to the previous infestation Steve had so cleverly started and they were taking no chances. Bullets continued to ricochet behind her into the old hospital, the occasional one making it all the way through and breaking into freedom again somewhere above her head.

Looking to the cliff in front of her, Emma low crawled as the building behind her tore apart. Another explosion rocked the structure not twenty seconds later and with an almighty crunch the whole thing split in two, sinking in the middle. A pattering noise could be heard as bricks and tile broke off deep inside and fell into the blackness of the basement.

At last the noise of gunfire stopped, Emma thought she could hear the chatter of radio but was not entirely sure with her current hearing. Odds were they had soldiers on the ground circling the building, inspecting. Making sure nothing and no-one survived.

Still about twenty feet out, Emma mustered strength for a burst of speed while crawling through the long brush. Reaching the edge, she looked behind and saw the piercing beams of flashlights waving as people surrounded the structure in the darkening light. Red had given way to inky blues but sooner or later if she was unlucky they would see the mural of blood she had painted on the wall she fell upon and follow it and bent grass out to her. Reaching the edge of the cliff, she looked down. Fortunately the drop wasn't far but it was jagged, about 10 feet of rock at a shallow angle out into water and weeds.

Lowering herself over the edge, Emma prepared to climb down but lacking the ability to grip with her left hand she just hung over the edge for ten seconds trying to get a hold with her wrist and palm. Her right wrist crunched painfully as she held on, the impact with the wall had broken a couple of bones in her wrist and hand.

As she scrabbled with the left a helicopter passed overhead and in surprise she let go. As she fell/slid down the short slope a sharp rock was kind enough to open a gash from the outside of her right knee to her hip. Hitting a chunk of cliff that – in passing – bore an uncanny resemblance to Elvis Presley, Emma bounced one last time and finally smashed down into the water.

Passing out from the shock of cold Emma drifted hopelessly, sinking slowly into the ocean water - clouds of red surrounding her haphazardly as blood puffed serenely from her recent leg wound. Some last vestige of her subconscious noted it and idly started word games.

Blood Pool at night, Zombie Delight

Clouds of Blood while Mourning, Zombie's Warning.

Needs work her brain decided reluctantly and moved on to other pastures.

John was gone. Granted he had been a somewhat unwilling ally at times but he was the only one she could trust to share any Zombie related problems with. _A girl needs someone to ask about period advice_ she thought to herself _Is it so crazy that I need a fellow Zombie to discuss best brain biting tips with?_

As she drifted gently in the ocean the image of the bullet splattering John's forehead haunted her. He had seemed invulnerable somehow - thinking of him dying by brain splatter like so many of her victims just seemed wrong somehow.

Did she really want to wake up to a world where she was completely alone again?

In the end, the decision was made for her. In the past month Emma had found an indomitable spirit that would make her mother proud, if such a thing were possible. It kept dragging her along no matter how much she would want to sleep. It had pushed her through all the late night studying and right now - when her sister would probably have given up and died - it, yet again, dragged her forward.

Consciousness came with a gush of water into her lungs. She surfaced the lapping waves coughing and thrashing, born again in a world where military helicopter chopped buildings apart with hails of bullets and everyone who knew her secret was dead. Looking the 10 feet over from where she had drifted she received the worst news yet.

The rock she had bounced off into the sea wasn't even shaped like Elvis.

### Epilogue

Channel 7 WHDH Urgent News Update

We have word from Amy Bishop of the National Guard that confirmed cases of EV are down over the last four hour period. According to the National Guard, reinforcements were successfully deployed to key barricades during the night, keeping most zones of Boston completely free of infection.

In the last hour WHDH has received unconfirmed reports of EV outside city limits. When asked for comment, Amy Bishop replied they will continue to stridently look into any reports of such cases. As of yet, she says they have yet to confirm a single case outside Boston.

Even so, the number of casualties ranks as one of the largest disasters to ever happen on U.S. soil, with early estimates of dead numbering somewhere between 10 to 30 thousand people. Given the damage to cell towers during the last couple of nights, it might be days before a true account of fatalities can be calculated.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of anyone missing during this time of crisis – WHDH pledges to assist in any way it can families searching for loved ones.

Viral experts have already gone on the record stating that given the pathology of this new virus it is unlikely we have heard the last of Emma's Virus. If you suspect anyone you know of contracting the virus, contact authorities as soon as possible. For WHDH this is Mariana Blanco, signing out.

Dragging her wet, dirty and bloody self into a taxi not far from the docks, Emma was struck by a sense of wrongness. She had come full circle back to the night John bit her.

_Well maybe not quite full circle_ she reflected, feeling a chill breeze against her cheek. When a driver tried to shoo her muddy mess past his taxi she had put a fist through his window.

The ride was colder but the shocks were much better so she considered the whole thing a net win.

Reaching her place – not the hotel but her actual apartment - Emma took a small amount of pity on the cabby and paid him an extra hundred dollars to replace the window.

Limping slightly from the still healing tear down her leg, Emma reached the door to the building and savored the moment. She had nothing left to fear from Steve, so she didn't have to go back to the shitty motel she had been living out of since he found her id.

Nodding to a fellow resident exiting the building – and receiving a stare normally reserved for homeless people in return – Emma remembered how she looked right now and cut short the internal dialogue.

Heading up the elevator, Emma got to her room and tried her key in the forced door, luckily it still managed to open the stressed lock, albeit with a little wriggling. As she pushed the door wide, the scene in the room that was revealed was one of utter chaos.

The wall opposite was emblazoned with the catchy slogan "Die Bitch!" spray painted with sloppy writing in fuzzy red three feet high letters.

"Fuck you Steve," Emma said quietly, feeling the hatred behind every word as she closed the door.

Entering the living room that now reeked of week old urine, Emma saw not an inch of the floor was free from wreckage, her clothing had been cut and ripped to tatters and now covered everything in festive multicolored confetti. The crowning piece was a Teddy Bear she had loved since she was five. It was sitting three feet into the room, a sliced cup from one of her bras now making a rough mop of black hair. Both eyes were torn out and red marker slapped over the little black mouth line - like he had a haphazard lipstick application.

"If I could kill your fucking ass a second time I would!" Emma yelled to no-one in particular.

Picking her way through glass, wood and cloth to the bedroom Emma wasn't surprised to see her bed had slashes everywhere; foam was all over the living room.

Her closet had nothing left in it, anything that wasn't torn to pieces was lying in a pile on the floor of the bedroom – and was the source of the piss smell Emma had detected upon entering her home.

Turning away from the awful smell, Emma spied her old gym bag more or less untouched. Opening it she found a pair of sweats and a t-shirt that had not been washed after her last workout – for a moment she wondered if the sweat smell was worse than the piss on her other clothing but sighing she dug them out.

Heading to the shower, Emma didn't even bother to get undressed before she got into the claw footed tub and pulled the curtain. Starting the flow of hot water - a balm for her cold, damp flesh, Emma started shedding clothes and dropped them outside the tub. The blood on them was incredibly damning should it ever be examined so tomorrow they would be destroyed and dumped. Tonight, however, a pile would do.

When she at last got to her jeans, Emma reached into the pockets. Drawing out fistfuls of damp slightly red tinged cash, Emma let the water wash over it as she vaguely counted it.

_It's blood money_ she thought to herself. The pragmatist she had been forced to become added _but luckily it spends the same._

All told she dropped over twenty thousand wet dollars out of the shower, taken from the bag of money recovered on the streets of Boston. It was followed by her bloody, torn jeans.

Ten minutes or so later, Emma got out of the shower and dripped on the floor – there were no towels left in the apartment. A red flashing light caught her eye, it belonged to her phone, sitting jauntily on her nightstand – clearly visible through the open door of her bathroom. It injected an air of normalcy into her ruined apartment, sitting exactly as it would have a couple of weeks ago before any of this started.

Limping back into her bedroom - the last cut she received was still especially painful – Emma hit the button.

"Two messages, First message, Friday, 6th, November, 10:37, AM," the nice little robot lady proclaimed. It took some very active thought for Emma to pin down today as Saturday. _Thank god it's the weekend_ thought Emma sardonically _this week has seemed to go on for – like - ever._

"Hey Emma," Dan's voice greeted her "It's Dan," the disembodied voice confirmed.

Emma did some quick calculation, this would be... a little over two hours after the main outbreak yesterday.

"I feel pretty stupid, actually," Dan continued after a brief pause "left the safety of the campus to go and get my dog. I know, pretty dumb but all I could think about was him alone and whining in the apartment."

"I guess I got lucky though, I mean I was already back home before the major infection vector. I am pretty scared though, there are lunatics running past outside the apartment and there are helicopters. Damn things are huge. Every so often I hear a noise in the distance like a saw – I think it's gunf-"

Emma gasped at the abrupt ending.

"Second message," said the answering machine.

"Sorry about that," started Dan. Emma exhaled sharply.

"I think your machine cut me off.. anyway I just wanted to check you are okay. I tried your cell but there was no answer."

Emma looked sadly towards her inert cell phone. A bath in the sea would ensure she would never answer on it again. She supposed it had been out of battery long before her fateful trip to the old sanitarium.

"I am hoping you finally made it back to the college," Dan continued "... and I had no-one else to call. Does that make me sound needy?"

"Anyway.. T.V. says to stay inside and keep quiet so I am going to studiously read. Hope you are okay. Bye."

"End of messages."

Emma sat down heavily, she was more tired, sore and raw inside than she could remember ever being. With a sigh, she dialed the number for the college – intent on getting Dan's home address.

* * * * *

Emma finally reached the apartment building specified on the small piece of yellow paper in her hand. Lacking a computer AND phone, she had to get the cranky lab assistant who answered the college biology department number to give her directions. To her credit, Emma persuaded her to do so with a bare minimum of threatening.

The building was nice – obviously much nicer than hers. It even boasted a private dog walking area somewhere to the rear of the property - handy for all the single people ensconced therein who desperately needed some form of company.

Assailing the stairs (power was out on the elevators) Emma soon came to the 2nd floor, where Dan lived. Getting ready to knock on his door, Emma instantly noted something amiss.

Emma had not previously noted the new habit but thanks to Steve and his merry band of misfits she had taken to carefully examining doors before entering a room.

This one had a couple drops of blood at the base of it.

Deciding to err on the side of caution, Emma didn't knock on the door - or ring the doorbell. She instead ran at it, centering her dense mass into the door, right by the handle. The door splintered as it gave, revealing a scene featuring Dan slumped in a pool of blood, emanating from a hole in his stomach.

"Oh great," he said, weakly lifting his head at the intrusion to see it was her. "Now I also have to replace a door."

"No-one leaves me two voicemails," she replied deadpan, masking her concern as she rushed over to tend to him. The man had a pallor to his skin that suggested the blood loss was at a critical level.

A chocolate lab, previously affixed to Dan's side growled as she entered but lay back down with a weak pat to the top of his head.

"I knew it was too much," he replied, coughing up blood. Coughing immediately set Emma's nerves on edge, until she realized this was just good old fashioned internal bleeding.

Examining the wound, Emma kept the patter going - hoping to take Dan's mind off the pain.

"So what happened?" she asked, quickly pouring a nearby bottle of vodka on her hands before probing gently into the stomach wound.

"So check this out," Dan replied, not really reacting to the pressure on his wound – not a good sign. The flesh had been devoid of good blood flow long enough to make the nerves dead. "It is the middle of a Zombie apocalypse and I manage to get **shot**."

"Poor reaction to a bad grade?" she asked, looking for damage to arteries – one had been nicked but was merely oozing.. mere millimeters to the right and his life expectancy would have been seconds as opposed to the... hours? that he had spent slowly ruining his nice carpets.

"Dumb bad luck" he answered. "People started looting pretty hard. This one guy had me at gunpoint when Prince came around the corner growling. I jumped him to try and grab the gun – figured it was that or watch him shoot my dog."

"How'd that work out for you?" asked Emma, thinking she probably would have let the gunman do so. _Sorry Prince_ she mentally added, slightly inclining her head.

Dan nodded over to the side and Emma was shocked to see a downed figure partially around the corner.

"Then how?" she asked intelligently, pointing to the wound.

"His friend was not happy," Dan said closing his eyes.

"You love your dog a little too much, attacking two people with guns while unarmed," Emma commented.

Dan nodded "I have spent the better part of a day reflecting on it and I am inclined to agree," he answered. "So how is it?" he asked, nodding his head weakly to indicate the stomach wound.

"Not good," answered Emma honestly. "You've lost a ton of blood and you have a nicked artery that still hasn't clotted over. You're a timebomb" she finished simply.

"Jesus your bedside manner sucks," Dan answered, coughing. "Can you operate?"

"God no. It would be touch and go if you had a surgeon – I would just kill you," Emma answered, getting up.

"Can you at least try?" Dan asked, pleading.

"How long has he been dead?" asked Emma, pointing down to the would-be robber by her feet. She wiped her hands absently on her sweatpants, leaving a bloody trail.

"I don't know," answered Dan, sounding frustrated but weaker. He was fading.

"You might not thank me for this in the short term. Hell, you might not even thank me for it in the long term," Emma said, kneeling.

She bit him.

Dan's weakened immune system was absolutely no match for this virus. Within seconds he started shaking uncontrollably, in time with the crunching noise of Emma bashing looter head repeatedly against her professor's granite counter.

"Crap," she said after a few seconds "Sorry Dan, I put another stain on your carpet."

* * * * *

In a basement a couple of miles away, a mound of rubble slowly shifted.

### My Unlife trilogy, books 2 & 3

Look for the following in 2014 & 2015!

Book 2 - My Unlife: Revolution

Book 3 - My Unlife: Extinction

### About the Author

Typhoid Marty is the writer for Hell Inc (http://www.hellinccomic.com), a webcomic about Demons, Angels and Big Business. He likes games, books and other nerdy things - outside gives him hives but he likes to look at it through the window.

Connect with Typhoid Marty at the following fine online venues:

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