Five
The blank white zombified goo-girl rose awkwardly to its feet and shambled towards me.
Euna! I screamed mentally. A flashback to earlier in the year when I had thought I lost her filled my mind with nothing but blinding panic. I could not lose her! Not again.
Thankfully, Euna’s voice cut through the panic like a warm knife through butter. I’m safe! That was just a copy, Ryan, my core is safely in HQ right now. I’m okay. I promise. But you need to destroy that thing before it hurts anyone else! Please?
As soon as she asked this, the undead blob before me split into two copies. Then four. Then eight. All the while each copy kept coming towards me, looking exactly like Euna the whole time.
I breathed a sigh of relief despite the horror show ahead of me, because the only thing that mattered was that she was safe. Okay, babe. How exactly am I supposed to do that? My guns are fried and this thing is a one-zombie-army already!
Use fire. It’s the only thing that can get rid of my biomass permanently.
“Uh, Ryan?” Selene asked. “Is there something wrong with your girlfriend?”
I glanced back to respond to her and saw Lana staring up into our car with a dejected look on her face, her wings still hanging at her sides while she clutched her little magic wand in her hand. An idea formed in my head. “Hey, Lana, come here!”
The fairy looked over at me sadly, probably expecting me to snap at her some more, but then blinked in shock when she was what was going on. She started backing away in fear.
“No. Lana, we need you! Do you know any fire spells?”
Her wings popped up and she started to flutter away frightfully.
Damn it!
Hannah suddenly reached out with one of Selene’s hands. Lana leapt into the air and started to fly away, only to stop mid-air and zoom into Selene’s palm. In a soft voice she quickly said, “Hey. Calm down little one. No one is going to hurt you, okay? Ryan needs your help. This is your chance to redeem yourself for abandoning us earlier. Don’t miss your shot.”
Hannah released Lana, who swallowed nervously and turned to face me.
“W-what do you need?”
My eyes flicked between Hannah, who had just displayed telekinetic powers for the second time today, and down to Lana; who I was slowly starting to realize was not purposefully screwing us over but was clearly scared shitless right now.
“I don’t know what’s going on in that little head of yours, Lana, but I’m sorry for snapping at you. Euna’s copy absorbed a zombie and it looks like that copy has been corrupted by whatever zombie virus is making this happen. I, we, actually, need you to burn each of those copies completely. Do you think you can do that?”
Lana looked over at the dozen-or-so zombies oozing their way towards us. She took a half-step back in blatant fear, resting one of her little high heels on Selene’s thumb as the officer cupped her hand to give the fairy plenty of space to stand on. With a deep breath, Lana nodded.
“I can do that. Stand back,” she suggested. With a white-knuckled grip on her wand, she twirled in place and produced a thumb-sized orange sigil sizzling away at the top of her wand. With a grunt of effort and a squealed word of power, she released a spell into the air that produced bright blue flames.
It was like a jet engine suddenly ignited in the middle of the street. In seconds, all of the zombified copies of Euna were torched. A few seconds after that, the remaining zombie remains were incinerated and the tour bus’s engine exploded.
Then the spell died down, leaving a scorched street and not a single trace of any of the undead that had been milling around it a few minutes prior.
Lana sat down in Selene’s palm and looked up at me, blinking tiredly. “Ta-da.”
I smiled down at her, equal parts grateful and impressed. “Thank you.”
“Does this mean I still,” her question was interrupted by a big yawn, “s-still get to be a field agent? I’d make a great Keeper, Ryan. Seriously. You’ll see. You’ll be so impressed with me, you’ll have to keep me. Ha, keep me. Get it? It’s funny because you’re a Keeper.”
Aww, she’s so cute, Io cut in.
While I silently agreed with Io, aloud I said, “We can discuss that when we’re back at HQ and you’ve rested up a bit. For now, let’s just worry about the drive.” At a gesture from me, Hannah/Selene carried the fairy girl into the passenger seat and I slid into the driver’s seat to take us back.
We only made it down two blocks and over three before we ran into another group of zombies, these were being taken out by a group of Hunters from the Bureau. Four blocks later, same deal. A quick check-in with Io confirmed it. There were zombies cropping up all across Eastport. We were in a full-blown Z-day situation here.
-
Two hours later I was leading Selene (and Lana, still asleep in the girl’s hand) into a lab back at HQ. Dr. Carolyn herself–the head of the Bureau’s science division–and Director Aleksei were staring down into a capsule at a writhing undead specimen. Several other scientists in lab coats milled around us as Carolyn was busy taking samples.
“Ah, Agent Stryker, good to see you made it back in one piece,” Aleksei said the moment he saw me. He reached out to shake my hand and pulled me into a half-hug. A gesture which, back when I first started at the Bureau, would have been inconceivable for him to pass on to me. For the first month or so that I worked there, he hated my guts. Which was fair. I showed up out of nowhere and questioned the way he was running things, showed him up at every turn, then slept with his daughter, Tabitha. Luckily, there was a world-ending crisis that we managed to solve together otherwise I’m pretty sure he’d still hate my guts. Nowadays though he liked to refer to me as his ‘protege’ to anyone who would listen, and was very excited to be a grandfather.
I clapped the Director on the back good-naturedly and nudged my chin towards the zombie in the capsule. “What are we learning?”
“Nothing good, I’m afraid,” Dr. Carolyn revealed. “This isn’t your average run-of-the-mill zombification. Necromancers use reanimated corpses all the time, heck we even have one or two roaming around the Bureau. As long as they are hygienic and properly enchanted, it’s really no big deal. These buggers on the other hand,” the doctor shook her head, “this is dark magic mixed with botany. Cursed spores are getting drawn in through the respiratory system, clogging up the victims’ lungs and using them as breeding grounds while they replicate and produce more spores. This process kills their hosts swiftly, and then the spores reanimate the corpse almost immediately. After that the dark spores spread through bites and scratches. The undead hosts don’t seem particularly interested in feeding, either. Each zombie is less of a brain-eating corpse and more of a… a drone in a hive. Their current directive seems to be simply pollinating to spread more of these dark spores.”
A chill crept up my spine at the doctor’s description.
After a second filled with nothing but silence as everyone present, including a newly-awakened Lana, stood there looking mortified, I jumped in to get us back on the right track. “Well. All of that sounds horrible, obviously. And I know firsthand that monsters are susceptible to these spores. But we’ve faced worse. How do we handle this? Hives have queens, right? Is there some mega-zombie out there that I can kill that will end this infestation?”
Dr. Carolyn shook her head. “My best guess is that it’s some powerful necromancer that started it, but even if you found the one responsible, killing him or her would not end this outbreak. This disease is already well beyond the point where destroying the source could end it. Any zombie with a handful of dark spores is a potential new patient zero that could kick-start a whole new outbreak. We need to find a cure and a method of delivery that can blanket the entire city in immunity. Tracking down the source may help us find a cure, if we can understand what foul magics are at play here, but it’s just one step. Based on how rapidly things are spreading, we are going to have to place Eastport on lockdown effective immediately.”
Aleksei sighed. “On it. I’ll contact my people at Hodgekins and tell them to quarantine the skyport.” He glanced over at me seriously. “Agent Stryker? It’s no secret that the Bureau is hurting at the moment. Boris’s coup cost us some of our best agents and left us vulnerable. I’m personally taking command of all other agents in the field and focusing on damage control to contain this outbreak. But I need you to get out ahead of the situation. Take whatever resources you need. Track down the source of these dark spores, find or synthesize a cure, and distribute it to all of Eastport.”
That was three impossible tasks my boss just handed to me all at once. On one hand it was somewhat flattering that he thought I was capable of handling so much. On the other, it was completely overwhelming being handed this much responsibility.
But there was no way in hell I was going to let the father of my girlfriend know that I was overwhelmed. He had just thrown down a serious gauntlet, and I was going to rise to the challenge.
I locked eyes with him and nodded, once, before turning to Dr. Carolyn. “Please send a full report on these dark spores and anything else you uncover here over to Io. Maybe she can find some way to track these spores and help us out in hunting down every last zombie.” Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Aleksei and Carolyn exchange a smile before he stepped away and started making phone calls and she gave me her full attention. “In the meantime, any information you could give me to point me in the direction of the source would be highly appreciated. Lana,” I motioned to the little fairy, “you’re my team’s new resident magical expert. Look over Dr. Carolyn’s report and see what you can learn. Come talk to me if you think of anything useful, alright?”
Lana gave me a little salute and fluttered over to hover over Carolyn’s shoulder.
I pivoted and marched out of the lab, already forming a mental checklist for what I needed to do next and consulting with Io, Tabitha, and Euna on our next steps. We all had plenty of practice hunting things down. All we needed was a place to start.
Selene’s boots squeaked on the floor behind me as she slid slightly in her hurry to catch up to me. “Wait! That’s it? What about the phantoms, Ryan? I need your help on this.”
My footsteps halted as I glanced up towards the ceiling of the labs.
I have way too many things to do and I can only be in one place. This is bullshit.
With a sigh, I spun around and looked at Selene. “Did you not hear that back there? My boss just gave me a major chore list, Hannah.”
“It’s Selene, actually. Hannah dipped once we arrived, said she was going to go hunt down some leads,” she corrected.
“Okay, Selene, then. I’ve got a zombie outbreak to take care of. Is that okay?”
Selene crossed her arms defiantly. “No. It isn’t okay, Ryan. There’s a lot riding on Hannah accomplishing her mission here. More than you know. She needs your help. We both do. I… I sort of blew it with the police department. The whole possession thing took a bit of getting used to and there was some weirdness in the first week or so. Long story short, they suspended me. I don’t have access to the resources we need to track these ghosts down, and this is a much bigger problem than I think you’re understanding.”
Annoyed, I brought my wrist-screen up and tapped in a few commands, calling up a friend of mine. A familiar face popped up on the screen a second later. “Hey, Agent Blitz. Aleksei just put me in charge of locating a cure for this zombie virus. I’m recruiting you as the first member of my new task force. How do you feel about helping a friend of mine track down some leads?”
Blitz, who owed me big time for what happened during the last major crisis that struck Eastport (long story short, some demons tried to take over, Blitz is a lesser demon who switched sides, and the only reason he’s still around is because I decided to trust him), immediately jumped at the opportunity to help me out. I told him to gear up and meet me in the garage in thirty minutes.
Deactivating my wrist-screen, I looked up at Selene. “Blitz has all the same clearance I do, and he has comms to reach people here in HQ who can help you out. I’ll tell Io to priortize any calls from him, and he will accompany you and Hannah wherever you two need to go. I’d love nothing more than to go see to this ghost, sorry, phantom problem myself, but I’m busy right now. This is the best I can do. Now, excuse me. I have some ladies I need to go talk to about stopping another apocalypse.”