Deadly Epidemic - Chapter One

Russell Chatman looked at me with something more than fear in his eyes. We knew what was coming. Any moment people would burst through the door...people that were no longer alive. People that wanted nothing more to eat the flesh off our bodies and give us the deadly disease that plagued their bodies. I didn't want it, it was no secret. I strived to find a cure for it but right now there was no cure. I figured there never would be, but Russell was adamant about finding one.

I could feel my heartbeat escalate more by the moment. The adrenaline was pumping madly through my veins. I whispered, "Get ready. We've got to make sure we position the alcohol just right before it lands on them." There was no sterilizing zombies, but may as well give them something that would disinfect them. Russell hollered as they came bursting through the door, "Now!" I positioned the string and pulled as hard as I could. The alcohol came down and poured all over the once living humans.

They hollered and howled with pain. I could see one of the to start to writhe. He took 'the ooze gun' and began blasting the serum on them. The serum was green, just as slime was. It wasn't slime though, it had all sorts of antibiotics in it, plus a little more. I stared at the zombies and then took out my own gun. I shot them with the ooze and watched as they began smoking. After we were done I looked down at the pile of once humans. They were nothing more than skeletons staring blankly up at the ceiling. "It didn't work...once again!" I was getting frustrated. Twenty-five more times had we already tried the cure. Twenty-five times it had failed.

"Je-sus! Why hasn't it worked by now? We've tried this and tried till I'm about to give up! I mean, why should this have happened to begin with. Those people who don't have the disease have already evacuated the city. Those who have it, have either died or we've killed them trying to procure this serum. How much more will happen? The government is doing all they can and I feel as though we aren't doing our end." I shrugged and sighed, "We'll get it done sooner or later. I mean look at how far we've gotten so far. Finding that alcohol will burn them." I had to make a joke in spite I knew it ate away at the bacteria in their skin.

There was no cure for this dreaded disease. I had faced the truth but I couldn't tell him that. I was so close into getting the answers I needed about the serum he had created to cure HIV. I believed with all my heart, he had killed my sister. At least he had contributed to it. I didn't talk to him again till we got back to the lab. We set out to work on the serum again. It wasn't working and I knew it wouldn't as he injected into one of the infected zombies we had captured.

He looked up at me, a smile touching his beard covered lips, "This should work! We may have our cure!" Eh yeah, I thought to myself. There wasn't a cure and it wasn't going to work. I kept my thoughts to myself as the zombie jerked and cringed up into a fetal position.

I was left with my thoughts as he realized he had failed once more. He took off the stethoscope he wore around his neck and threw it roughly to the floor. He left the lab and went up to his headquarters. He did this many times and had in the past. I knew the routines rather point-blank. He would come out from upstairs two or three more hours and sit over the desk for another two hours. He'd get up and then go the kitchen and grab a thing of freeze-dried potatoes and cheese and eat. He would lastly go into the lab and saw open the zombie that hadn't produced the cure.

It was a sort of punishment for the zombie, or so I thought. When things finally died down and he realized he had failed he would set out to find another zombie and capture it. I would tag along with him trying to pressure him into telling me the cure for HIV serum. It wouldn't work either. He'd never tell me a cure for anything other than the disease in which we worked with. I turned to my own bunk and crashed down with a thunk. I slang my door shut and turned to look at the sun streaming in through the window to my left. My 'cell' as I called it was sparsely decorated. It was no more wide than sixteen by twenty-five foot. I hated it.

On the right of my cot was a small desk with paperwork piled up to the picture above the desk. The picture was a replica of Sandro Botticelli's "The Rebirth of Venus". It was my favorite painting and he was my favorite artist. My cell phone lay on the desk beside the paperwork. It wasn't anything fancy but it was just a contact to the people outside New Orleans.

New Orleans had been evacuated going on ten weeks now. It had been ten weeks since I had seen any part of the world that didn't carry a zombie. It had been ten weeks since I had seen Sawyer. Sawyer was the love of my life and no, he wasn't a guy. He was my Golden Retriever that I had raised from a pup.

I didn't have a man in my life besides Russell. My intentions were to catch Russell in the act of revealing what he really put in the HIV serum that had killed my sister. My sister had been the only family I had, had left. She and I grew up on a farm together on the outside Green City, Kansas. I missed those days. We had lived there our whole lives till we graduated high school. Carrie had gone to community college and I had gone to the university to become a doctor. I specialized in forensics mainly but the government had called me in to do their work when the infamous "Voodoo Virus" had broken out in New Orleans.

Carrie had caught HIV from a partner in college and gotten very ill. She died within two years of contracting the virus. She had gladly become a participate in a medical cure that Dr. Russell Chatman had supposedly created. He had put something in her serum and it had killed her. The medical technician let her volunteer the autopsy on her sister and she had obliged, eager to find out if it had been murder involved. She didn't find anything out of the ordinary and it angered her. She knew the disease wouldn't have killed her sister that soon.

The doctors had told her she had easily three good years to live. She sighed and turned over, closing her eyes. She could feel the threat of tears clinging to the back of her throat. She growled and came to her feet. What would the future hold for the world?