Chapter 3
“Harbouring an undead being is a crime,” the stern voice over intoned to the train’s passengers. “If someone you know is undead, it is your duty to report it immediately. Anyone found to be hiding or protecting a former human risks fines of up to one hundred thousand dollars and two years imprisonment.”
Sitting uncomfortably on the train’s hard plastic seats, Miles did his best to block out another public service announcement. The rail operators were reaping in tens of millions of dollars per year ever since they decided it would be a good idea to bludgeon commuters with non-stop advertisements during their journey, but evidently none of that money went into improving passenger comfort. He was already nursing a slight hangover, and these incessant announcements weren’t making things any easier for him.
“And remember: Be vigilant. Be vocal. Help us win the war on horror.”
In the seat behind him, two obnoxious teenagers giggled over a clip they were viewing on their phones. It was another of those sadistic viral videos, the latest online fad that featured comic violence against the undead. Last year’s craze had homeless people fighting zombies for money. This year, it was all about movie parodies. Amateur filmmakers would post shot-by-shot recreations of scenes from cinematic classics, but with zombies playing the role of the victim.
So far there had been the ear-slicing scene from Reservoir Dogs, followed by the toll both scene from The Godfather and the baseball bat scene from The Untouchables. Each video attempted to outdo what came before it in terms of violence and sheer depravity. The more extreme the footage, the more views it attracted.
The current record holder, with over two hundred million views to date, was the Casino head-in-a-vice clip.
Judging by the disturbing sounds coming from the boys’ phones behind him, Miles assumed this the latest one paid homage to the woodchipper scene from Fargo.
He put his headphones on and turned the music up.
Miles watched the needle as it penetrated his skin and entered the vein. He had a phobia of needles when he was younger, but seemed to have gotten over that now. Maybe it was because he’d seen plenty worse, and minor things like blood and skin lacerations no longer had any effect on him. It was a different world, and his idea of what was normal had been irreversibly altered.
When he was fifteen, he almost passed out when someone in his home economics class sliced their finger open and spilled blood everywhere. Now he had become much more desensitised. A few weeks back, when he was packing up after a particularly messy job, he noticed a severed foot lying in the gutter and thought nothing of it.
The research lab was busier than usual today, and he had to wait over an hour for his turn. About thirty people had lined up before him, eager to sell their blood.
He sometimes felt guilty about selling blood for money when he could instead be donating it to save lives. He felt slightly better about it when he learned that he wouldn’t have been eligible to donate anyway, since anyone who worked with the undead was prohibited. The odds of him having infected blood were miniscule, but they still insisted on the extra precautions. If a healthy person was mistakenly contaminated with infected blood, the results are catastrophic. The recipient becomes a ticking time bomb who can turn into a zombie at any moment.
A local hospital had recently settled two lawsuits from plaintiffs claiming that family members had been turned into former humans after receiving transfusions with tainted blood.
They weren’t quite as fussy here at the research lab. Human blood had become a highly sought-after commodity in a post-zombie world, and the race was on between the biotech firms to deliver a vaccine or a cure for the infection. Their research required megalitres of blood which they used to study exactly how the infection reacted, why it behaved the way it did, and how they could stop it from spreading. Donors were paid $200 per pint. This was considered to be a rather generous amount, but since a successful vaccine was literally a trillion-dollar idea the companies involved didn’t hesitate in paying that much.
The search for a cure had been underway for almost three years now, but it was yet to produce any meaningful results.
Dr. Martin Bishop, one of the world’s leading authorities on the spread of the infection, believed that an effective vaccine could be developed within the next twelve months if only the biotech firms made their findings open to the public. He called on governments to force these firms to disclose the results of their trials, saying it was ridiculous to have the world’s greatest scientific minds competing against one another instead of collaborating and building on each others’ work. But his pleas fell on deaf ears, and at present none of them were any closer to finding a cure than when they began.
Last year Vidar Skredsvig, an infamous Norwegian hacker and activist, was arrested after posting tens of thousands of documents online that had been stolen from the databases of Amylin Pharmaceuticals. He is currently facing a two hundred year prison sentence for the heinous crime of endangering the future earnings of a billion-dollar corporation.
“Since this government took office, there have been over seven thousand undead attacks in this state alone,” the ominous voice declared over a dramatic soundtrack. “This is a figure that rises daily.”
Miles glanced up at the TV in the corner of the room while he waited for the blood bag to fill. It was another election ad insulting his intelligence. Networks had bombarded viewers with these ads over the past few months.
The onscreen counter ticked over, displaying the tally so far: 7413.
“How many more innocent victims have to die before they admit they’ve lost control of the situation? On March 1, vote for Bernard Marlowe. It’s time to take our country back from the grip of horror.”
This ad was played at least four or five times every hour, with an updated death counter to keep the public up to speed on just how many lives had been lost. Miles already had a fairly low opinion of politicians, but exploiting an ongoing tragedy for political mileage seemed to be hitting a new low.
He turned away from the TV and looked at the blood draining out of his arm. This was a sight he found to be slightly less nauseating.
The bag filled and the needle was removed, and the nurse covered the entry point with a band aid. Miles was running a bit behind schedule and tried to leave straight away, but the nurse advised him to rest a little while longer. He waited a few minutes, then jumped up out of his seat shortly after she left the room.
He moved a bit too fast. His vision went grey and fuzzy, like TV reception in a thunderstorm. He held onto the chair for balance and took a few slow, calming breaths until it passed and he regained his focus.
The woman at the reception handed Miles his cheque and let him have a lollipop from the jar on the counter. He took a second one when she wasn’t looking.
He deposited the cheque at a nearby ATM. This brought his bank balance to $15,579.29. That may have seemed like a significant amount of money, but Miles couldn’t help but feel a little deflated every time he looked at that figure. This was all he had to show for two-and-a-half years of working at Dead Rite. After scrimping and saving every dollar, renting out a room in his house, buying generic brand everything, walking and using public transport instead of buying a car, and selling his blood every two months, it only amounted to $15,579.29. That equated to about six grand a year, or five hundred dollars a month. After all that effort, he’d managed to put away seventeen dollars a day.
Clea spent that much on coffee.
The bus slowed to a crawl after a short distance before it finally came to a complete stop.
“Sorry folks,” the driver announced to the passengers. “Looks like we could be in for some delays. Some sort of protest rally up ahead.”
The way the driver uttered the words “protest rally”, and the groans that followed from the passengers, said it all. This was the latest public display of dissent from the Tribe of Zeroes, the one they had been planning the night before.
Organising protests was now Clea’s number one priority, her studies relegated a distant second. Her first one was about a year ago, after a far-right Finnish politician said that only those with “loose morals” were susceptible to the zombie infection. Miles wasn’t sure if Clea was genuinely outraged by these ignorant comments from a man she’d never heard of in a country she couldn’t locate on a map, or if she just wanted to put on a street party for herself and her like-minded friends. He suspected it was the latter.
Protesting and civil disobedience had become Clea’s main interest, even if at the end of the day nothing was ever achieved. Her protests were usually about as effective as her online petitions, and these weren’t worth the kilobytes of disc space they occupied. She often boasted that her petition calling for all former humans to be freed from processing centres had attracted over 200,000 signatures. She was unaware that three times as many people had signed an online petition demanding that Eddie Murphy make a sequel to Norbit.
Today’s rally was in response to the outcome of a court case earlier in the week. Four men were convicted of killing a zombie and sentenced to five years in prison. It was a case that had divided the nation. Supporters of the men said that they were upstanding citizens who provided a valuable service to their community, and were now being imprisoned to appease vocal minority groups. Opponents decried them as callous murderers who killed for the sheer thrill of it, and deserved much harsher sentences.
It was difficult to disagree with the latter assessment. The four men had spotted the zombie stumbling around a nearby park one Saturday night, but instead of reporting it to the authorities they stalked it for over twenty minutes before bashing it over the head with an axe handle, chaining its feet to the tow bar of their truck, then driving around town until the zombie’s parts were spread across a two mile radius. They probably would have gotten away with it, too – the police generally don’t have the time, resources or inclination to investigate every reported case of zombicide – except for the fact that one of the men filmed the whole thing and posted it online. He was smart enough to blur out the faces of all the men involved; unfortunately, he forgot to blur the truck’s licence plate as well.
Up until that point authorities had been willing to turn a blind eye to instances of violence against the undead, despite the recent introduction of the NEVADA law which prohibited this kind of premeditated zombie thrill kill. But this incident was so horrific, and the uproar so resounding, they had no choice but to press charges. The four men were convicted of using excessive force on an undead being and were handed the longest custodial sentences to date for an act of violence against a former human.
But the Tribe of Zeroes still weren’t satisfied. They were out in force today and had traffic banked up in every direction. They were furious, and they wanted the world to know it.
Ten minutes passed, and Miles decided he had waited long enough. He got off the bus, figuring it would be quicker for him to walk the rest of the way.
He looked at his watch as he hurried along the street. His shift was due to start in twelve minutes. He had no chance of making it to work on time today.