Warm Bodies: Awakening

Hero of the Moment

Stephen gently pulled the jug away to a nearby table so it wouldn't spill and covered the girl with a thin sheet.

He was mentally kicking himself for letting her come in in the first place, but he'd been curious. He'd heard rumors from the other soldiers who'd been at the stadium, who'd brought Julie and the... young man back. Rumors that they'd been very, very close. It was obvious to see first hand of course. The kid had come out of a heavy dose of propofol to grab her, Stephen had no idea how, but their connection was incredibly strong.

Was that what had brought him back from being a corpse? The Colonel hadn't released any kind of official statement yet, but Stephen felt he was probably waiting to see if the kid pulled through. How the heck do you give an official statement on love as a zombie cure? It was ridiculous.

If he hadn't been told by the Colonel himself, he wouldn't have believed it. And there was still some niggling part of his brain that refused to believe. A little voice that said it's a joke. It's a prank. A dumb prank, 'cause the kid was dying, but still.

He stared at the young man on the bed. He looked... normal. Too pale, but human pale. All the instruments he was attached to said the same thing - human. Alive.

A miracle. They'd been waiting for one for so damn long. When the outbreak had first started, there were dedicated teams working on a cure. Most were government institutions, but many were private groups, university think tanks. There was a strong momentum at first - people had hope. Then they'd been overrun as experiments failed, the dead broke free, destroyed everything. And it became just about survival. No one had time to look for a cure when they were too busy running, hiding, fighting. Failing. Life petered to the tiniest flicker and hope flat out died.

He'd been on one of those teams, been involved in the experiments. They dissected so many of the dead looking for an answer, a cause. He'd had their black gore up to his elbows as he dug and delved. They tried to cut it out, bleed it out. The brain seemed an important clue, so they'd sliced away at them until the dead became truly dead. But it revealed nothing. People started to believe in a curse - when science fails you so completely, what else can you do?

A part of him wanted to see inside the kid. Wanted to release the secrets he carried, and find something concrete, something they could reproduce in a lab and carry around in a syringe. To somehow make up for the failures of the past, become the hero of the moment. Show everyone that science could trump insanity. Make the world make sense again.

Another part of him was thinking about his son. David had been bitten. Stephen had tried to save him. And he'd failed. Had to put him down. His own son. Gently. There were no guns, no blunt trauma, just a very precisely placed cut, and he was gone. He hadn't had a choice then. Now that it seemed that they did, he could no longer make the right one for David. It hurt.

Stephen raised a hand to his face and squeezed a few stubborn tears from his eyes.

Then he noticed a growing bloom of red on the bandage over the center of the boy's chest, and an alarm sounded on the blood pressure monitor.

"Oh crap," Stephen whispered. He rushed to the kid's side and lifted the bandage gently. Underneath, beneath a thin crust of a scab, a slow trickle of blood pulsed. The blood pressure monitor alarmed again, and the young man's pulse rate dropped.

He'd torn the goddamn stitches saving the girl.

"Shit shit shit," he swore under his breath, replacing the bandage, and ran from the room.