They Call Me Daring

Chapter 7

I felt so depressed I forgot about the letter in my hand. It was like my entire life was one longish car ride, driving down a road full of sharp turns and hills, but steadily moving forward, nonetheless, and then, suddenly, out of nowheres driving off a cliff. And now I was falling.
    I just stood and stared at my feet for a couple of minutes, wallowing in self pity. Then I remembered the urgency in my father's voice, and I looked blankly down at the envelope in my hand. Then it began to rain.
    "Crap." I spat when the sudden downpour came out of nowhere. I jammed the letter down my shirt for lack of pockets, and took off.
    Now that the rainclouds were setting in, the sun's intensity was lessened, like God had turned down the brightness setting on the world. The freezing rain felt wonderful on my skin, and I realized I had been way overheated.
    Still, though, I felt slightly haggled as I ran. It was like there were small weights tied to each of my limbs, and however hard I tried, I moved slower than seemed reasonable. Nevertheless, I was moving at a pretty good pace, and I was at the lab in no time.
    The lights were bright downstairs, so I tried to sign in quick. Already I felt that the rain was being dried off my skin, and soon I would begin to burn.
    "Bert, my man!" I said with a lot more swag than necessary, as I scrawled a messy LIAM, down in all caps on the sign-in sheet. Bert the counter man raised an eyebrow at me, then grunted something back. I only caught "Kid". Which was sad because my name was written down right in front of him.
    "Yeah, keep up the good work...." I said encouragingly, watching as he pulled his magazine back open and poured over pictures of large shiny cars. I took the stairs two steps at a time, and landed lightly on the floor.
    The upstairs was lit very dimly, luckily, so I could concentrate. Only a couple of tall lamps were on, placed randomly around the room, and some christmas lights wound around a treadmill. Dozens of computer monitors flickered feebly, casting an unearthly blue glow on their surroundings.
    It took me only seconds to pick the Doc out of the usual jumble of zombies and workout equipment and zombies on workout equipment. This was mostly because he was painting a giant zombie on the ceiling.
    I silently padded over. The other scientists, or whatever you want to call a bunch of zombie-fanatics who understand about as much of biology as a cat can play croquet, didn't even look up. The Doc was balancing on an exercise ball to reach the ceiling, which seemed to me like not a good idea, which naturally explained why he was doing it in the first place.
    "Doc," I began behind him.
    "Holy zombie-" He yelped, his eyes wide in surprise. He tried to spin around to see me, and then seemed to remember he was teetering on an exercise ball about mid-turn. His arms flailed through the air, and for a moment I thought he was going to regain his balance, but then-
    "Oof!" He fell gracefully, like a ballerina, onto a nearby Zombiegram. The map-like sheet depicting the zombies' habits and growth over the past few years flew up into the air, coming back down to land on his head.
    "Nice hat," I said shortly. I took the graph and pulled it off the unhappy doctor (Actually, I don't even know that he was a real doctor). His hair snapped with static electricity and stuck up straight, even crazier than usual. "But I don't think it's your style."
    "Hello, Liam." The Doc said flatly. "What brings you here on this fine-" He glanced out the window, at the pouring rain and the dark grey sky. "-terrible day?"
    "News." I replied.
    "I could use some good news right now," He grunted, and I helped him to his feet.
    "Well, I don't know that it's good."
    "What is it, then?"
    "I don't know." I said, holding the only slightly damp letter before him.
    He eyed it suspiciously, but then his curiosity got the best of him, and he snatched it from my hands.
    "It's from Dad. With love." I added, watching as he tore open the damp envelope.
    "This'd better be import-" He stopped suddenly. His eyes flew back and forth at a million miles an hour behind his glasses, as he soaked up the letter. His expression grew steadily more and more anguished, until he threw the letter hopelessly on the ground.
    "I knew this would happen... I warned them.... They never listened...." He muttered darkly, more to himself than me.
    "Warned them about what?"
    He stopped and stared at me, as if he had just remembered I was there. "The end of the world..." He said dramatically.    
    "Dude," I shook my head. "The world ended, like, ten years ago. A la zombie apocalypse."
    "No, no, that was just the beginning."
    And without further ado he shuffled off, rifling through reams of papers and old magazines and graphs, and I was left to wonder what in the world he meant.
    The letter was still on the floor, and since there was no one to stop me, I picked it up, skimming it over because reading the whole thing would have been a waste of time. And I didn't have much time to waste.
    I squinted at the messy scrawl. My Dad's handwriting was worse than mine. Which was really sad because he was around back in the days when they still used manual scripting. We only worked on it for a few weeks a year back in school. As long as we knew how to type, old-fashioned scribbling didn't matter.
    A couple of words popped out at me, and I got the gist of the letter pretty easily. And then I saw what the Doc had been babbling about.
    Suddenly all the lights in the lab came on bright and flourescent. I cringed, and threw myself down under a desk. The Doc turned away from the light switch and shrugged at me.
    "Um, sorry...? Didn't know you had an aversion to light. But we can't take any chances, you know?" He held up his hands like it was out of his hands- Okay, pun not intended- And started up a conversation with another scientist.
    My chest started hurting suddenly, driving every other thought from my mind. I winced, the internal pain inside me overwhelming. What the heck? I gasped, then, and began inhaling rapidly. I hadn't been breathing.
    Cowering the darkness, I got a sinking sensation when I brought myself back to the present. The letter. I couldn't comprehend it.... The massiveness of the issue, it was just so... huge.
    Of course, I wouldn't be there to see the second apocalypse. The worst one, the real one. Liam Trackerson wouldn't be there, anyways. I wondered if I would even be conscious as a zombie...?
    But I still had a hard time believing it. Zombies adapting? It was something from a modern horror novel... It could never happen... At least that was what we thought.
    The human race had barely survived the first zombie apocalypse. We were hanging by a thread that is, one just waiting to be cut. And here were the scissors, in a manner of speaking. If we allowed this to happen, it would be the last straw. That last tiny thing that would finally push us over the edge.
    We had began to rebuild our civilization based on the daylight. Light was our salvation, our only form of hope, our protection. Now take that away... And watch us crumble.
    I remembered something they had gone over briefly with us in summer school, because the teachers obviously thought it wasn't an important subject. Evolution, adaption. They had a bunch of big fancy names for it, and the only one I remembered was: Survival of the fittest.
    The virus, for example. We made it incurable. When it began popping up everywhere, we tried curing it, and it worked. For a while. But the teachers explained that when the antidote entered the body, the doctors had never used quite enough, not on everyone. And the little germ cells that did survive? They built up an immunity to that antidote, and made little germ cell babies, and BAM. 95% of the human population became flesh eating monsters like that.
    So now I tried to put this scenario into the larger scale, as in the end of the world kind of scale. We'd been using the daylight as a weapon against the zombies... They thrived during the night, we survived and rebuilt, replenished and prepared ourselves in the light. Ten years of that. And now, apparently, according to my father's sighting, the zombies were beginning to adapt to the light, to venture out in the day.
    Who knew how long it would take before they got up the nerve to attack us in broad daylight? Surely I would have joined them by then...
    I shivered at that thought, and flinched again in the bright light of the lab. Well, they certainly had long enough to prepare themselves, because I wasn't feeling any more comfortable in the light. In fact, it was just getting worse. But when the inevitable did happen, how long could we hold up against the zombies, who would never need to sleep, nor eat, nor drink... An unstoppable wave, constantly breaking against our walls.
    I slunk out from under the desk, then I realized I was still in a half crouch, which wasn't the most human position. Quickly, I padded out of the lab and down the stairs, moving without a sound, which would have been cool, except that it was a side effect of being half zombie.
    The downstairs was crowded with technicians for the pool, making sure there were no leaks in our pipes, and that every once of water possible was caught in the rare rainstorm. The pool had been nearly empty, so it had a long way to fill, and they were very busy. I slipped past them easily, and out the door.
    The rain was cool and soothing on my skin after the bright electric lights. The world was whirling in premature night, the dark clouds above and the general drab gray the muddy, burned out streets and buildings making it seem as if the rain had washed all color from the world.
    I jogged home, going slowly, keeping to the shadows, even though it was hardly bright out. I felt uncomfortable, like the sun could peek out from the clouds at any minute and then the burning would hit. I was scared of the sun, I realized. Scared of the pain it brought.
    Now, tell me if I'm wrong. Fearing the sun?
    That's not human.