The Suicide King [A Zombie Novel]

Ch. 1 : Don't Make A Sound

He took a step and then another, making sure nothing below his feet would make a noise. With a whispered, fluid motion, Rob pulled the knife from its sheath. Quiet was the key, so he wrapped himself in a shroud of silence as he approached the shambling thing in the other room : a thing that had been a man once, just like him. In a subconscious motion born from a thousand repetitions, he checked his surgical mask, making sure his mouth and nose were covered as he continued to close in on his target. As he drew near, he could see the man's eyes had turned white, could see the faint trails of mycelium just below the skin, puffing it up as it burrowed into him, stealing the nutrients they needed to survive.

The things. That's the way Rob thought of them. He couldn't think of them as people, it was too painful and tore at his mind if he did. The thing continued to amble about, searching, listening for any noise that would give away its prey. The hard, wheezing blasts of its breath echoed against the cold marble walls and floors of the building's lobby, giving a surreal soundtrack to Rob's approach. This one was in its final stages, the parasite collapsing the wet dark space of the host's lungs. As he took the final steps behind the thing, his free hand shot out grabbing the thing under the jaw, keeping it closed as his knife slid in through the base of the skull, severing the spinal cord with a brutal thrust. Instantly, it went limp and he lowered it to the ground, using his hand still below the jaw and the knife still in its skull to bear the deadweight. The strange wheezing continued, it would for awhile before the monster growing inside would let him die.

Rob wiped the blade clean on a rag and discarded it on the floor. He then checked his skin and mask again. No open cuts and nothing out of place; he was relieved. He looked past the brass revolving door to the outside and the road he must travel, he was not pleased by what he saw. He quietly sighed at the futility of it all.

When the end came, it wasn't a nuclear exchange. It wasn't a super volcano, a meteor or even a virus or climate change. It was a genetically engineered fungus. Even the idea sounded silly to him, but that was before he found out about Cordyceps Unilateralis and the government's work to weaponize it. It was a fungus that in nature invaded ants and other insects. It inhabited their bodies, and as it grew and devoured them, it manipulated their actions and their brain. The infected ants were driven to find a leaf ten inches above the ground. The leaf was always north-facing and the humidity was within one point of ninety-five percent. That was how precisely it could control the insect. The ant was then instructed to fasten itself to a leaf and allowed to die as the fungus grew a spike from its brain. The spike, in turn, produced spores that rained down and infected the other insects below. It was a wonderfully gruesome and effective routine.

Someone in a high office or a sterile white lab, saw the potential for a brain manipulating fungus and tinkered where they should not. In the end they created something that wasn't what they wanted and almost beyond their control. Instead of destroying it, they shelved it, kept it alive, waiting for the day they could figure a way to use it or refine it to fit their needs. Then something happened; it got out. No one knew how or why, and in the end, did it matter if it was an accident, a spy, a fire or anything else? It escaped and a fungus that was designed to infect humans very easily slipped from the closed and controlled environment it was imprisoned into a habitat ripe with food and prey.

Rob never understood why the alarm wasn't raised until it was almost too late. Strange reports started to circulate of people becoming sick with a white fungus that grew throughout their bodies. It blinded them as it invaded their eyes; it bubbled their skin as it grew beneath it and it made the human hungry and aggressive as the spores sought to be passed on to more and more people. It even kept the host alive for as long as possible to ensure the maximum amount of offspring.

Nature is by fact hyper-aggressive, as each species seeks to spread its offspring. When that trait is tampered with and specifically manipulated to increase those instincts, a disaster is born. Images of people strapping themselves to trees or skyscrapers when the fungus had finished with them wasn't the most troubling part. To Rob, that was when they started to attack other humans, rending the skin and giving the spores a chance to take hold or to feed themselves, providing the parasitical fungus with more energy.

When not in direct action, the parasite put the host into an almost suspended animation, lowering the heartbeat, breathing rate and core temperature to well below the norm for an uninfected person. They sat on the ground, their knees pulled up to their chests and arms wrapped around them, foreheads resting on their legs, listening. They reminded him of nothing more than pods of death, waiting to bloom. They were all blind, but the least noise would draw them like a moth to a flame. Natural noise like birds or thunder didn't seem to bother them but a hard click, scrape, or any metallic sound drew them in droves.

All of that hard-earned knowledge did little to comfort Rob. He wanted to leave the building; he was traveling, searching for anything or any place that could offer him some safety. He must leave his hometown. Killing people that were once friends and family tore at his psyche along with the never ending need for silence. There were times when he caught himself about to scream, or sing or pound pots and pans together just to hear some familiar noise and end his isolation. But he held his breath; the song died on his lips, and pans were put down without a single click and he went on.

He looked out past the revolving door to the rows of 'pods' that lined the sidewalk. He contemplated the silent macabre dance he would have to perform just to navigate the street and start his endless journey to a safe place he doubted existed. But he had no choice. If he was going to lie down and die, he would have done it long ago. So Rob adjusted his back-pack, tightened his grip on the knife's hilt, gathering his audacity. He took a step and then another, making sure nothing below his feet would make a noise and walked out into a profound and weary silence.