Grey Matters

Chapter 7

The corridors reek of antiseptic with just a hint of ZV that seems to hang in the fumes. I’m pretty sure the staff here is used to the smell by now and won’t even register my personal eau de zombie. Dr. Hickman chats with me non-stop all the way to the elevator at the end of the hall. He’s an information junkie, the kind of guy you can’t ever trust with a secret because the potential ego boost of divulging it is too sexy to resist. I’m just what he needs to follow him around all day—a student minion to gaze in awe at the peacock spread of his superior knowledge. 

“This surgery was scheduled for tomorrow morning, but Dr. Christensen wants to get inside the specimen’s head and organs before deprivation from other sources of nourishment forces the virus to accelerate its consumption of the host organs.”  The way he talks about Bridger like he’s not the boy I went to junior prom with, like he doesn’t have a mom, like he’s not alive or human, I’m seriously tempted to rip this doctor’s stomach out and eat it in front of him.

“Don’t you have to talk to him first?”

The guy looks at me like I’m a half-wit. “Why?” 

“I don’t know. Find out his history? Who he is? I mean…he can talk. Couldn’t he tell you something about how he got the virus? I don’t know…I’m not really a doctor…but it seems to me you could probably get some pretty valuable information from him.”

Dr. Hickman laughs. “All that convoluted research on the origins of the disease. Yeah, we already wasted a whole day on that. Dr. Christensen’s research assistant, that Indian kid, Vladami, Vilamani…don’t know why they can’t have normal names. If they’re going to live in America, they ought to have names Americans can pronounce.”

“Nicolas Vadlamani. I read about him in the newspaper.”

“Yeah, well he does all that dry, interviewing, observation shit. Dr. Christensen and I handle the juicy stuff. We like to get to the meat of it.”  He laughs at his own gross wit. The muscles tense in my jaw. I’m trying desperately to swallow the urge to bite his head off—the literal way. We’ve reached the elevator and he pushes the up button.

I play into his game, keep up the charade. “Thanks so much for getting me in. You don’t know what this means to me.”

He nods condescendingly, but I can tell by the way he straightens his shoulders he’s really pleased that I’m such a suck up. “It means your Psych professor is going to be taking lessons from you. Hook your bike to my bumper, Evelyn. You’ll graduate a high value commodity.”  The door pings and opens.

“Thanks!”  I’m worried that the irony in my voice might be too obvious, but I keep going: “Dr. Hickman, I know I’m just a student, so I don’t know all the process yet, but don’t we stand a better chance of curing the virus if we find out where it came from? How it’s transmitted?”  We step into the elevator. I’m a little worried about him catching a whiff of me in an enclosed space. We both spot the drops of fairly fresh, purple-black blood on the floor. He rolls his eyes disgusted and I thank the zombie gods for the cover. The blood stinks more than the cleaning products.

“A cure. Is that what they’re telling you? You think those army stiffs are hanging about out there and the pentagon is sniffing around with a pen in its hand because we’re looking for a cure?”  He snorts. The door closes. We’re alone in the elevator. “Let me tell you something, little girl. There’s a new breed, a strain that enhances the host, makes it a better predator, but doesn’t destroy it. That’s what we’re after. They saw one last night when they picked up this talker. We think they may be a virus pair, but the male manifests a significantly higher rate of deterioration than the female. That’s why we want a good look at the virus inside this kid. We get that strain, and the military will be camped outside our door with money in their hands.”