He Was Almost Absorbed By The System - Part Two

Chapter One Hundred And Seventy Nine - Small Miracles

Kyan was in the middle of examining several samples beneath a microscope when he heard a familiar crash in the parlour. He'd assembled the scope with parts from sets of goggles he'd obtained from raiding a couple of nearby houses and a zombie specimen. Not that he was actively hunting them himself. He'd left that up to Sidney and Mabel Murphy the husband and wife couple he'd rescued on the day of the outbreak. It turned out Sidney was fairly squeamish, so it had been up to his wife to carry the corpse's head back after they had blugeoned it with poker and an axe.

With a sigh, he pushed away from his desk and was about to remove his protective gloves, before he heard; "It's alright! It just brought back another pigeon!"

"Dammit, pigeon for dinner again?" Sidney moaned as he placed down the book he had been reading down upon the table. Soft giggles followed his exclamation.

Kyan shook his head and decided to clear up any how. He'd been working on this for a while now and didn't really have any new answers. Creating a cure for the zombie epidemic was almost like attempting to cure the common cold, he wasn't having much luck with it. After he destroyed the samples and ensured he was clean, with assistance from Yin, there was a knock upon the door of his study.

"Master Lucian," Mr Forbes called out, still acting the role of the butler, even though Kyan had insisted he should stop. It was not as if Kyan could pay the man for his services now that money had ceased being useful. "I've brought you a fresh pot of tea."

"Come in, it is safe," Kyan responded. He could dwell on the coincidence of timing, but knew better. This sort of thing had been occurring a lot lately, as if an ancient part of his soul had awoken from its long slumber and he had resumed his role as the Living God.

He wasn't sure when the first time had occurred, it could have been that moment he had paused in the foyer of his home at the beginning of the outbreak. He had been thinking on how to fix various bugs in the kite and hadn't been particularly aware of where he was wandering to when he had stopped there. He maybe had stood there for a whole minute before he had heard the commotion outside the property and had opened the door to realise that the zombie tide had reached his street and there were two living people fleeing them. Letting them in was fate.

Sending them to a specific house some five doors down two weeks ago had also been fate. The couple had taken his lone gun, a poker, kitchen knives and the like and learned to fight zombies, otherwise, while they were trapped in the townhouse, they were no better than sitting ducks ready for slaughter. Who knew if the undead would ever one day be able to penetrate their safe haven and kill them?

That day, they had returned from the house that Kyan had asked them to look at, with a small amount of pitiful looking vegetables, that could barely be considered edible and two young children. The children's parents had been sick, just like Mr Forbes had been, but they had become strange, leaving their sick bed and attacking the maid! Their own maid had gathered the poor children and locked them in the basement of the house for their own safety. What had happened to the maid after that... the children had been left an urn of milk, left in the cooler temperature of the basement, bottles of wine and given a couple of rolls of bread each. The maid had said she would come back for them, but she never returned. Left even a day longer, the children would have died of thirst.

In the fight against the zombies hovering around the basement entrance, however, Sidney was caught and wounded by a scratch. By the time they had returned to the townhouse, he was showing similar symptoms to the sickness. Kyan had locked him in a room after testing his saliva and forced him to drink the medicinal soup. The poor man had poured three bowlfuls of the insidious stuff down his throat over the following twenty four hours. Kyan felt that it was too close a call, however, as at one point, his nails had blackened within their beds and his eyes had begun to yellow. At that point, Kyan was still uncertain to what was causing the mutations, but as the corpse dust had clearly been prominent in the man's saliva, Kyan simply used the potion that had cleared helped his now very healthy butler.