Waking The Zed (6 page)

“
This Hercules sounds like an interesting character. Well, to assuage my jealousy over Hercules, if everything goes well today, would you consider taking a vacation day off tomorrow?” Enrico asked.

“I’ll consider it. We have a lot to get past today, you know.
I might have to wait until next week until I can afford to take off.”

Enrico doubted that Dr. Klein would ever actually take a working day off unless she was so sick or injured she could not rise from her bed.
She really is not so young any longer, and she seems the type who might work herself into an early grave.
Of course, that might be convenient for him as well. Once he had married her, perhaps his South American connections could even assist him with that too. He believed they had access to poisons that could effectively mimic disease and eventually cause an early demise.

Poor Dr. Klein, a world famous scientist, might be found at the office in the morning.
Enrico imagined headlines in the newspaper and all over the Internet. She would have stayed to work late and suffered an apparent heart attack from stress and overwork.

He wondered how long he would have to maintain their marriage so nobody would be suspicious that he was anything other than her grieving husband.
Perhaps a slower poison would be safer. It might mimic a disease so that nobody would be surprised when Dr. Klein died tragically.

“I have to go now, my love,” Dr. Klein said.
She frowned thoughtfully at the text message for a moment. “Can you get the clinic prepared and then meet me in Preservation Room 17 in a few minutes? I’ll need some techs ready to transport the clients, of course.” In an instant, Dr. Klein had returned back to her professional tone. She ran a hand through her loose hair, checked her face in the small mirror, added a quick swipe of lipstick, and then turned to leave.

“Anything for you, and for the advancement of human knowledge,” he said seriously. She nodded and left him to
compose himself and straighten up his clothes.

He took
his time in front of the mirror to arrange his hair and make sure his clothes were adjusted. Meanwhile, he whispered to himself, “It’s like romancing the dead.” Working in this place, surrounded by all of the frozen clients, made the phrase seem particularly ironic. Unlike either Dr. Klein or Pam Stone, he was an engineer and not a scientist with medical training. He found the dead bodies, floating in their sparking solutions quite distasteful. He could hardly wait until he could marry Dr. Klein, retire from his position, and spend his time as he chose.

When Pam Stone, the intern, had told him she felt like her job was like babysitting corpses, his agreement had not been entirely insincere.
The young scientist was a fool though, unable to dismiss a bit of present discomfort for future gains. He did not care what happened to the young scientist, but he supposed she would manage to move on to some other grunt job, even if a well-paid one. Meanwhile, he could live out a fantasy, all financed by Dr. Klein’s estate.

He left the office to attend to his tasks. Meanwhile he pictured luxury cruises, yachts, and exotic destinations.
He thought about penthouse apartments and beach villas. There would be fine dining, culture and entertainment, and above all – passion. He pictured young women of a dozen different ethnicities and nationalities, all waiting for his embrace.

“I could father a whole new race,” he practically sang to himself. “
Maybe I will call them the people of Enrico.” He pictured children, all as handsome and charming as he pictured himself. The superior beings, all fair of face and brilliant, would eventually grow in numbers and spread through the world.
I will only be doing the human gene pool a favor.

Perhaps if Pam is still around, I’ll even give her a couple
of my offspring. She’s intelligent enough, if a bit blunt and naïve in a sort of corn-fed way. She has an interesting face. Any children we had together would surely be intelligent and handsome enough to please me. She seems like she could be a sturdy mother for my gifts. Maybe next week, after I have sealed this deal, I’ll go mend some bridges with the intern.

With that though in mind, Enrico emerged from Dr. Klein’s office and went out to meet his destiny.

Dr. Klein rushed back to Preservation Room 17 immediately after Pam called her.  The younger woman noted that the doctor’s hair was now loose and her cheeks looked a bit flushed.
Did she and Enrico actually find some quiet corner of the building to make a little romance?
Pam remembered that Dr. Klein’s office suite contained a plush sofa. She tried to push the image of the two of them together on Dr. Klein’s office sofa out of her mind.

The older scientist fiddled with some controls for a moment. Then she paced back and forth between the two warming capsules. By that time it was obvious that the mouths had opened.
Bubbles streamed out intermittently.

It’s not as regular as breathing, but some exchange of gasses is taking place.
In fact the two bodies seemed to be working their mouths in a way that reminded Pam of fish in an aquarium. Repelled and fascinated, Pamela was sure she had seen Mr. Barnes’s hand flutter and Mrs. Bell’s eyelids twitch again. Somehow the bodies had become reanimated though Pam was not ready to go so far as to declare them alive. She certainly saw no evidence that either of them was aware of their surroundings.

Suddenly revived like a goldfish in a tank, wouldn’t their faces betray some emotion?

Enrico entered the room a few minutes later. He still looked immaculate, and every strand of his dark hair had been combed in place. Pamela imagined that his mouth curved up slightly in a self-satisfied grin. He glanced at her dismissively and then focused on his boss as if her face was the only thing worth viewing in the room.
He barely even glanced at the suddenly animated corpses. What can he be thinking about to miss that elephant in the room.

“
Thanks for coming so quickly, Enrico. We need to move Mr. Barnes and Mrs. Bell to the clinical suite soon,” Dr. Klein said. Her tone conveyed nothing but professional urgency now.

“I am here to serve you
, Doctor Klein.” Then he pulled out his phone and called for assistance. In a moment two laboratory technicians wheeled in a pair of shiny steel carts. She had never seen these workers before, but she noticed that they each had their name embroidered on the breast pocket of their light blue work shirts.

The short, stocky, balding man was named George.
He made up for the lack of hair on his head with a thick mustache. Pam thought it looked like upper lip hair that her old roommate used to call a porn mustache.

The taller blonde
man was named Paul. He was clean shaven and looked about Pam’s own age. She could not be sure, but she thought he tossed her a meaningful glance. Then he seemed to casually flick his eyes from Dr. Klein to Enrico. Pam wondered if he genuinely wanted to chat later or was just here as more bait that Dr. Klein had cast about to set her up.
Would a common worker even understand what this place was about?

As Pam
watched, she saw the carts had been cleverly constructed to hold the cylinder shaped capsules. Under Enrico’s direction, George and Paul removed the capsules from their bases and set them securely on the carts.

Dr. Klein
had Enrico and Pamela picked up the tanks of serum to secure them on a lower shelf of the carts so they could be wheeled along too. The whole setup had been efficiently designed and Pam decided that Enrico must be a competent engineer despite his other faults.

After they finished
getting the carts set up, Dr. Klein looked at Pamela sourly and said, “You can stay here and perform your regular duties.”

Pam
was surprised to note that she actually felt a little disappointed. She did not believe that Dr. Klein could wake the dead, but she did want to know what the scientist actually had accomplished. As much as Pam despised Dr. Klein, she did respect her reputation. Her past work on the virus blocking protein had helped save millions of people from disease and even death.

But a
s she watched Enrico and Dr. Klein follow the two lab techs out of the room, Pamela felt a chill that did not just come from the low temperature in the room. “Bodies should stay buried,” Pam thought to herself.
But would I feel the same if these people used to be somebody I cared about?
She shook her head, undecided, and attended to her reports.

It took her two hours to complete her work
In Preservation Room 17. She might have completed her logs and reports faster, but she found it hard to focus after what she had seen earlier. She kept closing her eyes and picturing the way that Mrs. Bell’s pale fingers had moved.

After she finally completed her last report, Pam
logged onto the touchscreen monitor to check her schedule. She was supposed to move on and check readings in Preservation Room 18, and then she could leave for the day. Most of her work in this place turned out to be pretty dull and routine.  A lot of days she could complete her assigned tasks and take off a little early. Pamela did not believe she had learned a lot at Future Faith, except for the fact that such morbid places even existed. But still, the easy job allowed her time to recharge before returning to her demanding schedules.
And the place paid a lot of bills.

She had a lot to think about tonight
. She certainly did not want to return to this place the next day but abruptly quitting a job went against her grain. Besides, she really did need the money. The same argument between her sense of duty and financial responsibility and her revulsion had distracted her all morning. It ran like a tape on an endless loop through her mind.

Torn between fascination and revulsion, Pamela made up her mind to spend the night deciding
if she would return to work in the morning or just abruptly resign and find another job. The thought of calling in and quitting filled her with a sense of relief, but the same curiosity that propelled her through her years of grueling scientific studies tempted her to stay. She could, of course, always wait to see what happened tomorrow before she decided if she would quit or not.

After watching Dr. Klein tamper
with people who were, in Pam’s opinion, long dead, her employer disgusted her even more. Beyond Pam’s natural scientific skepticism some primal instinct made the whole thought of animating these long dead people repellant. She was pretty sure the doctor’s actions would offend the people at the Methodist church she had attended as a child and probably people from most other organized religions as well.

And yet she really wanted to learn about
the outcome of Dr. Klein’s experiment. She did not know if she could get her better sense to prevail over her curiosity though. Everything about this place made her mind race with indecision. In fact, Pam felt as if her mind felt unusually fuzzy for this time of day. She had a passing thought that she might be coming down with a cold or something.

Pam brushed it off.
With her normal tasks completed, she returned the lab coats to the closet and made her way to the door. She decided to pass by the break room for a second cup of the doctor’s excellent coffee.

Suddenly she heard a thump
. It sounded like somebody had struck a fist on the outside wall. After being closed up in this silent room for several hours, the noise made her suck in her breath. Startled, she glanced up to see a frightened face in the small reinforced window. As she watched in amazement, the shorter one of the lab techs stumbled through the door.

What was his name?
Surprised and shaken, Pam’s mind blanked out. Then she saw that the badge on his breast pocket said his name was George M. Before his beefy face, under the thick mustache, had been ruddy, but now his face was a pale and drawn mask of horror. George’s dark eyes were rimmed with red as if he had been crying. Pamela’s expression reflected his when she saw that the poor man was bleeding from a large oval wound on his arm that distinctly looked like a bite. Bright red blood had dyed his long blue shirt sleeve around the tear.

“What happened?” Pam asked as she reached out to guide him by his undamaged arm.

“They woke up,” he croaked.

Pamela was no medical doctor, but her early days on a farm had given her some experience with bit
es. She had seen animals bitten by other animals, and on occasion she had even seen people bitten by animals. She had been taught how to manage wounds before she was tall enough to mount a horse by herself. Pam sprang forward to take the arm of the stumbling man. His skin felt burning hot. She managed to steer him to the desk chair she had just vacated.

His skin looked unnaturally pale. “If you’re in shock we need to get you on the floor with your feet elevated,” she said. She ran back to the closet and pulled
out a blanket, a pillow, and the first aid kit. She returned to lift him out of the chair and managed to get him to lie prone on the floor. He complied with her directions, but his eyes looked distant and unfocused. He did not speak.

There was only one
pillow so she stuffed a spare lab coat under his head and used the pillow to elevate his feet. She covered his chest with the blanket and the two remaining lab coats. Then Pam noticed that the first aid kit actually had a small inflatable pillow. She quickly blew it up and also placed it under his feet on top of the first one. George seemed to be staring off into the distance now.