Claw Your Way Up

In the still of the night, the fire on the other side of the city billowed its smoke into the navy blue skies.

Philbert Bowman’s already knotted eyebrows further tied themselves together. He’d known it was significant when they’d woken him from his sleep with their call. But he saw the blazes on the city outskirts, where he lived in a cramped house with his wife and kids. That cemented the severity of the situation. Phil worried – to tell the truth, he felt petrified – that all his research and hard work had gone up in smoke. If that were the case, he’d lose years. And Phil wouldn’t have a hope of challenging Albion Cunningham for his spot at the top of the company ladder. To do that, he’d need to provide evidence of the ‘truly excellent work’ he’d assured everyone he’d been doing. He couldn’t say that every shred of his work had burned to cinders. It was the adult version of telling the teacher your dog ate your homework. Phil gripped the wheel of his battered sedan, which he’d hoped to replace once he became PARASOL’s top dog. His knuckles turned white. He put the pedal to the metal and eased the old banger past the speed limit.

A siren blared on the deserted main street as red-and-blue lights flashed in the night.

Phil swore and hit the steering wheel with the side of his palm, sending needles of pain shooting up his arm. He’d pushed his luck, thinking nothing else could go wrong, but of course, it had. And now the officer would pull Phil over and fine him, draining his poor bank account. He might even get points on his license – wouldn’t that be the kicker? And, worst of all, it would delay him getting to the lab and surveying the damage. He flipped his indicator on to show that he was pulling over.

The vehicle behind rushed towards him.

Phil cringed. But a moment of inspiration hit him. What if he lied? He could tell the officer that his assistant, Theo Garner, was inside the burning lab. The officer might let him off in the case of an emergency.

The fire engine blurred past, a streak of red in the sleeping city’s gloomy blue hues.

Phil grunted, a look of puzzlement on his face. He shrugged and cancelled his signal. He slammed his foot down like an overzealous drummer hitting the kick drum.

Indeed, Theo Garner was at the scene but had escaped the burning building. He stood on the pavement, a clipboard and pen in hand. He squinted at the page by the firelight and scribbled between glances at the flames.

Phil gasped for breath. It seemed, for a second there, that his spasming heart had leapt into his throat and seized there. He managed to drag down a breath, coughing on the smoke even through his closed windows. What had stolen the air from his lungs had been the sight of what was now his old workplace.

The PARASOL Corporation’s labs had gone trick-or-treating early, this late-September evening. It seemed that the incognito grey building had come to the Halloween party dressed as the gates of Hell. The charred skeleton of the lab’s foundations stood, blackened, inside the conflagration. The outer skin had burned and peeled away to ashes. Various flaming scraps flickered through the air – bits of wood and paper. And the blazes burned with an eerie purple-green glow.

Phil brought his car to a screeching halt, half on the pavement, half off. He leapt out of the vehicle, not bothering to shut the door behind him. ‘THEO!’ he screamed. ‘Theo! What in the blaz— What in the hell happened?’

Theo raised his head at his master’s voice like a good dog. He stopped writing and waved at Phil, smiling behind the thick lenses of his owlish glasses. ‘Good morning, Doctor Bowman! I didn’t expect to see you here so early at –’ he glanced at his watch ‘– quarter to three in the morning.’

Phil clenched his teeth, causing an ache in his jaw muscles. He had no time for his vacant assistant’s ditsiness. He grabbed Theo by the ash-stained lapels of his lab coat. ‘Theo! What. The hell. Happened?’

Still in Phil’s clutches, Theo shrugged and pulled a so-so face. The hellfires blazed in the reflection of his lenses, but in his eyes, only a remote presence was there. He pointed with his ballpoint pen to the flames. ‘Fire,’ he said, surprised that that wasn’t obvious.

Phil let go of Theo a little too roughly. ‘I CAN SEE THAT THERE’S A GODDAMN FIRE, THEO! I—’ He closed his eyes, unclenched his fists, and let out a long breath. He resumed at speaking volume. ‘I mean, how did the fire start?’

Theo lit up. ‘Oh! That! Well, I forgot to check that the large capacity centrifuge was balanced before I started it. It tore itself apart. Things that shouldn’t come into contact with each other came into contact with each other.’

Phil tried to hold onto his temper. A muscle twitched beneath his left eye. ‘And what were you doing?’

Theo clicked his pen, squinted into the fires, and then jotted something down. He seemed to have forgotten Phil was there. After a moment, he remembered. ‘Oh! I was watching,’ he said with a nod.

Phil told himself to let it go. Murder could come later. Hell, once he was PARASOL’s prize-winning pig, he could hire someone to take care of that for him. Assuming, that was, that he still had research somewhere in that building. He gazed into the hypnotic flicker of the blaze. ‘And the backup security system…?’

Theo made a quick note. ‘Failed.’

Phil staggered back, blinking as though Theo had struck him. The security system he’d established to save his work in worst-case scenarios had failed. And, deep down, hadn’t he already known? Those purple-green flames had a hue that was like the liquid in his vials. But now, the contents of said vials were no longer bottled, stored inside gloveboxes. They were now burning, turning to smoke, drifting in a cloud, and— ‘My God,’ he whispered.

Theo clicked his pen. ‘Yep.’

‘The Zom-B Virus—’

‘Is out.’

‘Then the whole city—’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Even we are—’

‘Correct.’

Phil ran a sweaty hand through his thinning hair. A ball of worms had begun to wriggle inside him, squirming and slithering through all his gut’s folds. The graveyard was next door. He’d never cared when residents had protested a pharma conglomerate setting up a lab here. They’d said it was sick of them to build on the same patch of soil in which they buried their dead. But, if PARASOL didn’t set up basecamp here, someone else would. But now, an awful thought was coming to him. ‘The recently deceased…’

Theo made another note. ‘Exactly.’

Only now, with dawning horror, Phil noticed what Theo was doing.

Theo kept glancing at his watch and jotting down the times and observations. At the top of the page, he’d written ‘t0:00’. His latest note was ‘t37:00’. All the times, thus far, had the accompanying note: ‘NO ACTIVITY’.

‘I think,’ said Phil, ‘that we ought to get out of here. I think that, maybe, we sh—’

A long wail punctured the night air as if on cue, from out of the curtain of smoke.

Goosebumps prickled up all over Phil’s body.

Silhouettes appeared through that grey veil. At first, they were shadows, but as they shuffled closer, they grew into something more solid.

Phil’s heart raced faster than his car ever had. His breaths came in short, shallow stabs. Who could have known that creating a virus to resurrect the dead, turning them into mindless cannibals driven by the need to feed, would lead to this? He’d heard nobody got to the top without getting their hands dirty and leaving a few corpses behind. But this was ridiculous. ‘Theo,’ he said, his voice sounding very small, like a boy’s, ‘come on, get in my car. We’re leaving.’

Theo’s note-taking absorbed him. Ever since the first graveyard groan, he’d been scribbling on his sheets like a man possessed. He seemed unaware of the encroaching danger.

‘Theo? THEO!’

But Theo was somewhere else, a dazed, happy expression upon his countenance. His tongue stuck out the corner of his mouth. He glanced up at the dead. The first few emerged from the smoke, coming into focus in all their ghastly glory. His eyebrows rose, and he nodded. He was humming Thomas Dolby’s ‘She Blinded Me With Science’.

Forget it. Phil wasn’t going to stand here and wait for— Well, he’d seen what that one rat did to its cagemates. It hadn’t taken long until they’d all succumbed to the virus, staggering around in search of fresh meat. At least Phil wouldn’t have to murder Theo himself. Although, in a way, he and the kid had murdered this entire city, if you thought about it. Phil didn’t intend to think about it.

The safe interior of his old sedan awaited, illuminated by the interior light.

His trusty companion. Thank God he hadn’t closed the car door when he “parked”. Phil scrambled for his car, tumbling into the seat and slamming the door shut as the first wave of zombies hit.

The car rocked on its wheels as the walking dead surrounded it, pawing at the windows like cats at a piece of string. Beyond the grim grey faces – painted purple-green by the fire’s glow – Theo was still jotting notes. He was still writing when a dead man dressed in his funeral best ripped out his throat. Theo continued to write, even as the undead swept him off his feet and opened his torso like a pack of gummy sweets. He only ceased his note-taking when a woman tore his writing hand clean from his body.

Covered in a cold sweat, Phil shook his head and prayed to whatever gods might exist. Being a good scientist, he sent it to each primary one. Phil did it three times so that it would be statistically significant. Then he started his car – his old friend.

Or at least, he tried to.

His ancient old banger coughed, spluttered, and then died.

Phil, panicking, hands slaked with sweat, tried the ignition key again.

There was a dull click.

His car was dead, and unlike the friendly folks excited to meet him, that chemical cloud couldn’t revive it. Sobbing, Phil sunk into his seat as though he could hide from view down in the footwell.

The undead pounded against the sedan’s windows, leaving gooey, bloody smears.

Phil didn’t know how long the glass would hold. But it didn’t matter. He’d inhaled the smoke; he was a dead man anyway. Or, instead, he was an undead man. But, at least Phil could rest easy knowing the fire hadn’t destroyed his work. His work was alive – ish – and well. Up and about. He’d worried that his project would have vanished and nobody would ever have known what he’d achieved. But he would get to claim credit for this.

Posthumous credit, anyway.