Lazarus Read online

And then it happened.

  Lucas poked his head around the door frame and watched as the man with the effeminate voice charged the boy into the wall by the cubicle. For a second he seemed dazed, the force of the throw knocking some sense out of him. But it was all that Lucas needed. As one, the remaining four brutes turned and focussed their attention on the boy, clearly forgetting the reason they had been drawn into the bathroom initially (or perhaps assuming that the boy was the source of all of the noise they had heard). The blond man writhed in pain on the floor, clutching his neck, fruitlessly trying to stem the blood flow from the arteries like a plumber attempting to stop a water leak with a cotton bud. “Now,” Lucas hissed, pushing the door enough to squeeze through, and pulled Maddie behind him. The blond man looked to Lucas for help, his mouth wanting to communicate words, but then his body shook violently as he began to fit.

  Lucas was halfway to the door leading into the store when he stopped and turned to watch the blond man on the floor. “Come on,” Maddie barked, but Lucas escaped her grasp and could’t help but watch. Something was happening. A change was taking place. And Lucas needed to see it for himself.

  The man convulsed on the floor. The sounds of his cronies gaining the upper hand against the boy just out of sight. His eyes rolled back in his head and his veins throbbed against the skin, almost varicose in their opinion. His face turned from a look of pain to a neutral stasis and he looked to have passed out.

  “Lucas, please.”

  “Wait.”

  A couple long seconds later, the blond man’s hand twitched. The eyes rolled back into place, but where the pupils and irises had been separate colours before, they were now nothing more than dilated black circles in the whites. Lucas recognised the hungry look of the feral, although there was one key thing missing.

  Maddie gasped. “Is that…?”

  Lucas nodded, mouth agape.

  “But where are the…”

  “I don’t know. But let’s not stick around any longer.”

  Lucas and Maddie didn’t stay long enough to see the blond man stand up, a vision of the reanimated dead. They didn’t see as the four struggling to take down the feral boy turned to see their companion behind them, growling and licking his lips. They were already opening the car doors when the pretty boy shouted in fear, surrendering to his fate as he was attacked from both sides.

  Donny sprang to life. Maddie slammed the door loudly behind her, eyes frantically hunting the gas station to check whether they’d been followed. Music filled the car as Donny Osmond belted out the chorus to one of his 90’s number ones and Lucas jabbed at the volume to turn it down.

  As the wheels span against the tarmac and the car pulled away, Lucas could just make out the shape of the effeminate man in his rearview mirror. He must’ve run for the door when he heard the car engine. There was a fleeting moment in which Lucas thought of spinning around and picking him up, until the feral boy pulled at his legs, causing him to fall flat on the floor, dragging him back inside the station.

  Lucas and Maddie drove on in stunned silence, the bags of goods left behind on the gas station floor.

  *

  Lucas turned Donny into an empty lay-by. He stared straight ahead, not even taking in the view of the land and the small village to his right that sloped down the gradient of the hill. The scene was green for miles around, the village looking almost like a child’s plaything thrown down by the gods and abandoned.

  Without a word, Lucas opened the car door, doubled over and heaved. Nothing came up. His empty stomach trying its hardest to expel contents but finding nothing. After a couple minutes, he wiped his mouth, stood up straight with hands on hips, and stared out ahead. The air was the freshest he’d tasted in a while. All remnants of the mist filtered by the respiratory process of the grass and trees.

  “You don’t get views like this round my way.” Maddie’s voice came over Lucas’ shoulder. She took another step and stood next to him. He hadn’t even heard her car door open or close. “It’s beautiful.”

  “What the hell happened back there, Maddie? What did we see?”

  “I’m not sure. But I sure wouldn’t queue up for another viewing.” Maddie smiled weakly. Humour. It was her defence mechanism. But even Maddie couldn’t fool Lucas right now.

  “We saw a man come back from the dead… or become dead… or.” Lucas threw his hands in the air in frustration. “What the hell have they done with the formula? RevitaGo was only a tool to navigate the Deadspace… to help us understand what is on the other side of death. Now we’ve got people coming back from the dead? It’s… it’s…”

  “Impossible,” Maddie finished.

  “Except it’s not! You saw it as well as I did. That guy was near enough dead. A couple chomps from a fucking vampire kid, and he convulses back to life.” Lucas shut his eyes and saw the change. The moment the eyes rolled back in his head, the vacant stare as he resurrected and turned on his pals.

  “Luke,” Maddie said, wrapping an arm around Lucas’ waist.

  Lucas pulled away, “I don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense. What the hell was anyone thinking when they released this stuff on the world? These clearly aren’t scientists behind it all. Scientists do their research before turning a large percentage of the east coast feral.” He threw himself on the ground, folding his legs and placing his hands behind to prop his body up.

  Maddie joined him on the floor. “You know that’s not true. There are awful people out there. Anthrax. Small pox. Some people just want to watch the world rot. Some people need to push the boundaries and see what happens. That’s how science progresses. You know that better than anyone. Who was it that first approached a naive blonde lab technician and coaxed her into joining a secret experimental group?”

  Lucas looked at the floor. “I never intended to hurt anyone.”

  “Right. And the guy who invented webcams never intended to create a tool to help pedophiliac hackers watch kids. Everything can be turned to bad uses by the right people.” Maddie looked out to the village and spotted a car rolling along the thin road in the distance. “But the world will go on. You’re not to blame for this. We will find out what is going on. We will get to the bottom of this.”

  They sat side by side for a short while until the wind picked up and prickled their skin with bumps. Maddie was the first to rise, helping Lucas up by the crook of his arm, and it was as they were getting back in the car that Lucas spotted something just out of view in the dip in the verge where tarmac met grass.

  A man and a woman. Bullet wounds masking their faces. On the floor beside them were two backpacks. A quick unzip of bag one revealed a host of bottled drinks, tins, and silver-foiled snack bars. In the other bag were a wallet, various chargers, and a laptop.

  “See,” Maddie said as Lucas handed her the first bag. “Silver linings and all that.”

  30

  Anita walked briskly through the doors of her practice. Past the oak reception desk with its brass bell stained with the greasy fingerprints of last week’s patients. Next to that was a single laminated piece of white card taped to the desk with this month’s Wi-Fi password. And sat behind the desk with all the enthusiasm of a dried-out cactus plant, Helen was busy completing a Sudoku on her phone.

  She looked up at the sound of Anita’s footprints and stuttered her words. Anita ignored them and swept on through the gold-lined door that lead into the surgery. She could hear people already. Nervous chatter working up from the door at the end of the corridor that led down and into the basement. She passed the frosted glass of her office, the place she spent the majority of her days now complaining at the speed of her piece-of-shit iMac and the printer that liked to throw bitch-fits when commanded to do its job. She walked on by the trays of instruments next to her plush chair to help diagnose the sick and the dying.

  Her heart fluttered at the prospect of where she was heading. How long had it been, really, since she’d rallied the troops? How long had it been since she really had reason
to enter the downstairs facility and get involved with her people in her real work. The work that mattered. Sure, the surgery was great, but that wasn’t where Anita’s heart lay.

  When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she spotted Stanley at the end of a cold, blank corridor waiting for her. He smiled, opened the door, closed it behind as he followed Anita into the room.

  The warmth of the large room was welcoming. There was a large oval table with space for ten chairs. She breezed her way into the room, a folder tight against her chest, aware of the three sets of eyes following her with keen interest. Their chatter died. Along the length of one wall were monitors with black and white footage fed straight from High Point’s security cameras, next to that an old CB Radio, dotted in the corners were tall plants that must once have been green and lush, yet now were brown and wilted. The last things on Anita’s mind after the Revivers had disbanded and moved on.

  Anita sat down and flashed a brief smile. “Thank you, everyone, for coming on such short notice.”

  “What, no hello?” a latin man said from across the table.

  “Hello, Miguel,” Anita said dryly. “And hello, Sammi. Again, thanks for coming. Does everyone know why I’ve asked you to come in today? Or do I need to give people the rundown on what’s happening in the world?”

  “Might it have something to do with a certain event that happened in a certain town a certain distance away from here?” Miguel snarked, his mouth chomping open and closed on a piece of gum. There was something about him that grated on Anita. A feeling like sand particles caught in your ass crack. No matter what the subject, or what time of day, Miguel seemed to act as though nothing in the world was a serious issue. It was all a joking point. A chance to create humour.

  “Can we not speak in riddles, please. Yes, you’re right. An event.”

  Anita turned and pointed a remote at the panel of screens. One by one the fuzzy black and white images of the various locations dotted across High Point changed to shaky amateur footage of people that had caught the yellow mist on camera. On one screen they could see someone sat in a chair in their garden, presumably their father grilling some food on the barbeque, the mist creeping up in the distance like a looming wall of yellow. On another was the inside of a house, objects and items barely visible through the fog as a pair of hands fought with the window latches, the camera shaking as the operator exploded into a series of coughing fits. On another, the side of someone’s face as black lines began to creep along the skin like worms crawling and burrowing beneath the flesh.

  Stanley, Sammi, and even Miguel looked up at the screens open-mouthed. The room silent for a moment as their eyes darted from screen to screen.

  “Jesus Christ,” Miguel said, drawing a cross against his chest.

  Anita stayed quiet. When one video would finish its loop, it would start over and play again. She waited a few minutes for everyone in the room to pay equal attention to every video, then sat herself down.

  Sammi turned her head away from the screens, looked to the door, then back at Anita while the others continued watching the screens. Anita already knew the question that Sammi was going to ask, her eyes saying everything that her mouth wanted to. The fact was that, though this was the first time Anita had called a Revivers meeting in several years, at least half of the original crew were missing. Out of the first generation, they had scored two out of six.

  And one of those was never going to be able to make it.

  Anita tried to think of a delicate way to not draw too much attention to the missing three, but it was Miguel that, as usual, asked it outright. “This looks pretty serious, Ani. So where’s the rest of the party? I know it’s not just us that should be here, or at least if that picture on your wall is anything to go by at least.” He pointed to a faded A4 printout of the same image Lucas sported inside his wallet.

  Sammi sat up.

  “So far no news on Maddie, Fred, and Lucas. I’ve tried calling, left some messages on Freddy’s cell, but nothing.”

  “And we can assume Maddie and Fred are like this,” Sammi said, crossing her fingers.

  “Right. As for Lucas, last I heard he’d gone off on his travels. I tried the number I had for him but the line is dead. Probably been long dead, if you ask me. It’s a shame though. We could really use him right now.”

  “What about the other guy,” Miguel managed before receiving an elbow to his rib from Stanley. “Hey! What’s that for?”

  Stanley shook his head into his hand.

  Anita stumbled for a moment, thinking of a delicate way to put it. Sammi jumped in front of her with, “He’s out of the picture.”

  Anita did her best to turn focus back to the task at hand. She had forgotten how it could sometimes be, controlling a room full of people she considered to be loose cannons. In the years before she had been the person with her hand on the dial, the voice of reason. As much as the others wanted to play with the boundaries between life and death, Anita had also kept herself on the safe side of the line. Lucas and Ira were a pair worse than kids. Minds racing with ideas that seemed beyond reality, but with a science so specific behind them, and an enthusiasm unmatched, that it made all the Revivers giddy.

  And now, she thought as she described as much as she knew from news reports and what her contacts further afield had informed her, here we are for Round 2. The children of the children.

  “So it’s definitely RevitaGo?” Sammi asked.

  “I’ve run some minor diagnostics. A quick scan in the lab and… it would appear so. Only there were some slight variations. The base formula seems in line with RevitaGo, but it’s certainly a different strain. Almost as though it’s been tampered with.”

  “What does that mean?” Stan said.

  Anita looked at Stan, then Miguel. She thought hard about the best way to communicate her point. Stan and Miguel weren’t scientists like the original Revivers. In fact, they each had yet to even experience the Deadspace. When Anita had moved to High Point after the Revivers disbanded, she had tried her best to put the whole scenario behind her. It had been tough to forget it all, watching people die, then resurrect with nothing more than an ink splatter on their chest left something of a blip on your unconscious. But as the years went by she thought harder and harder about it all. Like Lucas, Anita was not one to forget so easily, and before she knew it she had taken the samples left in her lock box behind her wardrobe and converted the basement space beneath the medical practice. A few months later she had found herself drunk one Saturday evening and bumped into Stanley by the front gates. She had spilled her heart to Stanley in the sentry booth, who later took her back home, past the practice. Anita had persuaded Stan to join her in the basement and had shown him around the lab. The next morning she could hardly deny the things she had divulged but found herself blessed that Stan was keen to discover more, and would hold his secret for as long as they both lived.

  “So where’s your tattoo?” Stan had asked one evening over a glass of wine.

  Anita looked at her chest, a tiny patch of dark skin showing through a gap between her shirt buttons. The slightest glimpse of the intricate pattern of a lace bra. “Truth?”

  “Truth.”

  “I never went into the Deadspace. I just couldn’t handle it, I suppose.”

  Anita had considered that period her relapse. She tried to explain the science behind it all to Stan, but found only a blank expression in return.

  The same as the one that was on his and Miguel’s face now.

  “Imagine you’re building a house, and you make a house out of brick. You use cement, plasterboard, whatever it is that makes a house a house. And, when it’s done, you stand back and know that you’ve made a house. Somewhere safe where you’re happy for people to live inside, because you’ve used all the right materials, and you know how long the house should stand with the right maintenance.”

  “Okay…” Miguel said.

  “Can it be made of Lego?” Stan added.

  Anita loo
ked at Sammi who struggled to hide a grin. “No. Now, imagine that you’ve built the house, but every tenth brick isn’t made of brick but made of a pressurised can. Immediately we know that house isn’t fit for purpose. That at any moment one of those cans could pop and affect the bricks around it.”

  “So, kind of like Minesweeper.”

  “Whatever helps,” Anita replied.

  Sammi took over then, explaining how the formula had originally been stable. They had worked out all the kinks and had a functioning product. “Not a marketable product, however.” The problem now was that the people on the screens – some people that, Sammi informed the group, she’d seen turn in real life – were clearly experiencing a different side to the formula.

  “What’s happening to them?” Stan asked. “Are we at risk at all? That guy at the gate can’t have come far, could he?”

  “I think it’s safe to say that we’re okay. High Point barely saw enough of the stuff to affect anyone. Most of it was diluted by the rain and disappeared before it could come this far west. However, that’s not to say that that’s a definite. We don’t really know much about the formula in this sort of weaponised form.”

  Miguel shook his head, eyes returning to the television screens. “Those poor people.” A panic flashed across his face. “You don’t think… my sister, little Verónica. She’s been sick for a couple days now. Won’t get out of bed. Coughing and sweating. Could it be…”

  “I highly doubt it. By the looks of the footage, it seems to be a pretty rapid change. Working through the respiratory system in a couple minutes. If Verónica is at all infected, you’d have known by now.”

  “So who do you think has caused this mess?” Stanley shuffled in his seat, idly playing with a pad of paper in front of him.

  Anita cued Sammi.

  Sammi opened an envelope and extracted a wad of papers. She fanned out several pages with profiles on, as well as legal documents each labelled with the same logo. “We can’t say for sure. As far as we were aware, there were only ever six people to know about the RevitaGo formula. Well… six until…” she glanced at Anita who held her gaze.