52 Project #16: Norris and the Plague Doctors 3/3

[alara]

With the grate separating the seating compartment from the back of the van, the driver and passenger couldn’t get the longer guns from the back without opening their door and then the van side door to take the gun. Raoul handed Aileen a rifle, and she got back into the van and aimed it at the tree, while Sarah and Raoul got their grabbing poles ready. “Okay, Norris,” Sarah said. “See if you can get him out of the tree.”

Norris strolled up to the tree, mask off, whistling loudly. “Wow, what do you know, here I am, a human kid, just strolling around totally unprotected because I’m sure there are no deaders up here in this nice rich neighborhood! Boy, it would sure be a shame if it turned out I was wrong and a deader showed up!”

There was movement in the tree. Norris kept the tree in his peripheral vision as he walked around it, starting to whistle again.

Despite his attention to the tree, he was still surprised when the deader jumped down from a low branch, implying that the guy had climbed rather than jumping, and took off after him. It wasn’t enough of a moment of surprise to slow him down, though. He raced back toward the van. As the doctors had predicted, the zombie was a zoomer, one of the ones who could move at a run, and they were often faster than humans despite their low metabolism because they didn’t feel pain.

As Norris reached the van, Raoul fired a taser at the zombie. Tasers didn’t hurt them, but they could stun them and knock them down, since their muscles still used electricity. As the zombie stumbled, they swung their poles into position, locking around the zombie’s neck and waist rather than arms like they’d done with Norris’ mom. Norris wanted to know why not, but he figured it was a bad idea to distract them right now.

Aileen came out of the car, with her pole. It had a different attachment on it – they were still pincers, but they were much thicker. She grabbed the zombie just under his left shoulder and pulled the pincers shut. There was a cracking noise, and the zombie’s arm went limp.

She was breaking their limbs, Norris realized, as she did the other arm, and then both legs. The zombie thrashed its body and head, but without working limbs, it had no way to stop them from slamming it down on the table and holding it in place while Aileen strapped it down. They did the same as they’d done to Mom – putting the tube-gag in his mouth, strapping it down, and pouring a sedative in. The zombie did not stop wiggling and struggling. The doctors wrapped his arms with bandages and sprayed them down with the aerosol that hardened it, like they’d done to Mom. Then they pushed the air tube in, pulled out the ice tank,  lifted the metal tray the deader was strapped to, and dropped it in the tank. Finally they closed the lid, sealing the zombie in.

Norris shuddered. That was a lot more violent than what they’d done to his mom. He was fine with shooting zombies, but it seemed kind of awful to him to render someone helpless and then methodically break their limbs, even if they were deaders.

“We’ve got two coming out of the bistro,” Aaron reported. “One looks really fresh. The other one’s... not. Recommend you shoot the one that’s more dead and take the other.”

Raoul nodded. “Aileen, you’ve got the gun.”

“Okay.” Both of the zombies were zoomers, running at high speed toward the van, presumably following the sound of human voices. Aileen lined up the shot. One of the zoomers didn’t even look dead; his white skin was pasty and colorless, but some white people just looked like that. The other one’s fingers were visibly rotting and there were blooms of mold on her body. Aileen blew her head off with the rifle. The other zoomer kept coming.

Norris didn’t have to do anything. Raoul and Sarah swung the poles out as the zoomer approached, hitting him in the legs and the head, hard enough to knock him to the ground. Raoul tased him before he could get up, and then they did the same thing they’d done to the man in the tree. Grab him by the neck and waist, hold him up far enough away that he couldn’t reach them with his arms or legs, and then Aileen moving in with the stronger pincer and crushing his limbs.

“It’s... it seems wrong for you to do that,” he said tentatively, after they’d gotten the deader secured in an ice bath. “You want to cure them but you’re breaking their arms and legs?”

“We don’t want them infecting us," Sarah pointed out. “We don’t usually get the ones who haven’t quite turned yet, like your mom. This one was infected within the last week or so, but he’s still as dangerous as any deader – more than most of them, because his body’s intact and he might have some brainpower still.”

“Yeah, but if you cure them, they’ll still have two broken legs and two broken arms.”

“Better than being a deader, though.”

“There’s some motion in the house,” Aaron reported. “I think one of the kids just found the back door.”

“Oh, we can get a kid? That’s great!” Sarah said enthusiastically. “We’ve got so few of those.”

“You want me to lure him in?” Norris asked. “Or her?”

“Sure, but don’t forget. Without prey for a while, they become zoomers, and you don’t have a lot of advantages against another kid.”

“Sure I do. I’m not mostly dead,” Norris said. He pulled off his mask again and got onto the median, trying (and mostly failing) to rap about how much zombies should want to eat him. His rhymes sucked and his rhythm was off, but he doubted the zombie would care.

It appeared finally, coming around the side of the house. A little white girl, younger than him. Maybe seven or eight. She had curly blonde hair and was still dressed in a pink T-shirt that said “GIRLS RULE AT SCHOOL”, with bloodstains on the collar where she’d probably been bitten. For several seconds she just stared at him, as he stared at her. Then she started running toward him.

Norris hadn’t gone far from the van, so he didn’t have far to go to get to safety. The little zoomer ran right in at Sarah and Raoul, who swung their poles into place to grab her.

She dodged.

“Shit!” Raoul shouted, as the zoomer got past him and tried to jump into the van after Norris. “Fuck! Kid, get a gun!”

There really wasn’t time to do that. Norris only had time to get his mask back on before the kid zoomer slammed into him, knocking him back against the divider between the seats in the van and the back area.

“Get off!" Norris yelled. The girl was trying to bite him, while he was trying to hold her away from him. He was taller and had longer arms, but she had deader strength and was forcing his arms back. Her mouth was open and drooling.

Sarah hit her in the head with her pole. The girl went to the ground, hard. As she tried to get up, Sarah pinned her in place. “Aileen! Get the crusher over here, do her legs!”

“She’s a kid!” Norris said. “Can’t we just pin her down with your poles? She’s not that strong; if I could hold her off, you grownups should be able to.”

“Can’t take chances,” Sarah said. “But we can leave her arms intact if we hold her to the floor and break her legs so she can’t use them to squirm free.”

Aileen snapped the bones in the child’s shin. “There you go. She can’t run, but if we do manage to find a cure, those are greenstick fractures and they should knit back together relatively easily.” The zombie thrashed her thighs and knees, trying to move her legs, but the broken part just flopped. “Or maybe not, since she won’t hold them still.”

“I’ll tape them if you take my pole and Raoul adds his.”

“Any reason we’re being so careful with this deader?” Raoul asked.

“The kids are the most likely to come back without brain damage if we figure out how to kill the fungus. I’d rather the kid not have permanently damaged arms and legs.”

Sarah used medical tape to splint the zombie’s broken legs, and a hardening foam all over the splint to hold it together. Then she used the same tape to seal up the zombie’s fingers and thumb, putting them into a ball-like cast where the zombie had no ability to move her fingers or touch anyone with them. She tied the arms to the child zombie’s side with the medical tape, and then used the bandages to wrap the girl like a mummy before spraying the hardening aerosol. “Okay, let’s get her on ice.”

“Two more incoming,” Aaron reported. “Both fresh. Adult from the same house as the kid, and another adult, from the bistro.”

“We can’t take them,” Sarah said wistfully. “No room.”

“Can we drive off without killing them?” Norris asked. “If they’re fresh, maybe you’ll be able to save them?”

“That’s really unlikely,” Sarah said.

Raoul went out with the gun. “We’d have to cure them within a couple of weeks for them to stay fresh. We’re not within a couple of weeks of cracking this. So... no.” He fired the gun, twice. Both zombies toppled over, their heads masses of blood and flesh.

Sarah and Aileen finished boxing the little zombie. “We’re full up,” Aileen said. “Let’s head back.”

“You wanna get back in the front?” Aaron asked.

“No, I want to get going before any more deaders come out of any more houses and we have to shoot them.” Aileen shuddered slightly. “There’s two more kids in the house this one came from and I really hate having to shoot the kids.”

“That does suck,” Raoul admitted. “If they’re far gone it doesn’t matter, but if they’re fresh… I just keep thinking about how we could put them on ice until we’ve got a cure and maybe they’ll recover, but we don’t have the equipment to put so many on ice so we end up having to kill them.”

“Maybe you could come back with more ice boxes and see if you can get the rest of the kids in that house, after you drop these guys off?” Norris suggested.

Sarah shook her head. “We can’t burn fuel like that. We’re not here to rescue anyone, we’re here to collect the specimens we need. That’s all.”

***

Back at the base, there was no role for Norris to help in with unloading the deaders, taking samples from them, and getting them into their permanent cold boxes. So he went to the cafeteria, because he was starving. It was late afternoon and he’d never had breakfast. A few folks gave him a hairy eyeball for the amount of food he was taking, but no one said anything.

After that, he considered going back to his room and taking a nap… but no. He had to keep up the pressure. If he wanted to finagle his way into being able to go out with them and help them again, he needed to remind them that he’d been helpful, by showing up and offering to help now.

They were buzzing around the lab busily. “Hey,” Norris said, strolling in with his leather armor still on, like they did. “Anything I can do to help? Wash dishes or whatever?”

“Norris, we’ve just been talking about you!” Sarah said cheerily.

“Uh... is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Listen.” Sarah squatted on the floor so her eyes were level with his – and then immediately stood up again. “Ow. I keep forgetting my knees don’t want to let me do that anymore.”

“You don’t need to do it anyway, I can look up.”

“Okay. Listen. You were helpful today, even Raoul admits it. But that incident where the child deader attacked you? That was terrifying. I never want to see anything like that again.”

“Oh, come on!” Norris couldn’t control the outburst. “I did everything I could to help you! I got two deaders to come on over to the van, and I shot deaders when it would have been too dangerous for any of you guys, and--”

“Kid, shut up and let Dr. Blake talk,” Raoul said, and Norris shut up. “Dr. Blake” instead of “Sarah” meant things were serious.

“So,” Sarah said, “we’ve decided to formally allow you to apprentice with us, on the specimen capture squads, because a formal apprenticeship will allow us to train you.”

Aaron spoke up. “You’re going to work with Dr. Alvarez at the range to practice your marksmanship and learn a wider range of weaponry. Dr. Walsh will train you on the use of the drones. I’ll be assisting you on learning to drive. Dr. Narayan will train you on data entry so you can help us put our numbers in for analysis. And Dr. Blake will continue to be your primary liaison with the team, but will also be monitoring your overall progress with your education, with us and in terms of your academic progress.”

“Really?” Norris’ eyes went wide. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” Sarah said, grinning. “We recognize that we’re not going to be able to stop you from trying to fight back against the zombie plague, whether we enable you or not, and we believe your chances of accomplishing something positive without getting yourself killed will be considerably better if we train you as our assistant.”

“There’s other teams,” Aileen Walsh said. “One of them came to help us with the tires. They’re not necessarily going to understand why we’re training a kid as young as you are or letting you help out on collection missions. They’re going to be overall too polite to say anything directly to you, but you might hear talk behind your back.”

“That’s okay,” Norris said. “I don’t pay any attention to that kind of thing.” The truth was he didn’t even hear that kind of thing most of the time; his mother had once been furious because she’d overheard children in the hallways at his school calling him weird and an Oreo, but he’d been with her and hadn’t heard a thing. He’d been too busy cataloguing Pokemon in his head.

“I want you to work out, too,” Raoul said. “Shooting’s one thing, but you need to build up upper body strength and stamina. You weren’t in any shape to fight off that deader and she was on you before you could have gotten a gun.”

“So you’re my gym teacher?” Norris said, grinning.

Raoul sighed. “Shoot me now. I’ve become a jock.”

“We’re going to work you hard,” Aaron said. “If you want to be helpful, and you want to come on the missions, we need you up to speed as soon as we can get you there, because we want you to be as safe on the missions as a boy your age could reasonably be.”

Norris thought of his long hours studying biology, chemistry and math, upstairs in his bedroom on the computer someone had left him there. “That’s exactly what I want,” he said. “I’ll go just as fast as you push me, so go ahead and push me hard.”

***

Later, he found his mother’s tank among the other near-suspended deaders. He couldn’t see her – the tanks were not transparent, and he knew better than to open the tank and risk his mom getting loose and getting shot.

“They let me join them, Mom,” he whispered to her. “I’m gonna help them find the cure for this, and we’re gonna save you. We’re gonna get you back to yourself. I promise.”