Chapter 18: Chapter 18: Journey Begins.

The zombie was already trying to gnaw at my suit helmet as it crashed into me. I pushed at it with my left hand but its grip was too strong. I pulled out the pistol with my other hand and shot it in the guts.

Or rather, I tried to. The zombie twisted aside at the last minute. I fired again, pressing my pistol into its chest. Somehow, I missed again. The zombie didn’t stop trying to gnaw at my helmet as we slammed into Hospital’s front desk.

I put the pistol under the thing’s chin and tried to shoot it again. Suddenly the zombie wasn’t on top of me, but clinging to the ceiling. I could see the shiny metal of an implant on the left temple of the tall, skinny infected.

It hadn’t teleported. That technology did not exist in usable form yet, as far as I knew. I’d felt it push itself violently away from me though, I realized that a second later. A second after that it was gone. I looked around and caught a glimpse of it disappearing into the food storage warehouses. I kept watching the area for several long minutes after but it didn’t come back.

There were now three things that bothered me about this newest threat. One, it ran away. Zombies didn’t run away. Ever. They saw prey, they chased. That was it. But this one did not do that. Twice now it had run away from potential prey. I was positive that it was the same implant zombie I’d seen in the Security cafeteria.

Transporting the combat suit turned into a much longer process after that. I tried to keep an eye out for it, but realistically I knew my chances of spotting it before it was upon me were not high. It was insanely fast. It had dodged gunshots at point blank range, that was the second thing that bothered me about it.

I already knew it was fast, but somehow it recognized that I was attacking it and defended itself. That was also not normal zombie behavior. And the third thing.

It hadn’t made a sound. Not one howl, growl, or scream. Not even once.

The thing was the perfect assassin. I’d thought I was paranoid, but this newest threat made me reconsider what true paranoia actually was. This thing really was out to get me. As the only living prey left on Walker, save some people stuck in stasis pods that it couldn’t see at the moment, it would be hunting me for as long as we were both alive.

Had it tracked me down somehow? The places I’d frequented were notable for their cleanliness and lack of zombies. That seemed like too much credit for zombie intelligence. To the level one could consider zombies having such a thing as “intelligence.” Did the implant have something to do with it? That was the only outwardly visible sign I could see that might hold a clue.

It occurred to me that I could have drained it if I could have put a hand on it. In the heat of the moment it hadn’t occurred to me though. That was potentially a good thing- that doing so was not an instinctive action- but it also meant that a dangerous foe remained a threat.

The Wampus Cat on my head must had woken from all the head movements I was making, trying to keep an eye out for the assassin I knew was out there while moving the combat suit slowly across the cafeteria. Well, that or the tumble and shooting that failed to even hit the sneaky zombie. The fuzzball made sleepy noises of complaint before noisily gnawing at the bottle’s nipple. There would be another mess to clean up if I didn’t hurry.

The rest of the journey back to Security passed without another combat encounter. I had suspicions that the implant zombie would be deterred by the swifter reflexes of the turret guns. But those suspicions were based not on facts but gut feelings, so I could not take comfort from them.

The combat suit neared the repair cradle and was placed upright as the cradle arms began swarming over it, removing the damaged armor from the front and whisking it away. I did not stay to watch.

I tried to find the implant zombie on the monitors at the Chief’s desk. It turned out to be a nearly fruitless task. Nearly, because the tracking software could identify individuals with exterior mounted cranial implants. But there were hundreds or possibly thousands of possible hits. I tried filtering by time and found the one that attacked me, but now that it had fled I could not find it again.

The other hits turned out to be either false positives where the software highlighted zombies that had bits of trash or food wrappers stuck to their heads. Then I tried to search for Security logs of who had implants on Walker, and found that there were far more than I’d anticipated.

Thousands. Easily ten thousand or more. There were also the refugees. Walker had accepted some refugees based on the logs I’d read on the management terminal. Not all that applied, but some. There was every chance that the implant zombie I’d been attacked by wasn’t in Security’s database at all because it had been in with the refugees.

That made me think of the horde at the docks again. What if the unexpectedly large number of zombies there was because they were former refugees? Maybe the virus got loose on a ship that was packed with refugees on the docks and spilled over to the warehouse district?

I looked to the massive freighter parked at the end of the docks. A lot of refugees could be fit in that hull. More if they’d been packed into stasis pods for the trip.

The video feed showed the horde was still there. A few zombies were actively wandering, but most remained quiet and still, conserving energy for the moment when some poor soul intruded upon their territory. Now that I was looking for them, I spotted several more zombies with implants.

Not all were like the little silvery thing I’d seen on the assassin zombie. The full replacement arms and legs stood out the most, but there were several more bizarre ones I noticed. One floating by a stack of crates actually still had a mane of hair, which zombies almost never had, that was blue in the few patches that weren’t covered by dirt and grime.

A tiny burp from atop my head reminded me of the time. I left the terminal behind, getting up to clean the little monster and grab a fresh bottle for when it woke up again. I was beginning to tire as well. The last few days’ activity were wearing on me. Nanite assisted healing or no, downtime and rest was something that was definitely needed.

Bots were about and cleaning the cafeteria area once again as I wearily made my way back towards Security Medical. While it wasn’t an iron bound guarantee that threats weren’t about, it was reassuring. The empty formula bottles got loaded back into the machine for cleaning and refilling. Then Experiment Number One needed cleaning.

Then, at last, it was finally time for a nap. My head felt stuffy and my body weak in addition to the aches and pains of healing wounds.

* * *

I spent two days like that recuperating, feeding the Wampus Cat and cleaning it up again, and eating meal bars. No more zombies showed up in the cafeteria and the video feed barely changed when I checked for zombie activity.

The fuzzball still hadn’t opened its eyes. It spent nearly the entire time eating, sleeping, and getting its oversized paws tangled in my hair or my shirt. Searching the medical database for symptoms of a defective Wampus Cat returned inconclusive results.

On the third day I woke feeling somewhat better. Still sore and healing, still a little bit sick, but much more alert and aware. A part of me wondered if draining zombies was somehow accelerating my recovery. How quickly the body heals after injury was not something I’d studied before, but it seemed that I shouldn’t have been able to be as active as I’d been. Nor be feeling as recovered as quickly.

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It wasn’t that the stab wound in my thigh or the rips in my back and chest or even the bite on my shoulder and bruises on my arm and leg didn’t hurt. But I could move around, even exert myself a bit if I was willing to suffer for it.

The implant zombie had not returned, as far as I could tell. The ships sitting on the docks had been on my mind of late. If any of them could be reactivated after sitting so long, they just might be my ticket off Walker.

It would have to be a ship big enough for the stasis pods, though. I couldn’t leave the people in the Hospital pods to die. At least, not any more than I already had.

I headed up to the management terminal to look through the information on the docked ships again. There had to be a way to query their status. Some sort of inspection logs or official documentation maybe. I loathed paperwork and bureaucracy. But this was too important.

The tanker I eliminated from consideration immediately. It had a tiny crew capsule attached to a massive storage tank and an engine just large enough to push it around at full load. The tiny cargo lighters and runabouts were too small and short ranged.

The freighters and traders were where my hopes were. Seven of them were moderately sized at twenty million of something called “dead weight tons.” That turned out to just mean “empty” with no fuel, cargo, stores, or crew loaded. They were big, boxy things with both internal storage and exterior cargo mounts that held things like rocks that weren’t a problem to carry in vacuum.

At least some of them would have been carrying refuges. Most likely, anyway. The cargo manifests were not written in a way I could understand- 13,000 BToP, 5.75Mzk, 14e3VL, 14,375LCR. Presumably the dockmaster whose terminal I was mirroring knew what these things were, but I didn’t.

The big freighter at the end of the dock had numerous fines levied against it and warnings that further failures to pay would result in the seizure of the ship for non-payment. It had no shipping manifest declared and was supposedly in contact with docking control to rectify that lack when the zombies happened and normal life went out the window.

It had been drawing station power the entire time, thus the fines and warnings that had gone unanswered these past seven years. The other ships appeared to have accrued similar notices and fines in that time, from what I could tell.

The view of the docks was in the background whenever I looked at the dockmaster’s screen, so I noticed at once when the horde started to move. Not just one or a few wandering zombies.

All of them.

I was out of the chair and headed for the armory before my brain caught up with my body. Zombies only moved en masse like that when they sighted prey. The only prey on Walker was me.

Or so I had thought.

On the docking screen I’d seen a glimpse of a figure. Clean. Dashing through an opening between warehouses. Not a zombie. Human. There was another human being on Walker. Somehow.

There was another human being on Walker.

And they were being chased by the biggest horde I’d ever seen on the station.

Right now.

The combat suit opened at my touch and I climbed in. As the metal cocoon closed around me I spared a thought for the Wampus Cat sleeping with the bottle in its mouth on my head. The suit seemed to treat it as a part of me like some kind of benign growth. Experiment Number One was not squished and I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d shed too much of my own blood already to lose that tiny furball to a stupid mistake.

The cradle unit requested to know what kind of loadout this test would require, popping the query up on the interior of the visor. Once again I selected everything. Then it asked where to get the ammunition from? That, I wasn’t sure of. Onboard stores was what I’d selected last time, but that option was not visible.

There was a dropdown menu I hadn’t noticed before. It looked like it was listing those locked rooms I’d seen in security before as possible locations, so I picked one at random. The cradle once again blurred into action, slotting blocks of ammunition all over the suit.

It asked for explosive type again and I picked fragmentary again. Then it asked something new. “Secondary weapons available. Would you like to install AGL in accessory slot1? Would you like to install AGL in accessory slot2?” More weapons sounded good, so I selected yes again.

Something clunked into place over my left shoulder followed by my right. Then a heavy weight settled onto my back for an instant before the combat suit helped me adjust my balance. Seconds later, the cradle arms withdrew and I was hustling into the cafeteria.

The large freight elevator in the food service area was my ticket down. I’d snagged the space suit and attached it to the combat suit on the way. If I had to abandon the armor, a space suit might help keep me alive and unbitten. Little by little, I was learning how to stay alive when facing hordes of zombies.

There would be no Security turrets to help me on the docks. This would have to be a fast smash and rescue. Finding whoever it was might be difficult. It might even be impossible.

But I had to try. I was done letting people die when there was something I could do to help. The elevator gate clacked shut and the floor began to drop, taking me with it.

I could hear the howls echoing up the shaft before it even reached the docks.

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