Chapter 2: Chapter 2: Habits…

A strange thing occurred on the way to my inevitable death. I did not, in fact, die. At least not yet.

But that was getting ahead of myself. My escape from my lab was initially without incident. The door had remained shut these long seven years. No infected individuals came knocking during that time.

This should not be surprising, as the labs are buried deep within the station and various security measures installed at great expense and to my once great annoyance must have been triggered. Why should it take upwards of thirty minutes to travel barely fifty yards? My questions were not received with the resounding agreement I expected, and the security remained.

And yet there I was in a corridor grown strange with time, barren and empty. There was no welcoming familiarity, as there was with my lab, no cheery fake plant and quiet hum of equipment. Just the shushing sound of air circulating transmitted through my suit speakers.

I was wearing one of the emergency suits provided to every compartment on the station. Doubtless an alert was pinging in some far office, letting the proper authorities know that someone had opened the emergency locker in Lab 23, Level 5. Perhaps the blinking of said alert would draw the attention of some former security operative, who would then have to solve the quandary of whether one can eat a blinking light or not.

I had seen zombies try to eat the strangest of things, and gnawing on a terminal screen would not rank in the top ten. Chances are better than even that one such zombie exists in the central security station. Zombies are creatures of strange habit.

The corridor was bright and clean. My door was the only one open, an oversight I quickly remedied. Why did I shut the door behind me? Perhaps it was my own strange habit, long buried beneath the weight of years. The other doors remained shut and dark. I wondered if the failing power had reset their locks, but none opened to my touch. My own nanites refused to go any further than the access lock.

This did not surprise me. Other researchers were of greater tenure and security clearance than me, and the lab supervisors made sure that my colony was most assuredly not on the approved list to access their lairs. I wondered if the locks would open to their currently zombified selves? Curiosity has ever been my sin of choice.

Three turns later the first checkpoint loomed. It was a mass of brooding metal and intrusive scanning equipment, all blocky and functional over form. The defenses pointed both ways with weapons visibly tracking you whenever you showed up for work with a humorless troll standing guard in a protected booth. And there just happened to be a troll manning the booth again that day as well.

My first live encounter with an infected was not so much a dangerous one as an interesting puzzle. Should anyone be reading this that survived the Fall, doubtless the stark terror of a sheltered academic facing a zombie that could not hurt him or even get to him at all would be perhaps amusing. Or jealous. Both are valid responses. I was frozen with fear for several moments, staring at a completely immobile zombie, floating upside down behind a reinforced armor glass barrier. No zombie would be getting through that on its own.

I wouldn’t be getting through the security gate either, it seemed. Not without help. The corridor remained shut as the automatic guns tracked me, staring at the booth and shaking. I wondered for a moment if the security officer might have actually been dead, not infected if I hadn’t noticed the shrunken body and withered skin that I could see. In normal times, the troll would press a physical button on his terminal to open the corridor. I’d always wondered why they didn’t use a simple virtual interface, but it was fortunate that they hadn’t.

The solution was obvious. I had to get the zombie troll’s attention and entice it towards the release button. He would remain imprisoned in the security booth. I would get to go free. I tapped on the window. The zombie troll immediately responded.

Suffice it to say, zombies are absolute shit in microgravity. Whatever muscle memory they retain to walk, run, grab, and eat does not seem to extend to the small and subtle shifts one must make to move in low gravity without over committing. It took several long minutes before a random flailing limb struck the corridor release. I hurried through, just in case he hit it again and trapped me inside. That would have been bad.

The second section of the labs held less dangerous or volatile experiments. I knew there was one large section devoted to plant and animal research but it, too remained closed to me. All of the other labs did. All dark and silent. I even hammered my fist on a few doors to see if there was anything in there to hear me.

I will admit to a small bit of hope that I wasn’t the only one who had survived. With how long it had been, if there had been some adventurous soul that set to clearing Walker of the infected, they hadn’t made it to the lab section or done anything that my terminal could pick up from the local network. I had no internal cameras and the labs did not receive any alerts save those that were most dire or affected our little world directly. And certainly no emails or holocoms.

But if someone else had survived, then perhaps we could escape together. My lack of courage would be a burden, but surely humanity would work together against a mortal threat. Humans were an endangered species.

That made me wonder again of another strange aspect of the initial infection. For a dual virus/worm program that proceeded so quickly from requisite disease load to full on zombification, how did the governments of the world not contain and quarantine it? There would be no asymptomatic patient zeroes lurking in an otherwise healthy population.

The disease vectors, at least the biological side of things, were thought to be well understood. Our entire long hominid history dealt with diseases that infected via blood, saliva, or mucus membrane contact. How for that matter did it get onto a space station?

The next security station was much the same as the last one, save the guard booth was empty. No troll. And the security gate left open. That made my path much simpler. I hadn’t needed my shoddy spear yet. I held no realistic hopes that such a blessing would continue.

Beyond that gate were more darkened labs, cold and empty. Much as my colleagues and seniors were a point of annoyance for me in the past, they were again at that point. They were either safely dead or wandering the halls as lovers of the newest haute cuisine. Neither option was quite helpful.

Things changed once I reached the final security gate. On one side, the labs where we tried to come up with new things before some other nation or company beat us to it. The research division was defended by even more guns here, with thicker armor and a truly prodigious number of trollish security personnel.

Such men and women would not quail and shake before a single zombie trapped in an unbreakable booth. They would bravely slaughter their way through the thousands.

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They had access to better weapons than a sharp metal stick, too.

On the station side were floating bodies and ripped up bulkheads. Had the zombies tried to get in to the labs? That made me question if they were really empty after all. Or did their wandering simply take them past the point that warning turned into gunfire?

Or the security personnel really did make a stand here. That last one seemed most plausible. It wasn’t my area of study, so I could have been off the mark and I’d never know it. A security troll would know much better than I. This realization saddened me.

I detested the supposed necessity that created what had ensured my safety. Perhaps it was unkind to call such men and women “trolls.” They had, after all, likely been the reason there’d been no knocking at my door. It was also likely I was distracting myself from looking at the carnage. I was thankful I’d chosen to wear the emergency suit. Canned air never smelled so good.

“How to get through the gate...”

My voice surprised me. Had it really been that long since I’d spoken aloud? Gah! Distracted again. Along with perpetual curiosity, another one of my failings. And disdain towards security personnel. The last intelligent being on Walker station was proving to be a right disappointment, I told myself.

There had to be a way to open the security gate from this side. They weren’t supposed to be protecting the station from us in the labs, were they? Was that why there were defenses on both sides? The ceiling guns still tracked me, putting paid to the notion that failing station power had affected them. The once clear security window was streaked with messy brown and black, but clear enough to tell it was uninhabited.

There had to be a significance to the drifting bodies. They moved. Not under their own power, but in vacuum things tend towards stability. Human bodies are elastic enough to absorb impacts as they bounce- even our bones are flexible to a small degree. Over a long enough time and in a pressurized environment, they should have been still.

But they were not. Something had been moving recently enough to disturb the area.

If that something was another zombie then I could entice it towards the security booth. This one, unlike the last, was open on the station side. That was odd. But if a zombie did come wandering by, wouldn’t the guns shred it like it had the others? That would leave me trapped.

This made me think of the trapped zombie in the first security booth. How did they get into those things? I had a vague memory of being early enough to see a changing of the guard. If there were a keypad or a code to enter and exit there was no way I’d be getting a zombie to enter it for me. The changing of the guard... only happened at certain times. Shift change. For the first time in I didn’t know how long, I checked the time on my HUD.

21:47. Almost quitting time. Shift change? I worked long hours, and the guard did change at some point along the way. Perhaps that was it?

That gave me and idea.

A crappy, no-good, possibly desperate plan.

Maybe I could get the zombie to somehow open the door in the booth. Somehow bring him to the last checkpoint. Would the sensors recognize and allow him through?

It was the only thing I could think of. I doubled back to the zombie.

The security gate looked largely the same from the station side, with a window for the guard to look out of. Through the glass I could see the zombie and the door on the bulkhead that lead back out. The door in the corridor did not open to my touch.

Not surprising. It wouldn’t do to have the lab researchers hobnobbing with security in the booths, now would it? The zombie was still once more, and once again facing away.

The plan was to get its attention, then hide below its view. Knock on the bulkhead hard enough for it to follow so it gets into the connecting passage. Lure it to the corridor side door. Disable it with the spear, or run like a rabbit back to the first gate where I’d be trapped with the zombie. This plan seemed overly complicated. But I didn’t have anything better, so my displeasure had to be borne.

Tap, tap. The zombie flailed its limbs wildly. As it caught a glimpse of me over its shoulder, I hid below the booth’s window and tapped the wall. Well, smacked it with the IV stand spear would be more accurate. Adrenaline is a heady thing. I resisted the urge to peek and see if it had actually entered the corridor and kept tapping the door in the corridor, which I could barely reach with my spear, down near the deck.

The door to the corridor seemed to shoot open in a rush. My heart leapt into my throat as I jumped away, using too much force. This caused me to hit the ceiling with bruising force and lose my grip on the spear just as the zombie’s head swung into view. We saw each other at the same time. It howled. I fled.

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