CHAPTER SIX – WILDFIRE
Meanwhile the zombies had been coursing through Aberdeen like a deadly virus through the shattered immune system of an AIDS victim, encountering no resistance worthy of the name. They spread out from the central point of Private Eyes, forming a lethal circle which swelled exponentially as they made their slow but inexorable way through the citycentre. Some now had limbs missing, some enormous gouges torn from their faces or from necks which quivered with twitching tendons and shredded flesh, others still were in clothes dripping with blood and bodily fluids, whilst the zombie virus added its own gruesome touches – eyes entirely red, fingernails transformed into deadly wolverine claws, teeth into vampirical fangs. Yet as the night had progressed, the crowds milling through the streets were inebriated almost to the point of mental retardation and only noticed what they beheld when it was too late. The zombies, too, had an animals instinct and proceeded through the streetlight-lit roads singly, minimising any attention. Kebab shops, chip shops, bars, clubs, swirling gatherings around buskers, ticketers promoting nightclubs, people heading to or coming from establishments singly, in pairs or in groups, beggars at optimistic sites adjacent to cash machines or fastfood queues, taxis, cars, buses with disembarking loads of bushy-tailed students – all presented excellent opportunities for the zombies. They did not pass them by. The demonic disease which had lain dormant on Alan for so long, mutating with his human DNA, had adapted with horrifying rapidity. It was spread now by bodily fluids and worked its way through a new host in a matter of minutes, turning them also into slavering, rapid monsters. Death in the ordinary fashion did not affect the zombies, as Laura had rightly judged. Dismemberment, disembowelment or loss of major organs could not stop anyone afflicted with the dread zombie plague. By some alchemical, mutated-contagion process, some bestial, animal instinct kept the body moving even whilst the neurotransmitters in the brain had ceased to function. Braindead, the zombies moved on by some nefarious instinct, seeking only to devour and destroy. Humans, as the nearest, the most numerous and helpfully self-incapacitated, provided ample victims.
Thus the drink touched in The Pelican spread its contagion throughout the club, its new drinker passing a cigarette to a girl. She greeted a newly-arrived friend a welcoming kiss, who sneezed when on the dancefloor. Some of the infected left for other clubs and bars, unwittingly bringing death with them, as the zombie fever spread wherever a carrier went. The contagion spread like a bushfire through tinder-dry outback scrub, the packed bars and streets providing ideal breeding grounds for the evil plague. A single carrier could enter a bar and within less than an hour would proceed to transmit to the majority of the revellers; or one drunken
Deep in the bowels of Aberdeen University, Colin King sat in a computing lab, typing up the figures from his statistical analysis of his experiments for his doctoral thesis. Although it was Saturday night he was close to completion of his thesis and even closer to the August deadline. Besides, he wasn’t one for going out too much. From an early age he had been an avid student, thirsty for knowledge, preferring his books to nightlife, his computer to women. You knew where you were with them. He had thus always been drawn to the safer but more imaginative things in life, from multiple role-playing games to Warhammer.
He charted an Excel graph, comparing the effects of traditional anaesthetics to the one which he had been formulated. He knew that not only would he have a doctorate and command a good research post, the patented formula of his anaesthetic would bring him a great deal of money. It was a form of somnabo-cannibinoids, one which rendered the mind unconscious while keeping the patient safe to a much higher degree than with chloroform, for instance. No need for measuring heart-rates or the unpleasant side-effects of nausea and aching muscles, nor any risk of overdose.
