Read Hero for Hire for Free Online

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    I smiled, but when she turned her face to me, she didn’t look too happy about it. In fact, she looked seriously pained.
    “They’re people, Rafe. I told you that. You just killed dozens of them as if it was a video game.”
    “They may have been people once, but they’re not anymore. Given half a chance, they’d rip you to shreds.”
    “And eat my brains?”
    The comment was meant to tease me, but I took it seriously.
    “I don’t know where you’ve been living since the world went to hell, but when my condo complex was overrun, the residents who didn’t end up zombie food took to the streets. I survived day to day by hiding in abandoned buildings. I had to scavenge for food. When I went to sleep, I didn’t know if I’d wake up the next day. In that time, I had plenty of up-close experience with those abominations down there. They may resemble people in a general sense, but they’re not as bright as normal people. It’s like they run on instinct. Some of them are stronger and faster. Even though some of their senses are dulled, like their ability to feel pain, some senses are sharper. They can smell more, hear more, and I swear they can see in the dark. They aren’t people, they’re killers.”
    She nodded thoughtfully, still watching the fire.“Those are the effects of the virus, in combination with the bad vaccine, on their DNA,” she said.
    “Oh? How do you know that?”
    “I’m a geneticist. I worked at Paragon when the virus hit. I was on the team trying to develop a vaccine.”
    I faced her, flabbergasted. “So what the hell happened?”
    She turned so we faced each other, her expression pensive, but I saw the energy in her eyes as she talked.
    “Basically, if you caught the original virus, on one end of the spectrum you were either completely immune which amounted to a very small percentage of total population. Or you got sick, your immune system fought it off and you recovered, which was another small slice of the total population. I assume you were one of those cohorts?”
    “Cohort?”
    “You were either immune or you got sick but recovered?”
    “Oh, yeah. I never got sick.”
    She considered that for a moment, as if it were significant in some way. It was significant to me, because I was thankful I never caught the bug, but it apparently meant something else to her.
    “Apparently you’re lucky. Genetically speaking.”
    “Guess so.”
    “Indeed. So, anyway, at the other end of the spectrum, if you caught the disease and you had no immunity at all, you died. That was a very large percentage of the population.”
    “Tell me about it. I’ve never seen or smelled so many dead bodies. So where do the zombies come in?”
    She cringed, but I couldn’t tell if it was because of my dead bodies comment, or something about the zombies.
    “I was on the vaccine team,” she said. “The team leader was a woman named Miriam Armstrong. She’s a brilliant woman, but her aspirations clouded her vision, so when I came up with a workable vaccine, she stole my formula. She re-engineered it, thinking she could make improvements. I complained, but no one was interested. Because she was the team leader, she took credit for the vaccine. When the vaccine was distributed and administered, my best guess is that it reacted with the live virus to cause mutation.”
    “That’s just shitty.”
    “It appears there are a couple of levels of mutation, producing a higher level of functioning in the infected individual, much like what you described–strong, fast, cunning, violent and with some heightened senses.”
    “Right. But there are also some who are just lumbering meat sacks. I think the smarter ones eat those when they can’t find anything fresher, so to speak.”
    She shuddered. “The point is, I can fix them. I can still cure them. That’s what I’ve been working on for the last eighteen months, but I need my journals at the lab to reconstruct my original work.”
    I