Road to London: City of the Dead

XIV – July 11th

Svetlana rolled her eyes as Chou emptied the contents of his stomach into the plastic bin by the corner of Science Three. Though the lack of a working microwave or oven meant that he and everyone else at St. James’ had been living off crisps and fruit for the last month, Chou’s sick had the colour and consistency of carrot soup. The shock of seeing the Dead’s intestines spill out across the table had seen him sprinting for a place to hurl.

Svet had already pulled on a pair of washing up gloves and was going about the process of stuffing the thing’s innards back inside its body. Because of the immense quantity of large and small intestine that fit into a human belly, this was no easy task. The Dead couldn’t scream for the thick gag stuffed into its mouth but it was still doing its best to break free from the leather restraints that kept it buckled to the Formica work surface.

When as much of the guts were back inside the Dead as was possible, Svet ordered Conrad to pass her the industrial stapler that they’d picked up from the stationary cupboard on the way here. Nathan and Conrad lined up the ruptured flesh as best as they could while she pumped staple after staple through the skin in an attempt to hold it together. The thing that had once been Miss Avery arched its back in pain and shook its head like a rabid dog.

When she was done Svetlana ordered everyone back from the table. She turned to Conrad, whose eyes were fixed on the Dead’s tattered midriff. “So,” she began, “she’s not gonna bleed out on us any time soon. What now?” Conrad didn’t reply right away. Svet suspected that he hadn’t brought her here with a plan. He had just needed to do something and this seemed like a good idea at the time.

“You need to tell me what this thing is.” The sentence was cold, lacking in emotion yet full of sincerity. He finally tore his gaze away and looked at her with sad, sad eyes. Svetlana glanced at the Dead. Then back to Conrad. Then shrugged her shoulders.
“I guess there are some tests I could run with the stuff in here. It won’t tell us what it is but it could tell us what it isn’t”

Conrad nodded, giving Svet the permission she was looking for to begin her experimentation. She was terrified of the beast that lay on the table before her yet she was also animated by a fascination and an excitement the likes of which she had never before felt. She quickly scribbled down three lists of equipment and chemicals that she would need and gave them to the three boys, who stood clueless in front of her. Nathan stared at his catalogue, not sure if he was able to pronounce anything that was written there, let alone locate it. “Well, fuck off then!” barked Svet, irritated by their failure to immediately respond to her every command.

***

“Applying local anaesthetic of sixty percent ethanol solution,” Svetlana said as she dipped a paintbrush into a beaker full of the colourless liquid that she had just mixed herself. She then wiped the brush back and forth across the Dead’s shredded stomach. The thing was nearly unconscious from stress anyway so it didn’t put up much of a fight. Svet was generous with the dosage but even so she was left with a sizable portion of ethanol when the wound had been anointed. Shrugging again, Svet poured the remainder of the liquid onto the Dead’s gag, allowing it to soak through.

She stood back and after a minute or so, surely enough Miss Avery’s breathing began to slow. Her muscles slowly relaxed and before long she was almost completely unconscious. It had been a dangerous decision to pour that much alcohol into the Dead’s mouth but Svet doubted that anyone would care overly if it died of an overdose. Approaching cautiously, Svet tapped the Dead on the arm. Then slapped it gently across the face to which there was minimal response. “Upon introduction of high-dosage, depressive psychoactive, subject displays reduced aggression and central-nervous transmission,” Svetlana wasn’t really speaking to anyone in particular but talking out loud made the whole experience seem slightly more professional and slightly less bizarre. “Normal,”

Next Svet took a large metal spoon that Conrad had placed on her desk of equipment. A spoon. Seriously? It wasn’t quite the mallet she’d requested but it would have to do. Moving around the table to the other end of the Dead, she gently tapped it on the knee, then hit it somewhat harder. The knee-jerk reaction she had been expecting came flawlessly. “Subject displays uninterrupted peripheral nervous transmission,” she placed the spoon back on the desk. “Normal”

Moving onto more clinically respectable analytical methods, Svetlana slid a stethoscope under Miss Avery’s top and began to listen to the throb of her heart beat. It was only then that it was brought home that this was still a living, breathing human being. With a living, beating heart in her chest.

LUBDUB. LUBDUB.

“Resting heart rate falls within acceptable parameters,” Svetlana said, tossing aside the stethoscope. Over the next few minutes she continued to carry out a variety of simple physical and chemical tests on Miss Avery. The results of each were almost synonymous to what she would expect from any normal person, aggravating her as she had learned nothing.

“Are you done?” asked Conrad impatiently, who took Svet’s disgruntled appearance as a sign that the investigation was over.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said, “With the facilities I have here, the only examinations I can perform are all telling me that this is a fully functional human being,”
“Svetlana, this thing is clearly not a...”
“I KNOW!” Svet shouted back angrily. The last thing she needed was Mr. spot-the-fucking-obvious here to tell her what was clear.

“I mean, there are certain things that I don’t need to run any test to notice,” she pointed over to the Dead which by now seemed to be asleep or at least too intoxicated to move. “Look at her,” she instructed. Conrad looked.
“Yeah? What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“Her skin, her eyes, her mouth.” Svetlana wandered gracefully over to the Dead and, without fear, brushed some strands of blonde hair away from her face.

“Her body was locked in that room for a month. It’s the middle of Summer, the air is hot and humid. A dead body at room temperature begins to visibly decompose after about five days. After a month flies, beetles and maggots should’ve completely eaten away most of her facial features. When Nathan cut open her belly about a kilo of worms should have spilled out of there along with her guts. None of those things happened.”
“What about Mr. Burns?” cut in Nathan. “He was almost falling to pieces when we first saw him, he had no fucking eyes and his skin was almost green!”

Svet went silent. She hadn’t seen Mr. Burns’ body and didn’t really know what to say to this. She toyed with some ideas for a moment for smiling to herself and replying: “Mr. Burns had a fungal infection behind his eyes!” The others looked at her blankly, wondering how in hell she would know something like that. “His wife came to me a few weeks before the Deaths to ask if I could recommend any antibiotics that would sort it out. I told him no and that he would have to go to the hospital but he obviously died before the appointment!”

Svetlana beamed with excitement, it gave her a serious rush when her clinical mind worked something out that everyone else overlooked. “The infection would have spread more rapidly after he Died, maybe across his whole body.” Nathan and Conrad seemed satisfied with this explanation and backed down.

“So anyway, why haven’t Miss Avery and the others rotted?” Chou piped up, intrigued to hear her theory.
“Because people don’t tend to rot... if they’re not Dead”

It took a short while for everyone to process what Svet had just told them. Conrad looked incredulously at Nathan and Chou to see if he’d missed anything here. When he was satisfied that he hadn’t, he opened his mouth and was about to question Svetlana’s sanity when she strode over and jammed her index finger across his mouth harshly. “Until you’ve heard me out,” she said sternly, “I don’t want to hear any more of your smart aleck comments Yankee boy. Ponimaesh?”

Conrad nodded slowly and obediently, Svet’s finger still stuck to his upper lip. “Good. I’ll leave that for now and come back to it later,”
“Svet!” Nathan objected. You can’t just come out with stuff like that then...”
“I SAID!” she bellowed, drowning out all complaints under a startling volume, “I’ll come back to that later! For now you boys are probably going to want to leave the room,”
“Why?” asked Chou and Conrad almost simultaneously.
“Because I’m about to open up Miss Blondie’s head and have myself a little game of eye spy. To be honest I don’t won’t Chou throwing his Chinese guts up again or Mr. Bush over here making any more of his Sir Pointouttheobvious-alot observations,”
“What kind of racism is that?” protested Conrad, “and George Bush isn’t even the president of America anymore!?”
“Yes, but everyone knows little Yankee South boys like you always keep a shrine or something to your Messiah, the Almighty Bush”

Nathan let out loud laugh at this. For him, the comedy of Svet’s ridiculous comments and judgements was in the way that they weren’t even clever. As was right now, the targets of her insults were often left speechless with confusion rather than embarrassment. She did this to shut people up and was usually successful. This, instance was no exception and Svet was thoroughly entertained by the look of bewilderment on Conrad’s face.

The boys eventually did as they were told and left Svet alone in the room. She sighed with relief. It was true what she had told them. The first time she had witnessed an operation on a human head even she had nearly thrown up. Taking up a scalpel usually used by biology students to dissect vegetation and small animals, Svet traced a line down Miss Avery’s face, all the way to the nose. This was an unorthodox way to perform a cranial biopsy but in her experience it was faster and in this particular scenario it wasn’t imperative for her ex-teacher to survive the procedure.

***

After about an hour Svetlana opened the door to show the boys that they were allowed to re-enter. They seemed dismayed at the ominous splatters of blood across her white foodtech apron but she ignored their looks. She pulled a wooden stool from under a desk and indicated for them to sit. They did, forming a semi-circle around the Russian girl, who didn’t seem so small with a soiled hack saw in her hands.

“I’m going to start by asking you a question...” she began slowly, her voice lowered even though there was nobody else in the building let alone within earshot. “Is it just me, or have any of you been experiencing bad headaches recently,” Svetlana anticipated how irrelevant this query seemed and so quickly saw it through, “specifically, since the Deaths?”

The change in the boys’ facial expressions from confusion to interest informed her that they all had. Before any of them had the chance to open their mouths she continued, “After the Deaths, on Prefect’s request I performed an autopsy on the bodies of two of the Dead dinner ladies. As I’ve told you before the corpses had huge swelling on their frontal lobes which would have resulted in massive brain death and so accounts for their... expiration”

As she had mentioned, this was old news but the boys were now all leaning forward, hanging onto the edge of their seats. Svetlana also noticed that Chou was rubbing scratching his head nervously. “That level of swelling on such an important part of the human brain should mean that any complex activity would be impossible. Walking, seeing, eating, none of the things we’ve seen today could’ve been done by livings things with brains in the state of those dinner ladies’...”

Still nobody said anything, they had no idea about complex brain activity or frontal lobes but they mostly grasped what she was saying. “so the only thing I could do with this in mind was find out for myself exactly what was going on with her...” at this she pointed over at Miss Avery, whose head was covered with a white sheet that was soaked through with a deep red. She was now undoubtedly dead. “and sure enough, the swelling has receded.”
“And so she Woke Up...”
“Exactly. Which brings me back to my earlier point that humans beings can only wake up when they are in fact human beings and not in fact human cadavers. From everything I’ve seen today, I can only assume that the swelling did not, as we first thought, result in death. Instead – and be very clear that I’m only speculating – what may have happened is that the staff and the people down in Carmyu and for all we know almost everyone in the fucking world was reduced to a comatose state where there heart and breathing rates were suppressed to almost zero. They were alive, but barely...”

It was a lot to take in she knew, but her friends seemed to be processing what she was explaining to them. Conrad itched his chin apprehensively. He was shivering. The gravity of what had happened today had hit him again, as Svet was sure it would hit her soon enough. While they were busy the issues surrounding them could be pushed to the back of their minds but now Svetlana was bringing them back into the limelight where they had to consciously deal with everything.

“But why did they wake up, all at the same time?” he asked, “surely if they were recovering then different people would come to at different times?” his voice was stressed now and becoming louder. He had just realised that he had no idea what was going on at all. He had come to terms with Deaths and done his best to help the students in his care to move on but in reality he was just as clueless as anyone.

“And more importantly, why the FUCK are they killing people!?” this last demand came as a shout. There were tears forming in Conrad’s eyes and he was beginning to hyperventilate. Svetlana was shocked. Not by his outburst but because for the first time in her life she had heard Conrad, Prefect, swear. It was so uncharacteristic for the composed, Evangelical, American boy. That was part of what made him the responsible one in everyone’s eyes.
Conrad wasn’t a rule breaker, he was never rude to teachers and he absolutely never swore.

Conrad was standing now, hands curled into fists at his sides. He was still shaking, but his breathing was slowing and so Svetlana waited for him to calm down. Nathan stood and wrapped an arm around Conrad’s shoulder. Close physical contact with anyone other the Svet was unusual for Nathan. He didn’t even really like high-fiving anybody and outright hated the bear hugs that Israel insisted on giving him. To see him give this level of affection to somebody other than her alarmed Svet at first, but then touched her. The last month had been a period of maturation for everyone and even Nathan had room to grow up a little.

When the depths of Conrad’s breaths finally returned to something that vaguely resembled normal, he sat back down. His face was reddened and he cradled his head in his hands. Svetlana expected Nathan to remove his arm but he didn’t, probably unsure of when would be appropriate to. Svet calmed down as well and remembered that Conrad had asked her two direct questions that she had not yet answered.

“Most likely the reversal of the adverse affects was the removal of the stimulus that caused the Deaths in the first place and there is no way that we can know what that was. There aren’t many forces in the world that can do what this has done. To answer your second question I would suggest that the initial swelling caused such damage to the frontal lobe that higher mammalian brain function has been irreparably damaged. Again I have no idea what could have caused such a specific reaction but it would explain why they took on such predatory behaviour while acting as part of a pack. They are running on pure instinct, an instinct to kill us and eat us.”