“Doctor Colbert,” I said gently, “We didn’t know there were any survivors here. Is there anyone else alive in this place?”
She pondered for a moment and then shook her head. “No, only me. Nobody else made it. Vess got them all.”
“What are you talking about?” Jax asked. “Who is Vess?”
Doctor Colbert turned her eyes to Jax. “Vess.” She said the name in a hushed tone, as if she were afraid to speak it too loudly.
Sam raised an eyebrow. “This is bullshit. She’s crazier than a box of frogs.”
“Doctor Colbert, who is Vess?” I asked her, ignoring Sam.
“Vess,” she whispered, turning to me, her eyes wide. Her gaze seemed to become far away, and I wondered if Sam was right and she had lost her mind. It would be understandable, being the sole survivor in a building full of monsters. She had probably known most of the people who were now roaming the corridors in various states of decay before they had become zombies. What would that do to someone’s mind, to be hunted by creature that used to be friends and acquaintances?
She turned to the door and waved for us to follow her.
“I’m not following some crazy scientist,” Sam said.
“Wait here, then,” I told him. “She’s survived for this long, maybe she knows something we don’t about the building. I want to see what she’s going to show us”
“Probably her collection of dismembered dolls,” Sam muttered, following us out into the corridor despite his announcement that he wasn’t going anywhere.
I pressed the button on the walkie-talkie. “Is level five clear?”
“Looks clear,” Tanya said. “The nasties are all over those bodies on level four.”
“Let me know if they move away. We need to get to that lab.”
“Will do. Where’s that woman taking you?”
“I’m not sure.” I lowered my voice so that Doctor Colbert couldn’t hear me. “She may just be crazy, or she might know something about what happened here. Probably a little of both.”
“Be careful, Alex.”
“Of course.”
Doctor Colbert led us to an office door bearing the name Doctor Marcus Vess. She opened the door and stepped inside, gesturing for us to follow.
The office was identical to Doctor Laurie’s office, even down to the books on the shelf, which I was sure from the unpronounceable titles were the same ones as on Laurie’s shelves.
Doctor Colbert took a seat behind the desk and typed something on the keyboard. Turning the screen so we could all see it, she pointed at a picture of a dark-haired man in his thirties, dressed in a shirt and tie beneath a white lab coat, looking at the camera. He seemed to be in this office at the time. The image was actually a video. “This is Doctor Marcus Vess,” Colbert said. She pressed the play icon and Vess began to speak to the camera.
“This is a historic day,” he said. “The lab trials of the serum have been inconclusive on mice and rats, but I know that’s only because I developed it to combat CJD in human beings. Animal testing will never show us what can be achieved. The only way to do that is to perform a human trial. I spoke to Akers about it, but she has requested more testing in the lab before we even think about injecting the serum into a human being, even someone who has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and is willing to take part in a trial. She says we can’t go ahead until we’re sure how the serum behaves in the human body.”
He paused to look out of his window. Sunlight streamed into the office, brightening the pale blue wall behind him. “How can we be sure until we administer it to a patient? If I don’t get results soon, I’ll lose my funding for this project and they’ll put me to work on something else. I’m making a breakthrough here, but Akers can’t see it because she’s too busy attending board meetings and making decisions that she has no right to make.”
Leaning in closer to the camera, he lowered his voice. “I’m going to inject myself with the serum today. Akers needs to be shown that it’s perfectly harmless in humans. Once she realizes that, we can move the project forward. It’s been delayed enough as it is.” He reached forward, and the video ended.
Doctor Colbert used the mouse to bring up another video. This one was recorded in a bedroom. Vess was sitting at the edge of the bed, dressed only in boxers, looking like he had a bad case of the flu. His eyes were bloodshot, his face drawn and tired. When he spoke, he sounded like his sinuses were blocked. “I made a mistake. I didn’t realize I was coming down with the flu when I injected the serum. It’s been going around the facility, so I should have been more wary of the possibility that I’d caught it. If it wasn’t for Akers and her deadlines, I’d have waited.” He looked angrily at the camera.
“I think the serum is reacting with the flu virus. The vascularity in my arms is very pronounced.” He raised his arm to show the camera that the veins beneath the skin in his arm were dark and prominent.
“This has nothing to do with the serum,” he said. “I’m having a bad reaction to it because of the flu, not because the serum itself is harmful in any way. Akers won’t believe that, of course. She’ll try to stop my funding. Well, she can fuck off. Everybody can just fuck off.” He got off the bed and stormed across the room, beyond the view of the camera. I heard something smash. Vess appeared again a moment later with bloody grazes on his fist. “It’s just the flu,” he said before switching off the camera.
“Wow,” Sam said. “It looks like this dude fucked up big time.”
Colbert looked at each of us. “Do you want to see the rest?”
“We know how this one ends,” Sam said.
“We still want to see some more,” I told her. I had been led to believe that the zombie virus had been developed in a government lab, but now it looked like a harmless serum had reacted with the flu virus in the outside world. There wasn’t some diabolical government plot to create monsters; the whole thing had just been a huge mistake.
Doctor Colbert brought up another video and pressed play. This one was filmed in the bedroom again. Vess looked bleary-eyed as he looked into the camera. Only his face and the collar of his shirt were visible. “I went out tonight. I don’t know why. I still feel ill, and I’ve not returned to work yet. But I remember thinking I needed to get some fresh air, and see other people.” He paused and looked down for a moment before facing the camera again. “That’s the last thing I remember. I must have blacked out. I don’t know where I went, or how I got back home. But something has happened.” He moved the camera back, revealing that his shirt was covered with blood. “I don’t think it’s mine,” he said. “I can’t remember what I’ve done.” The video ended.
“There’s one more,” Colbert said. “Vess came back here, saying he needed to be treated in our hospital. After he explained that he had injected himself with the serum he had developed for the treatment of CJD, he was taken to the hospital wing to be monitored.
“What we saw alarmed us. Vess was showing signs of paranoia, loss of cognitive function, and violent tendencies. He had been away from here for a week, mingling with the general population. If the virus in his system was contagious, we had no hope for containment. We had no idea where he had been during that week, and Vess was in no condition to tell us.
“The virus in his body was previously unknown, so we took a video record of his deterioration.” She pressed play on another video. Vess was in a hospital bed, surrounded by doctors, nurses, and scientists. His eyes were yellow, his skin pale. The veins in his neck and face were clearly visible. He was writhing in the bed as if in pain, sweat covering his face.