Endurance: The Complete Series Read online

“Oh,” said Chris, and he pulled his standard issue utility knife from his suit pocket and began prying out the hinges.

  “Two minutes, Captain,” Ivanokoff advised.

  Static answered him.

  Viktor frowned and re-tapped his intercom. “Captain?”

  “I warned you guys,” Chris said, “but nobody wants to be genre savvy.” He finished prying out the hinges and shoved the door from its housing.

  Empty sky loomed on the other side, beckoning from across a ledge just wide enough for one person to walk.

  Viktor glanced back. The roiling zombie hordes had made it up the stairs to shamble along the catwalk. He could see the ragged clothes and gaping mouths of those in the front. If their eyes had been alive, he’d soon see the whites.

  “Go,” he ordered, and Chris skittered out onto the ledge. Areva followed, then Viktor.

  Viktor’s enormous size gave him the most trouble picking his way along the narrow ledge. Chris kept a hand on the rotunda and walked in almost a straight line, well away from the edge. Areva navigated the treacherous space with ease, her footing sure. Viktor, in contrast, felt like half his body was already sticking out over the edge. He regretted some of his exercise regimen. Fewer muscles and more balance would have served him better here.

  The first wave of zombies poured through the open door behind them. Heedless of the perilous drop, they ran along the ledge after the escaping humans, or dug their long nails into the rotunda and clawed along like insects. A few fell in the crush, but they latched on below and climbed back up.

  “Faster!” Viktor ordered, but no sooner had he spoken than Chris came to an abrupt halt, arms flung wide to arrest his momentum.

  “Go back!” he screamed as more zombies poured through a hole in the rotunda.

  Viktor scanned the horizon for any sign of the Endurance, but saw nothing. He swallowed and drew his two personalized guns from his belt. He would not surrender. “Scientist, get between us. Areva, fire at—”

  “They’re looking, Viktor.”

  “No. They are dead. They cannot look.”

  Areva drew her service weapon and aimed it at the encroaching horde. “Already dead,” she muttered to herself. “Already dead.”

  Viktor set his weapons to rapid fire mode and leveled them at the decaying bodies closing in. “These are my guns, Dickens and Dante. Welcome to the inferno.”

  “Dammit, Ivanokoff!” said Chris. “You can’t spout cool catchphrases and survive! Am I the only one who’s seen a zombie movie?”

  “Yes,” said Viktor.

  He opened fire.

  Dickens and Dante spewed a dozen tiny projectiles every second. The grips warmed in Ivanokoff’s hands, but he kept firing. Wave after wave of zombies swarmed toward them, and wave after wave stumbled back under his assault. Many tumbled off the ledge, but more simply blinked at the holes in their bodies and resumed the attack. His wrists began to ache from the relentless firing and the weapons’ kickbacks, but he gritted his teeth and continued tapping the trigger panels as fast as he could. No need to aim; enemies were everywhere.

  Behind him, he heard Areva firing just as rapidly, and the scientist shooting haphazardly and spewing a curse for every bullet he spent.

  Three meters divided them and the horde.

  Then two.

  Then one.

  Still no sign of the ship.

  We cannot win, Ivanokoff thought. He had never put those words together in that order before, but they were true. Against a foe who shook off weapons fire and attacked in limitless numbers, he and his two allies stood no chance.

  Still he kept firing.

  He didn’t see the ambush until it was too late. A hand lurched out from beneath the ledge and grabbed his ankle. He stumbled and aimed downward to fire at his assailant. One of the zombies had used the ledge as cover to crawl all the way to them unseen.

  His shots severed the zombie’s arm, freeing his leg, but the horde seized the opportunity to swarm over him, pressing him back and dragging him down with the sheer weight of their bodies. Chris screamed and Areva shouted. Viktor’s back hit the concrete ledge and he nearly rolled off, but more zombies crawled up from below and shoved him back. One of them dove onto on his helmet, blocking out his sight. Though he strained until fire burned in his muscles, he couldn’t budge. Still they kept piling on.

  As mounting pressure from the pile crushed the air from his lungs, Viktor had one thought:

  That zombie had planned its stealth attack.

  These things could think.

  * * *

  He woke on a table.

  He sat up in panic, Chris’s warnings of cannibalism echoing in his mind, but he quickly realized this was an examination room, not a dining room.

  Areva and Chris were already awake, the former hiding under an identical metal table against a wall, the latter pacing the area before the only door in the small, windowless room. The floor was chipped tile, the walls a generic shade of tan, and a counter topped with dozens of sealed containers lined one wall.

  “A hospital,” Viktor said. “This is a hospital.” He realized his two companions still wore their spacesuits and checked to make sure his own helmet was still sealed. Then, afraid of what he might see, he looked at his wrist monitor.

  Eight minutes of clean air.

  “We are so dead,” Chris said. “They’re going to eat us.”

  “You said that the last time we were captured by aliens,” said Areva.

  “I know, but this time I mean it. They brought us to a hospital, as our good catchphrase-spewing tank so intuitively informed us. They’re going to make sure we don’t have any hideous diseases, and then eat us.”

  “Or,” said Viktor, “they do not know what we are, and brought us here to investigate.”

  “Great. Death by dissection instead of digestion. That’s so much better.”

  Viktor rolled his eyes and hopped off the table to study the room’s contents. The jars on the counter were of a strange, twisting design probably unique to this culture, but they were all empty, a few of them shattered or their airtight seals popped.

  “They were kind of like us, weren’t they?” Areva said from her hiding place.

  “Yes.”

  Chris waved his hands. “If you’re about to suggest that this could happen on Earth, then I’ve beaten you there. In fact, back in 2063, something like this almost—”

  The door in front of Chris opened, and a quintet of zombies shambled in.

  The scientist leapt backward with such force that he upended one of the metal tables. “Gyah! I’m not tasty! Eat Ivanokoff; his brain’s full of literature!”

  Viktor strode forward and positioned himself between Chris and the zombies. The leader of the undead had been a tall man, a little portly, with liver spots on his bald orange head. The remnants of some sort of tan jumpsuit clung to his frame, with multiple pockets on both breasts and hips. Various tools protruded from the pockets, including something that looked vaguely like a stethoscope.

  “You are a doctor,” Viktor said to the alien zombie. It didn’t appear to understand. And why would it? “Fish, get the talkie box.”

  Chris scrambled at his suit for several seconds before he found the box. “Tell them we taste like asparagus.”

  “What if they like asparagus?” asked Areva.

  “Enough!” said Viktor, whirling on Chris. “You have a PhD and a commission from the UELE. If any of us is qualified to figure out how to reach these people, it is you. Help, or shut up.”

  Chris froze in shock. Then his terrified expression melted into indignation, as Viktor had known it would. “No need to yell at me, Lieutenant. One of us has to be the voice of reason here.” He brandished the talkie box and took a step forward, though he stayed well behind Viktor. “Hey, uh, zombies. Mind if we walk out of here?”

  He mimed walking toward the door, then slapped his forehead and actually walked toward the door. However, one of the zombies stopped him, placing a dead hand on
his suit. Chris flinched away, but to his credit, did not run screaming into a corner.

  “Okay, then can you turn off whatever’s blocking our communications?” He pointed to the area of his suit helmet that contained the non-working intercom. “In-ter-coms. We want to talk to our people. We’re kind of running out of air, and while you all wear the grave look wonderfully, it would look terrible on us.”

  Viktor checked his monitor. “Five minutes.”

  “Yes! Pressure makes things magically go faster!” Chris’s lip curled. “I swear they tell you that in command school. Don’t deny it.”

  Movement in the back of the zombie group caught Viktor’s attention. While all five seemed content to simply stare at their captives, the two in the rear were not entirely motionless. One of them had been another doctor, presumably, since she wore the same tan jumpsuit as the leader. The other looked like he’d been wearing some sort of professional attire, multiple layers of expensive-looking fabric.

  They were holding hands.

  Viktor might have assumed their dead fingers got tangled together by accident, were it not for the way they mingled their hands, thumbs rubbing against each other in a gentle, comforting gesture.

  He knew that kind of movement. He’d tried to use it on more than one occasion to communicate to Areva what he could not seem to find words to say.

  This changed everything.

  “Sergeant,” he said to Chris, who was still babbling to the lead zombie, “look.”

  Chris took notice of the hand-holding zombies. His mouth dropped open. “Oh. Oh my.”

  “What is it?” asked Areva.

  “The two in back,” said Viktor.

  A pause. A gasp. “They’re holding hands.”

  “They still have feelings,” said Chris. Viktor watched the change in demeanor as his inner scientific curiosity took over his fear. He stepped forward, right between some of the zombies, to the two lovers. “Can you understand me?” He held up the box, which translated his words into the alien language from the library.

  They stared blankly at him. Their interlaced fingers tightened.

  Then, slowly, the female one nodded.

  Chris leaned forward. “Do you know what’s happened to you?”

  Blank stares.

  “We think this undead thing was caused by your air. So you see, we can’t stay here. Our suits are about to run out of oxygen. We have to return to our ship.” To highlight his point, he waved to the numbers counting down on his arm display. Four minutes.

  Pause.

  The zombies all shook their heads.

  “Uh, no, see, we don’t have a choice here. We need to leave, right now.”

  Shake, shake.

  Viktor strode forward. “Move.”

  More shaking.

  Three minutes.

  A movement to Viktor’s left caught his attention. Areva was trying to take advantage of the conversation’s distraction to slip past the zombies. The second she tried to pass through the door, the lovers in the back grabbed her and forced her to retreat.

  Viktor flexed his arms. There was no more time. “We will not be captives. Release us. Now.”

  Shake, shake.

  That left no choice. Without Dickens and Dante, Viktor felt far less confident of victory, but the guns hadn’t exactly helped on the rooftop. He popped his knuckles. “‘Once more unto the breach.’”

  He grabbed the lead doctor by the collar and threw him across the room.

  Two minutes.

  The zombie doctor crashed through one of the metal tables, but before Viktor could remove another alien from his path, the remaining four swarmed him, as they had on the roof, each one taking a limb and using their entire body weight to pin it in place. He struggled through a few halting steps, but then the doctor leapt up. Areva lunged onto the back of one of the zombies holding Viktor’s legs and began strangling it. The zombie didn’t even notice his lack of airflow. She snaked her arm through his and twisted her hips to pry him off Viktor. The zombie smashed to the floor, and Areva followed, but just as quickly the undead man tried to fight his way back. Chris Fish grabbed the empty jars from the table and threw them at the walking corpses, but even when the glass shattered against their skulls, they barely flinched.

  The lead doctor righted himself and grabbed the stethoscope-like object from his pocket. He banged it on the metal tables, sending clanging sounds echoing through the walls and shaking the floor. Backup would be coming immediately, Viktor knew. Even if they abandoned him, Chris and Areva wouldn’t get far. “Go!” he shouted.

  The scientist bolted out the door, but Areva shook her head, still valiantly holding the zombie away from him. “I won’t leave you.”

  One minute.

  The doctor zombie came to stand before Viktor, ignoring Areva and the escaping Chris.

  A scream sounded from the hall. The scientist had been caught. “No, no, don’t do that!”

  The doctor paid the noise no mind. He blinked dead pink eyes at Viktor’s face, then reached up to fiddle with the clasps binding his helmet to his EV suit.

  “No!” Viktor choked, fighting to free his limbs. The zombies’ wispy frames belied their strength. “No, the air is …”

  Click.

  Shhhhhhhhhh.

  Viktor gasped as the planet’s atmosphere seeped into his helmet and filled his lungs.

  * * *

  “Your people are dead.”

  Thomas’s dark complexion darkened further at the O&I man’s bluntness. “You don’t know that.”

  “They were captured by the planet’s inhabitants,” said Bradshaw, eye twitching away. “Surely you don’t dispute that. You heard the reports from the other two teams. There was evidence of battle on that rooftop.”

  “Yes, but captivity doesn’t equal lost in my book. They might still be alive.”

  “Their suits’ air supplies will have run out by now. Even if they survived the fight on the rotunda, they’ve inhaled whatever is in the atmosphere.”

  “We’re working on a cure for that.” Thomas wasn’t technically lying; teams two and three had procured several samples of DNA from the dismembered zombie parts on the rooftop and ground below. His people were studying them on the middle deck at that very moment.

  “Dispatch is awaiting your report, Captain,” said Bradshaw. “According to procedure, you should cut your losses and return home.”

  “Tell me, which subsection of the police code covers zombie infestations? I missed it at the academy.”

  “Your sarcasm is a blunt weapon. My point stands.”

  “So does mine.” Thomas rose from his chair in the center of the bridge, conscious of the eyes of his three bridge crew members. “I’m not leaving my people behind until I know what’s happened to them.”

  “This will reflect badly on you in our report,” said Bradshaw.

  “I’m sure it will.” Thomas straightened his uniform shirt and strode toward the hatch that led to the corridor. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to check on actual solutions to our problems.”

  He found Matthias and Maureen Habassa in one of the labs on deck two, with three scientists, two engineers, and for some reason, the ship’s janitor. “Mr. Cleaver,” he said, nodding to Archibald.

  The ancient janitor waved a liver-spotted hand at Thomas. At his side lurked his equally antiquated vacuum cleaner, stinking of must and industrial soap. “Cap’n. Just helping Mattie with some figurin’.”

  “Arch is great at calculus,” said Matthias. “I’ve got him double-checking my automated math on some of these reactions we’re doing with the mitochondrial—”

  Thomas held up a hand. “I don’t need the details. Just tell me if we have a chance of curing this thing. Ivanokoff, Fish, and Praphasat have been out for twenty minutes longer than their air supply, and from their reports, this plague might be in the atmosphere.”

  A woman across the room laughed. She had a dark complexion and short curls of hair and sported a three-stri
pe science patch on her uniform sleeve. “Don’t worry. My husband will refuse to breathe out of sheer stubbornness.” Joyce Fish finished whatever she was doing with a bunch of phials and a microscope and came over to join the group. Her brazen humor faded as she asked, “Is ... is there any word from them?”

  “Not yet,” Thomas said. “We’re monitoring all channels and sending a constant ping to each of their radios. If they come back into receiving range, we’ll find them. And if they come with friends, I’d like to have a way to deal with them.”

  The chief engineer grinned at him. “Actually, we’re there! I mean, not there there, but we’ve got a working idea of what happened here.”

  He waved at Joyce, who folded her arms as she spoke. “These aliens are physically dead. From what we’ve seen in the tissue samples, their cells don’t process oxygen anymore. They don’t need to breathe, eat, drink, or sleep, and we don’t think they can reproduce.”

  “That’s still gross,” muttered Maureen Habassa.

  “But we can’t tell if this is reversible unless we examine a whole zombie. We’re theorizing that their brains still have some neurons firing to account for them being, well, mobile.”

  “Neurons,” said Thomas. “They can still think?”

  “Yes. Most likely at a very basic level. If we could observe that process, we might be able to learn more about how that system stayed active despite the body ceasing to function.”

  Thomas chewed his lip. “Good work. Keep on it. I’ll check in again once we locate our missing people, but don’t count on getting one of the zombies to inspect. I don’t want to bring one aboard if we can avoid it.”

  He headed back to the bridge, bracing himself to tangle with the O&I suits again. He hoped that when they found their people, they wouldn’t be the zombies to be brought aboard.

  * * *

  Chris Fish paced faster than a racing hover on a straightaway. “How long?” he asked for the eighty-fourth time.

  “Twenty-five minutes,” said Viktor from his seat on the floor, leaning against the wall.

  “You didn’t even check the chronometer!”

  “You last asked only seconds ago. It is still twenty-five minutes.”