Read Online Zombie Ever After by Carl S. Plumer - Free Book Online

and crying like a baby.  
    He did neither.
    He simply said, “May I see the body?” And then, in a whisper, “Please?” Donovan felt a hundred years old and like dying himself.

Chapter 23

    So, Dr. Portanova, in your opinion, what was the cause of the eventual catastrophe?
    Well, there were problems we, as a team, were ignoring. First of all, all of the electrical activity was wrong. It was like it was upside down. We didn’t realize it at the time, but the activity closely matched the brain activity found in serial killers.  
    So, in other words, while these frozen heads were coming alive, they were becoming serial killers? Is that what you were thinking?
    Right. Of course, none of our findings, or even that the results of these experiments existed, was ever communicated to the authorities. Not to the local overseeing bodies, or national, or CDC.
    Why? That makes no sense—the secrecy.
    Why? Because Burkhart Egesa was truly thinking he was God now. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t answer to anyone.

Chapter 24

    “Here we go,” the receptionist said, pushing open a large set of doors.  
    Donovan stepped into a slightly chilly, slightly dark room. Tile shrouded the floor, ceiling, and walls. Drains strategically dotted the floor. Two sets of hoses, one on the left wall and one straight ahead, hung like red rubber nooses. Donovan felt as if he’d fell into the deep end of an empty, abandoned city pool.
    Only a single corpse, covered by a sheet, lay on a stainless steel table. Three other polished and empty tables lined the walls. The light over the body, a large round metal cone, was off. Only a single row of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling near the door illuminated the room. Donovan took a tentative step forward to the occupied table.  
    Please, don’t let it be her. Let this be some crazy fuck-up. Let Cathren still be with me and this be some other Catherine Whitney, some old lady who’d died of natural causes. Not my Cathren....
    He forced himself to take the corner of the sheet and pull it back. It was his Cathren after all. Looking alien, unreal. She was too young to die. Too pretty—it was crazy, he knew, but he felt it anyway—too pretty to be dead. To be a corpse. Her skin was the color of a used bar of bath soap. It looked slick, opaque. Not like human skin. He couldn’t see Cathren at all in the dead body in front of him. He couldn’t stand the sight of her like that. But he couldn’t look away. Couldn’t drop his hand.
    He wanted someone to fix this, someone to make it right. At twenty-four, someone to hold him and comfort him. After all his “conquests,” all his desperate one-night stands, he had actually connected to no one. Not a single soul.
    Until her.
    And now she was gone.
    He finally dropped the sheet and his shoulders fell. He began to weep. For Cathren. For himself. For every promise he’d ever broken. For every lie he ever told. For every time he didn’t tell his mother that he loved her when he’d had the chance. Or his father.  
    Or Cathren.  
    That he loved her so much more than he’d ever suspected.

Chapter 25

    Donovan left the hospital, or at least now realized he had left, because suddenly he found himself walking along Hyde Street, heading toward the waterfront.
    He passed some folks who looked very sick. Water-drinkers, the pallor of death upon them. Whatever poisons had contaminated the water, courtesy of ATELIC Industries, they were having seriously deadly effects.
    Donovan slouched his way along Fisherman’s Wharf, devoid of emotion, feeling nothing except hopelessness. He headed into the public men’s room near the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company and ripped a foot or two of paper towel out of the dispenser. Turning on the hot water, he soaked the paper, then washed his face with it, as if trying to wake himself up from a sleepwalking nightmare.  
    A chunky guy came in wearing a wrinkled suit. He was mostly bald, with a sprig of red hair on the sides of