Payne of the Bites (Pt. 3)

"A lab assistant and her boss finally stop walking back and forth from deep beneath to celebrate their latest scientific discovery." They were about to hang up the phone with the Umbrella Corporation, a bio-warfare firm, when the request to begin testing on the new specimen itself arrived. The bio-specimens that the subterranean lab had been working on consistently began to evolve into John Wick, the heir to the Legendary Hitman Agent 47 and the Baba Yaga himself.

The purpose of these bio-specimens is to have a weapon of mass devastation ready to tear the entire fabric of the One World Government apart, leaving it in ashes when world governments ultimately join forces." The three remaining survivors of our story had only just began their quest when they eventually departed the Blood Harvest Cabin in North Carolina.

The survivors had just witnessed the undead consume and slaughter their slain veietnam veteran Bill. Moans and roars erupted from within the pale walkers, and Bill could only hear horrific screeches of misery and dread that night. Bill's eternal location had simply been a different form of pain in and of itself.

As the last survivors managed to fill up and hot wire a pale grey mini van to flee the Blood Harvest Cabin, memories of life before the outbreak became ideal for someone like Louis. Louis calculated his ammo and provisions for the hours and days ahead in the back of the vehicle as Zoey and Francis rode in the front.

As Louis tried to remember nicer times during the apocalypse, he reasoned that a power nap may suffice. Louis recalled him and his sister Veronica playing in the hospital where their parents worked, Mercy Hospital. That night, Louis reflected long and hard about the day Veronica had played an intensive game of hide and seek with him in the hospital.

Louis had become stuck behind a morgue locker full of frozen corpses on this particular day. Veronica had locked Louis inside as a joke, and it had come as a surprise to her that Louis had also been imprisoned with all of the cutting equipment.

Louis swears he saw a woman with plastic wrapped over her head coming at him with a bone saw when the lights in the locker flickered on and off. Louis had been frightened to death in a corner when Veronica eventually answered the door, saying he had been attacked. Apart from the two siblings and the frozen corpses, there had been no one else in the locker.

Nonetheless, a cut across Louis' head was bleeding profusely. Perhaps the night of firing and running caused Louis to go from pleased to melancholy in an instant. One thing was certain: Louis knew he was one of the four survivors who wished he had known about the zombie epidemic sooner. Louis had lived the life of a white-collar office worker who had once been an army veteran when life was more stable than calm. Growing up in a family with numerous doctors and nurses led Louis to be labeled as the "black sheep" of his family.

Louis's family was ironically embarrassed by his desire to join the service and kill people rather than heal them. Louis's one true love in this life was his twin sister, Veronica. They were born identical siblings, living a life in which they assumed they would grow up and die together. They had this peculiar, acute ability to constantly know what each other was thinking and feeling. Following a near-fatal vehicle accident in her mid-twenties, physicians prescribed Veronica a lethal dose of painkiller medication.

While Louis was deployed overseas, Veronica’s pill addiction grew stronger. Weeks before Louis was stationed to return home, Veronica had overdosed at work during one of her night shifts. When Louis finally got a chance to say his goodbyes at Veronica’s grave site, he had just received the news from base that within a few hours there would be full blown media coverage about an undead outbreak. Gathering all his belongings that night, Louis eventually managed to link up with Bill, Zoey, and Francis at an intersection in the city.

Copyright © 2018 LUiS Thompson