Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [77]
I burst out a grunt of disgust and turned my back on the glass.
“Sarah, if you did decide to join me, we could be a remarkable team,” his voice continued behind me. “You are like a warrior woman from some extinct tribe. Think of what we could do with my brains and your brawn and, may I add, beauty. What do you say? Join me?”
I spun around to face him. “I would rather gnaw my own arms off.”
His brow arched through the glass and then he shook his head. “Well, it may come to that eventually, I’m afraid.”
“Aside from wanting to fuck my wife,” Dave snapped as his hand came to rest at the small of my back protectively, “what the hell are you thinking, Barnes? Were you involved in the zombie research? What the hell are you doing creating bionics?”
Barnes settled back into his chair and steepled his fingers in front of him.
“I wish I had been involved in the initial research. I’d heard about it, though it was deeply classified. But there are always whispers in the scientific community. But the research was in Seattle and I wasn’t able to get a transfer. They kept me here, working on other war elements. Like making soldiers stronger. Faster. More obedient.”
I blinked. “Making them bionic?”
“In a way.” Barnes shook his head. “What I told you about the plague hitting the city and us being in lockdown was true. When the alarms went off, though, I insisted that Robbie be brought down to the safety of the lab.”
“And what about his mother?” I asked softly.
“Let the bitch rot,” he snapped, his anger brightening his face in a rare display of his emotions. “She was sleeping with some army major anyway. A real man, she called him. I enjoyed watching her try to claw her way into the facility.”
“Wait, you watched her?” Dave asked in horror.
“Of course. I let her see that the boy was taken down to the labs. She begged the cameras, she pleaded with me… but I let the infected swarm over her. She was so torn apart, she didn’t even re-animate.”
I backed away from the window a step and stared. “Sadistic bastard.”
He shrugged. “Vengeance is commonplace in a world such as this. Are you saying that since the plague broke out you’ve never just killed someone because you didn’t like them? I mean, there’s no way you wouldn’t get away with it.”
“There’s been enough killing to last me a lifetime,” I said with a deep breath. “I don’t need to do it to frivolously satisfy my pride or my sense of moral outrage because someone took a parking place from me once.”
“Interesting that you compare stealing a parking place to stealing a wife,” Barnes said softly. “Either way, once she was dispensed with, the remaining survivors had to deal with the reality of our situation. And when one of the military men became ill, we realized that the infection had been brought down into the lab.”
I stared for a moment at Barnes and then let my gaze move to David.
“The infection came down here and you survived?” he asked in disbelief. “In this tight environment?”
“Well, we caught the man very quickly and confined him. In truth, his condition became very useful, for I was able to study him. I took core samples of his tissue, his brain, and using those I was able to begin work on various elements of the infection. One by one, I tested my theories first on the infected soldier, but then I needed to expand my research. So I picked others in our group of survivors.”
I covered my mouth. “So these people were trapped down here with you and you used them as guinea pigs.”
“No,” he said evenly through the speakers. “I used guinea pigs as guinea pigs. I used humans as test subjects. There were a few who caught on to my schemes, but they were easily isolated and taken care of. By the time the power generators went out