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cold hit her every
time. Why ZV affected some nerves and not others was a nut they hadn’t yet
cracked, but Ani was sure that somewhere amongst the legions of people toiling
away in the lab seven days a week, one of them, somewhere, was working on exactly
that problem at exactly that moment.
    She set her iPod to shuffle classical music. It
started with the Boston Pops. Close enough. She shut her eyes, slid the
rest of the way under the liquid, and pushed the “close” button.
    Whenever Joe was nice to her, all she could think
of was prom.
     
    *  
*   *
     
    “Put your hands over your head, please,” Dr. Banerjee
said. As usual, the hazmat suit muffled his voice to the point where Ani couldn’t
understand him, but it carried just fine over the speakers on the wall.
    Ani did as she was told, and her mom reached
around from behind her and lifted her shirt to expose her torso, the thick
rubber gloves making the task more of a chore than it should have been.
    “This will hurt,” Dr. Banerjee said. It always
did, but he always warned her. The thing he used was kind of like a syringe,
but bigger and uglier, and instead of drawing blood or other fluids it took a
tiny cylinder of flesh that Sam called a “core sample.” Dr. Banerjee placed it
between two of her ribs and pressed, punching it straight through her torso and
out her back. She gritted her teeth and tried to smile at her mom in the mirror
at the same time. It looked like a sneer.
    A sunken depression, almost gone, was all that
remained from the grease burn she had gotten at the Fall Foliage Festival a
lifetime ago. The treatments that Dr. Banerjee had at his disposal made some of
what her mom had been doing look like child’s play. Then again, her mom’s work
on an actual cure had outstripped anything Dr. Banerjee and his team had done
in the previous decade.
    It hurt more when he pulled the thing out. He
placed the red, drippy, nasty thing in a biohazard tray, slid the tray into the
wall, and resealed the room. The precautions they once used to prevent possible
infection or escape of the zombie virus now served only to make sure that their
samples were pure. Her mom’s ZV suppressors had advanced to the point that as
long as the dead had regular injections, there was zero risk of infection.
    As if on cue, her mom stabbed a syringe into the
back of her skull. She didn’t feel it except as a vague prick. It’s weird
that the brain doesn’t have any nerves. She used to need injections every
two to three days, but with the new formula, it was down to once a week.
    Her mom pulled out the needle, dropped it into a
biohazard bag, and stepped to the side. Dr. Banerjee paced and recited his
observations into the microphone as he did every week. No physiological
changes, no psychological changes, virology results pending—but of course they
would be no different—and no other changes of note. Same as last week, and the
eighteen weeks previous.
    After a long wait Ani was released and allowed to
go back home. She straightened her clothes, put on her wig, and walked out of
the airlock. She glanced into the next observation room on her way and stopped
in surprise. Dr. Banerjee pressed the plunger on a syringe filled with some
kind of green liquid, injecting it into Mike’s arm. Her mom was nowhere to be
seen.
    Dr. Banerjee’s soft, brown eyes rested on hers. After
a long moment, he dropped the syringe into a biohazard bag and turned away from
the door. Ani frowned.
     
    *  
*   *
     
    “I miss church,” Lydia whispered. She fiddled with
the silver cross at her neck and looked at the clock. Ani followed her gaze. 11:00
am Sunday. It’s got to be hard to be a Baptist zombie. Especially when your
preacher organized marches encouraging the government to send you to hell where
you belong.
    “Shush,” Ani said, patting Lydia’s knee and
returning her eyes to the performance. Kyle’s riff wasn’t anything special, but
he wasn’t murdering the bass like he