Chapter 7

Maxine was dead, to begin with.

It had been hours. Or maybe it had been days?

Max couldn’t tell; she was in a steel-walled room with no windows or other discernible features. The only way to tell one wall from the other was the long stainless steel table that doubled as a bed.

The air was strange, not that it smelled funny, but because it didn’t smell like anything at all. When she’d been in the van, she’d been aware of Jake, not just because she knew he was there, but because she could smell him, his life force. The very walls of the van drummed with the sound of his heart.

It was delicious.

Once they’d been picked up by the military patrol, they had separated her from themselves and Jake. Cuffed, muzzled and strapped to a backboard, they’d put her on a helicopter and transferred her to a military facility in Colorado. They asked her some questions like name, age, when she’d been bitten…

After another lap of her cell she flopped back on the metal bed, and pulled up the sleeve of the hospital issue thin cotton shirt. Her bite looked dead, black, and gray around the teeth marks. The deeper wounds were filled with thick congealed blood. She shook down the sleeve. “So much for my movie career.”

“I don’t know about that,” quipped a British accented voice. Max jumped, turning to find a pair of strange eyes peering at her through a slit in the wall she hasn’t seen before. “Perhaps it won’t be as the damsel in distress, but instead the monster eating her.”

The wall smoothly lifted and standing behind it was a tall thin man in a red velvet smoking jacket. His left eye squinted behind a monocle and he was leaning on a cane. No, not a man, a corpse, his flesh grey and ugly Max could tell at once that he smelled dead, like… her?

Her mind wondered why she wasn’t screaming and pulling herself to the back of her bed. Her body on the other hand knew this man wasn’t a threat to her.

“What are you?” Max asked.

“Who, my dear. Who am I would be the proper English.” The tall man walked to the middle of the room, his cane drumming against the metal floor. “Victor Barns the Third. But they call me the Baron here.”

“I’m Max,” she replied.

“Charmed, my dear,” the Baron said, inclining his head. He was too dapper to smell so bad.

“What do you people want with me?” She wrapped her arms around herself but she still couldn’t feel warm.

“I don’t want anything from you. I overheard the doctor talking about a victim that had been bitten yet still showing cognitive function.” He leaned more heavily on the cane and added conspiratorially, “Like myself.”

“I am not one of those damn zombies!” She slammed her hand down on the metal bed, causing the room to echo with the ring of it.

“Oh, you are. Brains, my good madam, brains.” He smiled showing gray teeth. “You are more too. Somehow you’ve kept part of your ego, even though your id has been completely rewritten.” Max jumped up, growling.

“I have no idea what you are talking about!”

He laughed and made for the wall as the loud tromp of military boots could be heard getting closer. Max started to follow after him but stopped when she found twenty men with assault rifles blocked the door. One of the men called out.

“Baron, you know this is a quarantine room! You are not to make contact with the subject.” The Baron waved off the man’s comment as he walked out looking slower than when he’d come in.

“Someone tell me what’s going on here!” Max yelled after them. Once the Baron was beyond the men with rifles he turned; he was tall enough to see over them. “Oh sweet Maxine Bait, the you and the good doctor are going to have a brilliant time.”

The door once again hissed closed and she was alone.

“You could have at least left me a guard to eat,” she mumbled.