Free Zombie Fever: Origins by B.M. Hodges

noise.
    “Tomas? Did you hear me? You have to turn off the machines running the stasis chamber. There should be a purge button on the control panel. Tomas? Are you still there? You have to shut it down. Shut it down, now,” she ordered.
    With the angle grinder in his hand still in his hand, Tomas circled around the source of the noise. A man in a white lab coat was crouched behind one of the vivisection machines and as he got closer he could hear him whispering.
    He grabbed the man by the collar and yanked him backward onto the floor. The cell phone that the man was whispering into slid across the tiles and under a table.
    “Who are you?” Tomas yelled, the burning fire of righteous anger fueling his attack as he took to one knee and, not giving him a chance to respond, repeatedly pounded the man’s face with the angle grinder.
    Dr. Greer was yelling into his ear, “Tomas! What’s going on! Tomas! Speak to me!”
    But he heard none of his.
    He was violence.
    He was animal.
    Sometime later, breathing heavily, his arms hanging limp at his side, the knuckles on his right hand scrapped and raw, the angle grinder coated in gore, Tomas stared blankly down at the blood from the man’s crushed nose and busted face. Teeth jutted from the crimson pool like remote islands around his head and the gold name tag with ‘Dr. Taverna’ hung from the torn lapel of his lab coat.
    Minutes passed as the scientist fought against death with Tomas standing over and watching.
    Dr. Taverna rasped and gurgled through his broken jaw, little bubbles of air escaping through the effluvia obstructing his nasal passages.
    He’s lucky to be alive.
    Tomas wiped his hand on his cargo pants and dug into his ear, pulling out the com-link to Dr. Greer and crushing it underfoot.
    Still hanging onto the angle grinder, he marched over to the stasis chamber.
    Screw Vitura.
    Screw Dr. Greer.
    I’m going to get my dad out of there and find a way to save him from the virus.
    He steadied the grinder against the base of the glass, intending to drain the fluid near the base, and then cut a hole large enough to squeeze Andy out of the chamber.
    “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a familiar voice said behind him.
    Tomas glanced back over his shoulder at Supervisor Bertrand and four security guards brandishing semi-automatics. In his periphery, he saw two other guards attending to Taverna. They hoisted him by his shoulders and legs and carried him out. “And what if I do? Are you going to shoot me?” He raised the arc grinder and flipped the switch, the blood on the blade splashing in spurts across the acrylic glass and Tomas’ face.
    “Well, that fluid inside the chamber is teeming with infection. If you don’t want to die an excruciating death akin to an Ebola fever, I suggest you do as I say.”
    One of the security guards fired a warning shot at his feet.
    Tomas was more stubborn than brave, and he would have tried to take them on. He knew that youth was on his side. He was considerably stronger than the forty-something guards due to that fact alone. And he would have if they were brandishing clubs or bared fists. But guns were another matter. Maybe it was the peace-loving Canadian-style neo-hippy upbringing, but he’d always had a healthy fear of firearms. Getting shot wasn’t in his plans.
    He switched the angle grinder off and its humming blade hummed to a stop.
    “Put the power tool down and raise your hands,” the lead guard commanded and Tomas complied, dropping the arc grinder onto the floor beside him and slowly raising his hands into the air.
    Two of the guards cautiously approached him, spread his legs and press him up against the stasis chamber, mashing his face into the glass. Tomas tried not to look at his father’s body and the humiliating way his private area had been mutilated and violated with the catheter and exposed for anyone to see. It filled him with renewed rage.
    As he was frisked, Supervisor Bertrand gloated, “You