Free Zombie Zero by J.K. Norry

lantern high, sweeping the space with light, and stepped through the carved stone doorway. She approached the sarcophagus, her dark eyes wide with wonder. Climbing carefully inside, she laid back slowly on the flat stone bottom. The white and dark and black of her eyes went to complete liquid darkness, and then they swirled with the colors of shifting sand.

Chapter 7
    The communications between the crew on Mars and the crew on Earth were primarily typed messages. A video recording could be sent, but two-way calls were impossibly awkward. As much as twenty minutes could pass while the signal flew through space to be translated electronically, and that was just one way. Still, Adams activated the live feed and began talking in hopes of a swift response. He was reporting on their shocking discovery, a pile of corpses that looked like they ran out of food before they ran out of air. They had apparently been up here for some time, although they had been preserved almost perfectly by the airless vacuum they were found in. Adams didn’t know whether he was more disturbed by the fact that they had obviously been human, or that they had obviously started eating each other. He also needed to know why the supply ship had received a change in their itinerary while en route. The new orders said to dock, and wait, rather than start on the return trip to Earth. It didn’t make sense; the planets were drifting further apart, and every moment that passed made the journey a longer one. Very far away, in the same moment…
     
    “Maya, what are you doing?”
    Mallory was the first in the room, and he saw her looking over the edge of the stone coffin. There was something strange about her eyes, but he hardly noticed for the shock of seeing the upthrust sarcophagus. She was sitting up in the coffin, smiling, as he came to kneel beside her in the sand. His gaze was on the stone box, the carvings along the sides and the markings on the front.
    “Are you alright?” He glanced at her as the others filed into the room, and this time he did notice her eyes. For a moment they were Maya’s eyes, dark and penetrating and beautiful. They swirled with black, and then they were orbs of shifting sand.
    “I’m wonderful, professor.” Maya smiled. “Won’t you join me?”
    His face was a mask of confusion for a moment. His eyes dropped to the edge of the box; when they rose to meet hers again, they swirled with the colors of shifting sand.
    “Of course,” Mallory said, dropping his head.
    Todd was next, elbowing Allen aside to kneel beside Mallory.
    “Maya,” he said. “What are you doing in there?”
    “She is reborn,” Mallory murmured.
    “What?” Todd nudged Mallory. “Professor, are you-”
    As Elayna knelt on Mallory’s other side, Todd’s eyes swirled with shifting sand, and he nodded.
    “Oh,” he said. “She is reborn. She is beautiful.”
    “She is beautiful,” Elayna sighed, the color in her eyes gone as well.
    They turned to Allen as he came up behind them.
    “Guys,” he said. “What’s going on?”
    For a shocked forever moment he stood there, looking at them each slowly in turn. Allen felt tendrils of electricity tickle his brain, he saw broken images flash behind his eyes, he felt the fingers of a pleasant invasion stab into his head. As his eyes fell on Maya, he seemed to flip from her perspective to his a dozen times in a blink; he couldn’t remember if he was him or her in that blink. Then the electricity fired throughout his brain, the images became a bank of scenes behind his eyes, and the pleasant invasion turned to complete occupation. Allen’s eyes swirled with the colors of shifting sand, and he stepped forward.
    “Maya,” he breathed. “Mother to us all.”
    “I’m so hungry,” Todd groaned.
    Allen turned at the strange sound that had become Todd’s voice. He saw that Todd’s skin had gone to a pale dead gray. Todd looked at him sideways and smiled, and Allen saw a set of jagged biting teeth