Ockham’s Razor

The Procurement Committee—long defunct but now apparently reinstated for some emergency reason—came and got her later that evening. At the time, Alexis was sifting through her collection of movies trying to find any she wanted to watch again or any she wanted to borrow. Courtney was lying on the couch, listening to music through headphones and trying to get used to having someone else hanging around. It wasn’t too bad though. It was reminiscent of before, when she would have friends over at her house in Florida. The Procurement Committee, however, interrupted just before she could get entirely comfortable with it again.

They came knocking and very politely said, “Miss Colvin, we’d like you to come to the conference room if you don’t mind.”

She asked, “Why? What’s going on?”

“It will all be explained once you get there,” they told her. “Come along now.”

So she did.

Alexis followed her to the hotel in her own cart since her bartending shift was almost ready to begin, but Courtney ventured alone into the conference room and sat down in one of the chairs around the circular table.

Leon was there too. So were Vaughn Winters and Delmas Ridenour. Soon Mike Newcome showed up, followed by Christopher Gooden.

The remnants of the Strike Team.

They all appeared to be just as uninformed as Courtney.

Though it had been two years since a meeting of this type was held, everything appeared the same as it used to. The brown executive-style walls of the conference room remained outdated and ugly. The marker-stained whiteboard was still nearby in all its imposing glory and the Flag of the United States of America and the state flag of Rhode Island were still hanging from their respective poles on either side. The big oval table and the comfy leather swivel chairs that surrounded it were also just as Courtney remembered them.

The four members of the Procurement Committee were sitting in less-comfy chairs lined along the wall and a typist was sitting in the far corner of the room, ready to transcribe the events of the meeting for posterity’s sake. Ervin Wright, the man who originally introduced the Odd Fellow system of government to Eastpointe, was sitting in the chair reserved for the Superintendent. Courtney figured he must have gotten re-elected at the last showing of hands.

At least now she knew for certain who was in charge.

Though the Superintendent and Procurement Committee members had changed since these meetings were taking place with greater frequency, all appeared as it should.

However, this time around, someone new was with them in the room.

The man who had arrived that morning was sitting in the chair next to the Superintendent. He was wearing clean clothes now, so he must have been allowed to visit the plaza sometime that day. He was short and kind of stocky, as if his muscles were simply out of shape, and his hair was already thinning even though he only looked to be in his early thirties. Like most others in the post-apocalypse world, he was very pale. Since everyone had heard him speaking in a French-Canadian accent at the gate they assumed he came from somewhere near Montreal.

They were half right.

After the doors to the conference room were closed to give them privacy, the Superintendent stood and introduced the stranger.

“This man is Dr. Aaron Dane,” he said, motioning with a relaxed gesture. “When the zombie problem first began to get out of control, he was put aboard The Atlantic Princess, a cruiseliner that usually ports up north. In that time, the ship was commandeered and modified to be a floating research lab.” He turned to the new arrival. “Am I telling this correctly?”

The man nodded and said, “That’s the short version.”

“He’s been on that ship for over four years,” Ervin continued, “But he’s found his way to us and he’s got some information you all might be keen on hearing.” He motioned back to the man. “Dr. Dane, the floor is yours.”

The man stood and glanced at everyone around the room, pausing noticeably longer when his eyes reached Courtney. She lowered her gaze to the very boring surface of the table and stared at it to let him know she wasn’t interested. His eyes eventually left her and once he felt he had everyone’s attention he began rolling up the left sleeve of his shirt.

Just as most of them had already seen when he first arrived at Eastpointe’s gate, there was a gaping bite wound on the thick, meaty area near his elbow. Teeth marks were evident, but up close, under the fluorescent lights, somehow the wound looked old.

He displayed his exposed forearm for a moment, then stated, “I was bitten over a year ago.”

Vaughn Winters, a member of the Strike Team who Courtney always thought was kind of creepy with that long black hair of his, posed the question everyone in the room wanted an answer to: “Then why aren’t you dead?”

“I’m a scientist,” Dr. Dane began, rolling his sleeve back down and buttoning the cuff. “That’s the short explanation of what I do—or what I did, anyway. Like your Superintendent was explaining to you, I was put aboard The Atlantic Princess to do research. The Army had sought me out and took me forcefully out of my home and tossed me in with some other researchers. We were ordered to figure out why the dead were rising, but we were never able to determine the cause. We still don’t have a clue.” He paused a moment before solemnly adding, “No one does.”

At this point Dr. Dane smoothed the back of his trousers with his palms and sat down again. He clasped his hands together and put them on the table, leaning forward very casually. He continued, “We were forced to work in very close quarters with the reanimated dead, drawing samples from them, gauging bite strength, things of that nature. Sooner or later something bad was bound to happen. And it did. I’m the last one left.” He lowered his eyes. “I kept on working though—even with malfunctioning equipment and limited tools and nobody answering my distress signals and all my dead colleagues locked away in the forecastle and in staterooms and making all kinds of racket. I was just floating aimlessly. I had no idea how to pilot a cruiseliner.”

“So how did you get here?” Vaughn asked.

“Luck,” Dane replied. “The ship beached itself on Point Judith a few days back. I climbed off, found a jeep with the keys still in the ignition, and here I am. And forgive me if I seem disturbingly calm about all this, but I’ve had over two years all to myself to consider what I would say if I ever found other survivors.”

“Like I told you,” Ervin soothingly told him, “Nobody will judge you.”

“Everyone here has been great,” Dane said, agreeing with the Superintendent.

“Whoa,” Vaughn interjected. “The only reason I’m still sitting here is because you still haven’t told us how you survived a zombie bite.”

“Because I found the Cure,” Dane replied. “Being all alone aboard a ship in the Atlantic with nothing but the sound of zombies to keep you company kind of makes you want to find a distraction. So I kept researching.”

“So how did you get bitten?”

Dane lowered his head and looked away slightly. He softly stated, “Because I let one bite me. I was alone. I thought I found the Cure but the only way to test it was to test it for real. I figured if it didn’t work, then at least I wouldn’t be alone anymore.”

This statement brought back memories for Courtney. She remembered the day she escaped Camp Rigero when nobody else had. She remembered getting out of the humvee to refuel it. She remembered the zombie crawling towards her and how she let it get so very close and even gave it a sporting chance before she put a bullet in its head.

“Wait a second,” Vaughn said, continuing to carry the brunt of everyone’s skepticism, “So you were bitten and you swallowed the antidote—”

“Injected the antidote,” Dane corrected.

“Whatever,” Vaughn continued. “Then in theory you should be immune to zombie bites.” He paused to show a smirk to everyone in the room. “So you won’t mind if we stick your hand out the gate and see what happens, right?”

One of the members of the Procurement Committee, who had been sitting quietly for some time, decided to tell Vaughn, “Show Dr. Dane some respect please.”

Vaughn shrugged his shoulders and leaned back in his chair indifferently. He mumbled, “I was just saying what everyone was thinking.”

“I wouldn’t exactly be thrilled with the idea of getting nibbled on,” Dane told him, remaining civil. “I’d be infected again. I’m not vaccinated. The Cure is a creation in and of itself. It’s not an antitoxin or an antidote. I should stop referring to it as such. I can’t call it a vaccine either because it doesn’t last indefinitely. Simply put, it destroys the infection then leaves the system. I wish I could explain more thoroughly, but you must understand this wasn’t my expertise when I joined the crew of the Princess. I’m no epidemiologist. I learned all this as I went along.”

Then Courtney’s good pal Leon decided to speak up. “I’m not understanding any of this,” he said. “Antitoxins, antidotes—what are you getting at?”

“There’s still no name for the disease those monsters carry,” Dane answered. “It’s not exactly poison, but it’s not exactly plague either. It’s somewhere along the lines of infection, but no one has isolated the difference between the saliva in a zombie and the saliva in living humans. We could never even determine why reanimated dead only sought out humans and not lower life forms.”

“Like politicians,” someone blurted.

“No, more like cats and dogs,” Dane replied, ignoring the joke entirely. “It’s all so complicated. Everything we know about them is only what we’ve been able to discover in the last five years and I’m not even talking collectively. If the science community as a whole could have gotten together on this, perhaps an answer to all these questions could have been found. Problem is, we started losing contact with sister stations all over the globe shortly after this crisis began. If everything worked like it should have, researchers in one area could be studying one aspect of the problem while researchers in a different area studied another. But instead, after all contact was lost, what we had was every researcher starting from scratch.”

“So how exactly did you come by a cure then?” Leon asked.

“Like I said: by going from scratch,” Dane replied. “I first accepted that death is a process, not an event. Except in the case of a nuclear bomb or something of that sort, different tissues and organs die at different speeds. We theorize that when a zombie bites someone, the germs spread through the body like a plague until they finally conquer the brain. Brain death seems to be what matters. After the brain is dead, the germs move in and reactivate it to a certain extent.”

“But you said no one has isolated the difference between zombie saliva and human saliva,” Vaughn pointed out. “So how do you know its germs causing it? How are you even positive it’s an infection?”

“I can only theorize,” Dane replied. “It works like an infection and dead people will only reanimate if they were bitten by a zombie—not if they died a natural death. So it must be an infection. I accepted this early on and that’s why I didn’t take the time to isolate the bacteria in zombie saliva. I had better things to focus my efforts on.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Do you really want to sit here and argue common knowledge?”

“I’m not arguing anything,” Vaughn replied. “I couldn’t care less. I don’t plan on ever becoming infected and I don’t see the point of this meeting. What are we getting at here?”

“You should let Dr. Dane finish speaking,” Ervin said.

Vaughn sighed and leaned back once more. He started twiddling his thumbs.

All was quiet for a while. Even the typist stopped his keystrokes, as he had nothing to transcribe at the moment. It almost seemed that Vaughn had been everyone’s source of enthusiasm and once he gave up so did the rest.

Finally Ervin said, “Dr. Dane is talking about a cure here, people.”

“We get that,” Leon answered. “It’s just that he’s awfully long-winded. Why can’t he just get to the point?”

“Fine then. I will,” Dane said. He crossed his arms and for the briefest of moments looked grumpy instead of pacified. He stated, very slowly, “I have the Cure to the zombie plague.”

“Yeah, that’s what we’re hearing,” Leon told him. “We just don’t believe you.”

Vaughn started chuckling under his breath. Even quiet Mike Newcome muttered, “I’ve only been here five minutes and I’m already bored.”

“Tell them the specifics,” Ervin said, trying to stay upbeat. “Tell them what you told me.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Dane replied. “I’ve been trying to explain that up until the point the infection reaches the brain, a person can still be saved. We can’t help the ones who are already dead. There’s no coming back from that. But we can stop the poison from reaching the brain and an infected person will recover.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Leon argued. “If you don’t know the exact bacteria that zombies carry, how can you have a cure for it?”

“I didn’t need to know the exact bacteria,” answered Dane. “It’s irrelevant. There wouldn’t be a name for it anyway, so I would have to name it. Do you want me throwing an invented name around? What purpose would that serve?”

Leon grunted and shrugged his shoulders. No one else said anything.

“Like I told you,” Dane continued, despite the calm, “Death is a process. Even though mitosis ceases after brain death, some tissues and organs will still live for up to twenty-four hours. Once the virus conquers the brain, it reactivates it. Any tissues and organs that are still alive upon brain death will continue to decay, but when they reach a certain point, they stabilize. And no, we don’t know why they stabilize. They just do. That’s why some zombies have been around since the beginning. Parts of them that were dead before brain death will continue to decay until they rot off. Parts that weren’t dead, on the other hand, will continue to function. It’s how they can still walk around.”

“Why are you telling us this?” Leon asked.

“Because I want you to understand that until the infection takes over the core of the brain, a person can be injected with the Cure. It will eliminate the infection and the sickness will go away and the body will begin to heal itself—provided that there hasn’t been a significant amount of blood loss or irreversible damage, of course. Say, for instance, a large neck wound.”

Courtney almost didn’t want to hear any more. Talk of a cure was just stupid. Even if it was real, why couldn’t it have been around when Gordon got bitten? Or when her mother got bitten? Why now, especially after so many people were already dead? What was the point?

She figured most everyone else in the room felt the same way she did.

“Look, I’ve had enough of this,” Ervin stated, standing up and rolling his eyes. “Listen to me, people. With the promise of a cure we could start taking more risks. We can send people through the gate and take back what was ours. We can expand beyond these walls without running too great a risk of casualties.”

“There’s always going to be a risk,” Courtney stated.

Ervin glared at her. She didn’t intend to anger him, but she didn’t care that she had either.

“Am I wrong to hope for better things?” Ervin asked. “Am I wrong to want the people in Eastpointe to stop living in fear?”

“I agree with Courtney,” Vaughn said. “Dr. Doom here—”

“Dane.”

“Dane, whatever, hasn’t really explained anything. We know corpses started getting up and eating people. Even if they didn’t have the means to digest them or even chew them, all they can think about is: us equals food. We know they carry a disease of some sort and to become infected is to become one of them. We’ve lived with this knowledge for five years. So what the hell do you want from us?”

“I’ll tell you what he wants,” Leon interjected, “He wants us to go get it because he doesn’t actually have it. Why else would we be here?”

“That’s what I’ve been assuming all along,” Vaughn said.

“And your assumption would be correct,” Ervin stated. “Dr. Dane tried bringing several samples of the Cure with him, but they were lost in an attack as he was salvaging that jeep he used to get here. But there’s more of the Cure aboard The Atlantic Princess. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

Dane nodded.

“Wow, he’s a man among men,” Vaughn mumbled.

“The six of you have been given a free pass!” Ervin shouted, startling the group of Black Berets. None of them expected such a loud voice from such an old man. “For two years you haven’t had to lift a finger around here and I’m sick of it!”

“But there used to be more of us than what you see in this room now,” Vaughn retorted. “The rest are dead so you could have your cows and chickens.”

“And no more have to die,” Ervin countered. “That’s the point. An antidote exists. You saw the bite on Dr. Dane’s arm. What further proof do you need?”

Vaughn smirked and chuckled some more. He stated, “Listen, Grand Pooh-Bah—Dr. Doom here is about five years too late. We would gladly oblige you and go fetch this Cure if it had existed a few years ago, but now it doesn’t matter. The zombies are rotting away. We just have to wait them out.”

“But the zombies are not rotting away,” Dr. Dane chimed. “There will be enough to last until the next doomsday. Did you not hear me when I told you that whatever parts of them were not dead to begin with would go on functioning?”

Courtney, growing annoyed with the arguing, decided to speak up in a constructive manner. She asked, “Wait a second. Why can’t you just recreate the antidote here?”

Dane turned to her and smiled, seemingly happy that she had spoken directly to him. He softly explained, “Because the process took me the better part of two years.”

“Two years?”

“Yes. I worked under the postulate that an infection will continue to spread through the blood of a human until it reached the core of the brain. But ask yourself this: What if there was no brain to reach? No ultimate goal? What would happen then?”

Courtney shrugged her shoulders and replied, “What is this, a science lesson?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to go into the gory details, but needless to say I was forced to use a replicated environment of a human body. I kept adding endless supplies of clean blood to blood that was already infected, surmising that the infection would continue to spread into the clean blood, but since there was no actual body, there was no actual brain. For months and months I kept adding new blood for the infection to consume, wondering just how determined and persistent it truly was. How long would it take before the infection would give up and render itself into a dormant state? Finally, I performed a test.”

“And?”

“And, I theorized that if new infection encountered any dormant infection, it would assume there was no brain to contaminate and it would therefore become dormant also. So, by injecting dormant infection—the Cure—into an infected human being, the infection process stops when it collides with any dormant area. The infection is then naturally flushed out of the system as a whole and the body recovers in a matter of hours.”

“Which means it doesn’t die and become another zombie,” Ervin added. “It won’t die at all.”

“Correct,” Dane said.

All was uneasily quiet in the conference room for the next several minutes. No one was sure exactly how this calm came about, but they figured everything that needed to be said had been said. Now they were all just waiting for something to happen.

The typist over in the far corner was sitting motionless with his fingers hovering above the keyboard, eagerly waiting for another syllable to be spoken so it could be documented. The Procurement Committee was sitting patiently with their legs crossed and their arms folded, perhaps waiting for a signal from the Superintendent. Ervin himself was silently drumming his fingers on the table and Dr. Dane was just watching the Strike Team meditate over what he had told them.

What was there to say?

Courtney exchanged glances with the rest of the people she had ventured out of the gate with years before. It was because of them that Eastpointe had become fully self-sufficient, with plenty of supplies and an endless chain of sustenance. Because of them, it was safe here and there was never again a reason to go outside into a world where they would be hunted for the very flesh on their bones.

But there used to be more.

There were seven Black Berets to start with. Now there were six. The seventh had had his visor snatched away by a particularly sneaky zombie and then a chunk of flesh eaten off his exposed scalp. A couple of well-prepared citizens of Eastpointe had been in the original Strike Team as well, but they didn’t last long. Even a couple of honest-to-god soldiers had aided them in their endeavors, but they weren’t here anymore either.

Now the remaining six were living fairly comfortably, given a free pass to live off the fruit of their labors without any more actual work, but that wasn’t what was important. Two years had passed since any of them had been in any real danger—any real threat of losing another member of their group. Before, when the Committees were sending them through the gate at least once a month, there had been no desire to establish any kind of bond between them aside from the trust factor. After all, they knew there might come a time when one would have to shoot another to prevent them from joining the enemy ranks and there couldn’t be any hesitation to do what had to be done.

But now there was supposedly a Cure.

Now they were hearing that when a member of their group had been bitten, there might not have been a reason to administer a lethal dose of drugs and put a bullet in their head. Why bother fetching a cure now, after all the things they had been forced to do to preserve the humanity of those who had fallen? Humanity as a whole prayed for a cure since the beginning—but just as Vaughn had pointed out, it may have come a little too late.

That wasn’t even the half of it.

While Courtney had remained alone since arriving at Eastpointe, she knew what the rest were pondering over in their silence. Now, since the danger was gone and they could go back to being regular people again, an inner circle had formed in the group. Courtney knew Mike and Delmas were people Leon played badminton with and she was fairly certain the others had developed some kind of relationship as well in the time following their last trip through the gate. And now—especially now—when it seemed possible she herself might find friends here even after her years in hiding, she wasn’t sure she would want to risk losing it.

Actually, she knew she didn’t want to risk it.

Then again, what had been bothering her for so long was that she knew the world had ended. Even in her conversation with Alexis she had pointed out that hope just wasn’t a possibility anymore. Human beings were no longer the dominant species on Earth. Now there was just the last bastion of survivors tucked away in a tiny spot on the globe with walls blocking out the true reality of the situation and giving the illusion that the world outside didn’t exist. For all she knew, the last survivors—with their last operational power plant and their last operational water treatment facility—were going on pretending things could go back to normal.

But she knew the reality of it. She had not been so far removed from it like the others had—not with the nightmare of the corridor haunting her almost nightly and the memories of the life she once had still fresh in her consciousness. It was all part of the consequences of being so long removed from the illusion everyone else was sharing. The world on the other side of the wall was very real and it wasn’t going away.

Maybe the Cure was just what everyone needed. Just like the Superintendent stated, with the promise of a cure, humanity could make an effort to fight back. It meant that one day maybe there would be Oreos and Cheerios and Spaghettios again, not to mention fresh Sprite. She knew it wouldn’t happen right away, but if there was a Cure, then at least there was hope that someday things would be normal again.

So, after the long, penetrating silence had overwhelmed everyone else in the conference room at the Eastpointe Hotel, Courtney slowly raised her hand and stated, “I’ll do it.”

Every head turned to her.

She didn’t lower hers. She stared right back at them.

After a moment, Leon raised his hand alongside hers and stated, “Same here.”

Courtney showed him a silent, thankful nod, which he returned.

The Superintendent looked expectantly upon the other four Black Berets. Mike Newcome’s hand was next to shoot up, followed in a few seconds by the hands of Delmas Ridenour and Christopher Gooden.

They all looked at Vaughn Winters.

After a moment he told them, “Okay. I’ll put my hand up on one condition: If I get bitten on this little escapade, you’ll bring me back here so I can bite off Ervin’s nose. That’ll be the only ‘Cure’ I need.”

He put his hand up.

A smile then began to become apparent on Dr. Dane’s otherwise emotionless visage.