Anna

With a ragged sigh, Anna turned the final page of the bulky medical file and laid it almost reverently on the passenger seat. Lifting a shaking hand, she wiped cold sweat from her forehead and blew stray hair out of her eyes, trying desperately to cling onto some sort of sanity. Chris, her fiancé of two years, the love of her life had been reduced to the status of a lab rat, known as “subject Z”. Despite her training as a paramedic giving her an insight into the clinical assessment by the mysterious doctor who had examined the big man, she had still struggled with the enormity of the findings. The results of the blood tests, the data from the ECG, EEG, MRI and every other bloody acronym known to medical science was just staggering! Hormone production was off the charts due to a huge increase in the size of his hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Muscle mass had increased exponentially and bone density too, all in all the doctors had reported 100s of changes within Anna’s partner.  

The brown jacket of the file, liberally splashed with bio-hazard warnings and covered in the spidery scrawl of one of the doctors gave off a palpably menacing presence from the passenger seat of the ambulance. The intermediate conclusions of the scientific team was, if she was reading it correctly, frankly terrifying and this was after just a few hours of study, with a local hospital’s limited resources. She needed to find her crew mate - Gobbo and get his opinion, the older EMT was currently studying medical research and evaluation as part of his paramedic science degree, at least he was before the end of the fucking world… 

That, of course was easier said than done! Immediately after Chris’s death at the hands (well teeth!) of a crowd of zombies, she had swung by Gobbo’s house only to find that half the road had been destroyed by a huge gas explosion and hundreds of the infected swarming the place. For the last few days she had been laying low, sleeping fitfully on the hard trolley in the back of the ambulance and racking her brains as to where Gobbo would have taken his family, all the while working her way through the medical file. Now as she contemplated the last few paragraphs, she shed yet more tears for her lost love. All those tests, needles and probes with men in white coats hustling around him like he was some kind of lab animal…  

synapses fired off in her neocortex connecting neurons and triggering memories 

animal…  

her hippocampus joined in for the hell of it, pushing out various different images across her amygdala and into her visual cortex 

animal… 

Images of Gobbo’s wife – Lisa, dressed in a grubby polo (yet still looking stunning, damn her!) with the logo of the local animal shelter that she volunteered for, covered in cat hair and other by-products of the raggedy strays that she cleaned out every weekend. That’s where they would go! The shelter was out in the sticks, well away from the towns of Thanet. Set off the road, it would be hard to remember it was there at all and surrounded by high fences it would be pretty decent to defend from the few humans – infected or not, that would be likely to stumble upon it.  

With one last look at the file, she hid it back into the battered bag-for-life and slipped the ambulance into gear. Easing the 5.5 tonne vehicle out of the narrow lane that ran alongside the small wooded park where she had holed up for the night, she turned into Nash road and bought the vehicle to a gentle halt, blinking in the daylight that once again illuminated the signs of devastation that had befallen the Isle.  Fresh tears fell across her raw cheeks, as she saw bodies strewn about the tarmac and blood splashed liberally over the pavements. Among the corpse, the infected swayed and moaned as they picked at the cold flesh of those bodies too destroyed to reanimate and join their ranks. As one, the “living dead” turned their milky eyes toward the bright yellow emergency vehicle, the noise of its big diesel engine pulling their attention from their gruesome meals.  The tears dried up as Anna tightened her resolve, patting the baseball bat that rested across her lap for reassurance, proof that she had fought some tough and bloody battles to get her to this point. She was a survivor, she would make it…