SPACESHIP ZOMBIE CRUISE

FILE ENTRY 14.0

Dr. Jett Mintaka

At Neptune Shores, many sick men and women, and a ten-year-old boy, occupy all thirty beds in the medical bay. Patients fill the adjoining overflow room too, an additional fifty beds. With more people lining the outer corridor, the infected count soars to over a hundred people and rising.

Dr. Jett Mintaka wipes sweat from his brow and hovers over an electron microscope, blinking twice before his eye hones in on the blood sample taken from Patient One, the first person brought into the medical bay, and the first person to develop a fever. The patient is a man, twenty-six years old, five-foot-nine inches tall and estimated to weigh one hundred and seventy pounds. At last check, the man had a 104.1 degree fever. Under high magnification, Dr. Mintaka observes the living cells of Patient One, watching the process of infection. Actually, the process has already taken place. The virus has invaded the body through some unknown means, attached itself to the patient's cells and injected its genetic material, taking over the host cells, reproducing itself, replicating, and infecting more cells.

The blood tests confirm a viral infection, but one of an unknown origin. Mintaka has ordered a round of antiviral drugs because the virus reminds him of influenza, although by his estimation it's far from it. Only time will tell if the treatments will work. Currently, it has yet to stop the virus or slow it down, and ibuprofen or acetaminophen does little to reduce the fever. If the sick recover, they'll have to let the virus run its course. That's what bothers Dr. Mintaka. When the outbreak ends, he wonders if there will be anyone left but the dead.

As an icy chill sweeps over him, he grimaces and rises from the chair at the lab table. His eye drifts across the medical bay. People suffer from nausea, headaches, and chills, accompanied by high fever.

Dr. Mintaka steps into his office and falls into his chair, the door standing half open, a slim view of several patients in their assigned beds. A mask covers his face, but he wonders if it will do any good.

He closes his eyes and runs a hand through his hair, trying to smooth away the anxiety pressing in on him. The quarantine has been effective, so far, but the number of sick continues to grow. Isolating them to the eighth floor has been the right move. The only move from Mintaka's perspective. With a veteran security chief like Maxwell Armando on the job, law and order should hold up. The thing he worries about is Armando taking the quarantine too seriously. Before his assignment to Neptune Shores, Armando ran security at the Space Venture headquarters in San Diego. They'd known him for being strict and having an itchy trigger finger. He was a washed up detective cut from the L.A. Police Department. After an interview with Electra Draco, he landed the job with Space Venture and ended up at the resort.

A patient whimpers, drawing Mintaka's glare.

He activates his tablet and patches a video call through to Grayson Flux. The resort manager looks like he's grown a few more gray hairs and his beard is wild. He's been running his fingers through it. He tosses back a shot of whiskey and winces. "Any luck in the med bay?"

"Things are digressing fast. That's why I wanted to talk to you. I think the next step should be to isolate the guests, restrain them to their rooms. Keeping people away from each other could keep the outbreak from spreading."

In the medical bay, an intense groan, more like a growl, distracts Mintaka. He glances up from the hologram of Grayson Flux.

A nurse rushes past his door, disappears from view.

"I'll take your suggestion into consideration," Flux says. "But I don't want to alarm the guests just because we have a few sick people."

Mintaka's gaze whips back to Flux. "A few sick people? What are you talking about? I have over a hundred people burning up with fever, and your security staff hasn't stopped bringing in the infected. There's a virus on the loose and we have to stop it before it—"

Motion catches his eye. Someone darts past his office door. Something hits the floor. Sounds like a bedpan.

"Don't bloody fall apart on me," Flux says. "I need you to fix this."

Mintaka can't bring himself to look at Flux; he can only stare at the gap between his office door and the frame. In a nearby bed, a patient writhes in pain, cries out as things spiral out of control.

Out of sight, something crashes to the floor. An IV stand? Maybe?

"I have to go." Mintaka swipes at Flux's image and powers down his tablet.

He pops up, his chair swinging to the side, and pushes through the door into the main chamber of the medical bay.

Alarms blare on the monitors next to the beds to the right. Patient's One and Two have flatlined. Two nurses scurry to their sides, crying out for Dr. Mintaka to get the defibrillator ready.

He opens a glass cabinet and removes the square unit with the paddles. The nurse attending to Patient One, the young man in his mid-twenties, takes the defibrillator unit and starts the charge. It powers up in seconds.

Mintaka says, "Clear."

Before he can lower the paddles and attempt to shock the patient's heart back to life, the man's eyes shoot open, cloudy white and bloodshot. Mintaka glances at the monitor—still no heartbeat—not one that can be detected, anyway. The man appears to be clinically dead, but he's alive. How can this be?

The man grabs the nurse by the arm and bites down like he's tearing into a steak. He rips the flesh from her wrist, blood squirting out across the floor and landing on the patient in the next bed.

Both nurses are standing next to Mintaka. The one with the bitten wrist screams, her cry filling the room.

That's when Patient Two leaps up from her bed and gazes about with the same milky eyes as Patient One. She jumps onto a nearby bed and bites down on the unconscious woman's neck, blood spilling onto the white sheets.

Mintaka backpedals, losing his grip on the defibrillator paddles—they go crashing to the floor as he holds his arms out in defense. The uninjured nurse races over to stop the woman, who is on a bed, devouring another patient.

Patient One lunges at the nurse he'd bitten and throws her to the floor as she clutches her seeping wrist.

More alarms blare.

More patients flatline.

Mintaka watches in indescribable horror as Patient One snuffs out the life of his nurse... with his teeth. He goes for her neck as she writhes and tries to free herself, but it's no use. In seconds, she stops moving and all Mintaka can do is stare, fear struck.

Over in the far corner, the other nurse cries out as Patient Two holds her down and bites into her flesh. Blood stains the white floor, splattered and smeared.

Finally, Mintaka comes to himself. He charges at Patient Two, latches onto her shoulders, and slings her to the floor. She rolls and regains her feet at the end of the tumble, sets her glazed eyes on Dr. Mintaka.

She launches herself at him, trying to tackle him and pull him down.

Mintaka spins and uses her motion against her, tossing her into a nearby bed before she bounces off of it and clatters against the wall.

Shellshocked and confused, he scrambles for the exit to the medical bay. Both of his nurses are dead. The room is descending into chaos. There's nothing he can do to stop it.

As Mintaka nears the door, Patient One looks up and leaps for him, but this time, he expects the attack.

Mintaka reaches over and wraps his palm around the top of an IV stand and whirls it through the air like a bamboo sword. The circular end of the stand slams into the man's temple and sends him hurling to the floor, but he doesn't stay down long.

Dr. Mintaka takes one last look around the medical bay before he opens the door and flees. The alarms sound on every monitor. All thirty patients have flatlined, and a growing number of the dead convulse in their beds. One dead person after another sits up and twists their necks to the sides, their cloudy bloodshot eyes searching for a victim, which can only be Mintaka.

The doctor's eyes widen at the bloodshed, and then he bursts from the room, slamming the door shut behind him, fleeing for his life.