SPACESHIP ZOMBIE CRUISE

FILE ENTRY 18.0

The medical bay is on the eighth floor, and the concourse is on the third. That's where Grayson Flux's office is located. That means he has five floors to descend. Five entry points for the infected.

Mintaka turns on the first landing and eases down the steps with light feet. He scrunches his nose. A smell. Something horrible. He'd caught a faint trace of it in the medical bay when the pandemonium broke out among the patients. He had paid little attention to it since he was fighting to stay alive, but now the odor stinks like something putrid. It offends his nostrils, makes him lose control of his thoughts. He grips the handrail, stops his descent, and shakes his head. Tries to bring his mind back on-line like restoring order to a malfunctioning computer system.

He reaches the doorway to the seventh level of the station. On the other side of the door, footfalls thud across the floor and race away. Out in the corridor, further down, someone screams. The footfalls intensify, accompanied by inhuman groans and a disturbing howl that pierces Mintaka's ears. His heart pounds. Breath gasps in his throat. He gulps air. Swallows and blinks.

At his feet, light from the seventh floor creeps into the stairwell. Mintaka regains control, if only for a moment.

This is not the floor he's looking for, so he pushes on.

The sixth floor is quiet and dark. Someone has cut off the lights.

He doesn't waste time, instead he pushes lower. The fifth floor and the fourth. Light seeps through the crack at the bottom of the door. The power is still on, which means someone or something had turned off the lights on the sixth floor. Still, he hasn't encountered the guard yet, the one assigned to the doorway on the eighth floor, which leads to the medical bay. Maybe the infected had attacked and dragged him from the stairwell and eaten him alive on one of the lower floors. In the medical bay, Mintaka had witnessed them devouring unconscious patients and the nurses. He knows what the infected are capable of.

Mintaka halts at the entrance to the third floor, the concourse level where most of the activity occurs on the station. It's late, most of the guests should have retired for the night to their rooms. Which explains why he'd heard the sounds of the sick on the floors above where the hotel suites are located, sounds of the infected chasing the people who aren't sick.

He hesitates before pushing through the doorway to the concourse. A possibility comes to mind. Why isn't he sick? Why are some people not infected? Maybe it's timing? All the guests at the hotel might be infected but have yet to develop the sickness? Or they could be carriers only? Not symptomatic. Or...

They might be immune?

He ponders the thought for a long moment, breathing slowly.

The idea twists and turns inside his head. Without blood tests, only time will tell if he's right. His hand presses against the door, but his body goes ridged. His mind is a billion miles away... on Mars... where scientists researched, manufactured, and created the inoculations in a lab. But that isn't where they originated.

Vesta. The asteroid in The Belt. He'd visited the underground facility on Mars. He remembers the clean whiteness of the lab room floor, the microscopes, the test mice, rats, monkeys... and at the end of the trials... the humans.

Mintaka had left before the tests concluded. He witnessed the non-human test subjects. The drug, Vestazine, passed the initial trials without problems, but he departed the red planet before the human trials concluded. Electra Draco had assured him of the drug's success... that the Federation's panel of doctors had approved it. That gives him reason to dismiss laying the blame on Vestazine, but Draco has connections and pressure points she can push if she wants to shove something through the approval stage. Does it matter at this point? The damage is done.

Developing a vaccine for a cure depends on understanding the origin of the virus causing the infection.

Before he can pursue the possibilities, he has to reach Grayson Flux. The resort manager's office is in the middle of the concourse across from several restaurants and fast-food joints. If anyone can get him in contact with the labs on Mars, it's Flux. But first, Mintaka needs to get an update on the repairs to the communication arrays. Until the maintenance teams restore the comms, they are isolated and alone on a dying station.

He glances down at the light coming from the bottom crack of the door. Something seems off. Mintaka switches off the night vision and double taps the LED lights on the frame of his glasses. The illumination reveals dark red streaks that appear to end under the doorway. Glare from the light coming from the bottom of the door had prevented him from seeing a dark spot on the floor. A sinking feeling tells him he's about to find out what happened to the security guard.

As Dr. Mintaka snaps out of the deepness of his thoughts, a group of the infected rush past the doorway. Once the stench fades away, he opens the door and creeps into what looks like a war zone, or better yet, the bowels of hell.