Chương 3: The world must live, lest manga fall into endless night…!
CHAPTER 2
The world must live, lest manga fall into endless night…!
The steel door with the little glass window didn't block the bracer's scan. Yurian technology far surpassed Earth's. Zhane's bracer detected their life signs down to the levels of infection each one suffered. Cerebral function was approaching critical.
Zhane knocked on the little window but the people inside didn't even twitch. He tried again but the only response came from the teen girl. She tried to stand, calling out to him. The others were slumped, senseless.
She's the youngest, they took better care of her then themselves by the looks of it.
Zhane pulled out his foot-long blade and with a quick stroke the door latch split in two. The door opened. The big man with the knife who'd been guarding the door fell out and lay still on the floor. The knife clattered from his hand.
Zhane opened the door wider and stepped in over the sprawled man.
The girl's huge brown eyes looked bigger than normal due to her overly thin condition. What surprised him most was her happiness to see him, her dazzling smile. No one his own age had ever looked at him on Yuria with anything other than distain and revulsion. Relief and gratitude were new.
She pointed at the others in the room. Starved, dehydrated and hurt, all six people could have been mistaken as zombies.
"Please help them," she said.
If not for his superior senses, Zhane would have completely missed her words. "I'll be right back."
Zhane went back to the lobby for two large luggage carts. Bringing them to the kitchen, he loaded up the group. The bruises and discolored skin on the people were numerous, some scratched and cuts already showed signs of infection and in their present condition healing would be painful.
By the time he was ready to transport everyone to a building elevator, the teenage girl had passed out like the rest. Zhane picked up the knife on the floor and returned it to its sleeping owner.
A short time later, he got everyone to the room where he'd killed the first zombie, directly under the pod on the roof. Zhane placed everyone on mattresses he'd found, lining them up so his patients lay comfortably side by side.
He made a trip to the pod for six gel-stone implants, having just enough. Zhane placed the inch-round gel-stones on their chests and waited for the crystals to turn red. The flush of color took a minute. The healing would require more time. These weren't Yurians. He had no idea if there might me complication with the gel-tech in their systems. For all he knew, he might just have slowed their deaths down a little.
Nothing to do now but wait.
The first day, Zhane noted a little improvement. That cheered him as he went over assorted cultural files Sai supplied. Zhane studied archived comic books, manga, as well as world history and customs. The main languages only took him a half-hour to learn. Though less complex than the Yurian tongue, English proved richer, more expressive, making Zhane take a liking to it.
On the second day, he went down to the kitchen and located can goods. A restaurant with tanks for fish provided plastic tubing and ran it down their throats, past their lungs, to pour fluids into them, each time sterilizing the tubing before use. A few of them protested feebly, almost waking, but when he was done, they sank back into oblivion.
By the third day, Zhane had watched multiple movies and TV shows using multiple monitors. Entertainment on Yuria was tame by comparison, their dramas flat and heartless. It seemed to him ironic that an inferior world like Earth could offer so much more than his own advanced planet.
His learning continued and before he knew it, he recovered something he'd only felt in solitude, when working on officially frowned upon project: happiness. The new ideas in his head kept coming one after another, soon he started learning about what materials everything around him was made off, and how they could be used or adapted.
He read relentless and watched his patients until the seventh day when the six began to stir. The stones on them were no longer red, but yellow-green, responding to human biology a little different than they would have on a Yurian.
"Looks like the gel-tech is done."
"The question will be," Sai said, "how effective is it on their alien biology."
The large, dark-skinned pushed himself up on the mattress. Zhane didn't move from the window. He didn't want to scare anyone. The dark man had dark brown hair, and eyes that were wary. Those eyes locked onto Zhane. "Where are we? Who are you?"
The man shoved to his feet and turned so he could see the others on their beds. He went to a woman and the teenager, checking their vital signs. He saw the yellow-green crystals embedded high on their chests. He touched the stones. Then his own, feeling something new. The confusion on his face gave way to anger. He glowered at Zhane.
"What the hell is this?"
"Gel-tech. Think of it as a second immune system, among other things. It's the reason none of you died, and why you're all recovering."
"You helped us?"
"Yes." Zhane's voice remained relaxed and bored.
The man looked confused. "You're saying we won't go zombie?"
"Right."
"How is that possible? Billions died. Everyone looked so long for a cure." His voice became sad and querulous. "Nothing worked. How could a kid like you succeed?"
Sai and Zhane had already devised a deception. They couldn't tell the truth; humans had never made contact with a race outside their own, apart from fiction. Telling them he was an alien was out of the question so they'd created a story to explain gel-tech and his present circumstances. The mangas had been quite helpful with that.
"This was a recent development made by an international community of scientists above the Arctic Circle. At the very moment of our triumph, our base was overrun by zombie Eskimos. I was the only survivor. I took a short-range plane to an airport. Traded up, made several hops, and finally got here at last by weather balloon. I landed on the roof, intending to rebuild civilization from here, and found you guys."
"You don't even look twenty and you're a scientist?"
Zhane looked him in the eyes, voice dead, without emotion. "If I'm not a scientist, how did I save all of you? You should not judge others based on your own limitations."
The man's back straightened. His muscle tightened as drops of sweat trickled down the side of his face. He clearly didn't like what he'd heard, but he knew he owed a debt. "Sorry, man, that wasn't very gracious. If you're a brain, we need one. With this damn virus eating up the planet, you may be the last one left."
"Negative," Sai said. "Several survivor outposts have been discovered that maintain contact by radio."
The big man stared at Zhane's bracer. "Who are you in contact with?"
"That's Sai. An artificial intelligence I designed."
"That is just not possible!"
"I thought we had this talk already about limitations. Are you going to force me to insult you again?"
The big man actually smiled. "Forget I said anything."
Zhane looked away from him and focused on the sun setting outside. He thought about how limited humans were and how hard it would be getting a small group to survive, let alone help him with his ultimate goal; making new comics and manga. His passion for this new art form demanded he save it from extinction, so the human race would have to be saved.
It's a long road ahead and I still have to find a way to improve my body without the gel-tech but we've made a beginning.
Sai's mental voice crowded into Zhane's head. Zhane, I've been thinking about a new approach to immortality. What if we look into this virus? Yeah, it turns the host into a brain-dead sunflower, but it also lets every cell in their bodies absorb energy directly. That ability could open up new paths in biology and genetics.
That's true, it's one of the main functions of the gel-tech, but not in such a direct way, not in such a large amount. Start running some simulations, we'll really get into it when I can build a lab, right now we need to focus on just getting food.
Zhane stared down at the ground, outside the casino. Motion had caught his gaze. In the far, right hand corner, near the front doors of the Camping World complex next door, a strangely muscular zombie with a stooped back moved faster than his brethren, swinging his head everywhere, like he was looking for something lost or tasty.
"That's different," Zhane said.
The black man came up to the window next to Zhane's and looked down. The black man's muscles tighten the moment his eyes locked on to the new type of zombie. "A Hunter," he whispered, as if afraid his voice could carry so far, drawing death near.
"What exactly is a Hunter?" That zombie put Zhane on edge just looking at it.
"They only come out at night. Sunlight hurts them. They're faster, stronger, and hunt like animals. They don't seem to survive on sunlight as well as the rest. Do you have UV lights set-up?"
"No, but the casino entrances are sealed." As Zhane said that, the Hunter and the normal zombies moving along in his wake, reached the casino. From this angle, Zhane couldn't see them anymore, but he knew they were attacking the front door, breaking the glass, tearing at the steel wall. "It knows we're here somehow?"
"It can smell us. He's been tracking humans throughout the city for months now. Normally, a Hunter only tracks people they can get at. They even eat other zombies at times. This one may have made this area his territory, so it will keep coming again and again. Without UV lights, we won't last more than a few days, and that's assuming that it has to claw its way in through walls. By the way, I'm Jamal Jackson. That's my wife Emily and our daughter Zoey."
Zhane turned from the window and took a few steps to look at the mother and daughter. The mother still looked pale but a natural pale skin tone, not a sickly pale one. The girl was a mix of the two with a light tan skin tone going to an olive glow. She had her mother's looks and some of her father's height.
Jamal also left the windows. "Thank you for saving us, the other two women are Jen Lee and Marcy Dothan. They're nurses. The guy is Marcus Lopez, vet. He worked at a gym—before the world fell apart."
"I'm Zhane, smartest man in the world."
Sai touched thoughts: Zhane, we can make what humans call black lights, it's simple and in the range of the wavelengths that cause chemical reactions to the Zombies. We can also make light emitting diodes at that wavelength.
For now, let's see if we can find enough to tide us over.
Zhane spoke to Jamal. "Any idea where we can find some of those lights?"
"Next door, inside Camping World, but it's all locked up, we tried getting inside but found a dozen zombies trapped there. We let them have the place."
Zhane's eyes landed on the building to the right side where the Hunter had originally stood, and saw a way in from the roof. Some top floor windows weren't closed. As Zhane considered how to get to that roof safely, the others started waking-up and looking around. Jamal went to reassure them. They looked at their chests and panicked for a bit until Jamal explained things.
Questioning the group, Zhane got information he'd been missing on this whole zombie thing, at least part of it. Their government had known of the virus for years, hiding it while making sure they wiped out anyone infected. Till some idiot made it into a bio-weapon and all hell broke loose.
In the following weeks, more than ten percent of the world was infected. The disease adapted, went airborne. After that, it only took another week before everything fell apart; the airborne strain didn't kill many, but the one that died from it attacked the people around them so it spread much faster.
It also mutated plant and animal life. No one knew why, too busy trying not to die to care.
Looks like someone tried to turn it into a gene-virus and humans got the bad side-effects while the plants and animals got off easier.
Now Zhane really had to look into this virus. Unlike his people who'd abandoned gene-virus research so long ago, Zhane needed a way to improve himself and the Gene-virus path was all he had to work with.
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