Cities of the Dead: Stories From The Zombie Apocalypse by William Young Page A

off a page, signaling to him what it was he was looking for. They had tried to subdue Gruev and get samples from him, but Gruev had fought them the entire time, injuring one of the medical technicians: Gruev was significantly stronger than a normal man given Gruev’s slim build and had nearly overwhelmed the team. The few samples they had managed to obtain had so far had yielded nothing.
    So they had just locked Gruev in the room until someone higher up the chain defined the procedures to be used to examine him.
    Haversill had been watching Gruev now for six days, and nothing about Gruev indicated the man was alive other than the fact he was alive. Confined in the small containment cell on the other end of the CCTV deep in the bowels of the building, Gruev never complained. Never asked for anything. Made only the most superficial efforts to try to get out. Gruev only reacted to stimuli when one of the technician’s would change his meal tray, but Gruev didn’t eat. He didn’t drink. He didn’t sleep. He just was.
    “Got anything?” Sarah Purcell said as she entered the room.
    “Nope.”
    “The guy’s wife has gone to the Bulgarian embassy for help,” Purcell said, sitting down and tapping through menus on a laptop computer. “It’s only a matter of time until we have to release him.”
    Haversill frowned. “I don’t know about that. He killed that morgue technician so he’ll go to jail in California before he goes back to Bulgaria.”
    That jarred a memory awake. “The other tech and the coroner from the LA incident have both disappeared.”
    “They disappeared?” Sarah asked.
    “Yeah, it’s in today’s morning update,” Haversill said, motioning to a tablet computer on the desk. “The tech and coroner were both discharged later the day of the incident and the dead tech’s body had already been transferred to a funeral home. None of them have been seen since that day. They just vanished. And the dead morgue tech’s body was lost at the funeral home somehow. The LA people aren’t telling anyone this, yet, because they also can’t find any of the people Mr. Gruev barfed on while he was on the airplane.”
    Purcell had an astonished look on her face. “So, everyone this guy’s come in contact with in the last, what, eleven days has disappeared?”
    Haversill smiled. “Well, you and I are still here.”
    A dull moan came over the speakers attached to the laptop, a plaintive, primitive call that caused Haversill and Purcell to look at each other.
    “I swear it sounds like he’s saying ‘brains,’” Purcell said.
    Haversill rolled his eyes. The entire facility was abuzz with the notion they had a zombie in custody. “Bowersox says that, too.”
    The door behind them opened and in walked Carl Bowersox, the team leader for the group studying Hristo Gruev. He was holding a clipboard and flipping through a series of papers and photographs on it. He paused and let the door shut behind him, waiting for the sound of the latch to click before he looked up from the paperwork.
    “Well, we still don’t know what he has, if he has anything,” Bowersox made a head move to indicate to the others that they all knew Gruev had something, it was just nobody knew what, “but one of the nuclear med guys ran a skin sample through a spectral analysis and found that the mitochondria in them all glow yellow.”
    Haversill let out the smallest laugh while Purcell just furrowed her brows.
    “Glow?” Haversill asked. “I don’t remember anything about them glowing, unless you put a laser on one.”
    Bowersox pulled the pages from his clipboard and set them down on the table. He fanned the pictures out for the other two to see.
    “Well, they don’t glow, Geoff, which is the strange thing about it,” Bowersox said. “Or should I say, the most recent strange thing about Gruev. But I’m willing to bet that whatever’s causing the glow is what’s causing our problems here with Gruev.”
    Bowersox looked up at the