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

two as Haversill and Purcell quickly exchanged a WTF? glance between them. Bowersox smiled.
    “I’ve been here eleven years, Carl, and never once have I had to figure out why something was glowing,” Purcell said, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Not only that, nobody has ever had to figure out why something was glowing, and I’m pretty sure we have nothing – no equipment, no tests, no procedures, nada – that could be used to even start figuring out why Gruev’s mitochondria are glowing, much less come up with a reason for why they’re glowing yellow.”

Carl shrugged. “Yeah, I know, but I’m going to ask you to find a way to figure it out anyway. And we need to work fast. Everyone who’s come in contact with this guy in California has gone missing, and the locals are starting to panic big time. We should have something on this by now, but we’ve got nothing.”
    Haversill tabbed through a series of folders on the laptop, scanned them, and looked up at Bowersox.
    “He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. And he’s unresponsive to most stimuli. He tests positive for nothing, and now you’re telling us his mitochondria glow yellow,” Haversill said, running the back of his right hand across his brow. “But the big problem is going to be actually running tests on him. We barely got anything the last time we tried, and nobody wants to go in and try again. Have you seen the guy’s teeth?”
    Bowersox nodded and shrugged. “Well, then we need to think outside the box and maybe venture into the realm of science fiction.”
    Haversill shook his head. “Horror, you mean.”
    “No, Geoff, I mean science fiction. Hristo Gruev is a real person suffering from something real that science can figure out. It might seem like horror, and let’s hope it doesn’t get to that, but right now we have science. And in this building we have some of the best scientists the U.S. government has. We need to figure this out.”
    “So, we’re going to actually go down this road and figure out if he’s a zombie?” Haversill asked. “I mean, okay, so we put out that joke position paper on the Internet letting everyone know we’d know what we would be doing in the event of a zombie outbreak, but I thought that was just because we wanted the CDC to seem hip and cool while telling the public to have emergency kits in their houses and plans to deal with real-life possibilities. But zombies?”
    Purcell tented her fingers. “Well, there’s no shortage of historical similarities to what Gruev is suffering from. It’s in just about every cultural history there is. In Europe they had what they called revenants, which were undead that walked and attacked the living. The Arabs had ghouls, often appearing as women who lived in the desert and seduced men into the dunes with their siren-like calls, and when the man would show up, they’d change form and devour them. Even the Chinese had a version of this, which established the death rite culture of binding the dead with ropes before burying them. It’s why we have locks on caskets.
    “Pretty much almost any culture with a written history has a version of an undead person in it. A lot of it is just rooted in burial practices and a fear of the supernatural, that a dead person might come back to life for some reason if not interred properly, but there might be something more to it. It might make sense that there’s a contagion of some sort we aren't familiar with that mimics death but which we haven’t seen in a long time because of,” Purcell said and paused, her eyes flitted through the corners of the room as she thought, “... I don’t know, better diets or hygiene or who-knows-what. But there is a historical record to it.”
    Haversill looked at her and tilted his head. “Really? And there’s a historical record of Minotaurs and Bigfoot and dragons - hell, every culture, especially the Chinese, have stories about dragons - and yet, no Minotaurs, no Bigfoot and no dragons.