Echoes of awkward arguments and tense chatter still bounced through the black corridors, but the worst of the furor had hit its zenith. A tense core of dissent could still be heard echoing from the lobby as small clusters of people equipped with flashlights peeled away and presumably retreated to their individual quarters. Underneath the other noises, uncontrolled sobbing persisted, almost too low to hear and potentially a product of one's imagination. The result was a morose pall of fear hanging in the air; making the general area entirely unpleasant.
Like many others, Lucas's discomfort ensured he had no intentions of remaining here. He again wondered where Evan had gone and decided there were only two likely places. Around where the sick man had been holed up, and within the common room nearby. Although his friend should have been able to hear these events from either place (and thus, would have put a stop to it), Lucas thought he may as well investigate what he had been up to. Once he found Evan, they could at least talk about various things to pass the time until morning.
Turning his attention to the common room first, Lucas proceeded through the door and casually approached the closest table. Apart from himself, the only other person in the room he saw immediately was Chloe. She had been using the paltry glow from her cell phone screen to navigate around various obstacles to a back corner. Her folded laptop sat on a far table, still connected to its defunct charger. When Lucas entered she glanced back at him, the whites of her eyes highly visible against her dark skin.
Halting before the empty table, Lucas marveled for a moment at how different the chamber appeared during this power outage. Without the outside lamps projecting light in through the broad windows lining the left and right walls, the place was quite forboding. Not only was he used to seeing the place with more light, but there were almost always a few people down here no matter the time of day. Luckily, the muffled noises in the hallway served as a comforting reminder he was not alone.
Shining the flashlight through the room in a slow, scanning arc confirmed the place was truly abandoned, at least for the moment. Spindly shapes spasmed in the dark as the narrow shadows of chairs, tables and miscellaneous forgotten objects cast elongated shadows within the radiant beam's path.
Turning to look towards Lucas again, Chloe spoke. "Would you mind helping me out? I don't have a flashlight with me."
"Sure. I don't see why not." Lucas lifted his right hand to aim the flashlight towards the back corner, weaving between a few tables as Chloe gathered up her laptop. She packed the device carefully in a leather carrying case, then proceeded to loop up the associated wires and collect her other belongings.
Quietly waiting, Lucas marveled a bit at how the simplest things- in this case a dark and nearly depopulated room- could inevitably seem creepy once there was very little light. Of course, he knew very well that a major component to his thoughts were due to knowing that tonight at least, something terrible stalked in the dark.
Outside, there was a whole empty city. The only denizens active spreading an unnatural, incomprehensible plague. For a moment, Lucas wondered if some of the unafflicted cities were similarly deserted. A few moments of deliberation later, he figured they probably were and moved on to wondering what it would be like to walk through those silent, desolate streets.
Chloe abruptly broke the silence as she finished gathering her things. "Lucas, what did you mean earlier when you said we can't be safe? Don't you think the military is going to be able to handle these..." Chloe hesitated, perhaps not wanting to use the word because the very notion should have been absurd. "Zombies?"
"Oh, that part should go okay. The zombies are too stupid to be really dangerous." Lucas replied casually as he considered the scenario of a firmly secured bus or jeep driving through the area, drawing undead attention; the occupants shooting at adjacent, stationary targets between welded metal bars covering the windows. "They should be pretty easy to kill for people who put any thought into what they're doing." Now that he visualized the notion, Lucas was a little surprised he hadn't read about any vigilante groups doing such a thing yet. Maybe everyone was still too rattled to consider it, but given time, such a thing was inevitable.
"Then what makes you think we can't be safe?" Chloe set her laptop case upon the table and secured its zippers and latches. "It's not like we're going to go outside until this is all taken care of or we're evacuated to a safe zone."
"Because of what caused it."
Chloe spoke in a stuttering gasp. "Y-you know where the infection came from?" Her attention was drawn away from her task to listen.
"Um. No." Lucas shook his head once and halted, pondering how best to sum up his thoughts. "Not really. But I do know some things about whatever the origin has to be."
"Go ahead."
"Well, whatever caused the first zombies, it seems to have popped up all over the place without warning. I was wondering about that, so I checked some times and I found out that all of the early reports are about individual attacks and they all take place around the exact same moment in time. Every report much later than that is about clusters or swarms. So that seems to indicate that whatever led to all of the individual outbreak regions was from a single event."
"Isn't that a good thing? It means once they're gone, this is over."
"It's possible..." Lucas conceded. "But there's something else to consider. We might not know exactly what the source is yet, but if there has only been one triggering event, it must have originated from a specific place, right?" Lucas paused for a moment, but Chloe only shrugged in a mildly accepting gesture. "So, whatever this is shoots out zombie radiation or whatever at Earth. As a result, a handful of random people, some on opposite sides of the planet were affected. That means that these- uh- z-rays can travel through a planet and still have its normal effect. So being indoors won't protect anyone from another event if it happens again."
Chloe looked at him with an expression that was either shocked bewilderment or exasperated disbelief. "Z-rays?" It could have been a little of both.
"There's one more thing. If a zombie loses all their blood, how does it continue to get the energy needed to still move around?" Chloe offered a disinterested shrug in response to the query and continued readying her things. "Well, there might be something major about biology that I'm missing, but the only thing I can think of is a wormhole. As far as I can tell the only other alternative is that conservation of energy is being violated." Lucas paused there, still quite unsure of that conclusion. But the possibility of that was just too amazing not to bring up. If every other possible alternative was dismissed, that is exactly what scientists would know they had.
