Zombies! Episode 2.8: Hopeless Cases

By Ivan Turner

Now firmly entrenched in her life in Atlanta, Denise Luco must face new challenges. Pregnant with a child she feels she cannot raise, she must deal with both the physical and emotional burden. But there is a bright side. One of her patients, Number Six, is improving. What's responsible for the patient's health and can Dr. Luco reproduce its effects before the government takes drastic steps to constrict the spread of the plague.

Still reeling from the effects of Ms. Huang's personal attacks, Abby has picked up the pieces of her career and settled back into place. But a new surprise is in store for her. It was inevitable that her empty patient slots would be filled, but who fills one of them creates a problem she cannot solve on her own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ivan Turner
• Release date: May 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476202006

Ivan Turner

A child of the movies, I was always consumed by fantastic stories told by others and translated into adventures to be retold by me through the action figure medium. As I grew older, I put the action figures away and moved into the realm of role playing. Though I never outgrew role playing, I certainly don't have the time for it anymore. Since I was eleven years old, I've been pouring almost every ounce of creative energy I have into writing.I graduated college in 1993 with a degree in computer science. I tried my hand at programming for a couple of years and found it pretty unsatisfying. I later became a partner at a comic book store, where I spent several years. Though it wasn't a financial success, the experience I gained from running the store and the people that I met (many of whom I'm still in touch with today) was priceless. After leaving the store, I settled into a career of teaching. I still teach at a public high school in New York. Ironically, I've picked up computer programming again, which is what I mostly teach.I've been writing the whole time.I released my first book electronically in 2010. Forty Leap was a turning point for me in both style and story building. The Book of Revelations, which was written earlier but released later, was sort of a midway point between the writer I was and the writer I've become. I experimented with a very odd style and a story that employed diverse characters and controversial situations.In September 2010, I released the first installment of Zombies! Zombies! has been a tremendous success for me that came very close to being made into a television series. Since Zombies!, I have written a five part miniseries called Castes and have been working on developing tabletops games, the first of which, ApocalypZe, was published in early 2014.Now, 6 years later, a 3rd Zombies! series is due to be released in September of 2016.

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Zombies Episode 2.8: Hopeless Cases

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 by Ivan Turner

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The people and events in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental.

***

What has come before…

Invited to tour the Zombie Containment Facility, Abby Benjamin, who worked with victims of the zombie plague, was horrified to learn that the parent company, ZCF Incorporated, was making money by containing zombies and offering final services for family members. Though she appeared powerless to do anything about it, the company took her as a serious threat and took steps to throw her off balance and discredit her. As things developed, however, Albert Chatham and ZCF eventually turned their attentions toward more important issues. Abby, however, was left to deal with the fallout from the company’s clandestine activities.

Fugitives from the law, Denise Luco and Lance Naughton fled north to Canada. Though they started new lives there, both found their old lives incriminating on their personalities. Neither could find peace while they knew that the work they had left behind remained undone. In the end, they were exposed and brought back to New York. But no charges were brought against them. Naughton was reinstated into the Police Force and Luco was given the opportunity to move down to Atlanta and continue her work in fighting the zombie plague. It meant the end of their relationship, but not the end of their connection. Only a few weeks later, Luco discovered that she was pregnant. Knowing that she would not be with Naughton and could not care for a child, she made the decision to abort the child, quickly making an appointment with a doctor.

***

Wakefulness came slowly. It seemed that that had been the case over the last few days. And, in direct contrast, sleep would be an elusive tease hours later when she crawled back into bed. What usually got her out of bed in the mornings, and this morning was no different, was the terrible nausea that demanded attention like nothing else. Denise Luco had been pregnant for approximately seven weeks, though she’d only just learned about it four days before. She couldn’t imagine what forty weeks of this torture would be like. Fortunately, she wouldn’t have to know. In a couple of days, she would visit the doctor and have the abortion. She would never tell Lance. He would be devastated. Worse than that, she was sure that he would hate her for giving it up. On top of the guilt that was already building in her gut, she doubted she could live with that.

After throwing up absolutely nothing into the toilet for five minutes, she brushed her teeth and hauled herself into the shower. She had showered the night before and felt the need to do so again. She didn’t know whether it was her work or her emotional state but she always felt unclean. More and more often, she found herself showering at night and again in the morning. Shortly after lunch, she would be craving that nighttime shower. She’d probably get under the water as soon as she got home, but the child demanded food. For the past four days, she had spent too much time trying to figure out a way to consolidate that meal with her twenty minute drive home. Somehow she didn’t think that a pregnant woman cannon balling a burrito on the parkway was very safe.

She had to eat before she left the house. She’d have to eat again when she got to work. Luco had never been able to control the types of foods she ate, nor had she ever had to. Now, though, she knew that she was going to blow up like a balloon. Just over the last couple of weeks, she had noticed a change. Some of her favorite pairs of pants were tighter than they were supposed to be. Even her blouses were stretching across her chest. No. This would not do.

Traffic was light. Well, for traffic. Thirty miles an hour on the highway is general frustrating. Thirty miles an hour on the highway to work is amazing. Luco found the similarities between New York and Atlanta dizzying. At times, she felt almost at home. She’d settle into the familiarity of it all only to have the rug pulled out from under her by some stark difference that she just hadn’t noticed before.

Parking the car as close to the medical complex as she could, she got out, choked on the hot air, and walked toward the building. Ralph Kraemer had set her up in the Robert Louis Turner medical center. It wasn’t a government building, but the government had leased out a significant portion of it when fighting the zombie infection had become a federal interest. The outside of the building looked amazingly like the Guggenheim Museum, only it wasn’t composed of the elegant white spirals that the museum sported. Instead it was tiered and peppered with glass windows all along the exterior. As she approached, she could see inside the building. Even at eight o’clock in the morning, the place was busy. She could see doctors in white coats carrying their cups of coffee back to their labs. She could see clerical personnel rushing files or flash drives from one office to another or pushing carts stacked with paperwork. She could see lazy administrators in expensive business suits walking eight inches behind their expanding bellies and laughing over who knew what.

The front doors opened into an expansive lobby that was manned by four standing security guards and four desk personnel. A short corridor toward the back would take staff into the building. Luco fished her ID out of her bag and swiped it as she crossed the threshold.

Good morning, bitch, said Rico, the security guard as he inspected the x-ray of her bag.

Good morning, asshole, she said with a bit more conviction than she usually put into their morning ritual.

When she’d arrived, much of the staff had taken notice. Though new people passed through those doors on a regular basis, Luco had come with a reputation that was both unexpected and, she thought, undeserved. It was amazing to her that the events that had caused her to run and hide in Canada had actually wound up working very much in her favor. She had never expected that a man like Kraemer, with his hard face and deep voice, would have ever done anything but scold her like a child and send her back to her room. But he had lauded her for the work she had done since the beginning of the outbreak. He had showered praise after praise upon her, especially for her creativity and initiative. On that he was speaking about her bringing Zoe Koplowitz back to life. She hated it when he mentioned Zoe. She also believed that he knew she hated it. It was his little bit of revenge. Luco couldn’t think of Zoe without either crying on the spot or storing it up for later. What had she done for that poor little girl? She’d brought her back to life only so she could suffer again.

Anyway, Rico, the security