Prologue: Mistake
The harsh halogen lights of the lab pulsated faintly, as a sole scientist carried his equipment over to his meticulously arranged setup.
This is it, he thought. This is the last experiment. Finally, I get to fix what happened.
Eliza...
Dr. Blake Steel was a scientific genius, graduating from high school at the age of 16. Now 24 years old, he had pioneered a vast array of biological defences for the Umbrella Security Service or USS for short. However, his life hardly reflected such an intellect. He had lost his fiancée in the crossfire of a gang fight.
He had proposed only one hour ago.
Spiritual resuscitation, Blake thought to himself. Is it even possible? I guess I'll have to find out, won't I? This project was originally meant to revive fallen soldiers, healing them to the point they had nearly no injuries whatsoever. Yet, Blake had another thing in mind: bringing back his beloved from the grave.
A quick, sharp fizzling noise, and a block of silvery metal lay on his desk. Picking it up with a pair of tongs, he rushed it over to the airtight chamber. No point in reviving someone who's alive and well, now is there? he chuckled to himself. The block was loaded into the chamber, which consisted of a hollowed-out MRI machine reprogrammed to execute the project at hand. Of course, bringing back the dead would require one hell of a lot of power. The machine was directly connected to a self-made nuclear reactor in the same room. Beside it was a large wooden box with an inscription on it.
Here lies Eliza Fitzpatrick.
1989-2010
He picked up the casket, an inexplicably delighted expression on his face. Loading it into the machine, he rushed to his computer, typing in a series of commands. A solitary red light lit up on the machine, and a soft whirring noise ensued. The smile on Blake's face grew wider with each passing second. Suddenly, the machine stooped abruptly, with a sound like crackling wood coming from inside. Alarmed, Blake stumbled into his protective gear and rushed over to the machine. On the glass, there was something that stopped his heart:
The words "Why, Blake?" were written in blood.
Then the glass shattered.
Blake stumbled back, his eyes wide open in terror. What the hell is going on here? What went wrong? Is Eliza okay? Thoughts and questions went racing through his mind. But, from inside, Blake saw something he had never expected to see, never expected to happen, was never meant to see the light of day.
"No...no, no, no, oh please, God, no," Blake stuttered, tears coming to his eyes. "This...THIS ISN'T ELIZA!"
Surely it wasn't Eliza, yet in its own way, it was. It had the same DNA code as Eliza, at the very least. There was just one major problem: she had become the first of zombie-kind.
It's going to eat me, Blake thought between choking sobs. My Eliza's going to kill me. However, instead of going for him, the zombie plodded over to the back of the reviving machine. Its clawed hand rose slowly, and then stopped right above the wires connecting it to the nuclear reactor. The zombie's head turned slowly, revealing empty eye sockets, and a toothless smile. It was impossible to tell if it was sincere, or a sneer of evil.
The hand swooped down, cutting the wires. Of course, a power failure like that would damage the reactor to some extent. To top it off, the power surge created by the zombification made a long hairline fracture in the casing. The power failures created an outburst of kinetic energy, making the resulting thermal energy make contact with the nuclear fission core. To make matters worse, this power source was connected to the company grid, thus making any problems in the system determinant of other factors in the rest of the system.
Only one word can describe the resulting reaction: Boom.
