Back to the Doctor

Zombie in Z Minor Part 5

Marty nearly walked into the landlady as he left the room. She had obviously been eavesdropping, but by her slight look of annoyance he could tell she hadn't been able to hear anything. She instantly perked up at the sight of him, flashing him her best smile as the Doctor closed the door behind him.

"Everything all right?" She asked politely.

"No," Marty muttered.

"Just fine," the Doctor interjected. "We won't get much more done here."

"Well I hope your trip wasn't in vain."

The two men looked at each other.

"No…" The Doctor turned back to her. "Not entirely in vain."

"Fancy a cup of tea then? Or must you be going?"

"Well, I think it's probably best we get going. I mean, we wouldn't want to be a trouble," the Doctor started taking steps down the stairs, trying to escape the stuffy house.

"Oh it's no trouble at all!" The landlady beamed, pushing past the Doctor and heading for the kitchen. "You just take a seat and I'll be right-"

A terrified scream cut through their conversation. The landlady stopped at the bottom of the stairs, clutching her chest in fear as Marty and the Doctor turned their eyes to the door they had just come out of, and without another word ran upstairs and threw it open.

No one was in the main room they had had their conversation in, but the door to the adjoining room was wide open and the two dashed through.

Marty couldn't help but pause a second as he took the sight in front of him in: Mozart, the composer, lying on his back, fear ripping through his wide blue eyes as he tried to keep another man at bay. The other man, obviously Ludolf, was on top of Mozart, his own eyes blank orbs that stared only in the sense that they looked forward and his jaw snapped open and closed continuously as he tried to pull the small man towards him with bloody arms in some sick attempt to bite him.

"Help me pull him off!" The Doctor yelled, rushing to their side, but Marty didn't have a chance of remaining rational at this point.

"KILL IT!" Marty screamed, looking wildly around the room to find a weapon.

Ludolf looked over at the two newcomers as the Doctor grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him off of Wolfgang, who quickly scurried to the other side of the room.

"He died! I saw him die!" Wolfgang was frantic, in shock, and as far as Marty was concerned: completely useless.

Ludolf stumbled against a table and emitted a noise somewhere between a hiss and a scream. He lunged at the Doctor.

"Stop! Let me help you!" Ludolf grabbed onto his arms and the Doctor found himself twisting to escape the impossibly tight grip.

It occurred to Marty that this zombie was new, fresh even. It hadn't begun the decay that would inevitably slow and weaken it. For all intents and purposes they were fighting a starving, full-grown man. He grabbed an end table and threw it against the wall, then again until he broke a leg off.

The Doctor had given up on rationalizing with the crazed man as the two tumbled to the ground. The Doctor fell hard onto Ludolf, who didn't flinch, but merely opened his mouth wider in an attempt to bite him. The Doctor managed to pull away, but Ludolf took hold of him again, and started pulling himself on top of the Doctor.

"Look away Doc!" Marty called as he swung the table leg at Ludolf's head, doing everything in his power to pretend it was just batting practice with a real ugly baseball.

The wood connected and Ludolf fell to the side. Wolfgang let out another panicked scream as the Doctor caught his breath. Marty looked down at the twitchy, moaning corpse. He only needed to see Ludolf's blank eyes looking up at him to get the courage to raise the wood again and bring it down on Ludolf's skull as many times as it took to smash it open on the baroque moldings like a watermelon.

Everything went silent, except for the drip, drip of blood coming off Marty's weapon.

"Fuck!" Marty let the table leg fall and took a step back from what he had done feeling something between disgust and relief.

Someone grabbed his collar and roughly pushed him against the wall. Marty raised his fists to defend himself, but it was the Doctor, desperately staring into his eyes with disbelief.

"What have you done!" The Doctor practically screamed at Marty. "You've killed a man!"

Marty pushed the Doctor away and barked up at him fearlessly. "Where the hell have you been? That thing was dead before I got to him!"

"How do you know!"

"I saw him die," Wolfgang whimpered in the corner. "He died – how did he-? I saw him… I saw them both… die…"

The Doctor looked away from both of them, his eyes suddenly wandering around madly. He began turning in place, his fingers running through his hair as his mind raced to find meaning in all of this.

"Oh no…" the Doctor muttered, biting his lip.

"Oh no?"

"I may have missed something, something big," he was starting to pace now, making Marty feel even more uneasy – if that was even possible at this point.

"What are you saying, Doc?"

The Doctor suddenly stopped, then turned around and looked at Marty.

"We need to move, fast," he took off out the door.

"For fu-" Marty was cut off as he started to follow the Doctor.

"Don't leave me!" Wolfgang struggled to his feet, still shaking after the whole ordeal.

Marty looked at him and motioned towards the door. "Well come on!"

They ran out of the apartment, where the Doctor met them and quickly locked the door with the sonic screwdriver.

"Is everything all right?" The landlady stood halfway up the stairs, looking up at them with more curiosity than concern.

"Yes, yes, everything's fine. It is imperative you stay out of that room!" The Doctor ran past her.

"Yeah, by order of the Emperor and all that!" Marty added.

Wolfgang barely managed a sorry as he ran past her, still trying to get a hold of his senses and he chased the strangers onto the street.

The Doctor ran into the traffic of carriages and stuck his fingers in his mouth to whistle hard. A cab pulled up and everyone piled in as the Doctor gave the driver directions. Before they had even closed the door the cab took off and the three began to settle into the calm motion of the carriage.

"What happened in there?" Wolfgang asked, still clearly bordering the frantic.

"This is because of that goddamn radiation, isn't it?" Marty couldn't help but glare at the Doctor slightly.

"Yes, well, remember when I said it couldn't hurt people?"

"Yes…"

"Well, I had forgotten to take a few things into account."

"You were wrong."

"I was a little bit wrong."

"People are dead!"

"I didn't kill them," the Doctor leaned forward, slightly menacingly.

"Neither did I," Marty hissed.

"Just tell me what's going on!"

The two calmed down and leaned back slightly.

"The radiation doesn't affect you or I, or anyone-"

"Then how do you explain-"

"Let me finish! Anyone alive! This radiation reacts differently with dead flesh."

"How do you forget something like that!"

"It's hardly common! Someone must have died near to where this radiation is coming from, and once that flesh was poisoned, it charged."

"It reanimated! Into a zombie!"

"Not a zombie!"

"Call it what you like! It's the walking dead, right!"

"So… the dead are walking?" Wolfgang asked meekly.

"And it's mutated into an infection," the Doctor added, coughing slightly under his breath.

"Oh Jesus, Doc. There cannot be a zombie outbreak in 18th century Europe! It's a bit harder to fix than getting my parents to kiss at prom!"

"I can stop this, and you can stop gallivanting around like a bloody cowboy."

"I saved our lives back there!"

"All right! All right!"

"Where are we even going?" Wolfgang asked.

"To the source, of course."

OOO

By the time they reached the bridge where Jens had been killed, the body had mercifully been taken away. The crowed had mostly dispersed, now only a few remained to gossip about what had taken place the night before – if only they knew the truth. No one paid the three men any attention, even when the tallest of the three put on a strange pair of glasses with one lens that was red and the other blue.

"The trail's fading, we have to move fast," the Doctor said as they began following the dwindling trail of radiation.

Wolfgang had gotten over the fear he had felt before, but he stayed with the two strangers because he needed to know what had killed his friends. He needed to understand why they had died and he knew this was the only place he'd ever get the real answers.

They jogged along the river bank for nearly an hour before the Doctor finally stopped under a bridge, and hidden from view they found it – that damned robot again. This one was in perfect condition, save a six foot long steel pole plunged straight through its main processor like a steak through its heart.

"There, right through the core. A radiation leak."

"You are positive it can't hurt us?" Wolfgang asked, not wanting to get too close to the strange contraption.

"Uh," the Doctor decided he hadn't heard the question and took out his sonic screwdriver to maintain the damage.

"Where'd the pole come from?"

"Hm." The Doctor scrunched up his brow. "That's interesting. I don't think that pole came from this time, I think… it's part of a train."

"A train?"

"Looks like a johnson bar…"

"Would those be found on a steam train?"

"Yes but, they haven't been invented yet…" His head snapped towards Marty. "It could be from your friend's time… err… train."

"The Doc was here!"

"And made quick work of this machine."

"And unleashed a plague on us," Wolfgang spat.

"Hey, it's not like Doc Brown knew about this. Even he," Marty jerked his thumb towards the Doctor, "didn't know what all the effects of this radiation would be."

"Right, fine," Mozart found a slope and sat down in exasperation. "You better explain everything to me right now, because I want help you end this – I really do – but I can't do anything until I understand what is happening."

Before Marty could protest the Doctor took a step forward and stared Wolfgang down. "Fine, but you best save your questions until the end because we're running out of time. Now, how much do you know about the time vortex?"

To Be Continued…

(I talked about swearing before, so all I want to say here that I've never thought more about the right place to put the word "fuck" in a story before. It wanted to come out a lot earlier, but I was really keen to save it for this moment, lol. I watched a few episodes of The Walking Dead to get into the mood to write this chapter, and while I can't say that helped much, it did make me change Marty's weapon from a letter opener to essentially a bat. There's just something so desperate and feral about killing a creature with a blunt object. I've been ridiculously sick for the past two weeks, so I'm not entirely sure how well these chapters came out in my delirium, but I'm just happy that I actually managed to make my deadline in such a state. Who knows, maybe being this sick helps me get into the zombie mindset better.)