An ex-game designer is hired by a secretive agency to do speculative work that nobody wants to explain. But the pay is good, and for five years, life is splendid. And then something in that work comes true.
"They didn't have to restrain me. Several of my captors looked for any excuse to punish me with their fists, but one young fellow used a civilized, sober voice, guiding all of us across the street to a little strip mall. Two doors down from the coffee shop was a dentist's office. So important was their mission that the office had been confiscated, its residents missing. I counted bodies until I lost count. More than a dozen men and women wore masks and gloves and peculiar looking monitors that blinked urgently and occasionally beeped. My first duty was to sit on the dentist's chair and say nothing while various captors passed in and out of the examination room, half of them whispering into sat-phones. My second duty was to do nothing while blood was pulled from fingers and then out of my left arm. Important samples were whisked off. More calls were made, tangles of conflicting orders distilled into a single strategy. The polite youngster stepped to the front, saying, 'Lawrence,' while offering a glove and hand. 'I'm so sorry for the confusion. Let's find a way to make this mess go away.'"
Robert Reed has written many, many science fiction stories. This is most likely his only zombie tale.
Genre: Science Fiction
"They didn't have to restrain me. Several of my captors looked for any excuse to punish me with their fists, but one young fellow used a civilized, sober voice, guiding all of us across the street to a little strip mall. Two doors down from the coffee shop was a dentist's office. So important was their mission that the office had been confiscated, its residents missing. I counted bodies until I lost count. More than a dozen men and women wore masks and gloves and peculiar looking monitors that blinked urgently and occasionally beeped. My first duty was to sit on the dentist's chair and say nothing while various captors passed in and out of the examination room, half of them whispering into sat-phones. My second duty was to do nothing while blood was pulled from fingers and then out of my left arm. Important samples were whisked off. More calls were made, tangles of conflicting orders distilled into a single strategy. The polite youngster stepped to the front, saying, 'Lawrence,' while offering a glove and hand. 'I'm so sorry for the confusion. Let's find a way to make this mess go away.'"
Robert Reed has written many, many science fiction stories. This is most likely his only zombie tale.
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Robert Reed's What We Do