“I want you to feel special,” the zombie said, standing before me. The zombie in question was my former first mate, Emorson Brunnos, now somehow become one of the undead.
Myself, I was the captain of this starship, before the horde overran it and turned 90% of the crew and passengers into their own. I was tied to my chair on the command deck, waiting for whatever horrific end Emorson had in mind for me.
“Special. You want me to feel special,” I said. “Because you singled me out, tied me to a chair, and you clearly have special plans for me? Great. I feel special.”
“Terrific!” Emorson replied, without a single hint of irony in his voice. It was hard to look at him because he was missing an arm and his officer’s blouse was covered in blood from where the arm had been ripped off. “Any questions before we begin?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I have a couple,” I said. “Namely, how did this happen? We scan crew and passengers alike for infections like this before they board. How did we miss this? Also, what exactly is it you’re planning to do with me?” I could feel fear and adrenaline both rising, and I was powerless to do anything about it. This wasn’t exactly the cruise among the stars that I had expected.
Emorson shrugged. “As for the infectious vector, near as we can tell, a passenger boarded in the very earliest of stages of infection. I, for one, think he was injected with the virus because no one who boarded was injured. Scans would have lit up like a beacon if he had been. He may even have been self-injected, just before boarding, though to what end I have no idea. The process of the change isn’t exactly pleasant, and it’s hard to imagine someone doing that to themselves deliberately. But,” and here Emorson spread his hands, “here we are. Couple that with a long voyage to Sirius Prime, I’d say he had more than enough time to incubate to become Victim Zero for a new horde of undead on this ship. Unfortunate for him but.” He spread his hands again.
“As for what we intend to do with you, most of the crew is damaged or disabled in one way or another. Zombie takeovers are rarely peaceful. And I’m afraid some of us may have gotten a little carried away in the process and eaten the brains out of some of the crew and passengers. You, though… you’re in perfectly fit condition, still 100% human, so I think we can turn you with a minimum of damage to your body. We don’t have an injection to make this completely clean, so we’ll have to infect you in a more traditional way.” I shuddered at that implication.
“Now,” he continued, “you have a choice. We can make the infected injury small and let you turn over the next several days, which will be unpleasant for you, or we can make the injury more or less instantly fatal so you’ll turn over the course of the next couple of hours. I can’t guarantee the second option will be any more ideal than the first, I’m afraid. It’s just a matter of how long you want to suffer.”
Emorson stopped talking then to let me consider. I didn’t like either option, naturally. I didn’t want to become a mindless brain-eating machine. Except these zombies weren’t entirely mindless, were they? They had their minds still, albeit with a certain lust to spread the infection as far and wide as possible.
“What about when we get to Sirius Prime?” I asked. “The station there will detect you immediately and destroy this ship before it can even make dock.”
Emorson grinned, and I wished he hadn’t. The look on his newly undead face was ghastly.
“Why, we’re not planning to dock at Sirius Prime,” he said. “We going to crash the station and spread further into it during the ensuing chaos. We’ll come out of hyperspace too close to the station to stop, and too close for them to react. Sure, some human life will be lost in the crash, but we’ll more than make up for it in the number of bodies we’ll convert. And we don’t need oxygen to live. We’re already dead!”
His grin would have been smug were it not so lopsided. Part of his face had slipped off the skull and was now oozing onto the floor.
“Now, Captain, how do you want to die?”