The docking status screen was hidden behind a blizzard of bureaucratic nonsense of course. Regulatory stuff, fees, trading data. Utterly mind numbing page upon page of tables and lists. I was nearly to the point of random clicking to get away from the soul crushing boredom, but checking through the menus allowed me to mirror the main docking status screen. It was refreshingly easy to navigate from there.

Walker apparently had a good lot of ships that had undocked in the panic. There were a few little ships, cargo lighters and runabouts. There was a tanker still sitting in the dock, a handful of big freight haulers, and one absolutely massive freighter sitting at the end of the main dock. That added up to less than 10% of the available dock space.

I tried to check the local space around Walker. It took some doing to find the sensors. It looked like there was a dedicated station just for local traffic control and another for farther out. Both sets of sensors were showing critical errors. Not completely busted, but not useful either. If it wasn’t visible out the viewports then I couldn’t see it.

That led me to looking for the communications menu. There might be log files there that I could use to infer the possible presence of ships nearby. But it turned out communications was completely inoperable too.

Walker might as well have been deaf, dumb, and blind apart from the optical scopes that were all pointed at the Earth. I was about to dig into the logs when experiment number one started licking my neck. I sighed.

“You’re hungry again, aren’t you?”

The tiny furry being with a black hole in place of a stomach trilled at me. Then it got back to licking. It was time to go back to Security Medical. The little fuzzball would probably need cleaning about then, too, if recent experience was any guide.

I thought about leaving the experiment out of the space suit to clean him up in the decontamination cycle. If it decided to loose its bowels on the trip back, that is. But that would probably just result it it being tossed around like a ping pong ball. Maybe when it got bigger.

The rifles in the armory drew my eye as I exited the elevator. They’d been racked but not cleaned. Now that I knew that dirty weapons weren’t reliable, I was loathe to leave them like that. Which reminded me of the combat suit that I’d left in the Hospital.

Recovering that piece of equipment would have to be a priority as well. After second breakfast for the little monster. I sneezed.

It wasn’t allergy to the thing licking my neck. The feeling of sickness had been growing in me since I’d been bit. My thoughts felt slower, fuzzier. I didn’t feel quite right. Since I’d woken up in the morgue I’d been avoiding thinking too hard about the fact that I’d been bitten and was still alive. And the things I’d done to stay alive, both consciously and the ones I’d forgotten in the grip of... whatever it was I’d absorbed from not just one, but several zombies.

Avoiding uncomfortable topics had never been a habit before, but there was little I could do about it. Avoid draining more zombies, yes. Or people. Should I ever find living ones that weren’t inches from dying, that is. Other than that either I would recover or I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d just pushed the clock back. Maybe I’d still become a zombie.

But I wasn’t yet.

Everybody leaves behind unfinished business when they die. I just hoped to find a way to bring the people in the stasis pods back healthy. Anything more than that was beyond the scope of hopes. That was the realm of prayer. And I’d never been a particularly religious man.

The next major step was to secure the pods from the docks somehow. Yet another impossible task. I’d lost count of how many impossible things had happened since I stepped foot out of my lab. But the list of things I had to do just kept getting larger.

The decontamination cycle interrupted my thoughts as it scoured the space suit around me. The fuzzball stopped licking my neck for a moment. I felt it tilt its head at the noise, but it didn’t seem to be disturbed. The cycle finished and I got it another bottle. I queued up two more just in case. Then I ate another ration bar, because I was hungry again, too.

With the Maintenance shaft being home to that large horde, I was loathe to use it again to get to the Hospital. I reloaded magazines for the pistol and settled the knife in its sheathe. The food service elevator had been a possibility before.

It was more attractive now that I was avoiding my previous path and not in such a rush. The rifles could wait until I recovered the combat suit to be cleaned. It might be necessary for the planned extraction from the docks.

I slipped the bottles of formula into a container on the space suit’s chest after feeding the little monster. It was hard sided and hopefully tough enough to handle rough handling from zombies, should it come to that. Not the strange cutting thing they did, but claws and teeth probably. Two meal bars just in case. Because healing wounds needed energy.

The cleaner bots were active again as I returned to the front desk area and walked into the cafeteria. It struck me that this was only the second time I’d been in one since everything fell apart. It felt anticlimactic this time.

No zombie hunting howls chased me. Trash and evidence of battle was being tidied up and swept away. The floating food cart that the implanted zombie had perched on was upright once again and at least nominally touching the deck.

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Entering the area at the rear of the food vendors was strange. I’d never seen into the inner workings behind the people that provided food to the station residents. There were franchises and home grown businesses with a slight difference in quality in favor of the independents, reading between the lines of the weekly station newsletter. I headed for the place with the most nests. If there were any lurking zombies left that the cleaner bots missed they might be nearby, and it was best to clean them out where I could.

I found a nutrient paste dispenser. It could be used as a base ingredient in various recipes that the vendors sold. It could act like a soup base and provided necessary vitamins and minerals, increasing the food score and also cutting the vendor’s cost slightly as paste was often cheaper than raw ingredients.

It had been years since I was able to taste anything even before the fall. The fact that meal bars and nutrient paste never seemed to get stale while most everything else did was not a crippling issue for me at all.

The zombies had been chewing on the end of the nozzle, sucking the nutrient paste out by the look of it. Meal bars were sold everywhere as a cheap alternative to “real food,” so there were boxes of meal bars that looked to have been chewed open. I wondered if the zombies somehow remembered that there was food there, or one zombie had found an open box and the rest of the horde simply followed suit.

The back of the restaurant was blocked by nests. After a moment’s consideration, I kicked the nests down and tossed them out into the cafeteria. The cleaner bots should take care of things now. Had they ignored the nests before for some reason? Or had the cleaner bots just never gotten around to it before?

The fact they’d been active here once before suggested the former. Which made me wonder why nests were ignored, if that was so. Perhaps the bots programming classed them as human construction somehow?

Behind the restaurant was a wide corridor that ran behind all the restaurants and vendor locations. The food service elevator was at a back corner but the actual elevator was more of an open platform. An accordion style gate closed it off when the elevator was in service, but stood open upon my approach.

It descended much quieter than I’d expected, hardly the clanging whining noise that I’d imagined. Just a soft thump.

The Hospital deck would have zombies in the food storage warehouses. I wasn’t going to be provoking them on purpose this time, but if they came at me... Well. I would deal with that on the if and when.

Then I stopped, going back over what I’d just thought.

Such violent tendencies were not something that I had experienced before. Was this driven by guilt on account of my failure to save all the residents in the pod room? Not just the ones that had died as I slept, all the ones I hadn’t been there for in the seven years Walker had descended into madness.

It was possible, I decided. That would bear keeping an eye on. I couldn’t afford to die before saving everyone I could. Maybe I wasn’t the good guy. I could feel the hunger in me to drain more zombies, to feel that feeling of power and euphoria again.

But there was no one else. That also meant there was no one to stop me from doing just that. No one... but me.

Maybe the remaining residents of Walker wouldn’t get to be saved by the hero. But there was nothing saying that a monster couldn’t do some good before someone inevitably put him down. That meant I couldn’t go chasing down other monsters in the dark. At least not yet.

That meant I had to be sneaky enough to not get caught while checking on the people in the pod room, then grabbing the combat suit. The Wampus Cat took that particular moment to announce that it was done with the first bottle by bouncing it off the inside of my helmet. Then it crawled into my hair again to sleep.

I’d noticed it doing that before. I took off the helmet to put the empty one away and put a new bottle close so Experiment Number One would have enough sustenance to keep growing. If it was, in fact, a growing biological organism and not a synthetic construct with a pocket singularity in its guts.

The only thing that argued against this idea that I could tell was the amount of crap the thing produced. Which made me check and yes, it had crapped in my hair. I had wipes for this eventuality and used them.

Wampus Cat crap had nothing on zombie funk but it was still unpleasant. The furball in question meeped sleepily as I cleaned it- and my hair- back up. Then I put everything back in its place, minus the crap.

The Hospital Level’s cafeteria back alley was cleaner than the one I’d just left. Out in the cafeteria the bots had performed a miracle. No corpses, body parts, or even blood marred the deck. The combat suit remained standing where it was, cleaned of blood but otherwise unchanged. I slipped into the hospital and through the newly tidied up hallways to the pod room.

The corpses had been removed from the hall, which startled me for a moment. I had expected them to remain, somehow. But there was no reason for these corpses to be special outside of my own head. No one would ever know about them unless I told them.

Should there ever be other people to tell, that is. Experiment number one did not count. And I doubted it would care so long as I kept feeding it, even if it could understand me.

The pod room was dimly lit compared to the bright hallway I’d just left. Row upon row of red lights with a bare few blue ones. I would have to investigate what problems each of the ones that were still alive had to see if there weren’t a few who could be safely resuscitated with minimal effort, but held out little hope for that. It would be a start at least.

I manually examined each pod and checked their status panels. None were below 80%, surprisingly enough. I suppose that any that were borderline hadn’t made it, but the good ones kept working. I looked in on the people in the pods. Young, old, men and women. They all had problems that required them to be put in pods.

Several years ago they came to the Hospital, met with their doctors, put on a hospital gown and got into the stasis pods expecting to come out not long after. Some of them might not have even heard about the problems on Earth or the refugee crisis that was spreading to orbit and the colonies.

They were in for a rude awakening. The world had changed while they slept, and not for the better.

I left the sleepers behind and exited the pod room. On the way out, I closed several doors down the hallways. There were no zombies in the rooms now. If they ever spread to the Hospital again, closed doors would not interest them without people going in and out or making noise behind them. That would cut down on the potential ambush locations.

As zombies were creatures of strange habit I did wonder if there would be many coming to the Hospital anyway. They seemed to collect around food and water sources, but often wandered to more familiar places. Then there was the horde on the docks. Something about that one didn’t make sense with what I knew. What could they be eating down there?

The combat suit still had power. The chaotic mess of the fight seemed to take far longer than twenty minutes when I was in the middle of it, but the charge level didn’t lie. I couldn’t bring the Wampus Cat with me in the combat suit, so I commanded it to lower its arms and stand at attention. That would make moving it easier through doorways. Then I had it disengage the charge that attached it to the deck.

And then a zombie ambushed me out of nowhere.