When the Dead Rise (Book 1): The Beginning by C.M. Fick Page B

authority. "These nice gentlemen are keeping you from being eaten by your wife when she reanimates."
    "We need to go see Cliff. He can tell us what to do to stop this." Hugo sounded frantic but seemed to have stopped struggling. "He's not far and I'm... I'm sure he'd be happy to help us figure out how to get her back. You just need to restart her heart and keep her alive a little longer while I go talk to Cliff. At least try to revive her; don't just leave her like that."
    There was a long pause and when Dr. Alvarez spoke again, he sounded weary. "Cliff has been in quarantine for close to four days with the best virologists Synergy could find. They've been diligently working around the clock, trying to find the key to a vaccine. From their reports, they've had no success in locating a single antibody in Cliff's endless blood work. Even if they had, it wouldn't work on someone already infected. Regardless, from the progress reports I've received, Cliff is in no condition to answer questions at this time."
    The camera, which hadn't been turned away from Mrs. Farner, shook slightly when the fingers of the corpse twitched. "Um, Dr. Alvarez..." Dr. Nguyen spoke in a shaky voice, "I think she's reanimating."
    "Come Dr. Nguyen, we should review the EEG results before the next stage progresses much further."
    The camera swung to a large bay of computers, where Dr. Alvarez sat clicking on a keyboard; the screen before him was filled with a series of wavy horizontal lines. "These are the results we received two hours ago. What do you see Dr. Nguyen?"
    "Normal brain activity; this is when she was still responsive but unconscious," Dr. Nguyen responded easily.
    The results scrolled quickly across the screen until a point where the peaks and valleys of the lines changed, becoming less prominent. "And here?" Dr. Alvarez asked.
    "This is when she fell into a coma and became unresponsive." The change in the horizontal lines was obvious even for someone untrained.
    "Now we'll forward to time of death." The screen scrolled quickly until a sudden change in the results appeared. The steady horizontal lines with minor peaks and valleys became drastic vertical lines for a span of several inches on the screen before straightening out into a solid horizontal line.
    "The last spikes before brain death," Dr. Nguyen explained without being prompted. "But here," she pointed to the far right of the screen where only a few of the lines resumed minor activity, "what's this?"
    Dr. Alvarez moved forward. "Very interesting," he mused. "It appears that some brain activity has restarted."
    "Does that mean she didn't really die?" Hugo asked from behind the doctors.
    "No you idiot," Dr. Alvarez snapped. "Her vitals have dropped off all together and didn't restart when the minor brain activity resumed. She's dead," he said irritably. "This is showing us what parts of the brain are reactivated by the virus."
    "It appears that the hypothalamus is responding highly in certain areas, while the primary motor cortex and parietal lobe are functioning in a limited capacity. The cerebellum has almost no activity at all." Dr. Nguyen seemed to be puzzled.
    Dr. Alvarez hummed as if it made perfect sense to him. "Hypothalamus drives hunger and primary motor cortex and parietal lobe allows the virus to control the body. As these creatures seem quite uncoordinated, I'm not surprised to see little activity in the cerebellum; perhaps it is too complex for the virus to control so many systems at once. There's also faint activity in other parts of the brain but a majority of the brain remains dead. The amygdala, hippocampus, temporal lobe and a majority of the frontal lobe show no activity at all."
    "Enough of the doctor speak," Hugo snapped. "Look, she's sitting up - how can she be dead?"
    The camera spun back to the window where, sure enough, Mrs. Farner was sitting up, face turned towards the window. "Incredible." Dr. Alvarez got up from the computer and shuffled over to the