…I know, BAD Doc
The Doclopedia #989
Poultry That Saved The Day: The Duck Who Stopped The Zombies Genre: Humor, Horror
Dr. Taringani had been hiding in the Safe Room for two days, ever since that Rhesus monkey had come back to “life” on the operating table and attacked Gary and Francine, then crashed through glass of the observation window into 30 students. The virus had mutated inside the monkey and was now killing humans, apes and monkeys at an alarming rate. A cut, a bite, an inhalation at close range…that was all it took. According to the radio, which they often left on in the lab, the zombie virus had spread a thousand miles outward from Wisconsin in a mere 48 hours.
Of course, after he had made his initial call to the CDC, the battery on his phone went dead, so he had been cut off from communicating with the rest of the world. The zombies had only hung around outside the thick glass walls of the Safe Room for about half a day before running off. Yes, these weren’t slow shambling zombies, they were fast and strong and still intelligent enough to be cunning.
While he had been trapped, Dr. Taringani had figured out an airborne anti-virus that would destroy the zombie virus. Now, free from the Safe Room, he got to work on it. It didn’t take that lone to make, since they had already created an anti-virus to what they had thought was just a version of a common flu virus. Getting it airborne was pretty easy affair, requiring only a very high pressure tank, which he had grabbed from the physics lab, and a tank full of the anti-virus. The anti-virus tank had a safety setup on it that, after filling, required him to enter a 6 digit code, so he chose his birthdate, 3-7-1970. Figuring that the tank would release a cloud of several hundred yards volume and noting that there was a stiff breeze blowing south, he figured that the anti-virus should kill all the virus in at least a few hundred square miles. Satisfied that he had done his best, he began towing the very heavy tanks out of the building and into the quad.
It took him a while to reach the quad, a place he had always liked. He took a moment to check for zombies (which he had been doing every ten seconds or so anyway), catch his breath and admire the fact that the ducks, geese and swans were swimming in the pond as though nothing was wrong. Actually, for them, nothing was wrong. The virus only affected humans, apes & monkeys.
He had just typed in the first three digits of the code when he heard the waterfowl making excited noises. He turned just in time to see a hulking zombie, probably a football player, leaping towards him.
The doctor and the zombie went down onto the grass and rolled around. By the time Taringani could break free, he had been scratched several times. The zombie was up fast and the doctor barely dodged him. Seeing a rock next to the pond, he grabbed it and, as the zombie grabbed and bit him, he bashed in the side of it’s head. Sure enough, disrupt the brain with enough trauma and the zombie stopped functioning.
The bite wound burned like fire and his vision was beginning to blur as Dr. Taringani staggered back to the tanks. By the time he reached them, death was near. He fell to his knees next to the tanks and had just enough strength and life left to enter two more digits before he died, his index finger resting lightly on the final zero. In less that thirty minutes, he would rise from the dead without having released the anti-virus.
Fortunately, a large male duck came over to check things out. He looked around at things, hoping the human had brought some bread to feed the pond dwellers with. Seeing no bread, he was about to leave when he noticed the white necrotic tissue on the humans otherwise very dark brown index finger. Thinking this might be a worm or other food source, the duck gave it a good hard peck. The final digit was entered and the safety device let out the 10 second warning, which caused the duck to fly off into the safety of the pond.
The anti-virus was released just as the wind picked up. It spread across an area of over 2,000 square miles and killed an estimated 7,000 zombies. Even better, the anti-virus was now being carried by birds and humans, so it spread even wider over the next few days. Once the CDC reached the university lab, they found the formula and released hundreds of anti-virus clouds worldwide. The zombie apocalypse had been averted!
The duck lived a good long life and fathered many babies. Nobody ever knew that it was he who had saved the human race.
