Quantum Leap: Leap of the Living Dead
Title: Leap of the Living Dead
Author: astrogirl2
Fandom: Quantum Leap
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Al
Length: ~4,300 words
Rating: PG, mainly just because I've let Al use a couple of words the network probably wouldn't have liked.
Spoilers: None
Warnings: None
Prompt: 371. Quantum Leap - Sam leaps into a zombie.
LEAP OF THE LIVING DEAD
There was the familiar tingling, and that paradoxical sensation of moving very, very fast, while also somehow, just for a moment, existing in some still, quiet place outside of normal space and time. Then came the bright light, the usual feeling of disorientation, and...
Sam blinked. He appeared to be in some kind of cell: three walls of shiny, featureless metal, and a fourth of transparent plexiglass. Beyond the clear wall, he could see some kind of laboratory. A biological containment facility, maybe? It was clean, very neat, and very high-tech. He couldn't be too far in the past, then.
The fact that the metal examination table across the room appeared to have straps on it was somewhat worrying, but Sam generally tried not to jump to the worst possible conclusions this early in a Leap. Usually, the really bad news came later. He supposed he ought to be glad that at least this time he hadn't appeared in the middle of anything awkward, embarrassing, or obviously and immediately life-threatening, but somehow he didn't find the silent emptiness of this place reassuring. Especially not when he considered which side of the wall he was on here.
He took a step back and tilted his head. From the right angle, he ought to be able to get a pretty good reflection off this surface... Ah. There.
The face that looked back at him was female, something he was sufficiently used to now that it no longer gave him pause. More disturbing, though, were the flat, dull eyes, the grayish skin, the loose, sagging flesh. It must be some kind of quarantine, he decided. This woman did not look well. In fact, if he didn't know better, he would have sworn he was looking at a three-day-old corpse.
"Oh, boy," he said.
It came out as, "Nnnnn bnnnn."
"Oh, hell," he amended, and at least that sounded all right.
**
It was hard to tell in the complete absence of any kind of clock, but Al seemed to be taking longer than usual this time. Sam had already examined every inch of the cell twice, which, admittedly, didn't take very long. It was obvious that a section of the clear front wall was designed to slide open, and equally obvious that there was no way to unlock it from the inside. Having established that, he tried calling out for a while, but after a few minutes his shouts of, "Hello! Is anybody there?" began to sound much more like incoherent moaning sounds, and he stopped. The stress, he decided, must finally be getting to him. That had to be it.
Eventually, seeing nothing else to do, he slumped down in a corner to wait, thinking exasperated thoughts about whatever it was that had possessed him to believe that time travel was a good idea in the first place and attempting to convince himself that God, or Time, or Fate, or whatever it was wouldn't have brought him here just so he could rot in a cell forever.
Even so, he couldn't help feeling a surge of relief when the holographic doorway appeared and Al stepped through.
"Finally!" he cried, springing to his feet.
"Sorry, Sam. We've been kind of busy."
"Al," he said, "I think something's seriously wrong here. More than usual, I mean." He gestured towards himself, or rather, at the face and body Al must be seeing. "I look like some kind of-- of--"
"Zombie?" said Al. "Yeah. Funny, that."
Sam gave him an I-do-not-appreciate-your-sense-of-humor look, but Al really didn't seem very amused, himself. "Where am I? Does Ziggy know why I'm here?"
"Oh," said Al, "we don't even need Ziggy this time. I know exactly why you're here."
"Great!" Sam grinned, but it must have looked disturbing on the face he was wearing, because Al flinched a little at the sight. Although, Sam suddenly realized, there was more to it than that. Al had seemed uncharacteristically grim since the moment he'd arrived. There'd been no colorful excuses for his lateness, no impatient thwacking of the handlink. He hadn't even glanced at Sam's cleavage, and while Sam liked to think that even Al would draw the line at ogling a woman who looked to be at death's door, if not already well over the threshold, the fact that he hadn't even make a joke about it was worrying. "Al? What's wrong?"
Al pretended not to have heard him, staring at whatever was showing up on his handlink as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. But before Sam could repeat his query, he looked up. "To answer your question about where you are: it's four days ago, and you're next door."
If the idea was to distract him, it certainly worked. "Wait, what?" The second word came out as something like, "whraaaauuurgh." Sam cleared his throat. "I'm what?"
"You heard me. You're four days in the past, from where I'm sitting right now. And you're in the biological weapons development facility next door to the Quantum Leap Project. Well, I say 'next door.' But, really, what's a couple of miles of desert? Not very much." He looked, Sam decided, not just grim, but tired.
"What am I here for, Al?"
"Oh," said Al. "That's easy." He pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and lit it. "You're here to stop the zombie apocalypse."
"Oh, come on, Al! There's no such thing as zombies!"
"Take a look in a mirror," said Al, "and then tell me that."
"I already did," muttered Sam. He had to admit, if he didn't know better...
"Well, then." Al waved his cigar in Sam's direction. "You've seen the evidence! Anyway, there didn't used to be any such thing as time travel. Now there's time travel, and zombies." Sam wasn't sure whether it was a sign that, after an uncounted but very large number of Leaps, he was finally starting to lose it, but this logic almost seemed persuasive. "Like I said, Sam," Al continued, "this is a biological weapons facility. The stuff that they get up to at these places, I'm telling you, it'll curl your hair. Genetically engineered superbugs, flesh-eating bacteria..."
"And zombies?" Sam prompted.
"And zombies. Some douchenozzle named--" Al consulted his handlink, shook it, and checked it again. "--named Dr. Allen Weisser decided that since zombies didn't exist, it would be a great idea to invent them. He invented a virus that could turn dead bodies into living dead bodies. Can you believe some people?"
"If all this is true, Al, then if I'm here to stop him, I'm a little late."
"You're not here to stop him creating the virus. You're here to stop it getting out. According to Ziggy, a couple of hours from now Weisser is going to take his pet flesh-eating ghoul -- that's you, Sam -- out to run some experiments. But he doesn't restrain her well enough, and she -- it -- breaks loose and bites him. Then he goes out and bites someone else, they bite two friends, and they bite two friends, and four days later, half of New Mexico is overrun."
"So, all I have to do is... not bite him?"
"Maybe," said Al, although the tone in his voice clearly said what they were both thinking: it was never quite that easy.
Sam opened his mouth to make a comment to that effect, but all that came out was "Unnnnnngggh!"
"I'm sorry, Sam. I didn't catch that."
"That keeps happening! Al, I'm starting to worry that something's really wrong with me."
"Well, you're a zombie, Sam." Sam glared at him. "OK, OK." Al consulted the handlink again. "Ziggy thinks it probably has something to do with your brainwave connection to the real zombie in the waiting room."
Sam wondered briefly if he ought to be alarmed by that phrase, then decided that his friends were probably capable of keeping that particular situation under control. "Sometimes I really wish I had fewer holes in my memory," he said instead. "I've gotta say, I've never really had a clear idea how that works."
Al shook his head. "It's not your swiss-cheesed memory this time. You never understood how it worked. Ziggy doesn't understand it, Gooshie doesn't understand it. Nobody understands it."
Sam, somewhat disturbingly, found that his mouth was watering a little bit at the phrase "swiss-cheesed brain." He tried very hard not to think about this particular fact. "Well, what do I--?"
But Al was looking off at something Sam couldn't see, his eyes narrowing in concern. "Gotta go, Sam."
"Al, what--?" But Al was already gone.
"Great," said Sam. "Just great." He slumped against the wall of his cell, wondering exactly how much longer it was going to be before he had to do whatever it was he was supposed to do, and wishing there were some reading material in here to take his mind off things. Like what it was Al'd had to go and deal with.
He closed his eyes and sighed. It sounded like a very soft, exasperated moan.
**
More time passed. Finally, just about at the point where Sam was starting to conclude that, unbelievably, this was shaping up to be his most boring Leap ever, the laboratory door opened and a human figure came through.
"Ah, this must be Dr. Douchenozzle," said Sam. "I mean, Dr. Weisser." Somehow, the word had sounded way more obscene coming from him than from Al, and his hand had automatically come up to cover his mouth as if he were afraid his mother might catch him talking like that. He lowered it back to his side, shook his head, and leaned forward to get a better look.
The man was wearing some kind of hazmat suit. A great idea, if zombiism were an airborne pathogen, but both Sam's vague memories of bad horror movies and Al's earlier remarks about biting suggested it wasn't. And Sam was pretty sure a sufficiently determined monster could get into that suit somehow, given the opportunity. "A monster like me?" Sam muttered.
Weisser was standing only a few feet away from him now, but seemed not to hear him through the thick plexiglass and the protective helmet. Or else he was hearing only what he ought to hear from the real zombie. Sam was never entirely sure exactly how that worked, either.
For a moment, the two of them stared at each other. Sam could see Weisser clearly through the helmet. He had a round, mild-mannered face, nothing at all like the mad scientist Sam had been picturing. But, of course, he of all people knew appearances could be deceiving.
Weisser was dictating notes now, presumably to some unseen recording device. Sam could hear him, faint and muffled, but audible enough to make out the words. Well, that answered one question, maybe.
"Subject shows no obvious signs of further deterioration," Weisser was saying. "It appears to be considerably calmer and more interested in its surroundings than previously." Sam quickly dropped his eyes and tried to look more like a zombie, although he wasn't at all sure quite how to do that. "The aggressive behaviors observed earlier have now entirely ceased, presumably due to continued lack of food intake."
So, they hadn't been feeding the poor thing. Half of Sam felt extremely relieved at that, considering what it almost certainly ate. The other half felt a pang of sympathy. "Who was she?" he said quietly. "This woman whose corpse you've resurrected. Do her family know what you've done?"
"Given the subject's apparent weakened sate," Weisser continued, "this would seem to be a good time for further examination." He went over to a tall laboratory cabinet and took out a pair of bulky handcuffs and a long stick with a semicircular attachment at the end at looked like it might fit nicely around a zombie's neck.
"Handcuffs?" said Sam. "Seriously? You're going to restrain a hungry zombie with handcuffs?" Admittedly, he probably figured he'd just have to hold it off long enough to get it strapped down on the table, but still. Sam had heard of overconfident researchers -- hell, he'd been an overconfident researcher -- but this was ridiculous. He wondered if maybe this guy was in danger of losing his funding and was getting reckless under the pressure. He wondered how he'd managed to get funding for something like this in the first place. Maybe he hadn't. Maybe that explained the pitifully inadequate equipment, if not the nice, shiny lab.
Weisser propped the stick up against the wall, readied the handcuffs, and moved to the keypad that controlled the door to Sam's cell.
He tried one more time. "Dr. Weisser, don't do this. Please, don't do this. Doctor!" But even he heard the last word as a moan.
The cell door opened. Even in the hazmat suit, Weisser was very quick with both the stick and the handcuffs, Sam had to give him that. Maybe he had reasons to think he'd be okay against something with slower-than-human reflexes. Not good reasons, maybe, but reasons. Sam, however, had very good reflexes. A roundhouse kick knocked the handcuffs from Weisser's hands, and a quick wrench of his arm sent the stick clattering to the floor. Inside the helmet, Weisser's face was a particular combination of surprised and terrified Sam wasn't sure he'd ever seen before.
Weisser's head swiveled towards the cell door. "Oh, no you don't!" shouted Sam -- although it sounded more like "Nnnnnn nn ynnn nnnnnt!" -- and both of them lunged towards the door at once, Sam making it out hard on Weisser's heels, well before he could reach the door mechanism.
The two of them stood facing each other in the laboratory, Sam crouching a little in a martial arts stance in case the man tried coming at him again, although that would be even more foolish now.
Weisser's eyes were huge. "What did I do?" he cried.
Sam felt himself relax a little. This must be what he was here to do! Make Weisser see the folly of his ways, get him to abandon his research...
"It's still intelligent!" said Weisser. "Intelligent and fast. This is amazing! So much better than I'd hoped for!"
Sam buried his face in both hands and moaned. This time, it was all him.
Then he picked up a piece of scientific apparatus his swiss-cheesed memory almost-but-not-quite recognized, and hit Weisser on the head with it.
**
Sam was bent over Weisser's unconscious body when he heard Al reappear, checking Weisser's pupillary response with a light he'd found in one of the laboratory's cabinet drawers. He was glad to see that it looked okay. The man might have been about to bring about the zombie apocalypse, but Sam still didn't like the idea of accidentally giving him brain damage. Although thinking too hard about the subject of Weisser's brain was making him salivate again.
Abruptly, he realized that Al had been standing there for the better part of a minute and had said nothing at all. He looked up just as Al started towards him. There were bags under his eyes, his hair was mussed, and he was scowling like a thundercloud.
"Al--" Sam said, then stopped abruptly as Al aimed what would have been a vicious kick at Weisser's head, if his foot hadn't gone right through it.
Sam stood up. "What is it, Al? What's the matter? Is that--" It was hard to tell for sure, given the loud colors Al was wearing, but... "Is that blood on your shirt?"
Al looked down at himself, made an ineffectual gesture as if attempting to brush the blood off his clothing, and shrugged.
"What happened?" Sam pressed. A horrible thought occurred. "Did the zombie in the waiting room get out?"
"What?" said Al. "Oh. No. No, that one's fine. It's the zombies outside that are the problem." He kicked pointlessly at the unconscious scientist again and said, "Bastard. You should have killed him, Sam."
"Al--" Sam began again, but broke off as Al looked off at something or someone Sam couldn't see, nodded, and frowned.
"I don't think we have much time," he said.
"What do I do, Al?" Sam realized there was a definite edge of panic in his voice. He swallowed, trying to get it under control, but it was hard to ignore the vivid images that had popped into his mind. His best friend being ripped apart by zombies was not something he ever wanted to see. Not to mention, if Al and everyone at Project Quantum Leap were killed, what would happen to him? "Do I... I dunno, do I just get back into the cell? Maybe when he wakes up, he'll have learned better?" He smiled hopefully.
Al shook his head. "Ziggy doesn't think so."
"Of course not." Sam sighed. "When is it ever that easy."
Al consulted the handlink, shook it, checked it again. It made a particularly unhappy-sounding squeal this time, Sam thought, although maybe that was just his imagination.
"Ziggy says, first you've got to destroy all his research notes. In the cabinet, over there." He gestured with the handlink. "He's operating on a shoestring budget here. He even had to borrow these facilities from another project. With all his records gone, he probably won't get the chance to try again."
"Gladly," said Sam. He wrenched open the cabinet drawer. It was full of files, notebooks, and discs. Sam set about shredding, mangling, and otherwise demolishing all of it. It felt ridiculously satisfying. "Now what?" he said, when it was over.
"Well..." Al thumped the handlink, grimaced, and thumped it again. "No," he said. "Ziggy... No!" He sounded half like he were admonishing a disobedient dog, half like he were protesting bad news.
"What?" said Sam. On the floor, Dr. Weisser stirred slightly. Sam prodded him with his foot, and he lapsed back into full unconsciousness. "Al, what is it?"
Al looked like he wasn't going to answer, but Sam gave him what must have been an unusually effective glare. "Aww," he said. "Ziggy says... Well, Ziggy says there's one more--"
Suddenly, the invisible floor on which Al was standing shook. He flickered, various parts of his body alternately disappearing from view. He whirled around, looked at something behind him and said "Shit!"
"Al!" But Al had disappeared. Sam waited half a minute, a minute, two, but he didn't reappear. "Al," he said, feeling suddenly full of despair. He scrubbed at his face with one hand, ordering himself to think. You've got a great big brain, Beckett. Use it! "One more what?" he said quietly. "One more... loose end?" He caught a glimpse of himself -- of the zombie -- reflected in the shiny surface of the examining table, and had the sinking feeling he knew what it was he had to do.
**
Sam walked down an empty corridor. He thought he could hear voices coming from somewhere, but he hadn't seen anyone yet. Apparently Dr. Weisser had been keeping pretty late hours. He guessed zombies didn't really need to sleep.
He wondered what the best way to kill a zombie was. He seemed to remember something about targeting the head. Cutting the head off, maybe? There might be a fire axe around somewhere, but somehow he doubted it would be very easy to chop off your own head. If you didn't finish the job on the first cut, things could get pretty ugly. Or was it supposed to be a bullet to the brain? That sounded right. Well, there had to be guns around here somewhere. Maybe if he provoked a security guard? Except he'd have to make sure it was a head shot. He wasn't entirely sure how to do that.
Lost in thought, he'd already passed the door before he realized what it said. He went back and stared at it.
"Incinerator." Of course. They'd need a safe way of disposing of dead laboratory specimens, wouldn't they? And burning would kill pretty much anything.
"I wonder..." he said. He opened the door with the key card he'd removed from Dr. Weisser's still-unconscious body. The room inside was as clean and as empty as everywhere else he'd been so far. The incinerator looked to be just about big enough to accommodate a human body.
Sam stood there, staring at it. Move! said something in the back of his brain. Every second you stand here, you're putting Al and the future in greater danger! But, actually, countered something in the front of his brain, if you change things here and now, they'll never have been in any danger, and a few more minutes won't matter.
"I think I'm getting a headache," said Sam. He went over to examine the incinerator. It required someone on the outside to push the activation button, but there were plenty of tools around here. He could rig up some kind of remote trigger, a weight suspended over the button, set to drop when he activated it.
That, at least, was something concrete for him to work on. He rolled up his tattered sleeves and got started.
**
He was standing in front of the incinerator again, holding his trigger mechanism in his hand, when Al reappeared. He'd never wished so much that he were able to hug the guy.
"Al! You're okay!"
Al shrugged.
"What happened? You look terrible."
"Yeah, well, back atcha." But Sam thought Al look almost as pale, and considerably more haggard, than Sam's reflection had. Before he could say anything more, though, Al apparently noticed where they were. He stared at the incinerator, at the jury-rigged trigger system. "What are you doing, Sam?"
"This is what Ziggy was trying to say, right? I have to get rid of the last loose end. As long as this zombie exists, there's always the possibility she'll get out again. It's not enough to make sure no more zombies are created. I have to make sure this one is destroyed." He made his voice as gentle as he could. "Isn't that right?"
"Aww, Sam, no." But Sam could tell that was a "no" of protest, not one of disagreement.
"Ziggy... Ziggy doesn't know what'll happen after this, does he? Whether I'll leap or..."
"Or whether you'll die? No. No, he doesn't. Which is why you can't do this, Sam!"
"I don't think I have much of a choice!" The words came out a little too loud, a little too close to a moan, and Al flinched slightly. His hand went to his arm, as if he were in pain. Sam suddenly noticed that there was even more blood on his shirt than there had been, that one orange-and-purple sleeve was torn, and underneath it was...
"Al! You've been bitten!"
"What, this?" Al shrugged. "Yeah, well."
"What do you mean, 'Yeah, well'? You've been bitten!"
Al waved this concern away. "Don't worry about it. Ziggy says there's a chance I haven't even been infected."
"How big a chance?"
"Oh, at least a..." Al rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the floor. "At least a ten percent chance," he mumbled.
"This is ridiculous, Al. We both know what I have to do here."
"I know, but... This bites, Sam!"
Sam managed to smile. "No pun intended?"
"Ha, ha, ha." He did look almost amused for a moment. Then he looked like he might be about to cry. He reached out and put a hand on top of Sam's shoulder. Sam couldn't feel it, of course, but the gesture almost made him want to cry. He mirrored it, carefully placing his own hand just above the hologram's shoulder so as not to ruin the illusion.
"You know what really gets me, Al?"
Al raised an eyebrow. "I can't imagine," he said sardonically.
Sam laughed, just a little. He took his hand from the image of Al's shoulder and held his thumb and forefinger close together. "This time, I was this close to being home."
"Aww, Sam."
Sam smiled again, more easily this time. "Bye, Al. See you in another life, right? One way or another."
Not trusting himself to say anything else, Sam turned away, climbed into the incinerator, closed the door, and pressed the trigger.
There was heat, and light, and a familiar tingling feeling...
**
He was juggling lit torches. He yelped as they clattered to the floor, one, two, three, and crammed his singed fingers into his mouth. Somebody has a very unpleasant sense of humor, he thought, casting a quick glare in the general direction of the ceiling. Around him, people were laughing and heckling. He exited the stage as quickly as he could and excused himself to the men's room.
Where Al met him. Looking... looking like Al.
"Al! You're all right! What happened? Did I fix it?"
Al's forehead wrinkled. "What do you mean? You only just got here! Now, Ziggy says it's 1974, and your name is--"
"Never mind that! What about the zombies?"
"Zombies? What zombies? There's no such thing as zombies. Did you manage to knock yourself in the head while you were out there on stage?"
Sam grinned. "Never mind," he said. And, looking up to the ceiling: I take it back. Thank you.
Al cocked his head a little. "Are you sure you're all right, Sam? You look a little flushed."
"I'm great, Al. I've never been better. Now..." He rubbed his hands together. "Tell me what I'm here to do. For some reason, I'm feeling really optimistic about the future right now."
Author: astrogirl2
Fandom: Quantum Leap
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Al
Length: ~4,300 words
Rating: PG, mainly just because I've let Al use a couple of words the network probably wouldn't have liked.
Spoilers: None
Warnings: None
Prompt: 371. Quantum Leap - Sam leaps into a zombie.
LEAP OF THE LIVING DEAD
There was the familiar tingling, and that paradoxical sensation of moving very, very fast, while also somehow, just for a moment, existing in some still, quiet place outside of normal space and time. Then came the bright light, the usual feeling of disorientation, and...
Sam blinked. He appeared to be in some kind of cell: three walls of shiny, featureless metal, and a fourth of transparent plexiglass. Beyond the clear wall, he could see some kind of laboratory. A biological containment facility, maybe? It was clean, very neat, and very high-tech. He couldn't be too far in the past, then.
The fact that the metal examination table across the room appeared to have straps on it was somewhat worrying, but Sam generally tried not to jump to the worst possible conclusions this early in a Leap. Usually, the really bad news came later. He supposed he ought to be glad that at least this time he hadn't appeared in the middle of anything awkward, embarrassing, or obviously and immediately life-threatening, but somehow he didn't find the silent emptiness of this place reassuring. Especially not when he considered which side of the wall he was on here.
He took a step back and tilted his head. From the right angle, he ought to be able to get a pretty good reflection off this surface... Ah. There.
The face that looked back at him was female, something he was sufficiently used to now that it no longer gave him pause. More disturbing, though, were the flat, dull eyes, the grayish skin, the loose, sagging flesh. It must be some kind of quarantine, he decided. This woman did not look well. In fact, if he didn't know better, he would have sworn he was looking at a three-day-old corpse.
"Oh, boy," he said.
It came out as, "Nnnnn bnnnn."
"Oh, hell," he amended, and at least that sounded all right.
**
It was hard to tell in the complete absence of any kind of clock, but Al seemed to be taking longer than usual this time. Sam had already examined every inch of the cell twice, which, admittedly, didn't take very long. It was obvious that a section of the clear front wall was designed to slide open, and equally obvious that there was no way to unlock it from the inside. Having established that, he tried calling out for a while, but after a few minutes his shouts of, "Hello! Is anybody there?" began to sound much more like incoherent moaning sounds, and he stopped. The stress, he decided, must finally be getting to him. That had to be it.
Eventually, seeing nothing else to do, he slumped down in a corner to wait, thinking exasperated thoughts about whatever it was that had possessed him to believe that time travel was a good idea in the first place and attempting to convince himself that God, or Time, or Fate, or whatever it was wouldn't have brought him here just so he could rot in a cell forever.
Even so, he couldn't help feeling a surge of relief when the holographic doorway appeared and Al stepped through.
"Finally!" he cried, springing to his feet.
"Sorry, Sam. We've been kind of busy."
"Al," he said, "I think something's seriously wrong here. More than usual, I mean." He gestured towards himself, or rather, at the face and body Al must be seeing. "I look like some kind of-- of--"
"Zombie?" said Al. "Yeah. Funny, that."
Sam gave him an I-do-not-appreciate-your-sense-of-humor look, but Al really didn't seem very amused, himself. "Where am I? Does Ziggy know why I'm here?"
"Oh," said Al, "we don't even need Ziggy this time. I know exactly why you're here."
"Great!" Sam grinned, but it must have looked disturbing on the face he was wearing, because Al flinched a little at the sight. Although, Sam suddenly realized, there was more to it than that. Al had seemed uncharacteristically grim since the moment he'd arrived. There'd been no colorful excuses for his lateness, no impatient thwacking of the handlink. He hadn't even glanced at Sam's cleavage, and while Sam liked to think that even Al would draw the line at ogling a woman who looked to be at death's door, if not already well over the threshold, the fact that he hadn't even make a joke about it was worrying. "Al? What's wrong?"
Al pretended not to have heard him, staring at whatever was showing up on his handlink as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world. But before Sam could repeat his query, he looked up. "To answer your question about where you are: it's four days ago, and you're next door."
If the idea was to distract him, it certainly worked. "Wait, what?" The second word came out as something like, "whraaaauuurgh." Sam cleared his throat. "I'm what?"
"You heard me. You're four days in the past, from where I'm sitting right now. And you're in the biological weapons development facility next door to the Quantum Leap Project. Well, I say 'next door.' But, really, what's a couple of miles of desert? Not very much." He looked, Sam decided, not just grim, but tired.
"What am I here for, Al?"
"Oh," said Al. "That's easy." He pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and lit it. "You're here to stop the zombie apocalypse."
"Oh, come on, Al! There's no such thing as zombies!"
"Take a look in a mirror," said Al, "and then tell me that."
"I already did," muttered Sam. He had to admit, if he didn't know better...
"Well, then." Al waved his cigar in Sam's direction. "You've seen the evidence! Anyway, there didn't used to be any such thing as time travel. Now there's time travel, and zombies." Sam wasn't sure whether it was a sign that, after an uncounted but very large number of Leaps, he was finally starting to lose it, but this logic almost seemed persuasive. "Like I said, Sam," Al continued, "this is a biological weapons facility. The stuff that they get up to at these places, I'm telling you, it'll curl your hair. Genetically engineered superbugs, flesh-eating bacteria..."
"And zombies?" Sam prompted.
"And zombies. Some douchenozzle named--" Al consulted his handlink, shook it, and checked it again. "--named Dr. Allen Weisser decided that since zombies didn't exist, it would be a great idea to invent them. He invented a virus that could turn dead bodies into living dead bodies. Can you believe some people?"
"If all this is true, Al, then if I'm here to stop him, I'm a little late."
"You're not here to stop him creating the virus. You're here to stop it getting out. According to Ziggy, a couple of hours from now Weisser is going to take his pet flesh-eating ghoul -- that's you, Sam -- out to run some experiments. But he doesn't restrain her well enough, and she -- it -- breaks loose and bites him. Then he goes out and bites someone else, they bite two friends, and they bite two friends, and four days later, half of New Mexico is overrun."
"So, all I have to do is... not bite him?"
"Maybe," said Al, although the tone in his voice clearly said what they were both thinking: it was never quite that easy.
Sam opened his mouth to make a comment to that effect, but all that came out was "Unnnnnngggh!"
"I'm sorry, Sam. I didn't catch that."
"That keeps happening! Al, I'm starting to worry that something's really wrong with me."
"Well, you're a zombie, Sam." Sam glared at him. "OK, OK." Al consulted the handlink again. "Ziggy thinks it probably has something to do with your brainwave connection to the real zombie in the waiting room."
Sam wondered briefly if he ought to be alarmed by that phrase, then decided that his friends were probably capable of keeping that particular situation under control. "Sometimes I really wish I had fewer holes in my memory," he said instead. "I've gotta say, I've never really had a clear idea how that works."
Al shook his head. "It's not your swiss-cheesed memory this time. You never understood how it worked. Ziggy doesn't understand it, Gooshie doesn't understand it. Nobody understands it."
Sam, somewhat disturbingly, found that his mouth was watering a little bit at the phrase "swiss-cheesed brain." He tried very hard not to think about this particular fact. "Well, what do I--?"
But Al was looking off at something Sam couldn't see, his eyes narrowing in concern. "Gotta go, Sam."
"Al, what--?" But Al was already gone.
"Great," said Sam. "Just great." He slumped against the wall of his cell, wondering exactly how much longer it was going to be before he had to do whatever it was he was supposed to do, and wishing there were some reading material in here to take his mind off things. Like what it was Al'd had to go and deal with.
He closed his eyes and sighed. It sounded like a very soft, exasperated moan.
**
More time passed. Finally, just about at the point where Sam was starting to conclude that, unbelievably, this was shaping up to be his most boring Leap ever, the laboratory door opened and a human figure came through.
"Ah, this must be Dr. Douchenozzle," said Sam. "I mean, Dr. Weisser." Somehow, the word had sounded way more obscene coming from him than from Al, and his hand had automatically come up to cover his mouth as if he were afraid his mother might catch him talking like that. He lowered it back to his side, shook his head, and leaned forward to get a better look.
The man was wearing some kind of hazmat suit. A great idea, if zombiism were an airborne pathogen, but both Sam's vague memories of bad horror movies and Al's earlier remarks about biting suggested it wasn't. And Sam was pretty sure a sufficiently determined monster could get into that suit somehow, given the opportunity. "A monster like me?" Sam muttered.
Weisser was standing only a few feet away from him now, but seemed not to hear him through the thick plexiglass and the protective helmet. Or else he was hearing only what he ought to hear from the real zombie. Sam was never entirely sure exactly how that worked, either.
For a moment, the two of them stared at each other. Sam could see Weisser clearly through the helmet. He had a round, mild-mannered face, nothing at all like the mad scientist Sam had been picturing. But, of course, he of all people knew appearances could be deceiving.
Weisser was dictating notes now, presumably to some unseen recording device. Sam could hear him, faint and muffled, but audible enough to make out the words. Well, that answered one question, maybe.
"Subject shows no obvious signs of further deterioration," Weisser was saying. "It appears to be considerably calmer and more interested in its surroundings than previously." Sam quickly dropped his eyes and tried to look more like a zombie, although he wasn't at all sure quite how to do that. "The aggressive behaviors observed earlier have now entirely ceased, presumably due to continued lack of food intake."
So, they hadn't been feeding the poor thing. Half of Sam felt extremely relieved at that, considering what it almost certainly ate. The other half felt a pang of sympathy. "Who was she?" he said quietly. "This woman whose corpse you've resurrected. Do her family know what you've done?"
"Given the subject's apparent weakened sate," Weisser continued, "this would seem to be a good time for further examination." He went over to a tall laboratory cabinet and took out a pair of bulky handcuffs and a long stick with a semicircular attachment at the end at looked like it might fit nicely around a zombie's neck.
"Handcuffs?" said Sam. "Seriously? You're going to restrain a hungry zombie with handcuffs?" Admittedly, he probably figured he'd just have to hold it off long enough to get it strapped down on the table, but still. Sam had heard of overconfident researchers -- hell, he'd been an overconfident researcher -- but this was ridiculous. He wondered if maybe this guy was in danger of losing his funding and was getting reckless under the pressure. He wondered how he'd managed to get funding for something like this in the first place. Maybe he hadn't. Maybe that explained the pitifully inadequate equipment, if not the nice, shiny lab.
Weisser propped the stick up against the wall, readied the handcuffs, and moved to the keypad that controlled the door to Sam's cell.
He tried one more time. "Dr. Weisser, don't do this. Please, don't do this. Doctor!" But even he heard the last word as a moan.
The cell door opened. Even in the hazmat suit, Weisser was very quick with both the stick and the handcuffs, Sam had to give him that. Maybe he had reasons to think he'd be okay against something with slower-than-human reflexes. Not good reasons, maybe, but reasons. Sam, however, had very good reflexes. A roundhouse kick knocked the handcuffs from Weisser's hands, and a quick wrench of his arm sent the stick clattering to the floor. Inside the helmet, Weisser's face was a particular combination of surprised and terrified Sam wasn't sure he'd ever seen before.
Weisser's head swiveled towards the cell door. "Oh, no you don't!" shouted Sam -- although it sounded more like "Nnnnnn nn ynnn nnnnnt!" -- and both of them lunged towards the door at once, Sam making it out hard on Weisser's heels, well before he could reach the door mechanism.
The two of them stood facing each other in the laboratory, Sam crouching a little in a martial arts stance in case the man tried coming at him again, although that would be even more foolish now.
Weisser's eyes were huge. "What did I do?" he cried.
Sam felt himself relax a little. This must be what he was here to do! Make Weisser see the folly of his ways, get him to abandon his research...
"It's still intelligent!" said Weisser. "Intelligent and fast. This is amazing! So much better than I'd hoped for!"
Sam buried his face in both hands and moaned. This time, it was all him.
Then he picked up a piece of scientific apparatus his swiss-cheesed memory almost-but-not-quite recognized, and hit Weisser on the head with it.
**
Sam was bent over Weisser's unconscious body when he heard Al reappear, checking Weisser's pupillary response with a light he'd found in one of the laboratory's cabinet drawers. He was glad to see that it looked okay. The man might have been about to bring about the zombie apocalypse, but Sam still didn't like the idea of accidentally giving him brain damage. Although thinking too hard about the subject of Weisser's brain was making him salivate again.
Abruptly, he realized that Al had been standing there for the better part of a minute and had said nothing at all. He looked up just as Al started towards him. There were bags under his eyes, his hair was mussed, and he was scowling like a thundercloud.
"Al--" Sam said, then stopped abruptly as Al aimed what would have been a vicious kick at Weisser's head, if his foot hadn't gone right through it.
Sam stood up. "What is it, Al? What's the matter? Is that--" It was hard to tell for sure, given the loud colors Al was wearing, but... "Is that blood on your shirt?"
Al looked down at himself, made an ineffectual gesture as if attempting to brush the blood off his clothing, and shrugged.
"What happened?" Sam pressed. A horrible thought occurred. "Did the zombie in the waiting room get out?"
"What?" said Al. "Oh. No. No, that one's fine. It's the zombies outside that are the problem." He kicked pointlessly at the unconscious scientist again and said, "Bastard. You should have killed him, Sam."
"Al--" Sam began again, but broke off as Al looked off at something or someone Sam couldn't see, nodded, and frowned.
"I don't think we have much time," he said.
"What do I do, Al?" Sam realized there was a definite edge of panic in his voice. He swallowed, trying to get it under control, but it was hard to ignore the vivid images that had popped into his mind. His best friend being ripped apart by zombies was not something he ever wanted to see. Not to mention, if Al and everyone at Project Quantum Leap were killed, what would happen to him? "Do I... I dunno, do I just get back into the cell? Maybe when he wakes up, he'll have learned better?" He smiled hopefully.
Al shook his head. "Ziggy doesn't think so."
"Of course not." Sam sighed. "When is it ever that easy."
Al consulted the handlink, shook it, checked it again. It made a particularly unhappy-sounding squeal this time, Sam thought, although maybe that was just his imagination.
"Ziggy says, first you've got to destroy all his research notes. In the cabinet, over there." He gestured with the handlink. "He's operating on a shoestring budget here. He even had to borrow these facilities from another project. With all his records gone, he probably won't get the chance to try again."
"Gladly," said Sam. He wrenched open the cabinet drawer. It was full of files, notebooks, and discs. Sam set about shredding, mangling, and otherwise demolishing all of it. It felt ridiculously satisfying. "Now what?" he said, when it was over.
"Well..." Al thumped the handlink, grimaced, and thumped it again. "No," he said. "Ziggy... No!" He sounded half like he were admonishing a disobedient dog, half like he were protesting bad news.
"What?" said Sam. On the floor, Dr. Weisser stirred slightly. Sam prodded him with his foot, and he lapsed back into full unconsciousness. "Al, what is it?"
Al looked like he wasn't going to answer, but Sam gave him what must have been an unusually effective glare. "Aww," he said. "Ziggy says... Well, Ziggy says there's one more--"
Suddenly, the invisible floor on which Al was standing shook. He flickered, various parts of his body alternately disappearing from view. He whirled around, looked at something behind him and said "Shit!"
"Al!" But Al had disappeared. Sam waited half a minute, a minute, two, but he didn't reappear. "Al," he said, feeling suddenly full of despair. He scrubbed at his face with one hand, ordering himself to think. You've got a great big brain, Beckett. Use it! "One more what?" he said quietly. "One more... loose end?" He caught a glimpse of himself -- of the zombie -- reflected in the shiny surface of the examining table, and had the sinking feeling he knew what it was he had to do.
**
Sam walked down an empty corridor. He thought he could hear voices coming from somewhere, but he hadn't seen anyone yet. Apparently Dr. Weisser had been keeping pretty late hours. He guessed zombies didn't really need to sleep.
He wondered what the best way to kill a zombie was. He seemed to remember something about targeting the head. Cutting the head off, maybe? There might be a fire axe around somewhere, but somehow he doubted it would be very easy to chop off your own head. If you didn't finish the job on the first cut, things could get pretty ugly. Or was it supposed to be a bullet to the brain? That sounded right. Well, there had to be guns around here somewhere. Maybe if he provoked a security guard? Except he'd have to make sure it was a head shot. He wasn't entirely sure how to do that.
Lost in thought, he'd already passed the door before he realized what it said. He went back and stared at it.
"Incinerator." Of course. They'd need a safe way of disposing of dead laboratory specimens, wouldn't they? And burning would kill pretty much anything.
"I wonder..." he said. He opened the door with the key card he'd removed from Dr. Weisser's still-unconscious body. The room inside was as clean and as empty as everywhere else he'd been so far. The incinerator looked to be just about big enough to accommodate a human body.
Sam stood there, staring at it. Move! said something in the back of his brain. Every second you stand here, you're putting Al and the future in greater danger! But, actually, countered something in the front of his brain, if you change things here and now, they'll never have been in any danger, and a few more minutes won't matter.
"I think I'm getting a headache," said Sam. He went over to examine the incinerator. It required someone on the outside to push the activation button, but there were plenty of tools around here. He could rig up some kind of remote trigger, a weight suspended over the button, set to drop when he activated it.
That, at least, was something concrete for him to work on. He rolled up his tattered sleeves and got started.
**
He was standing in front of the incinerator again, holding his trigger mechanism in his hand, when Al reappeared. He'd never wished so much that he were able to hug the guy.
"Al! You're okay!"
Al shrugged.
"What happened? You look terrible."
"Yeah, well, back atcha." But Sam thought Al look almost as pale, and considerably more haggard, than Sam's reflection had. Before he could say anything more, though, Al apparently noticed where they were. He stared at the incinerator, at the jury-rigged trigger system. "What are you doing, Sam?"
"This is what Ziggy was trying to say, right? I have to get rid of the last loose end. As long as this zombie exists, there's always the possibility she'll get out again. It's not enough to make sure no more zombies are created. I have to make sure this one is destroyed." He made his voice as gentle as he could. "Isn't that right?"
"Aww, Sam, no." But Sam could tell that was a "no" of protest, not one of disagreement.
"Ziggy... Ziggy doesn't know what'll happen after this, does he? Whether I'll leap or..."
"Or whether you'll die? No. No, he doesn't. Which is why you can't do this, Sam!"
"I don't think I have much of a choice!" The words came out a little too loud, a little too close to a moan, and Al flinched slightly. His hand went to his arm, as if he were in pain. Sam suddenly noticed that there was even more blood on his shirt than there had been, that one orange-and-purple sleeve was torn, and underneath it was...
"Al! You've been bitten!"
"What, this?" Al shrugged. "Yeah, well."
"What do you mean, 'Yeah, well'? You've been bitten!"
Al waved this concern away. "Don't worry about it. Ziggy says there's a chance I haven't even been infected."
"How big a chance?"
"Oh, at least a..." Al rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the floor. "At least a ten percent chance," he mumbled.
"This is ridiculous, Al. We both know what I have to do here."
"I know, but... This bites, Sam!"
Sam managed to smile. "No pun intended?"
"Ha, ha, ha." He did look almost amused for a moment. Then he looked like he might be about to cry. He reached out and put a hand on top of Sam's shoulder. Sam couldn't feel it, of course, but the gesture almost made him want to cry. He mirrored it, carefully placing his own hand just above the hologram's shoulder so as not to ruin the illusion.
"You know what really gets me, Al?"
Al raised an eyebrow. "I can't imagine," he said sardonically.
Sam laughed, just a little. He took his hand from the image of Al's shoulder and held his thumb and forefinger close together. "This time, I was this close to being home."
"Aww, Sam."
Sam smiled again, more easily this time. "Bye, Al. See you in another life, right? One way or another."
Not trusting himself to say anything else, Sam turned away, climbed into the incinerator, closed the door, and pressed the trigger.
There was heat, and light, and a familiar tingling feeling...
**
He was juggling lit torches. He yelped as they clattered to the floor, one, two, three, and crammed his singed fingers into his mouth. Somebody has a very unpleasant sense of humor, he thought, casting a quick glare in the general direction of the ceiling. Around him, people were laughing and heckling. He exited the stage as quickly as he could and excused himself to the men's room.
Where Al met him. Looking... looking like Al.
"Al! You're all right! What happened? Did I fix it?"
Al's forehead wrinkled. "What do you mean? You only just got here! Now, Ziggy says it's 1974, and your name is--"
"Never mind that! What about the zombies?"
"Zombies? What zombies? There's no such thing as zombies. Did you manage to knock yourself in the head while you were out there on stage?"
Sam grinned. "Never mind," he said. And, looking up to the ceiling: I take it back. Thank you.
Al cocked his head a little. "Are you sure you're all right, Sam? You look a little flushed."
"I'm great, Al. I've never been better. Now..." He rubbed his hands together. "Tell me what I'm here to do. For some reason, I'm feeling really optimistic about the future right now."