CAGED ANIMALS

'HEY, YOU'RE BACK! So how'd it go?' Logan jumped up from his bunk as Sam walked into the tiny room they were sharing at the research center. Sam groaned, shrugged off his backpack, and dumped it in the corner along with his gun.

'Don't ask,' he said, staggering over to his own bunk and collapsing onto it.

'Already did,' said Logan. 'So come on. Spill the beans.'

Sam's legs were humming with tiredness. He thought that if he closed his eyes, he might sleep for a week. 'Well, we got the sample,' he muttered. 'Purna's giving it to West now. That's the good news.'

'Which means there's bad,' said Logan.

'Uh,' Sam grunted.

'"Uh"? What does "uh" mean? I know you've walked a million miles today, but if you don't tell me, I'll just keep on asking till it drives you insane.'

Sam groaned again and shuffled halfway upright, folding his pillow to prop up his head. 'That witch doctor guy's dead,' he said.

'Shit! No way, man! What happened?'

'Purna shot him.'

Logan blinked. 'Oh-K. Any particular reason? He look at her funny or something?'

Briefly Sam told Logan what had happened up at the burial site. When he had finished, Logan asked, 'So who is this Yerema chick?'

'She was the witch doctor's daughter, if you can believe it,' said Sam. 'Her daddy was the one who sealed her in there.'

'Sounds like a hell of a family argument. She tell you why?'

'Some. Seems she decided she wanted to see the world and get an education, even though her daddy wanted her to stay home, become a wife and mother, follow the traditions, all that shit. They argued about it – a lot, I guess – till finally she just upped and left.'

'Ran away?'

'I guess so. Anyway, she told us that at first she thought she'd never be able to go back home, that if she did her daddy's vengeance would be terrible. But then once she'd been among "civilized" people for a while, and had seen how reasonable they could be – how they listened to you, and how sometimes, if you put over your argument well enough, you could get them to change their mind – she started to think that maybe her own people weren't as rigid and primitive as she'd thought, that maybe she could get her daddy to see her point of view, after all.'

'I'm guessing that was a big mistake,' said Logan.

Sam nodded. 'Not only did her daddy not listen to her, but he tried to drive the evil out of her by getting some of the guys in the village to torture and ritually rape her.'

'Jesus,' Logan said. 'That's fucking sick.'

Still nodding, Sam said, 'And the thing was, it looks like that's how all this shit started in the first place.'

'What do you mean?'

'The guys who raped Yerema? They got ill and died. But not only that – they came back. They were resurrected as the walking dead. Yerema said at first that her daddy saw this as a sign of forgiveness from the gods. He thought the gods were telling him the guys had been made immortal, and that they'd sent back their bodies so the rest of the village could eat their brains and become immortal too. So a whole lot of brain-eating went on, and a whole lot of people died and came back. Thing was, the Ope family and their close relatives didn't get sick. They contracted the virus, but it didn't change them; they just lived with it. Yerema's daddy thought this was because the gods had cursed them due to Yerema's running away an' all. So to appease them he offered her up as a sacrifice. He locked her in the tomb and left her there to die.'

'And then the plague began to spread all over the island,' said Logan.