The citadel

As Azrael woke, he found himself in a closed room with white walls and a single door made from solid steel and a small window in it.

After his aching body confirmed the fact that he was, still alive, Azrael forced himself to get up from the bed he had been laid on.
He looked around and finally down at himself.

Someone had cleaned his wounds and dressed him into a white shirt and matching pants. His blade was gone and no sound was to be heard from anywhere.

After trying to puzzle together the pieces, a sharp headache shot through Azrael's head as the memory of right before he had blanked out came back, along with a flood of other memories which tore at his consciousness from all directions.

Azrael went down to his knees and cried out as loud as he could, trying to drown out the chorus of voices that resounded in his head, making it feel like it would explode soon.

On the brink of blanking out again, he felt a sting in his shoulder and shortly after the voices all went silent and the flood of memories stopped. He fell forward and just before his face hit the ground, someone grabbed his shoulders and carefully laid him down again.
Azrael heard something being spoken, but for him it seemed so far away, it might as well have been a bird chirping a happy little song for him. When he tried to look up, his sight blurred even more and nausea rose from his gut.

When he woke again, he found himself fixated to the bed, an IV with blood attached to one arm and one with a clear liquid attached to his other arm.
However there also was something else. A small device rested in the palm of his right hand with a cap on what seemed to be a button.
Azrael flicked the cap open with his thumb and pressed the button, hoping that it would not trigger anything bad again.

A few minutes later, the door opened and a few people came in with hasty steps.
He had expected to see some sort of doctor come in, maybe with a syringe ready at hand to sedate him again, however his eyes widened when Maria bowed over him and asked, "How are you feeling, Azrael?"

"I..." Azrael croaked, trying to touch his forehead only to be reminded that he was bound by the shackle holding his hand down.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Just a moment, I'll just..."
"Don't," an also familiar voice cut in.
A few seconds later, a male hand moved into Azrael's view and the same voice asked, "How many fingers am I holding up?"
"...4...am I...a captive?"
"Sort of. You're in quarantine. We need to be sure that you haven't been infected with something else while out there...which is also why we can't unchain you quite yet."

"I...see..." Azrael croaked with a sense of disappointment in his voice. He had hoped that it had all been a dream after all and that he was finally waking up. That he had been in a mental ward all along and that nothing of it all had ever happened. That he was just a crazy man with a too vivid fantasy.

But the bloody IV on his left side and the familiar voices told him better. The world had been destroyed, the walking dead were roaming the streets and he had become a monster.

Tears streamed down his face as he realized that it hadn't been just a dream or a fantasy. That it had all been real. And that it would only get worse.

Suddenly another set of hasty steps came running down the hallway and a young voice shouted, "I've got it! I've finally got it! I've got the cure!"

Azrael's eyes shot open wide and he shot up, tearing the fixations from the bed with him. The others jumped back and as Azrael tried to find his bearing, trying to realize what was happening, he found himself staring down the barrel of a set of guns aimed at him.

Once his head stopped spinning from the sudden movements, he was able to recognize the faces of the people behind the guns.
John lowered his gun and ordered, "Put that thing down, Gordon...how are you, Azzy?"
"Don't...call me that...!" Azrael tried to complain, but his voice was still hoarse.
In the meantime, Derrick had arrived at the room, holding a pile of papers in his hands, which he dropped once he looked at the awake Azrael.

He stared at the company and asked, "Hey, since when is he awake?"
"A few minutes. Tore right through the shackles, but hasn't tried to attack us yet."
"Honestly? Damn, I knew the feedback was making him strong, but this is taking the cake..."
Azrael raised his hand and asked as loud as he was able to, "Would someone please tell me what the hell is going on here? Where am I?"
John turned around and said, "You are in the citadel."
"This doesn't look like a church to me, John."
"Not cathedral, citadel. You know? Small, self-sufficient fortress? Hard to crack?"
Azrael rubbed his temples while he sorted out his thoughts.

In the meantime, John pulled over a chair and waved the others to give Azrael some room. They did as they were told, however Gordon refused to lay down the rifle he was holding.
John sighed, "Okay Azzy...I take it, you're confused."
"You can say that again...what...what the hell happened? Everything's so fuzzy..."
John put his hand on Azrael's head, causing jolts of pain to run through Azrael's entire body. Azrael shot up and shoved John against the wall on the other side of the room.
Gordon was just about ready to pull the trigger, but John recovered in time and yelled, "Don't!"
"John, he almost killed you just now! You've seen what he did with the shackles, do you really think the door will be able to hold him once he decides to go rabid?!"
"He won't. Just...just believe me. Okay, Azrael..."
"Just...just shoot me already!" Azrael suddenly shouted, his head hanging low, small drops of water trickling down on his clenched fists.
"No, we won't. Not yet, at least. First we need to tell you what happened to you."

Azrael looked up, tears in his eyes, which he quickly wiped away as he waited for John to speak.
However John merely nodded over to the slightly chubby boy standing behind the others, "Derrick, I think you're the best man to explain this."
"Err...yeah...sure...okay, so this guy...the other Uber-Zombie...he had holed himself up in the citadel, from where he was controlling the zombies using the broadcast equipment."
"Broadcast...I...I don't understand. And what do you mean by 'Uber-Zombie'?"
Maria sighed and took over, "According to the records of Doc, the Zombies are communicating, just like you've been saying for a while now. However they don't speak telepathically like we originally assumed, but they are using plain radio waves with a fairly low range. Maybe a hundred meters or so. By using the broadcast equipment in the citadel, the Uber-Zombie forwarded his commands to every Zombie in a very wide range, somehow interfacing with them to form a greater mind."
"Leading the hive mind...yeah, he mentioned something like that..." Azrael croaked.

Maria nodded and then proceed to explain, "Derrick here was the first to figure out the connection to radio waves, when he decoded a few signals we received on the radio at the colony as 'more than just white noise'. His first idea was, that it was some sort of encrypted military communication, but it didn't match any sort of encryption algorithm he knew. And he knows a lot about computers and all that stuff, you can believe me that."
Azrael laughed a little, remembering the time when he had first found him.
"Anyway, there was a signal far stronger than all the other similar ones. By tracing the signal, we came up with the coordinates of the citadel. You can imagine our surprise, when we learned that we had already known them."
"What...what do you mean?"
"Do you remember the bunker I told you about when you found me? The one you wanted to check out?"
"...wait, the citadel is..."
"Yes, this is the bunker, where the Zombie virus was researched," Maria concluded Azrael's realization.
"Oh this god damn...that's what the battle had been all about. He just wanted to keep me away from here..." Azrael muttered.

John continued, "When we arrived here, there were a few armed guards just outside, patrolling. Can you imagine that, Zombies with guns!"
Azrael remembered the time when he was just about ready to surrender and replied meekly, "Yes, I think I can imagine that..."
"...and here I thought I might get a smile out of you...anyway, we slipped past them easily."
"You didn't kill them?"
"Oh, we could've...but that would've alerted anyone in and around the bunker and if there's two Zombie's with guns patrolling the entrance, there was likely to be more around."
"...good choice. If they had even just smelled you, Walter would've known you were there."
"...Walter?"
"...the 'Uber-Zombie'. The one pulling the strings behind the recent madness. That is...was his name."
The bitterness in Azrael's voice made in the room everyone fall silent and look in different directions. None could bear to look at him right then.

After a few seconds, John cleared his throat and continued, "The bunker was largely intact once we had passed the secondary perimeter. A few signs of struggle and a few corpses with gunshot wounds, but there were no traces of the living dead. While searching the compound, we came across this 'Walter', who had holed himself up in the radio room."
Sam cut in, "That was the weirdest sight ever. He was just sitting there, staring at the radio in front of him."
"And...you just shot him?"
"No, at first we thought he was a survivor or just another Zombie...but when he noticed us, we quickly learned that he wasn't. He spoke to us in our minds with a screeching voice. Told us that it was futile, that we could do nothing to stop him now, that the only one who could have stopped him would be dead in a few seconds...well, that's when Gordon put the bullet between his eyes. What did you say again when he dropped?"
"I told him he talked too much," Gordon replied with a smile. Azrael tried to remember the last time he had seen Gordon smile, but his mind came up empty.
"Just...just like that? I mean...that was way too easy! He's a master of deception, have you checked that he's really dead?"
"Multiple times, yes. We're pretty sure that he's dead."

Maria took over, "After Walter fell, the Zombies became momentarily disoriented all over the place...and then became rabid, clawing and ravaging at the gates of the colony. There was no longer sense or reason in their actions."
"Because the one controlling them was dead," Azrael concluded.
Maria nodded and then continued to explain, "A few hours after the Zombies went rabid, the guys came back with a helicopter and picked up Derrick, myself and a few others to check out the material they had found. And while we were going through the material, they brought you in."

"And...and what does all of that have to do with me?"
"I'll explain that, " Derrick cut in, collecting the papers he had dropped earlier.
"Remember how I told you that the Zombie virus was originally meant to be a super soldier serum?"
"Yeah...I think..."
"There was something in the records of the old man Herguson he called 'Biofeedback'. It was one of the effects they had meant to happen...basically, if the correct signal is received, the affected soldier turns into an unstoppable killing machine. They never quite got it under control and the few specimen they didn't have to shoot right away turned rabid and destroyed everything around them. They only stopped after getting killed by, and I quote, 'a large quantity of lethal substances that would have killed an elephant easily' or after completely overexerting themselves. Most never woke up again."
"And...I was in that state?"
"Yes, the state we found you in and all examinations we ran on you while you were asleep suggest that," Maria chimed in, sounding almost happy.

"But...but how...why? I mean, why would Walter put me into a state where I'd be able to fight whatever he throws at me?"
"...that's the thing...we don't think he did. You see, every host of the virus has a very specific command sequence, so they could be activated separately. There was just no way for him to know your sequence. There's also something else..." Derrick explained.
Azrael looked up and asked, "...what?"
"Remember when we hailed you on the radio? And told you that we took down the general?" John asked and Azrael nodded.
"You replied. All of the records indicate a total loss of all higher thought, which also includes capability of speech with the people affected. Yet you replied...and that lead us to an interesting theory," Maria said, her eyes shining from excitement.
"We think that you triggered it yourself to defend yourself against those suckers!" Derrick concluded.
Maria cut in, "We think that Walter's death, which disoriented all the Zombies also affected you and sent you into your delirious state."

Azrael rubbed his head while saying, "I do remember a major headache coming up before going out..."
"Which brings me to this here..." Derrick said triumphantly, holding up the papers.
Azrael took a while until he remembered what Derrick had shouted before he came storming in.
He asked carefully, "...you...found a cure?"
"The recipe for it, yeah. I had to crack some top-class encryption to get to it, but there's nothing a real hacker can't bypass," Derrick replied, beaming with pride.

Maria gently pushed Azrael back to his bed and said, "You should rest some more, Azrael. You're still weak and you haven't in forever. I'm sure John will bring you something in a bit."

The group slowly withdrew from the room, until only Gordon remained.
"Wait!"
"...rest, Kid. God knows you've earned it."
He left the room and closed the door behind him.

Azrael flopped back on his bed and closed his eyes, wondering if it really was over. If it really was going to be okay now.

And without much of a sound to disturb him, he returned to his sleep.