by Urban, Tony
The docs said it was a form of encephalitis that fried the brain and none of the normal drugs had any effect. Once someone was sick, they kept getting worse for a day or two and then they died.
They didn’t stay dead, either. Jorge discovered that morbid fact first-hand when, just minutes after praying with a dying woman in the makeshift field hospital that now occupied the Eagles’ football stadium, she awoke from her eternal slumber and tried to bite a nurse who was removing the oxygen mask from her face.
The dead woman’s jaws snapped so hard that her dentures shattered. Soldiers quickly strapped her to the bed and the docs in charge examined her, but she gave off no vitals. They muzzled her like a vicious dog and shipped her away to God knows where.
When the sick died of the disease, they came back like slow and clumsy cannibals. That was bad enough, but Jorge also saw what happened when they managed to bite someone. The first time he saw it happen was when a private, fresh out of high school, got chomped by one of the zombies.
They had orders not to call them that — zombies — but that’s what they were. Calling them infected or diseased or whatever other words the brass deemed media friendly and less likely to cause a panic didn’t change anything.
The private, his name was Keller, Bolivar thought he recalled, was dragging a lifeless body off the street when out of nowhere it reanimated. It bit down on the boy’s forearm and ripped right through his US flag tattoo. Bright red arterial blood sprayed from the wound and the private moved to cover it and stop the bleeding. Within minutes the life left his eyes. He scrambled about like a crazed animal, every bit as quick as he’d been in life.
The boy made a mad dash toward his fellow soldiers, who gunned him down before he could reach them. The first shots in his chest seemed to have little effect, but the bullet that took off the top of his skull sent him to the ground. He didn’t get up.
Complicating matters was that it wasn’t always the same. Sometimes a person turned within seconds of being bitten. Sometimes they lasted a few minutes, long enough to build up a false sense of hope. The docs speculated that it depended on a person’s immune system, or perhaps the location of the bite itself. Either way, the unpredictability made the fight even harder.
They stayed ahead of it, for about a day and the outlook was cautiously optimistic. And then it turned. It seemed like all the soldiers got sick at once. Don Rando, a beefy master sergeant with a southern accent and a talent for downing liters of beer without getting even a bit drunk, was the first to die.
Rando keeled over in the midst of clearing out a government housing complex. He came back in short order and bit two of the people he’d been sent there to try to save. They turned, attacked, and created others. It spread like a grass fire on a dry afternoon.
That was the morning of the third day. The last twenty-four hours had been a nightmare of sickness and attacks and running and hiding. Bolivar had spent two years in Iraq and witnessed battles and attacks and bombings, but nothing compared to this. This was Hell on Earth.
He became separated from the other two remaining soldiers in his squad just before dawn when a pack of eight or so of the slow zombies shambled out of a shattered storefront window. Corporal Gwen Peduto and First Sergeant Clint Sawyer zigged while Bolivar zagged, and by the time he realized they’d gone a different direction, more zombies were in the middle. Reconnecting was not an option. He pulled his pistol, shot at and missed a zombie. The gunshots drew a crowd of twenty more. As he ran, he stumbled over a dead body and his pistol skittered down a sewage grate.
Bolivar sprinted into an alley where he found a rusted, green dumpster and climbed inside. His feet sunk into hot, rotting filth and the wet muck seeped into his boots and filled the crevices between his toes, but at least he felt safe, or as safe as possible under the circumstances.
As he settled into a sitting position on some trash, a gray rat the size of a small dog scurried out and ran across his legs. He went to knock it away, then realized it was the first live rat he’d seen since arriving in the city. The first living animal of any kind, actually. I won’t hurt you, Mr. Rat. Just keep a healthy distance.
He cohabitated with the rat for at least two hours, looking out through one of the rust holes to the street beyond. He saw thousands of zombies in that time, but after a while, they slowed and it reached a point where he had seen no one, living or dead, for the better part of forty minutes. The morning was already scorching and conditions in the dumpster were stifling. Sweat poured off his brow and the aroma of hot trash nauseated him.
Bolivar eased the lid of the dumpster open. He grabbed hold of the metal and pulled himself up from the pile of garbage he’d settled into. His feet pulled loose from the grime with a wet smacking sound that for some reason reminded him of a late spring night when he was a horny, inexperienced teenager kissing Lisa Weiss in the back of his dad’s hatchback. He swung his long legs over the edge of the dumpster and dropped to the pavement.
The dead-end alley was vacant and he hugged the wall as he approached the street. To the right, a group of slow moving zombies staggered up the road. To the left was emptiness, at least that’s what he first thought. But then he spotted a wheelchair rocking forward and back, forward and back, a few inches at a time as its occupant tried to maneuver out of a jumble of bicycles, overturned trash cans and the curb of the sidewalk.
Bolivar jogged toward the wheelchair and grabbed the handlebars. From the back, all he could see of the person was a mop of white hair.
“I’ve got you,” he said as he pulled the chair from the debris as gently as possible.
Once it was clear of the rubble, he turned the chair around so he could face its fair-haired rider. What he saw was a dead man with his legs amputated at the knees. His head bobbed atop his neck. When his dead eyes caught Bolivar, they locked on him.
Bolivar stood motionless until the zombie dove out of the wheelchair and tumbled on top of him. It clawed at him with its ragged nails and Bolivar stiff-armed it to hold it back. The zombie snapped its jaws, biting at air. The stumps of its thighs kicked up and down in a swimming motion.
As Bolivar held the zombie up and away from him, yellow saliva seeped from its lips and he had to turn his face sideways to keep the slimy drool from landing in his mouth. It hit his cheek instead and dribbled down his skin like warm honey.
He tried to hold the zombie off with one arm and reach for the knife he carried on his belt with the other, but the legless man was too heavy and Bolivar could feel his grip slipping.
The zombie was top heavy and tilted downward, its face coming nearer and nearer to Bolivar’s own. The sour smell of rot emanated from the creature’s mouth, which was perilously close his own.
Just as Bolivar’s fingers wrapped around the shaft of his knife, the right side of the zombie’s head blew out in an burst of brains and bone. He pushed the zombie away and looked to his left and saw Gwen Peduto running to him, her pistol still raised.
“That was a close one!” she said.
Bolivar climbed to his feet as she reached him. She was in her late twenties, over a decade younger than himself. Her brunette hair was pulled back in a bun that bulged from the bottom of her cap and he noticed a fair amount of blood spattered on her uniform.
“I was pretty sure you bit it,” she said and tittered. “Bad choice of words. Sorry.”
Bolivar couldn’t manage a laugh but offered a weak smile. “I thought the same for you. What about Sawyer?”
She glanced back in the direction from which she came. Clay Sawyer hauled ass up the street and a few dozen quick zombies weren’t far behind. Sawyer was about the same age as Jorge. He was tall and wide with a shaved head and a bushy red beard that Jorge thought made him look like a lumberjack.
“Move! Move!” Sawyer screamed as he ran.
He was still a hundred yards from them and Peduto handed Bolivar a pistol.
“Take this. It’s only a nine but there are six rounds left in the mag.”
Bolivar chambered a round and flicked on the safety.
“I’d let the safety off if I were you.”
Peduto was one of the soldiers that had requested he accompany them on the apartment building debacle, even though he should have been tending to casualties in the field hospital. Some of the younger soldiers thought it was good luck to have a medic along because they believed bad shit only happened when no one was around to fix it. He’d been happy to humor them, but that superstition had been disproved once and for all.
“What the fuck are you yahoo’s waiting on?” Sawyer said. He was less than twenty-five yards away now. “Head due south!”
They did as told. Sawyer caught up to them and the horde of zombies wasn’t far behind.
“Where are we going?” Peduto asked.
“Wells Fargo. Orders came over the radio a couple minutes ago. All personnel are to report for immediate evac.”
“And then what?” Bolivar asked.
“Operation Liberty Bell. At twelve hundred Juliet, they’re firebombing the city. Everything from Roosevelt Cemetery to the airport.”
At hearing that news, Bolivar slowed a step. “What about all the people? How do they get out?”
Sawyer didn’t look back. “They don’t. That’s the point.”
Peduto slowed to let Bolivar catch up to her. “Come on. Let’s just get there first, then we’ll figure it out.”
The zombies were close enough to hear their throaty gasps and growls and Bolivar picked up the pace.
Chapter 9
It had been three days since Wim had burned his animals. His phone was out, as was the power, and he was cut off from the world. The cut off part didn’t particularly bother him, but he found himself with what his mother would have called ‘a bad case of the sulks’ over the animals. That and doubts about what, if any, future remained for the farm.
The farm had been in his family for three generations, counting Wim. His grandfather on his mother’s side was the first to break ground. He died when Wim was only four and Wim didn’t remember much about the man; couldn’t even recall his actual first name for certain. The male influence in Wim’s life had always been his Pa, and even though they butted heads here and there, his respect long outlasted his life.
The old man was a firm believer that if you worked hard enough and prayed long enough, anything was possible. When the farm failed after that bad summer when all the crops died, Pa could still work men one third his age into the ground. He seemed capable of living forever, but less than two years later he was the one in the ground. It wasn’t sickness that put him there, at least not the physical kind, but in the end it didn’t matter. Dead was dead regardless of the cause.
Wim was thirteen when Pa passed, and soon after he informed his mother he was dropping out of school to take care of the farm. She gave him a little slap on the mouth and that was the end of that.
So, the two of them, a teenage boy and his almost seventy-year-old mother did the best they could to keep the family farm afloat. All things considered, they did an admirable job. The bills all got paid and the animals were always well tended, too. They made enough money to survive, and that was all they needed.
Four years later, when Wim was a junior in high school, Mama’s sugar got out of control and she ended up in the hospital where they first cut off her toe, then her foot, then the bottom part of her leg. When they said there was a wound that wouldn’t heal on her other leg, she told them to pack their knives away for good. She never made it home.
Wim finished high school because he knew that’s what Mama would have wanted, but he turned down offers from three different colleges. For the last seventeen years, he hadn’t been away from the farm, or his animals, for more than a few hours at a time.
In the absence of his parents, the pigs and chickens and cows had become his family. As much as he told himself they were all he needed, the loneliness wore on him. He’d go weeks at a time without talking to anyone but the livestock, and now they were dead, too, and he was all alone.
The reminiscing wasn’t getting him anywhere, though, and Wim decided three days was long enough to sulk.
The bland gray sky mirrored Wim’s mood. He hadn’t bothered to collect his mail in days. So, when he made the long walk up the dirt lane that connected his farm to the county road and found the mailbox empty, he was more than a little perturbed. He slammed the mailbox closed and turned back to face the farm when a scraping sound drew his attention.
The noise came from around the blind tree-lined curve up the road and Wim could see nothing. Whatever was making all the racket was getting closer, so Wim crossed his arms and decided to wait and see.
It was only a few moments until the source revealed itself. The blue uniform would have been a dead giveaway, but Wim didn’t need it to know the person staggering down the road was Hoyt Mabrey, the man who had been delivering mail to the farm for close to thirty years.
Hoyt dragged the large mail sack behind him and the canvas scraping against the rough pavement was the object causing so much noise. It was an odd sight and Wim couldn’t quite understand it.
“Hoyt? Where’s your mail truck?”
Hoyt didn’t respond, he just kept walking down the road.
“Are you all right?”
Hoyt turned his head toward Wim and staggered toward him. As he came closer Wim saw that the man’s skin had taken on a sickly gray pallor. His mouth hung open like a door with a broken hinge and thick saliva, opaque with mucous, dribbled out.
When he was only a few yards away, Wim noticed the man’s eyes were as dull and as gray as his skin, but they were still seeing. He looked at Wim and a pained moan worked its way up his throat and fell out his mouth.
“Hoyt?”
The mailman was almost within arm’s length now, and he reached out and swiped at Wim, who felt the displaced air rush by his face. Wim also caught a whiff of Hoyt’s aroma and it was a scent that was common in the country: the smell of death.
“Oh, my God.”
Wim took a step backwards, then another. The zombie kept coming.
Wim turned and ran down the dirt road to the farm. He outpaced Hoyt, who progressed slowly but steadily, still dragging the mail sack behind him like an anchor.
When he reached the barn, Wim grabbed the double-barrel shotgun he’d earlier used to destroy the rats. He’d reloaded it after disposing of them and, at that time, wondered why he even bothered. He flicked off the safety, then stood by the barn doors and watched the mailman trudge down the path.
Wim waited until Hoyt was about ten yards away and within range, then fired a round of buckshot into the zombie’s chest.
The mailman staggered back a step as his blue uniform shirt disintegrated and a gaping wound appeared beside the “Hoyt” name tag.
With little hesitation, Hoyt lurched forward again. It was like something out of a movie or a nightmare. Wim could see bits of shattered ribs through the tattered ribbons of flesh on the zombie’s chest.
Wim had one more round left, and he allowed the mailman to get good and close. Hoyt was only a few feet away as Wim leveled off the barrel and aimed it at his head. Wim looked away as he squeezed the trigger, but still caught the right side of the zombie’s head shearing off in his peripheral vision.
A splash of dark, coagulated blood and light gray brains shot out of the gap where Hoyt’s skull had gone missing. He toppled backward and landed on top of his mail sack.
Wim set the shotgun against the barn door and looked down at the dead mailman and wondered what to do next.
Chapter 10
Grady O’Baker chewed his thin bottom lip as he stood outside his boss’s closed office door. Ollie's voice had summoned him over the showroom intercom a few minutes earlier. As always when he heard his name boom over the loudspeakers, his stomach turned sour. He raised his hand to knock, lowered it, then made a second attempt.
Please, Father in Heaven, don’t let this be anything bad. I’m trying so hard.
He gave a tepid rap just beside the nameplate declaring the space behind the door belonged to Oliver Benedict, CEO.
“It’s open!” Ollie barked.
Grady eased the steel door open and leaned inside. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Benedict?”
Ollie glanced up from a mountain of manila folders and waved him in. He was barely into his thirties, but his ruddy red face carried the stress and blood pressure of someone twenty years older.
“Don’t stand there like you got your thumb stuck up your goddamn ass.”
Grady cringed at the blaspheme, but tried not to show it as he stepped into the office. He started toward Ollie’s desk, but Ollie pointed to the doorway. “Close the goddamn door!”
Grady did as told, then tiptoed across the room. He hesitated when he reached the chair. Ollie scowled and Grady took a seat. They sat there in silence for a moment while Ollie sorted through the stack of folders. Grady, all five feet two inches of him, felt like a boy waiting to be scolded by the principal.
Please give me strength, Father. I can withstand all adversity with your guidance.
Eventually, Ollie extracted a folder from the pile and waved it in Grady’s pale, worried face.
“You know what this is?” Ollie asked and didn’t wait for an answer. “Your personnel folder.”
Grady thought it was quite thick considering he’d only been working at Benedict Electronics for four months.
Ollie pulled out a fistful of yellow slips. “And these are customer complaints against you.”
Grady sucked in a mouthful of stale office air and the sour sickness in his belly turned into a molten lake of pain as one or more of his ulcers sent up a geyser of acid. “I’m sorry, Mr. Benedict. I always try to do my best and treat the customers in a Godly manner.”
Ollie flipped through the complaints. “That’s the problem. ‘Salesman kept talking about God.’ ‘Asked where we went to church.’ ‘Asked us if we wanted to pray with him.’ ‘Invited us to his church.’” He looked at Grady with visible disgust.