Jesus, this is perfect, fucking perfect.
The Director stood still, totally enveloped in his world. His tone going soft, emitting unwavering control. “Give it to me, guys. Go Zombie Ten.” His overt pleasure of moments before had given way to quiet gratification.
The only movement on camera was the slow rise and fall of Alex’s chest. His clothes were now stained and wet, his face and hands covered in sludge and blood. A telltale moan sounded in the cave. Alex carefully stepped backwards, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
The whites in Alex’s eyes stood out against the dirt that smeared his face. The spark of intelligence in a human that was never in a zombie, no matter how fresh it was.
Alex took one more step back, putting himself behind the bodies of the two slain zombies.
The Director took a deliberate breath, his control of the game absolute. Everyone in America waited on him.
My America.
His voice barely rose above a whisper; the crew was ready for his call. “Go Blue Two.”
The zombie took a slow step closer. Its tall, muscular frame blocked the cave’s entrance. The zombie swung its arms wide and opened a mouth of cracked and broken teeth, letting loose a bellow that echoed throughout the cave.
The zombie heaved forward. Alex took a step to his right and sprinted towards his enemy.
“Go Zombie Ten,” the words snaked from The Director’s mouth.
Alex rushed past the zombie. It turned to follow but its bare foot caught the blood-stained earth. The camera swung wildly as the zombie fell over the bodies of Alex’s last two kills. Undeterred, it groaned out and got back up, the mouth of the cave the only thing in view. The zombie lurched forward, moans and growls filling the night air.
The Director saw everything as it was about to happen. He was in control. He had all the angles. He knew how this would end.
The zombie breached the front of the cave. A blur of motion filled the screen, followed by a loud static burst, then black.
The Director breathed out with quiet intensity, “Go Blue Two.”
Alex stood on a small boulder that made him a foot taller than the zombie. His arms were out of frame as he looked at his knife sticking out of the zombie’s chest. He leapt. The zombie looked up and opened its mouth to meet Alex in mid-air.
Alex’s arms came down in front of the camera. He held a large rock in both hands and smashed it against the zombie, flattening its face. Unfazed by the brutal wound, it grabbed Alex by the chest and pressed hard, its strength quickly crushing the air out of the human. The momentum from the jump caused them to tumble to the ground. Landing on top of the zombie, Alex’s knees spread on either side of its large torso. He pushed the rock harder into its face with whatever strength remained in his body. The zombie was on its back, hands instinctively continuing to squeeze. Alex gasped, trying to breathe. He pulled the rock up over his head.
The zombie’s face was deformed beyond recognition, a flattened mass of bone and swill, blackened slime pouring all over the ground. It lifted its head, its useless mouth trying to bite the human over him.
Alex slammed the rock against the zombie. A loud, violent crack filled the air as its skull split in two and liquefied brains spewed out in all directions.
An audible sigh came from Alex as he let go of the rock. He slowly stood up and walked away from the lifeless mass of flesh. Alex stopped a few feet away, laid on the ground, and looked up.
It was a calm, peaceful night, stars filling the cloudless sky.
“Go One.”
The Director let a twisted smile play across his lips.
Welcome to the new America. My America. Let me show you the way.
The Interview
Media covered every moment it could from The Night. It felt like each second was captured in some form of video or picture. The news agencies recovered quickly and they had every angle covered in every city. At least it seemed that way at the time.
As the first year turned into two, and two turned into three, we realized there was so much we didn’t know, so many stories to be told. Everyone had a story that would have been worthy of a novel after The Night. People began to express themselves any way they could. Some stories were touching, some were horrifying. All were real.
George Benson began reading them on his radio show. This turned into a television show for him. The Night and Beyond: America’s Journey aired its first episode on the fourth anniversary of The Night. It was a simple interview show, George and a guest. The first person on the show was President Lansing. As impressive as that was, it was the show with Agent Randall Jeffries that shocked everyone. Let’s watch a segment from that episode.
Excerpt from “The Decade”
Dr. Rudolph Graham
The lights around the set faded up as the camera pushed in. “Welcome back to ‘The Night and Beyond: America’s Journey,’” George Benson said into the camera. “We are here with Agent Randall Jeffries, bureau chief of the FBI for the southeastern region of the United States.
Before the break we were talking about your meeting with President Lansing when Dr. Boshifski told him that the virus was made in China. Something happened after that meeting not many people know about. A couple days later you, Agent Betzon, Dr. Boshifski, and Dr. Pasek went to Portland, Oregon.”
Randall looked at the man across from him, not paying attention to the camera that he knew was there. He remembered when George was the arrogant bastard that ruled the radio, questioning everything. Even he had changed. He still ruled the airwaves but his tone was different. He had become the voice of America as soon as he found out China was behind the virus.
Randall began, “It was a hunch that Bosh had. I learned long ago to trust a hunch or gut feeling. It was never proof, but it almost always led to finding the proof you needed. I mean, we could have gone to Seattle or San Francisco just as easily.”
George cut in. “Looking back, why didn’t you go to those places?” He leaned forward in his chair, waiting for the answer.
“We thought something didn’t feel right about the Pacific Northwest. Again, we were talking, thinking out loud. There was no proof. The Pacific Time Zone had the least amount of turns, Mountain Time was second fewest. Central and Eastern were about the same. At first we thought it was geographic, something to do with the Rockies. We eventually narrowed it down to time zones. The news was beginning to spread when people on the West Coast were waking up. There was enough of a reaction to the outbreak to make a slight difference once you looked at the numbers, except for Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco. Why? Bosh didn’t know why but her gut told her there was a reason. Portland was the first city abandoned, so that’s where she wanted to start. There had to be a reason it was the first city. It wasn’t luck, she told us.” Randall paused and took a sip of water. A video screen came to life behind him showing a picture of the four of them loading up their SUV.
“That is a picture of the four of you preparing to leave Spokane and head to Portland, correct?”
“Yes, it is. We left early in the morning to give us as much daylight as possible. The four of us headed North with the plan of driving through the city, doing a visual inspection, then looping back and finding a place to set up some kind of base to work from. We had enough supplies for two weeks and all the ammo we could load up.”
“Why only the four of you? Why not a whole convoy to protect—” George paused. “Please don’t take offense to this—to protect the two doctors leading the fight against the virus.”
“None taken, George. We were only there to protect the CDC doctors. There were two reasons. First was resources. It’s still hard for people to truly grasp how thin we were spread that first year. It didn’t matter how important we were, there were no men to be spared. It was even tough to get all the ammunition we did. The second reason was that Bosh thought a convoy like that would attract too much attention. If the city was swarming with Zs, we had no shot of slipping in and out without going to battle in a c
ity where one was already lost.”
“How long did you spend in Portland? What was it like in the city?” The picture on the screen changed to an office building with desks pushed along the walls. Bosh and Randall were looking over Dr. Pasek’s shoulder at his laptop. Behind them was a darkened skyline.
“We spent ten days there.” Randall took another drink of water. He got permission to tell the truth, there was no reason to hide it anymore. “What was it like? It was death. We didn’t even make it into the city before we got attacked. We got about ten Zs before we regrouped and got past them. That was still fifteen miles outside the city. Then we drove in. It was empty, but not really empty. There wasn’t a wall of zombies charging at us, but they were there. Packs of them chased us when they heard the SUV drive by. They were everywhere we went. There were zombies in the office building we stayed in. We could hear them banging on the door, trying to get out. They heard us, but couldn’t get us.”
“Why didn’t you kill them?”
“Why open the door and take a chance? They weren’t getting out, let them rot, locked away forever.”
“Interesting point, Agent Jeffries. I’m sure you could spend hours talking about how it was in Portland, but there is something specific I want to ask you.”
Did he know already? Was this a setup? Randall slowly sat back in his chair.
“When did you find the confession and can you tell us where you found it?”
Randall exhaled and relaxed. “That was on the ninth day. Where did we find it? It was on the files we got from the shipyard, when we had time to go through them.
George sat up in his chair, his body tensing. “The docks? What led you there?” The questions tumbled out of him.
“When we got ambushed going into the city, it’s because I stopped to get a closer look at an accident that didn’t seem quite right. Two tractor trailers with shipping containers on them were overturned blocking all three lanes on I-5 South. As we got closer, I saw that the trailers were empty. Again, there was no proof, but something seemed off. Why would they be empty? Who would waste time and fuel dealing with that while fleeing a city? I stopped the SUV and ran to get a closer look at the container numbers so we could track them.”
It was George’s turn to take a drink. He put his question cards on the table and picked up his glass. When he put it back, he left the cards on the table, “You went to the docks hoping to track the containers?”
“No, I made a few calls and had them tracked for us. Sure enough, their country of origin was China and they arrived at ten p.m. on April 13th. The manifest said they were loaded with electronics. We got the name of dock foreman that night and spent a day tracing him. We couldn’t reach him via cell phone or email, but that wasn’t too surprising. The eighth morning we got up and went to his last known address.”
“What was the—”
Randall put up his hand and George stopped mid-question.
“The three of them were poring over notes as I drove us to the subdivision where he lived. It was a modest house in a lower-middle class area of Portland. We pulled into his driveway and they went inside; I stayed with the vehicle to keep an eye on things. I left a couple of small packs chasing us and hoped I lost them. Another couple of Zs heard us driving in. They came half-shuffling around the corner. I fired two shots and took them both out while they were still four houses away. I didn’t hear anything from inside so I figured they were all good.
“Another Z came out from behind a house across the street, a shuffler that I took down quickly. A few minutes later Bosh, Pasek, and Betzon came out of the house. Bosh said to head to the docks. On the way they filled me in. They couldn’t find any hard evidence, but there was some really new looking TVs and furniture. The docks …” Randall stopped talking. He glazed over for a second.
“We got there at about two p.m. From the highway we could see the place was crawling with them. The city had been evacuated for so long that most of them were shufflers. We could outrun them for sure, but there were a lot of them, and when they got into a pack, there would be no way to get out if we got caught. Agent Betzon was still working on getting the building layouts but was having no luck. Bosh was chomping at the bit to get inside. She kept saying we had to find the foreman’s office. I pulled over to the shoulder of the highway. We didn’t want to drive in guns blazing and get the SUV trapped inside. So, the plan was to sneak up to the fence and cut a hole in it. Slip in and out of buildings till we found any information, then slip back out. It was a horrible idea, but we’d been through worse.
“We loaded up all that we could carry and started down the hill of the off ramp. It was a clear shot to the fence line. I went first and cut a hole in the fence. There was a group of Zs in the first courtyard area but they hadn’t spotted me. I got through and dashed to the back of the closest building. Pasek and Bosh came through next. Betzon brought up the rear. We were at the third building when four zombies came around the corner and headed towards our group. I kicked the door but it didn’t open. Betzon opened up on the zombies. His M-16 might well have been a homing beacon. He cut them down quickly but more would be on the way.
I kicked once more and the door burst open. We piled into the room and closed the door as best we could. Pasek went straight for the first computer he saw and plugged it into his mini-generator. Luckily the computer booted up quickly and he started ripping as many files as he could off it onto an external hard drive. The rest of us barricaded the door as best as possible. It was a one-floor building with a front and back door and a couple of windows. We trapped ourselves. It was a stupid mistake.”
Randall balled up his fists
The words poured from Randall’s mouth now, tumbling out. “I watched them from the front window, amassing and heading in our direction. What we tried to pull off was just plain stupid and I hoped we didn’t pay for it. We hashed out a quick plan. Betzon would bust out a window by the back door and fire into the crowd of them, drawing their attention away from where we came in. We were going to go out the back door and haul ass behind the buildings and through the same hole in the fence. All we could do is hope that the Zs would be distracted by the gunfire and we could be back to the fence before they knew what was going on.
I would go first, followed by Pasek, Bosh, and Betzon. Bosh handed me the hard drive. I would have the best shot getting out since I was going first. Betzon smashed out the window and fired. He let off a long burst. Then another. They were heading in our direction. I ran out the door as Betzon fired once more. All I had on me were two pistols. We wanted speed. If we ran into any more of them we were done for anyway.
“I was running full speed when I made it to the corner of the last building. I thought I was in the clear. The Z came around the corner at the same time. Thank god it wasn’t expecting me. I plowed into it, both of us tumbling to the ground. The cold water on the ground, combined with the unexpected impact, stunned me. I rolled a few times and ended up on my back looking up at the gray, drizzling sky. I don’t know why, but I remember seeing individual raindrops falling on me, feeling each one hit me.
A snarl ripped me from my peace. If the Z didn’t do that, I would have been dead right there. I rolled away from the noise and pushed back up to my feet. The Z hit my legs and I was knocked to my stomach. I kicked back and felt my boot connect with something. I kicked once more and rolled over. It opened its mouth and I fired two shots, dropping it.
“I scrambled back up to my feet. There was a pack off to my right, all of them looking at me now. Whatever distraction Betzon had made, I erased it. I was close to the fence. I would make it no problem. Pasek was at the last building and the other two were a little ways behind him.
“There were maybe twenty-five Zs and they were all coming at me. I stood up and dashed for the fence, heading away from the hole in it. I started yelling for the others to hurry, keep running. Pasek darted past me as I veered away from my only escape. The horde got closer, tracking me. I backed up to the fence
firing off the last few rounds I had in my pistols. A few of them fell to the ground. They were trained on me, and I was far enough away from the opening that Bosh and Betzon should’ve been able to make it to the fence before the Zs did. I yelled at them again. ‘Run! Run! Run!’”
Randall’s face flushed, and his voice dropped. “Bosh stopped. She stopped at the corner of the building. I have no idea why. Betzon damn near ran her over. That was it, maybe five seconds. That was all it took. Five seconds in combat is a lifetime. Everything changed right then. They wouldn’t make it now.
“None of the Zs made a break for them. They still didn’t see them. I yelled for the two of them to stop. Gunfire erupted from behind me. We left our four spare M-16s up top. Pasek was firing into the leading edge of the pack. I turned and ran for the SUV. I slipped twice on the wet grass going up the hill. Pasek was picking them off now. At least they were slower ones. I grabbed one of the M-16s and fired burst after burst. If any Zs came up from behind us, we were dead, but I didn’t care at that point.
“Limbs and bodies ripped open. We kept taking Zs out, but now they were coming from buildings all over. There were so many of them. I glanced over at Bosh and Betzon. They both had their pistols out. I yelled for them to run and I don’t know if they heard me. Bosh took off first. Damn, she could fly. I swear a few hands came within inches of her. Betzon was right behind her.”
Randall’s head sagged and he sunk slightly in his chair, the color gone from his face. He looked pale and defeated. “Sacrifice, that’s what it was. Betzon knew it the whole time. I lied to myself then, but looking back I saw it too. He never had a chance. Bosh was almost to the fence when he finally went down. Three of those fucking things jumped on him. He was my partner for five years. I heard him cursing the Zs, I can only imagine the pain he was in. He kept firing, though. Not at the ones on him. He took out the ones that were almost to Bosh. His voice carried over top of all the other noise or maybe I blocked everything else out. I don’t really know. I brought the M-16 up and took aim. I made sure I didn’t miss. He was a great agent and an even better friend. Agent Patrick Betzon died fulfilling his mission.”
The Night Page 15