“We were on our way to pick you up on orders from DHS. It was right after the initial outbreak happened. Things were still running smoothly, or as smoothly as they possibly could after hundreds of thousands of people began dropping dead and then rising up and attacking the living. They put me in charge of the drop team, gave me a full brief on you and how important you would be to finding out what the fuck had happened. Scott was the actual boots on the ground group commander. The rest of the guys were plain old, no name, spec ops noobs. We had no idea how bad things were about to get, how bad they were out in the demilitarized zones.”
I stop her.
“What do you mean? I thought you said that things were going fine.”
She nods and takes a long drag on her cigarette and a sip from her can of Bud.
“Yeah, the major cities—New York, Washington, Chicago and L.A., Philly, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit—were out of the loop. We had already enacted the council of governors, which totally failed. Not because of the zombies or whatever they are, but because the civvies were up in arms and shit about death camps and fucking conspiracy nuts came out of everywhere lead, of course, by Alex Jones and his revivalists. Everyone who wasn’t infected went ape shit which, in turn, made it harder to keep quarantine zones locked down. It was a blood bath.”
“Jesus,” I whisper into my coffee mug and take another drink. “You know he was CIA, right?”
“Who?” she asks, and I say, “Alex Jones.”
“No, I didn’t. I wonder what they were getting at, then?” she asks.
I shrug my shoulders and shake my head. “Clampdown,” I say back to her.
She shrugs her shoulders back and continues. “Anyway, when we got here, the building was already shut down but enough of the infected had breached the city center and were in the building that when we landed on the roof, we—me and Scott—knew that shit was going downhill.”
“So, how did you guys get in here?” I ask, pulling out another cigarette and lighting up. This time I take baby hits and manage to get through half of it before wanting to puke.
“I was supposed to stay onboard while Scott and the rest of the spec ops team came down here and grabbed your little tube, but I decided to come along. We were gonna figure out how we were gonna stay behind. When we got here it was overrun already, so we tried to clear out the ones we could and looked around.”
The carnage from the lobby made more sense now: the massive amounts of the shell casings, the fact that Carol didn’t have much of a face, how the security guards had been overwhelmed.
“When we couldn’t find your tube we came back up. Scott and I decided to send the rest of the team up and we would just radio in a fake attack, order them to leave and then we would be officially dead.”
“That doesn’t explain how you got in here, though. It needs a bioscan or the right key sequence. How did you get past that?” I ask.
“The power went out; the doors swung open enough that Scott could get his hand behind it and pry it open, and when he did we ran inside. The auxiliary power kicked back on a couple of seconds later and the door locked us in here.”
I look down at the screens, then over to the three files on the screen to my left. “Dumb luck, that’s some shit.”
We hear the door to the bathroom open and Skinny Scott comes out; he makes a low whistle and waves his hand in front of his face.
“Don’t, seriously, go in there for a good half hour,” he says and then flops on the same chair as before, cracks open another beer and begins to stare back out the windows. I look back to the screens and pull the three files into the separate open windows, looking for the earliest date first. I find the cache that I’m looking for and open it up, but wave the screen off.
“Hey, Scott,” I say over to him. He lolls his head around to look at me and says, “Wha,” which I take as being the same as asking me “What?”
“Put your hand on the wall behind you, you should find a piece that slides up. There’s a touch panel under it. When it comes up, tap in one-three-three-one, then turn your chair around. Got it?”
The touchscreen is already lighting up his face halfway through my instructions; he turns his chair around and then the rest of the wall panel slides down to reveal my television screen along with every gaming console that’s ever been made. I don’t play them, but I used to collect them. It’s like comics or baseball cards or CDs or whatever else it is that humans used to collect. And since I had what at one time would have been considered a ton of fucking money, I also have one of the world’s last and greatest collections of video games. He slides down to look at all the consoles and games.
“Holy shit,” he says as he begins to pull cartridges and CD/DVD cases out of their current alphabetical order.
“Holy shit, you have a mint Legend of Zelda, in the fucking box. Kel, he has a mint Legend of Zelda.” He holds up the dusty gold cardboard box so that Kel can see it.
She looks over at me and I pull out my wireless headphones from my cigarette drawer and toss them to her.
“Here, just put these on if you’re gonna play, same code as the panel,” I say and Kel hands him the headphones. He looks over to me and holds up another box. I can’t see what it is from the desk. I squint but still can’t make out the title.
“Castle. Fucking. Vania. In Japa. Fucking. Nese,” he says back to me in complete seriousness and then puts on the headphones and powers up the ancient-looking Nintendo that’s halfway through the line up of outdated game systems. At least he has good taste. Kel gives me a weird look. She stands up and walks over to Scott, tapping him on the head.
“Wha?” he says as he hits pause and looks back up to her.
“You’re already drunk. Don’t stay up late; we should do a security sweep on the building tomorrow. I’m going to lay down,” she says and before she turns away he pulls the headphones back up over his ears and salutes her, then loses himself in Simon Belmont’s original quest to destroy Dracula. She comes over to me and puts her hand on the desk and leans forward, presumably so that Scott won’t hear us, though I doubt she needs to. He’s already completely engrossed in the ancient game’s pixilated world.
“You know this doesn’t make anything better,” she says first, then adds, “You’re still a monster like Scott said. So don’t think that the food or the beer or the games are going to make me, or us, feel different about you in the morning.”
I lean back in the chair and light up another cigarette, then pull another set of wireless headphones up from another drawer. The gun is still in the waistline of my pants and she looks nervously from it to my face.
“Kel, I have no idea what happened. Like you said, I was frozen, but I’m about to find out tonight, okay? So don’t fucking judge me. You two aren’t innocent, either. Let me see if I can guess here: deserters, probably in a relationship, maybe a couple hundred or so murders on your hands from those little covert operations all over the fucking world. Am I right; did I get it?”
She pauses for a few seconds and then says she says, “Yeah, something like that.”
I think she’s turning around to walk away, but she fakes and returns with a right hook that, as it connects, flips me out of my chair. I rub my jaw and feel my bottom lip getting swollen. I stare down to my hand. There’s more of my blood running down my fingers.
“You broke the fucking world, asshole. Do you even get that? The fucking world. And now you’re still trying to buy people like you did before everything went to shit because—let me remind you again—of you. Yeah, I’ve killed some people, and most of them would have shot me if I hadn’t shot them first, but you’re the monster that did that,” she says and points out towards the windows.
The fires seem to have intensified. The silence of the night has hidden away the monsters milling about in the street, the wreckage of the cars, and even the broken down facades of the buildings. But the soft orange glowing coming from the horizon line seems as bright as a cluster of supernovas. I stare for a w
hile before she turns away again and moves towards the couch, stretches out on it and closes her eyes.
I look around and find my set of headphones, then get up and sit back down. Scott doesn’t even register that there’s anything happening outside of the fact that he can’t make the last jump on the screen. He’s sticking the tip of his tongue out the side of his mouth, sitting cross-legged, and every time he attempts the move, his body jerks up as if it’s going to carry the eight-bit hero on the screen forward. I wave my hand over the screen and open the first file again. I bring up the feeds first, then the sites and then the videos.
7.
I leave the video feeds alone; the regular old RSS feeds are easier and lighter on the system, so I dig into those first. The screen pops up with my feed aggregator; there are over 100,000 entries in assorted categories. I do a quick keyword search for words like beginning, apocalypse, plague, zombie, first stage, infection, and so on. It cuts the number to just over 60,000.
“Jesus,” I whisper. I don’t know what I was thinking going straight to the feeds first. When I froze myself there were nearly 300 million blogs available to read. 300 million people who thought that the world really cared about what they thought or what they wrote or what they ate and read and…well, you get it. There were a lot of assholes with nothing better to do.
I start at the very first entry that was in the folder.
June 22nd.
Hey everyone, I know I haven’t written in a while, but there’s been a lot of crazy stuff going on here lately, as I’m sure you all know. The world is steadily getting crazier. Today on CNN there was a whole video on the importance of hygiene in the event of a pandemic, like we’re really going to care about washing our hands if there’s a global medical emergency.
Also, in other news, my band, Suffering Carpets of the Dawn, is playing at the Grog Shop on Saturday, yes, this Saturday, so come out and have a great time, hang out and check in with us after the show for a free badge to unlock a new set of credits for our album. See ya there!
Okay, so it’s not a promising start. I do another search, this time I do a random search for thee words: outbreak, government and hysteria.
August 12th
Holy Shit, it is going down. I can’t leave the house because there’s a curfew so I’m updating the old blog. Yesterday I was walking to the store on the corner and I saw three huge armored vehicles roll down the street. They stopped at the intersection and let three dozen or so soldiers out and then they started setting up four-way stops and checkpoints. Fucking weekend warriors were going crazy, telling people to go home and that there was now a curfew and that food rations would be handed out door to door. It’s happening man; they’re using this fucking outbreak or whatever it is to start their global agenda man, Alex is right, we gotta rise up and take it back. Just Listen to his special report on Prison Planet.com…
There’s more but I stop reading. I put my head down into my hands and sigh. Jesus, I can’t believe that people were this fucking stupid. I know if I keep reading I’m going to start to think that, if it was or is my fault, I may have done the world a huge fucking favor.
I look over to where Scott is sitting, still playing Castlevania. He’s pumping the buttons with thumbs that could probably play the game on autopilot. The glow from the screen makes his face look ashen. Shadows and muted colors dance a graceful ballet on the walls and windows of the office. He pauses the game long enough to light another cigarette and take a gulp from his beer. I light up another one of my own and decide to put the feeds away and move to the videos. Fuck accuracy of information, I can’t handle this shit.
The first video is footage from a news chopper outside of a shopping mall. It looks completely normal. I pull my headphones on and listen to the audio report from the reporter in the chopper. It’s entitled “Garrettsville Mall Massacre.”
“There’s been an outbreak of what health authorities are calling the H6N7 strain of flu, at the Garrettsville Mall. Police and security from the mall are on the scene and are attempting to lock down the mall and establish a quarantine zone. Be advised that if you are watching this and know someone in the mall or are someone currently trapped in the mall, that there is a standing order by officials to use lethal force on anyone coming out of, or going into the mall at the present time. Authorities on the ground are advising that you please stay put or away from the scene.”
As the reporter continues and the chopper lowers itself down to get a better shot, police cruisers and tactical vans begin establishing a perimeter around the complex. The cops jump out of their vehicles and look like black knights defending a pointless citadel. Their full head-to-toe riot gear glistens in the sun and instead of normal insignias and badges they have the big white DHS emblazoned on their backs. They’re all carrying heavy munitions, lots of firepower, military spec stuff you wouldn’t imagine cops having.
The camera on the chopper zooms in on a couple who have made their way out of one of the bigger department stores. They’re running towards a group of police who look like they’re motioning for the two to stop. They keep coming; the woman has blood running down the front of her shirt and is holding her hand up to her neck. The man is almost dragging her along behind him. Poor fuckers don’t even know what’s going on. Behind them another group of people has made it out. The police put their hands up and then raise their weapons, sight down the couple and, when they don’t stop, they begin shooting.
Blood and tissue and most likely fragments of bone fly from the first couple. Their clothes begin to turn from brightly advertised consumer goods to a comically bright red and then to crimson-soaked rags. A couple of the cops land head shots on the woman and her face splits into three separate parts. Pink and grey chunks of brain blow backwards, up into the air and then come to settle on separate sides of the bodies.
The second group of escapees hit the ground but meets a similar end; then more and more people begin to run out of the mall, filtering out in clusters of threes and fours. Hundreds of people are gunned down in the same fashion as the first couple. The feed from the chopper cuts to two newsanchors in a green room studio. One is a man in a black suit and impeccably crisp, white shirt, which is offset by the purple bags under his eyes. The second is a bleach blonde woman who looks like she’s about twenty-five and hasn’t eaten in months. The man looks down at the screen that’s embedded into the large desk in front of him. He starts to turn green. The woman has her hand up to her open mouth.
The video goes on for a few more seconds; the man attempts to read the script, but after a few brief sentences about how the station should have warned viewers about the shocking content, he turns his head away and sprays sick behind him. The woman begins crying. The video stops. The video aggregator pulls down another clip.
It’s an on the ground, hand cam, gorilla-style piece of footage entitled “My Hood.” It looks like it was taken with a tablet or a phone. The audio sucks, so it was probably a device not running my app. The voice sounds like a teenage boy; I’d say he sounds fifteen, tops. His face comes into frame a few seconds later. It’s a bad close up and even with the terrible resolution from the device’s camera you can see he has a terrible haircut that makes him look like he’s a girl. He’s got a pretty horrific case of acne and braces fighting an overbite of epic proportions that make his words almost unintelligible.
“So, yeah, I woke up today. Which is cool, I guess. I haven’t heard from Mom or Dad yet, but they were downtown, and that was locked down about three days ago, so they haven’t been able to leave their buildings yet. I got an email from Mandy this morning; she said that her college was about the same, but she was safe. I have enough food for now, though I blew through all the Mountain Dew last night. The television doesn’t have anything on it anymore except emergency broadcasts, which blows. But the real reason I’m taking this video is ‘cause after I woke up I looked out the window and there was this outside…”
He turns the device around in his hand and sticks it
through the curtains. As the camera spins, it tries to focus on everything, making my eyes want to cross. Shitty device doesn’t even have steady hand technology; he should have been running the app. Then as the outside comes into focus, you can tell that the sky is bright and clear, the clouds are heavy and white. It’s a picturesque suburb where every house is some slight variation of the next one. But as he pans the device from left to right you begin to see lumbering silhouettes making their way up and down the sidewalks and street. They look like the broken, crooked bodies that I saw out of the window, like the crooked man when I first woke up: empty, open eyes, grey-green skin, some have dried blood stains on their clothes, and some look impeccable except for their skin.
They stalk silently, panning their heads from left to right, looking aimlessly at everything, as if it didn’t register that they were outside or that they were looking at the ground or sky or plants. One of the figures that passes by is a woman in a nightgown, flowing white and tattered, nearly sheer, showing off everything. Her belly looks distended but then I realize that she is, or in this case, was, pregnant. Her hair is a tangled mess of auburn and crusty, dried chunks. She’s the closest of the monsters to the house that the kid is in. She slowly turns her head from side to side, as if it were nearly impossible for her to move her neck.
She takes a step forward, then, as if she knows the kid is in the house, as if she sees the device he’s holding or maybe even his hand, she begins to turn. She begins to walk toward the camera. One foot in front of the other, she silently hobbles over the grass towards the house. Her mouth agape, her teeth look as if she’s been eating black liquorice, her tongue is swollen and green. Her nightgown moves on the wind and if it wasn’t for the way that she’s stumbling around like she’s just woke up from a three-day bender, she would look like she’s floating. She continues forward.
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