“Why do they call it ‘chaos theory’ anyway?” Tom went on when Halverson didn’t answer. “It sounds like an ironical name for a theory that maintains that everything is connected.”
Halverson started at an outburst from Foster.
“Man, that thing stinks,” said Foster, regarding the dead Chinese ghoul on the floor near him.
Rogers came up to Foster. “We should move it somewhere out of the way. It could be contagious.”
Foster reached down to grab the ghoul’s leg.
Halverson jumped to his feet. “Don’t touch it. It could be carrying the plague virus or bacteria or whatever it is on it.”
“I saw rubber gloves in the pantry,” said Rogers.
Foster angled for the pantry.
Tom joined Rogers and Halverson.
“This heat and that smell are making me nauseous,” said Tom. He massaged his belly.
“Where are we gonna dump it?” Halverson asked Rogers.
Rogers clapped his eyes on a closet door at the end of the bar. “We’ll shove it in there and keep the door closed.”
Foster returned with plastic packages of Playtex rubber gloves. He gave a package to Halverson. The package said Large. Halverson tore the package open and donned the yellow rubber gloves.
Halverson and Foster each grabbed one of the ghoul’s feet. They dragged it to the closet and opened the door. It was a wardrobe for employees’ uniforms, it looked like to Halverson.
He and Foster flung the dead ghoul into the closet and shut the door.
“That thing’s gonna attract flies smelling like that,” said Foster. He pulled a face.
“Hey, the TV works!” hollered somebody at the bar on the other side of the room.
Everybody scurried to the TV, including Halverson after he collected his night-vision goggles and his MP7 from the banquette seat. The flat-panel TV hung on the wall behind the bar.
“Another battery-operated deal,” said Tom, watching the TV screen.
“It must use cable,” said Foster.
“It could be connected to a dish,” said Rogers.
“The point is it works,” said Tom.
On the TV screen a reporter was sitting inside a helicopter that was flying over an area shrouded in smoke.
“FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) assures us that everything is under control,” said the fortyish reporter, gazing into the camera lens.
He had grizzled black hair bracketed by a headset. Projecting the image of an outdoorsman he wore a safari jacket.
“According to authorities,” the reporter went on, “the fire engulfing Los Angeles is 80 percent contained.”
“Then it’s not under control,” said Foster.
The picture on the TV screen flickered.
“Uh-oh,” said Tom.
The image of the reporter returned on the high-definition screen.
“The Centers for Disease Control is working 24/7 on a cure and a vaccine for the plague and will have them ready soon.”
“I believe that,” Foster said ironically.
“Where’s that helo gonna land? That’s what I want to know,” said Rogers.
“If FEMA’s involved you know this is a major catastrophe,” said Tom.
“Power is out in many areas of the state,” said the reporter.
“The whole state?” Tom peered quizzically at Halverson.
“Residents are urged to stay home due to widespread road closures,” said the reporter. “If you are not at home, head for the nearest government-run shelter.”
“Where?” asked Tom
“I’ll read a list of those for you shortly,” said the reporter, as if hearing Tom’s question.
“What happened to the president, I wonder?” said Rogers.
“He was running for his life the last time we saw him on TV,” said Foster.
“This is bigger than just California,” said Lemans.
“California is just the tip of the iceberg, I have a gut feeling,” said Rogers.
“So what do we do now?” asked Tom
“We head for the nearest shelter,” said Lemans. “You heard him.”
Halverson had a headache what with the heat and the smoky air. “I say we lie low for the time being till we send a squad out to reconnoiter the area.”
“I say we divide into five groups and leave this death trap. With five groups we can stay mobile. If one group runs into ghouls, there are still four other groups that are safe. If the ghouls find us here, we’re all gonna end up ghouls.”
“He has a point,” Foster told Halverson.
“Everyone knows I’m right,” said Lemans.
“I don’t,” said Rogers. “First off, we’re not gonna stay here forever. We’re eating and resting up here till we plan our next move. Then I’m sending a squad out to search for transportation.”
“I don’t see any rush to get out of here,” said Mildred, walking up to Rogers’s side. “We’ve got plenty of food here. We don’t know what we’re gonna encounter out there in the smog.”
“When is that reporter gonna announce the list of shelters?” asked Tom.
Just then they lost their TV reception. The image of the reporter flickered out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I say let’s get out of this death trap now,” said Lemans. He pumped his fist.
Some of the passengers clapped their approval.
“Now that we’ve eaten, we don’t need to stay,” agreed Foster.
“We don’t know how many of those things are out there,” said Rogers. “We need to send out a recon squad first before we move out.”
“Let’s put it to a vote,” said Lemans. “This is still a democracy, isn’t it?” He searched the faces around him.
“But we’re at war,” said Rogers.
“Those things out there want to kill us,” said Halverson. “We can’t go around acting like it’s business as usual.”
“Our main objective at this point is to defend ourselves against those creatures.”
Lemans didn’t want to hear any of it. He started strutting back and forth. “It’s a free country. We don’t take orders from the military.” He stopped abruptly and slewed around to confront Rogers. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Posse Comitatus Act?”
“The military cannot be used domestically,” explained Tom.
“I’m not the military,” countered Rogers. “I’m a commercial pilot.”
“But you served in the air force,” said Lemans. “So you can’t order us around.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“What about NORTHCOM?” chipped in Halverson.
“What the fuck is NORTHCOM?” said Lemans.
“The United States Northern Command. They’re military and they can intervene domestically in times of emergency.”
“Says who, gunslinger? Are you a lawyer now, too?”
Halverson felt like popping Lemans in his sleazy face. Halverson decided it would probably do more harm than good to Rogers’s cause under the circumstances, so he put the kibosh on his urge.
Instead, he challenged Lemans. “How can you take over if you don’t know the law?”
“I don’t want to stand around here parsing the law with you. It’s time to break up into groups and get the hell out of here. Those things could be surrounding us even as we speak.”
A smattering of applause. Nothing overwhelming, decided Halverson. Lemans had his supporters, Halverson could see, but they didn’t seem to be in the majority.
“What law?” blurted Tom. “How do we know we have any law left? You saw the president running for cover on TV. I don’t know about you, but that scared the living daylights out of me.”
Disconcerted expressions clouded the faces of the passengers.
“What are you talking about?” asked Rosie.
“Didn’t you see the president’s broadcast on TV?”
“No.”
“Me either,” said a passenger beside her.
Most of the other passengers nodded their concurrence.
“You might have opened a can of worms,” Halverson confided to Tom.
“Are you saying our government has collapsed?” asked Lemans.
“We don’t know that to be the case yet,” Rogers chimed in.
“Yet?”
“That’s all I can tell you. It looked like the president was under some sort of attack on TV.”
A chorus of oohs and ahs escaped the mouths of several of the passengers.
“All the more reason to get out of here on the double and try to find out what’s going on outside,” said Lemans.
“We’re in an emergency mode right here, right now,” said Rogers. “We’re under attack and we must defend ourselves. This is an all-out war between us and those things outside.” He gesticulated toward the restaurant’s broken window. “Make no mistake about it. We are at war. We’ll worry about the government later. For now our own safety takes precedence over everything else.”
“We’re not gonna get anything done if we just stand here talking about it!” shouted Lemans.
“It’s getting dark,” said Rogers in a measured voice. “We need to send out a recon patrol to find transportation for us.”
Halverson heard grumbling in the crowd. Nobody was happy with the situation, he knew. Who could blame them? Despite the grumbling, nobody spoke up.
“Do I have any volunteers?” asked Rogers.
“I’ll go,” said Halverson.
“Figures,” said Lemans. “You and flyboy are asshole buddies.”
Lemans was begging to have his big fat nose rearranged, decided Halverson. Halverson said nothing.
“If gunslinger finds a car out there, how do we know he’ll bring it back with him?” Lemans addressed the passengers. “How do we know he won’t drive off by himself and forget about the rest of us?”
“Like you tried to do in the parking lot earlier?” said Halverson.
Lemans glowered at Halverson.
“This isn’t open to discussion anymore,” said Rogers. “Let’s break it up.”
“We can discuss anything we want to discuss,” said Lemans.
Rogers walked away from him. Halverson followed suit.
“I’ll volunteer,” Tom told Rogers.
“You’ll need a silenced MP7,” said Halverson.
“Fine with me,” said Tom. “You took mine away from me. Remember?”
“We’ll get you another one.”
A blonde passenger in her early twenties sitting at a dinner table shot her hand up and hailed them. A pink scrunchie was holding her hair back in a ponytail. “Hey! I’ve got something on my laptop.”
Its screen vertical, her black laptop was lying on the tabletop facing away from Halverson.
“You got Wi-Fi?” asked Tom. He rushed over to the blonde.
She nodded, her eyes riveted on the screen. “And a battery for my PC. I haven’t been able to get onto the Internet until a moment ago.”
“Any news?” Tom peered over her shoulder to read the screen.
“I’m not getting any news. I got a blog about the zombies, though. Take a look.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Zombie Blog #1: “The Problem with Zombies”
by
Jonathan Parker
I’m trying to get everything I’ve found out about zombies onto the Internet ASAP so that anyone else still living out there will know what we’re dealing with.
The zombie threat is real!
They’re not coming here. They’re already here!
I have no idea how they got here.
There are all sorts of rumors flying around about a plague having infected people and turning them into ghouls. How they got here is secondary to the fact that they are here and they must be dealt with immediately. The longer you put off destroying them, the greater the jeopardy to the human race. I will do my best in this blog to explain why we must not hesitate to destroy these creatures.
The danger posed by the zombie can never be underestimated.
First off, the zombie’s appetite is insatiable. No matter how much the zombie eats, it can never be satisfied. It is condemned to feed eternally. Not only that, the zombie has no interest in anything whatsoever besides eating. It is the ultimate eating machine. Think two-legged shark.
As I said before, I don’t know how these creatures came into being. All I know is that they seem to be resurrected from the dead. The brains of the dead are becoming reanimated in some inexplicable fashion. Once a corpse’s brain becomes reactivated, the corpse’s nervous system is held in thrall to the brain. The brain issues but one command to the rest of the body: Eat living human flesh!
The zombie doesn’t care about property or procreation; it must eat, eat, eat. It can never glut its all-consuming lust for human flesh. Its favorite dish is human brains. It appears that zombies will eat any living thing, but it is certain that they prefer living human beings.
Unlike humans, the zombie doesn’t respect property. Since the zombie doesn’t own property (or desire to), it doesn’t respect the property of others. Nor does the zombie care to reproduce. The urge to procreate doesn’t drive it. The only thing the zombie has in common with humans is its desire for food.
Because the zombie’s brain is its only living organ, the zombie moves spastically. It has been observed that zombies shuffle along jerkily. This is because they don’t have live muscle tissue. Their nervous system is the only force that propels them forward. Without muscle tissue, zombies possess limited strength.
When it comes to intelligence, speed, dexterity, and physical strength, man has the advantage.
However, the advantage goes to the zombie in the following category: the zombie doesn’t need to sleep. The zombie can go 24/7 forever. It is continually on the move seeking out food. Again, think shark. Nevertheless, the zombie’s lack of need for sleep isn’t the zombie’s greatest advantage over humans.
The zombie’s trump card, so to speak, is its sheer weight of numbers. Think about it. The dead will always outnumber the living. This, indeed, is the most terrifying characteristic of the zombie. The zombie can multiply exponentially. For every living human, how many humans are dead and buried? These same dead and buried can become zombies in a matter of minutes. The numbers boggle the mind.
Not only do zombies have the potential to outnumber living humans, they are also contagious. One of their bites is enough to turn a living human into one of the soldiers of the legions of the undead. Zombies are a walking plague.
They must be stopped!
Is there anyone else out there still living who can read this blog?
If so, shoot me an e-mail.
All survivors need to connect with each other so that we can band together to defeat these creatures.
The clock is ticking. Time is running out for our very survival.
I hope that isn’t one of them right now banging against my front door . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“There’s one of those things at the entrance in the wall!” a guard at the window called out.
MP7 in hand, his face dripping with sweat, Halverson strode over to the hole in the window where the guard was standing. Halverson made out a tall ghoul clad in a fluorescent orange polyester vest with black Velcro fasteners on its front shambling through the entryway in the wall. The creature was also wearing a yellow hard hat, heavy boots, and canvas gloves. He may have worked for the electric company when he was alive, it looked like to Halverson.
Halverson glanced down at the bandoliers on his chest. He realized he had about half the magazines he had had when he started. He had no idea how long this war with these creatures was going to last. It was best to conserve ammo, he decided.
He set his MP7 to single shot.
The creature’s plastic hard hat might screw up his shot, he knew. Even though his ammunition had armor-piercing capability, his Brugger & Thomet sound suppressor might reduce the velocity of his bullet a
nd compromise its penetration power. In any case, he had no choice. He had to go for a head shot. A shot at upper body mass would cut no ice.
The creature looked to be about thirty feet away, Halverson calculated. Halverson assumed the Weaver stance and trained the MP7 on the ghoul’s head. Halverson lamented the fact that the weapon didn’t have a laser attached to it on the railing. Not that he was going to lose any sleep over it.
Personally, he preferred the DPSS (diode pumped solid state) laser, which afforded a green light. The green light showed up better than the laser’s traditional red light, especially during daytime.
He would just have to make do without the laser. He left the two sights folded flat. He drew a bead through the sights on the creature’s head. The jerky movements of its head didn’t help his aim any. He squeezed off a shot.
The 4.6 x 30 mm round zipped out of the mouth of the MP7’s sound suppressor.
The hard hat tipped and flew off the ghoul’s head. The creature spun its head clumsily around, not knowing what was happening.
Halverson didn’t know if he had hit the head or not. It didn’t matter. What mattered was he hadn’t hit the brain. He could stand here all night perforating the thing’s head with bullets, but if he didn’t hit the brain he was wasting his time.
He sighted between the staring, white-filmed eyes of the ghoul. He double-tapped its head. The creature spun on its heel and fell backwards. It landed hard on its back. Its bullet-ripped head slammed the pavement even harder, bounced up once, then came to a rest. The ghoul was dead for good this time.
Halverson scoped out the entrance in the wall for more ghouls. He didn’t see any. He wondered if ghouls ate other ghouls. He didn’t think so. He doubted they were cannibals. They fed only on the living, it seemed to him.
“Reverend Jim, you need to sit down,” said Rogers.
Halverson turned around to confront a gruesome sight.
His neck wrapped in a blood-mottled towel knotted in front of his Adam’s apple, Reverend Jim shuffled in Halverson’s direction.
Rogers made to grab Reverend Jim’s arm and escort him to a seat. “You can’t be walking around in your condition.”
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