Tom slumped back in his seat with exhaustion. “I need a drink.”
On his way to the UCLA medical center, Halverson drove past and evaded ambling packs of zombies that cluttered the dark roads. He also had to wend his way through abandoned cars that strewed the roads. From past experience, he knew the freeways would be even more congested with desolate motor vehicles than were the surface streets. He made it a point to eschew the freeways.
Other than the predatory zombies, Halverson spied no signs of movement. He might as well be driving through a cemetery, he realized.
Somewhere along the way, Tom had fallen asleep, Halverson noticed. Halverson wished he could do the same. He could barely keep his eyelids open. His stomach was growling, too.
At length he discerned the sprawling UCLA medical center looming in the distance. To his dismay, it looked as dark and barren as every other place he had seen.
He pulled into a parking lot full of empty vehicles. He jostled Tom’s shoulder with his hand to wake him up.
The snugness of the NVGs on Halverson’s head was wringing sweat from his face. He felt like he was suffocating. He removed the goggles. He unbuckled his seat belt. He got out of his seat.
Everything looked different without the goggles on. He felt like he needed to get his bearings. He was in the process of taking a step onto the sidewalk when he tripped on the curb, fell face forward, and blacked out.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
It was dark. Halverson could not see anything.
He realized he was lying on his back in a bed. Something seemed to be covering his face. His head ached.
He raised his hands to his head and felt it. Something soft was covering his forehead and eyes. It felt like bandages of some sort swathed around his head. He felt lower. The bandages were covering his eyes as well.
It was quiet, wherever he was. He heard no sounds.
He sat up. He had to know where he was. The last thing he remembered was parking at the UCLA medical center.
His head throbbed harder as he sat up. He unwrapped the bandages swaddled around his eyes.
Gradually, light percolated through the bandages that thinned as he unwound them over his eyes. He finished removing them.
He squinted in the sudden light.
He looked around.
He was in a hospital room, it looked like. It was daytime. The vertical blinds were drawn. He could see the sun shining through the window. The sky was hazy, but not as bad as it had been at LAX.
He turned to his left. He saw a laptop flipped open on a desk at his bedside.
He shifted his position on the bed so he could read the screen.
Zombie Blog #3: “Coexistence with Zombies Impossible”
by
Jonathan Parker
Certain talking heads on the Internet will have it that we should learn to coexist with zombies. These talking heads are misinformed. The human race can’t coexist with zombies. There isn’t enough room on this planet for the both of us. Zombies have only one goal in life—to consume. They will consume any and all living things. But what zombies crave most is living human flesh. The flesh of sentient human beings drives zombies crazy with desire.
A zombie’s lifeless staring eyes all but pop out of its head when they light on a living person. The zombie’s spastic movements become more animated and groans emanate from its throat as the zombie anticipates its next meal. The zombie’s hands claw the air in front of it as it staggers in herky-jerky movements toward its prey. Nothing else exists for the zombie except the human in its sights. In this sense, the zombie becomes a monomaniac. As soon as it beholds human food, it will never relent until it has consumed its victim or been destroyed in the attempt.
Nothing he didn’t know already, decided Halverson.
He slid out from under the sheets on his bed. He was fully clothed, he realized. He sat at a chair in front of the laptop. He tried to access the Internet. Nothing doing.
He could not change the picture frozen on the screen. The laptop wasn’t plugged in, he realized. It must have been battery operated with Wi-Fi capability. In any case, the laptop was useless to him as a means of communication in its current condition. He kept clicking the touch pad. No dice.
Frustrated, he withdrew his hands from the keyboard. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a sheet of paper on the desktop to the right of the laptop. He realized it was a note.
Dear Chad:
You fell and hit your head on the curb when you got out of the jeep. (Did you go on a toot while I was sleeping?) You bruised your head and blacked out. I brought you into this hospital room. All the comforts of home, as you can see. (LOL.) I put the bandage on your head, in case you’re wondering. (If you’re reading this letter, it must be obvious to you at this point that I have no medical background.)
I haven’t been able to find anyone in this labyrinth of a hospital as yet. (Maybe I should have brought a ball of string with me like Theseus. If I don’t return, you’ll know I’m lost.) I will keep looking. If you wake up when I’m not here, then you’ll know I’m searching for somebody in this ghost town of a hospital. Things are looking up (a toilet drainpipe)! Pleasant dreams!
Your comrade in arms,
Tom
Halverson chortled.
He stood up. He wasn’t going to wait for Tom to return. Halverson would do some exploring of his own. After all, he had come here to find his brother Dan, and that was what he was going to do.
He padded to the closed door. He opened it. He gazed out into the corridor. It was, as he had suspected, deserted. He entered the hall. He still felt lightheaded, he realized. He wobbled on his feet.
He froze in his tracks. He thought he could hear shuddering nearby. It sounded like a door was shuddering in its jamb, like somebody was trying to open the door from the other side.
Warily, he approached the door that was vibrating. Halverson started. Suddenly somebody started banging on the other side of the door.
He had no idea who it was. He doubted it was Tom. It wasn’t a friendly knocking on the door. It sounded more like a frustrated pounding. The knocker, whoever it was, sounded hell-bent on breaking down the door.
Not a good sign, decided Halverson. He felt relieved the door was locked.
He headed in another direction. He had no desire to find out who was trying to break down that door.
He still wasn’t steady on his feet. Tripping, he almost fell to the floor. The blow to his head must have been more than just a bruise, he decided. No matter. He still had to plow on. He didn’t exactly feel safe in this hospital.
He brought up short. He could distinguish a figure moving at the other end of the hall. It looked like Tom. Halverson could not discern the face of the man clearly, but the clothes looked like Tom’s.
Still . . . , decided Halverson, he wasn’t sure who it was. Halverson decided to play it safe and not draw the man’s attention until he could see the man’s face.
The figure kept coming toward Halverson. The guy wasn’t walking quickly, Halverson could see, but he was walking steadily in Halverson’s direction.
Halverson could distinguish the guy’s face now. It was Tom, Halverson realized.
Halverson waved at him with a smile.
Tom didn’t wave back, but kept making a beeline toward Halverson.
There was something strange about Tom’s gait, Halverson realized. Tom seemed to be shuffling, plodding like an old man.
With mounting horror, Halverson could make out Tom’s features now. They were twisted in a grimace. Tom’s hands clawed the air. He groped toward Halverson.
Halverson turned tail and ran for his life.
The thought occurred to him that he might be the last man on earth. There was no way he could tell that, of course. One thing was for sure. He was feeling more and more like Ishmael in Moby Dick.
And I alone have escaped to tell thee.
Tell who? he thought. If only there was somebody left that he could tell.
Zombie Necropolis
Bryan Cassiday
Copyright © 2012 by Bryan Cassiday
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Bryan Cassiday
Los Angeles
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition: May 2012
PRELUDE
CIA black ops agent Greg Coogan couldn’t believe his eyes. If anyone outside of the Agency tumbled to this, the blowback would inflict incalculable damage on the CIA’s resurgent reputation. After all, it was the CIA, along with the SEALs, that had been instrumental in the tracking and execution of the notorious Osama bin Laden. But now this.
In his midthirties Coogan wasn’t a novice, but, experienced or not, he didn’t know what to do. He had to tell someone, but who could he trust in the Agency? Agency employees were sure to close ranks on this one. Nobody in the Agency would want this particular intel to leak beyond Langley’s walls.
Though at this moment, Coogan wasn’t in Langley and neither were his coworkers. They were all hunkered down in the bombproof, airtight Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center in Virginia.
Sitting at his desk in his cubicle, Coogan was watching a video on his laptop concerning the Erasmus medical center in Rotterdam, Holland. The video had been sent to him as an attachment to an e-mail. He had been treated at the Erasmus hospital for a bullet he had taken that had just missed his femoral artery in his thigh while he was stationed in Europe a few years back, which might explain why the e-mail was addressed to him.
The medical center was a bleak-looking complex with towering cranes parked in its many areas that were under construction. A few pedestrians were strolling on a cement concourse outside of a white skyscraper that had large white block letters perched on top of it saying Erasmus MC.
Within moments, a nightmare began as a knot of medical staff workers in white scrubs were disgorged from the high-rise. The staff personnel staggered drunkenly toward the unsuspecting pedestrians and descended on them and, incredibly, commenced tearing them limb from limb.
Coogan turned his face away from the laptop’s screen in horror. He had to tell someone of his discovery. But who? The Agency was riddled with bureaucrats who would do anything to cover their asses.
If the intel Coogan had got his hands on leaked to the public, it could lead to a major overhaul of the Agency, and, Coogan knew, heads would assuredly roll.
Coogan could think of only one person he could trust—a fellow worker in the National Clandestine Service, otherwise known as the black ops arm of the CIA. The fellow worker was Chad Halverson, who was about the same age as Coogan.
They were both members of SOG (Special Operations Group), which was responsible for paramilitary operations in the NCS. Officially, Coogan and Halverson were known as paramilitary operations officers, who neither wore uniforms nor carried government ID. Unofficially, and off the books, they were in actuality CIA hit men.
Coogan had been trying to contact Halverson by phone for hours—with no success. Coogan had no inkling where Halverson was. For some reason, Halverson wasn’t answering his phone.
Coogan reached for his encrypted Agency satellite phone and urgently punched out Halverson’s phone number one more time.
No answer.
Coogan threw down his phone and cursed.
It was vital that he get in touch with Halverson.
CHAPTER ONE
Halverson found out it was much worse than anything he could have imagined.
As near as he could tell, the entire state of California had been reduced to a wasteland, a charred smoking battlescape of twisted debris strewn with corpses among fire-gutted, desolate, smoldering remains of buildings.
Banks of dirty yellow smog billowed across the flatlands in the Los Angeles basin, revealing plague victims everywhere around him as far as the eye could see, which wasn’t very far on account of the smog that obfuscated his vision and stung his eyes. The sallow, noxious smog wasn’t easy on his lungs either, for that matter.
Corpses sprawled in the middle of the streets. Corpses slumped over steering wheels in crashed cars abandoned on those selfsame streets. Corpses everywhere.
And then there were the creatures . . .
Even now a leash of them were approaching him, emerging from the smog with their signature herky-jerky movements. Their vacant milky eyes stared in his direction as the creatures wended their way past cadavers and detritus toward him.
The lead creature’s skin was in the process of disintegrating on its red and white blotchy face even while the creature walked. Its gimme cap that bore a hardware company’s logo above the black bill sat askew on the creature’s head.
One of the lenses in the ghoul’s spectacles was shattered. The ghoul didn’t care. It just kept shambling forward. Thick flakes of reddish purple skin peeled from the creature’s drawn cheeks and tumbled off to the ground to reveal bright white cheekbones.
The face of death bobbed and weaved Halverson’s way through the ruins of Los Angeles.
But how? Halverson wondered. How in the world could it have happened? And more to the point, given the circumstances, was there anybody else, besides him, left alive now?
Halverson was standing on Wilshire Boulevard, the main artery of Los Angeles. The wide thoroughfare stretched sixteen miles from the Pacific Ocean through Santa Monica through Beverly Hills to the heart of downtown LA where it ended at Grand Avenue. Without Wilshire Boulevard at its core, Halverson knew, there would be no Los Angeles.
He was standing on Wilshire where the 405 intersected it. He was facing eastward toward downtown. The creatures were shuffling toward him from that same direction.
Halverson figured it was time to head west. Maybe the infestation of creatures had not yet spread to the coastline. He knew for a fact they had infested LAX and the 405 heading north from the airport.
He struck off for the west at a brisk clip. He didn’t break into a run. There was no need. Though deadly, the bumbling creatures could barely walk. He could easily outstrip them by walking.
He was on the verge of fleeing the plague-infected creatures when he spotted a blonde that looked to be in her late twenties walking near the veterans’ cemetery on his right. She was wearing blue jeans and a pink blouse.
Pegging her for a creature he decided it would be best to head away from her.
She caught sight of him at the same time he laid eyes on her. She broke into a run away from him along the chain-link fence that skirted the necropolis.
That was strange, he decided. As far as he knew, the creatures could not run. They could only shuffle and jerk along. Unless they were in the process of mutating . . . But she had run away from him, not toward him. The thought of making a meal of him obviously hadn’t crossed her mind.
She must be human, he decided. He bolted after her.
She glanced over her shoulder, saw him giving chase, and, terrified, accelerated her gait.
“Wait!” he called out to her. “I’m not one of them!”
The gate in the chain-link fence around the cemetery hung open. She fled into the graveyard.
He charged after her.
She stumbled over a white tombstone in the well-manicured cemetery and fell on her stomach. She let out a cry of pain as she hit the ground.
Seeing her prostrate he pumped his legs harder, knowing she was within his grasp.
She scrambled to her feet, her face ashen at the sight of him nearing her. She lurched away from him. But she was off balance, he could see, and she tripped over another tombstone.
He caught up to her, gasping for breath.
“I’m not one o
f them,” he managed to say between gasps.
Her blue eyes wide with terror, she considered him. Like him, she was breathing heavily.
“I can talk,” he said. “They can’t talk.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” she said, still apprehensive. “You could still be a rioter.”
“Rioter?”
“The riots. Look around you.” She gesticulated with her arms. “The whole city’s burned down. Where have you been the last couple of days?”
“Rioters didn’t do this.”
“Of course they did. Don’t you remember the LA riots? This has happened before. And now it’s happening all over again.”
“It’s the plague. The plague-infected creatures did this.”
Nonplussed, she stared at him. Then she screwed up her face.
“Are you nuts?” she said at last. “You’ve been watching too many reruns of Night of the Living Dead.”
“Look at the way those things walk,” he said. He pointed at the trio of creatures that had been tailing him earlier and now were making their way toward him and her in the cemetery. “Normal people don’t walk like that.”
She gazed at the three creatures. Confused, she shook her head, unwilling or unable to believe this was really happening.
“I just flew in from Washington, DC, yesterday,” he said. “When we landed, LAX was taken over by these creatures. They’re occupying the entire state, as near as I can figure. Maybe even the entire country.”
She grabbed her head with both her hands. “This is insane!”
He could not tell her he was a CIA agent. If he told her, she would think he had gone mad like the rest of the world had. He used his cover story instead.
“I’m a journalist,” he said. “I’ve been covering this outbreak of plague. The government thinks it started in China and spread here.”
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