Dead World | Novel | Dead Zero

by Platt, Sean

  He took a breath, then continued. “I also know that if she didn’t run away on foot, she couldn’t have taken your car because she doesn’t drive, and even if she did, the two of you had the keys. And I’m also pretty sure she doesn’t know how to hotwire a random vehicle. So, what’s left?”

  “The vans,” said Carly.

  “Whether you believe me or not—” Rick gave his son an earnest look. “—the trail to finding Rosie starts with Hemisphere.”

  Two new sirens screamed in the distance. It suddenly struck Thom how quiet and still it was up here other than the sirens, which were multiplying by the moment.

  Shouldn’t there be cars circling to park?

  Shouldn’t there be new arrivals to the mall, getting out of their cars before sensing something amiss?

  The place had been packed, and yet there wasn’t a single straggler around right now. No matter how Thom sliced it — even denying everything his father said — things were rotting in Denmark.

  “I guess I can go get the car,” Thom said.

  “No way,” Brendan told him, looking at their foursome. “This time, we all go.”

  Thirteen

  Guile

  Thom’s doubts sloughed away like dead skin the minute they left the mall’s orbit.

  The complex was a rough circle, with twin paths circling the ring of parking lots. You had to turn onto the outer road, then take a short access road to reach the boulevard beyond. The entire way was clear, and that was unusual — but what lay out in the wider world was even more surprising.

  Pure chaos. The second they drove into it, Thom wished they’d stayed at the mall. He hadn’t realized how good they’d momentarily had it. Other than the one creature who’d chased Thom and Carly through an open door, no others seemed to have emerged. With the doors closed, they might as well have been locked.

  In the quiet parking lot with all the people gone, the somewhat-higher-than-its-surroundings mall had been like a citadel during a storm. Now they were in the soup at its base, and it wasn’t the everyday calm he’d expected.

  Cars had crashed, and no emergency vehicles attended them. Injured people were everywhere, shambling along vacant-eyed and with zero direction. But when Thom stopped to help one of them, it reached through the window and nearly clawed his face off.

  They passed by others in the same condition, this time with all the windows up, and got the same result. They were surrounded whenever they stopped. To break the tension, Brendan told his dad to go ahead and let them wash the windshield. Thom tried to laugh, but funny might be dead for a while.

  Sirens were everywhere, but they were always moving, never seeming to stop. Some of those on foot around them kept attacking others, usually in an animal frenzy from which Carly tried, without success, to hide Brendan’s eyes.

  They drove past a park centered with a beautiful gazebo, but the structure had been knocked askew, and there was a red mass slumped against one interior wall that Thom sincerely hoped wasn’t human but of course almost certainly was.

  “Look,” Brendan said, leaning his head against the window and looking up. “Helicopters.”

  Thom craned to see, but immediately realized that he didn’t have to.

  There were more of them through the windshield, and their presence wasn’t subtle. They were low, and they were large — the kind that ferried troops and had massive guns.

  Thom nearly caused a collision while staring up at the sky.

  Carly screamed for him to look out; a city bus was barreling down a wreck-littered throughway and, as they all watched, T-boned an SUV driving perpendicular.

  Thom repeatedly tried turning onto larger roads, but the widest ones were gridlocked. Pedestrians walked between cars, visible from the surface roads, but Thom doubted they were everyday folks who’d run out of gas. Hints he saw while trying to keep his eyes fixed to the road — combined with small disturbed noises from Carly, Brendan, and even Rick — suggested the walkers were pulling others from their cars, then using them for a meal.

  “LOOK OUT!”

  No time. Thom registered Carly’s shout a half-second after she verbalized it, then yanked the wheel a half-second after that. But the two slumping forms had come from nowhere. Thom, who’d pressed the gas nearly to the floor without realizing (and driving more often than not on sidewalks and berms) had no time to avoid them.

  He saw their faces before plowing into them, noting them as vacant, and knowing them to be like the others. One went under the car and another struck the windshield. It was like they’d decided to divide and conquer, except that Thom’s Volvo was the one concluding their encounter in triumph.

  The thing that’d gone over the car had left a lot of its skull behind and stayed down, but the one Thom ran over did not. His speed and a lucky strike had severed the woman nearly in half, but when Thom glanced in his rearview, he saw her take the hit, turn in a crawl, and keep on coming with guts in long red ropes behind her.

  They found a street that wasn’t clotted and swung a hard right, but a single glimpse of a tank and a handful of National Guard vehicles turned him right back around.

  Past the vehicles, he’d spied not just orange-and-white traffic barricades, but four-point tank-stoppers strung with razor wire.

  Carly watched it longer than Thom did, revolving fully to look out the rear as they drove back away.

  “Turn on the radio,” she said.

  “I’m not really in the mood,” Thom told her.

  She reached for the radio and on came the news station.

  Thom felt dumb. Again.

  A report spilled from a reporter’s lips. “—of the unknown outbreak, but thanks to an emergency barricade, News 11 is being assured by both local and national authorities that for now the infection is contained. We’re also being told that airspace around Bakersfield has been commandeered by the National Guard and U.S. Army and that the area is considered a no-fly zone.”

  The reporter said it carefully, as if the words might not be self-evident. “We can’t provide you with our own aerial footage, but listeners wishing to view what there is to see of Bakersfield from above can visit our website at News11.org for footage courtesy of the Army. Viewer warning: What you see there … is disturbing.”

  “Jesus,” Thom said. “It must be the whole city.”

  Rick grunted. “Look on the bright side. At least it’s only the city.”

  “Are they saying what it is? Like, what caused it?”

  “We all have exactly as much information as you, Thom,” said Carly, annoyed.

  “But you’re still listening.”

  She was, with the volume lowered. It’d been ten seconds. She glared at him.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Brendan!” Carly snapped.

  No response from Rick, but if that exclamation had come from Thom, Rick would probably be calling him a pussy right about now.

  In the mirror, Thom saw a shuffle in the back seat, presumably as Brendan’s phone (although, it was actually still Thom’s) moved from grandson to grandfather. Rick began to scroll, holding the phone high with his left hand and using an arthritis-gnarled finger to move down the page.

  He tapped, and Thom watched their heads lean close to watch a video.

  Thom, up front, could only hear snarls. What sounded like jackals feeding.

  Now, still in the mirror, Brendan was paper-white.

  To his credit, Rick snatched the phone, still looking, but no keeping the screen away from his grandson. “Service sucks. I guess we’re lucky the mall stayed lit, because this says power’s going out all over the city. You wanna know why?”

  “No,” said Carly.

  “They’ve got us all blocked in, but the power plant’s in with us. And …”

  “The nuclear plant?” Thom asked.

  “No. Luckily. The coal one. Anyone know which plant powers which areas? I’d rather not be in the dark when night comes.”

  “Wait,” Brendan said. “We can’t leave? We
’re staying here tonight?”

  Rick either didn’t hear or didn’t care to answer. “Says here most of the cell towers are down, and the coal plant supplied power to most of the providers, so it’s moot anyway. The signal I’m getting is probably coming from somewhere beyond the barricade.”

  “Should I stay out near the edges, so we can get a signal?”

  “No. We have to head toward downtown.”

  “Downtown?” Thom said it like a swear. Rick’s proposal was tantamount to going down into a spooky basement while ghosts prowled the neighborhood, or teenagers doing it in a tent with a serial killer on the loose. “We need to get out. No way we’re going downtown!”

  “What about our home?” Carly asked.

  “According to this,” Rick read from the phone, “your neighborhood is about the worst place in the world we could possibly go. Seems a helicopter went down.” He looked through all the windows, then pointed. Thom saw a rising line of smoke in the distance. “There. And it …”

  “It what?”

  “It kind of … rang the dinner bell.”

  “Where are they all coming from?”

  “From the population.” Rick shrugged. “Zombie apocalypses are a sort of self-sustaining situation.”

  Thom wanted to shout or laugh at the mention again of “zombies,” but he couldn’t summon the breath. If it walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, Thom was very unfortunately starting to think maybe it wasn’t his business to keep insisting that it wasn’t a duck.

  “You’re saying the zombies create more zombies?” Brendan said.

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “Because, like, when someone gets bit?”

  Rick shrugged.

  “Mom?” Brendan said, eyes ticking in the general direction of her ankle wound.

  “Why downtown, Dad?” Thom rushed to change the subject.

  “That’s where Hemisphere is.”

  “We’re so not going to Hemisphere anymore,” Thom said.

  “Yes we are,” Rick insisted.

  “No, we’re not.”

  “What about Rosie?”

  “What about Rosie?” Thom asked.

  “You signed her out. She’s your responsibility.”

  “We didn’t sign her out. Her daughter signed her out.”

  “Seriously, Thomas? You’re an asshole.”

  “Let it go, Dad.”

  “An asshole and a coward.”

  “Whatever. I just want to survive.”

  “Like a coward asshole.”

  “Language!” Carly had sweat on her brow. Thom tried not to see it.

  Rick leaned forward, putting a forearm on each front seat. “I know you don’t think you’re going to drive through a military barricade.”

  “No, I was going to find a safe place, inside Bakersfield, to ride it out.”

  “Ride what out?” Rick waved his arms all around. “This right here? It’s already ridden. You’re good at math, son. What do you call it when one makes two, and two make four, and four make eight?”

  “You don’t know that’s how it is.”

  “I goddamn well do, and only half of it are the reasons you know.”

  Thom considered balking, but he was no longer poised to rebut anything his father told him.

  “So what do you call it?” Rick pressed.

  Begrudgingly, Thom said, “Exponential.”

  “So you know how fast this is going to slide out of control. Shit. It’s already out of control. And it’s only gonna get worse. We aren’t going to your home or that dungeon where you’ve stuck me, because they’re both in the middle of what the news says is a mass buffet. You can’t get us out. So, okay, you want to lay low. Where? And here’s the most important question: For how long?”

  “Until it’s handled.”

  Rick laughed. “They’ve got one city that’s a problem, and it’s quickly becoming a very serious one. From what I see, it’s only us. Only Bakersfield. So what would you do, if you were the military lead in charge of ‘handling’ this? Does the word triage mean anything to you? How about acceptable losses?”

  “Dad?” Brendan pleaded.

  Rick gave the boy a glance, then said somewhat quieter, “Listen to me, Thom. You didn’t believe anything else I said, but maybe you’re willing to hear me now. You can’t wait this out.” He took another look at Brendan, then seemed to decide that the truth needed to be said, no matter how scary it might be. “I know what I’d do, and it wouldn’t be opening the gates and trying to sort us out one by one. I don’t know what happened here any more than you do, but I do know that Hemisphere is somehow caught up in it, and that ‘laying low’ and hoping they let us out later is only gonna get us all dead. So, there’s really only one choice left.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Guile.”

  The car was silent.

  “What’s that mean?” Brendan asked.

  “Cunning,” Rick clarified. “Cleverness. Coercion. It means we need to use our brains, if we don’t want to see them get eaten.”

  “But … What’s it mean?”

  Carly answered, having assembled his puzzle fastest.

  “It means,” she told her son, “that we’re going to Hemisphere.”

  Fourteen

  Exponential Growth

  Their luck with the car didn’t hold out.

  The mall was on the outskirts, near the edge of the city-wide blockade, and as near as Thom could tell, it had either been the incident’s epicenter or one of several that happened at the same time.

  If his father had theories about how it’d all gone down, Thom was finally ready to welcome them. But Rick was silent and Thom refused to humble himself enough to ask, so by the time he hit an impassable wreck, he’d decided it ultimately didn’t matter.

  What did matter was how fast everything had gone down — a supernatural speed to accompany what should have been a supernatural disease.

  Everything had been fine when they’d left for the mall.

  It seemed like the nightmare had happened within the last … What? Two hours?

  There hadn’t been a slow rotting of Bakersfield. This whole thing had dropped like a rock into a pond.

  And that, thought Thom as he carefully parked the car and pocketed the keys just in case they’d return to it, was only the tip of things. For the rest of the decent part of the drive, his passengers had been quiet. Without taking a census, Thom thought that Brendan was scared for his life, his future, and his mother; Carly in turn feared for Brendan and her worsening bite; Rick was devouring all the news he could and (if Past Rick was any indication) probably formulating a plan.

  Thom had been thinking in the quiet. About the suddenness of the change, but also about the almost immediate response. By all reports, the Bakersfield blockade was military atop military, and it wasn’t like all those tanks and troops had just been sitting around, taking in the sun and shopping at Vons.

  How had they dropped that hammer so fast?

  And he thought of Hemisphere. To Thom, the company was only an academic construct, not something he’d really ever had intimate knowledge of. He knew it as a drug company with a charismatic but obnoxious founder, and as the manufacturer of BioFuse. He’d never heard of the drug before the home’s resident liaison called to ask for a bit of Thom and Carly’s time to discuss a potential Alzheimer’s trial.

  Thom had been skeptical about the trial because that was his nature. Carly was skeptical because she worked in medicine and had seen vain attempts to slay the Alzheimer’s dragon before. Rick wasn’t skeptical at all. He was losing his mind. And life, per Rick, would be pointless without it.

  Fry my brain, liquify it in my skull — I really don’t care, if there’s a chance you can fix me, too.

  Because Thom was his guardian at the time (still was, but he’d needed a guardian then and even Rick could admit it), his consent mattered most. So Thom had researched, talked contentiously to Rick when his father was lucid, reviewed
all Hemisphere could give him on the drug, and even spoke to a biochemist he knew from college.

  Not every light had been green, but enough were in the family for Thom to finally agree to the experimental trial. Two weeks later Rick had taken his baseline tests and been given his first dose of BioFuse using a small, aesthetically unobjectionable injection device the company simply called a “gadget.” The next week, another. Then another. It took about a month for Rick to show any improvement, and Thom knew he was getting better because Thom started hating him a whole lot more. Ironically, a sick father was a big improvement over a healthier one. Turned out the trial was really a choice between Rick’s well-being and his son’s.

  With the treatments working so well, Thom had mostly stopped asking questions. BioFuse became one thing while, quite separately, wider Hemisphere became something else. Founder Archibald Burgess had started appearing on a growing number of magazine covers, while other drugs in the company’s suite gained popular (if mysterious) favor.

  Hemisphere had a way of generating more rumor than fact, and that was strange for a company that required so much paperwork and compliance to function. Whispers abounded about drugs that could make people live longer, feel a lot better, and look like models even if they’d been near the soil of an ugly tree. Nobody could substantiate or prove those rumors, but the internet swore they were true. True, and also not technically by-the-books as far as the FDA was concerned.

  The company’s infamy grew alongside its fame.

  All these things, Thom had thought about Hemisphere. But it really wasn’t like that, because while Thom had indeed had all the thoughts, they were only in passing. He didn’t obsess about the company. He didn’t think the pharmaceutical enterprise was God’s Greatest Gift or the Devil. He noticed Archibald Burgess in the news but didn’t stalk him or seek any information beyond what naturally came his way, and even though his father was benefitting from Burgess’s invention, Thom only had tolerance for a few hours a month spent thinking about his old man.