Dead World Resurrection

by Joe McKinney

  Nettle kicked his foot. “Wake up,” he said. “I want a word with you.”

  Barlow thought him a policeman at first, and had already half pulled himself to his feet when the haze of sleep left him entirely, and he realized who was standing in front of him.

  “You owe me an answer, Mr. Barlow.”

  But Barlow didn’t stand still to give it. He turned and ran with all the energy a scared, weather-beaten, and prematurely old man could muster.

  Nettle followed him at a jog, yelling “I want an answer!” over and over at Barlow’s back, and as they slipped deeper and deeper into the warren of slimy streets that were the bowels of the East End, a cold, light rain began to fall.

  Nettle closed on him in a back alley off the Brown Hay Road, the streets deserted now and splashy beneath their feet. Barlow had curled up under a flight of stairs, trying to hide his face with his arms.

  “You have some explaining to do,” Nettle said. The rain rolled off his face unnoticed.

  Barlow stared at him with abject fear.

  “What did you do? Answer me!”

  “For the love of all that’s ’oly, sir, please don’t yell. You’ll—”

  “I’ll what? Wake the dead? Go on, you villain, say it! Say it! Are you afraid they’ll hear us?”

  Barlow looked seasick. His eyes pleaded for silence but got none.

  “Spill it!” Nettle roared. “Tell me what you did.”

  Nettle waited, and for a moment, there was no sound but the pattering of a gentle rain on cobblestones, but then it came, as both Nettle and Barlow knew that it most assuredly would, the sound of slow, plodding feet dragging on the cobblestones behind them.

  Nettle looked over his shoulder and saw a small crowd of shamblers in the mist. There were men, women, even children. Their faces were dark with disease and their cheeks empty from extreme hunger. Their eyes were carrion eyes, and a smell that could only be death’s smell preceded them, filling the street with its sad, inexorable power.

  A man in front raised his arms, and it looked like one of his hands had been partially eaten. He groaned “Fooooood” and Barlow jumped to his feet and tried to run.

  “Where are you going?” Nettle yelled after him. “Don’t you know you can’t run from this?”

  Barlow didn’t make it very far, only to the middle of the Brown Hay Road. There, he stopped, wheeling around in panic, surrounded by the dead on every side. They stepped out of every doorway, out of every alley, from behind every staircase, taking shape in the shadows. He fell to his knees in front of Nettle and started to cry.

  “Please,” he begged.

  “Tell what you’ve done,” Nettle said.

  Barlow looked at the groaning, starving dead, and he shook his head no. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!

  “Say it,” Nettle said. “While there’s still time.”

  But there wasn’t any time. Barlow could no more belly up to the magnitude of what he’d done than he could force himself to stop breathing, and as the rotting dead shouldered their way past Nettle and closed on Barlow, all he could do was close his eyes.

  The dead tore at Barlow with their hands and their teeth, ripping his flesh like fabric. Nettle stumbled away, into the dark, and as he walked, he heard Barlow’s screams carry on and on and on. They seemed to go on far longer than it was possible for any one man to suffer, but go on they did, and they echoed in Nettle’s mind even after the shrillness disappeared from his ears.

  After that, Nettle wandered, his mind unhinged, until he began to see people. He tried to tell them what he had seen, but they flinched away from him, alarmed at the intensity in his eyes and the urgency in his voice and the complete lack of sense in his speech.

  As day broke, a russet stain behind plum-colored smoke clouds, Nettle collapsed less than fifty feet from the doors of Stepney Green Hospital. He lay there, lips moving soundlessly, eyes still as glass beads, until an orderly from the hospital knelt beside him and said, “Hey, mate, are you hurt? What is it? Are you ’ungry?”

  If the horror wasn’t on Nettle’s face, it was nonetheless there, in his mind. Eat, he thought, and sensed his body in complete revolt at the idea. God no, I’ll never eat again.

  State of the Union

  I know when I’m being lied to. It’s not hard to figure out, even when you’re a stranger in a country halfway around the world and you don’t speak the language. Bullshit smells the same, no matter how it sounds. And that’s what our Chinese hosts were trying to shovel down our throats.

  Bullshit.

  Pure, unadulterated bullshit.

  Our group went down for dinner at eight p.m. We stepped off the elevator but barely made it into the hotel lobby before a couple of blue-shirted cops started yelling at us to go back upstairs.

  “What’s this all about?” asked Brad Owens. He was our leader, a Young Democrat from Columbia University. Tall, slender, and dignified, Brad stood an easy six inches taller than the cops, but it didn’t seem to impress them at all.

  “You go back upstairs,” one of the cops said. “Go now.”

  “But I want to know what’s going on,” Brad insisted. He pointed to the reception hall. “They’re supposed to be throwing us a party.”

  “No party for you. Party over. You go now. Go upstairs.”

  While Brad was busy arguing with the Chinese cops, I was looking through the glass doors of our hotel. Outside, Beijing was in the middle of a riot. I heard screams overlapping screams. I saw people running for their lives, others throwing rocks. Right outside the front doors, a small crowd knocked down an injured man and swarmed over him, like they were trying to pull him apart.

  “But why do we have to go upstairs?” Brad asked.

  The concierge came over. He looked utterly frazzled, and more than a little distracted, but he kept his tone level and his smile bright when he talked to us.

  “Please,” he said with a slight bow. His accent was good, even if the syntax was off. “Please, you and your friends to go upstairs please. We have the flu outside.”

  “The flu?” Brad said.

  I looked out across the Beijing skyline and saw buildings on fire in the distance.

  “People don’t riot because of the flu,” said Jim Bowman, our Young Republican representative.

  The concierge’s smile wavered for a moment. “You to go upstairs to your rooms now,” he said and then muttered something to the cops in Chinese.

  The next moment we were being hustled upstairs and forced into our rooms.

  I tried the door, but it was locked from the outside.

  I beat on it with my fists and got no reply.

  I looked out the peephole and saw the cops pacing the hallway. They looked scared and anxious, and I didn’t like it. One of them kept swallowing, his Adam’s apple pumping up and down in his throat, looking to his partner for some clue what they were supposed to do.

  I gave up on the door and sat down on the foot of the bed and tried to get online. Nothing worked. Email, Livejournal, Twitter, Facebook, even Google was down. I lowered my iPad and tried my iPhone. Same thing. I had been sending emails all day. I had even sent my latest article to my editor at The Crimson right before I took my shower and got dressed for dinner. But now, nothing. Just a “network connection error” message.

  That’s when it really hit me. Not only was I a stranger in a strange land, but the Chinese government had somehow managed to shut down the Internet. My one umbilical cord to the real world had just been cut.

  It hadn’t seemed real, standing in the lobby and watching Beijing tear itself apart, but once I found out the Internet was down... well, that was the clincher.

  We were being lied to.

  And like the old Bob Dylan song goes, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

  §

  Okay, so what do you need to know?

  Introductions first, I guess.

  My name is Mark Wellerman—though I suppose you already know that, my name being what
it is. These days, I run a small farm in Georgia. It’s not much, but I grow all my own food, raise my own livestock, make my own bullets. I can take care of myself. That’s a far cry from the plans I had growing up, but don’t think for a minute that I’m a failure. Like I said, this farm makes all the food a man could ever need, and there is no fortune greater than that.

  Believe me. I know that better than anyone.

  I’m twenty-four now, but I was twenty-two when this story I’m telling you happened. I was a senior at Harvard, majoring in Journalism. I had the world at my feet, every door ahead standing wide open. And that’s how I landed in Beijing that summer. I was one of two-dozen college students from across the United States selected to take part in an exchange program to China called “Our Best, Your Best.”

  Our group was called the “Young Americans.” We were supposed to represent the best and brightest of America’s up-and-coming generation. We were a cross-section of this once great country, our own mini melting pot. We had Brad Owens, our Young Democrat from Columbia; Jim Bowman, a Young Republican from the University of Texas at Austin; and Sandra Palmer, a junior Tea Party Patriot from the University of Nebraska—all three of them intent on becoming president one day. But we had a lot more than politics going for us. We had a cop from a junior college in Texas, a West Point cadet, a teacher’s assistant working on her master’s degree at Florida State, a UAW assembly lineman from Michigan doing an online graduate degree in Pension Fund Management, computer programmers, rich kids, poor kids... We had it all. Hell, we even had a guy who was attending UC Berkley illegally but got to go with us anyway because of the DREAM Act. Between the twenty-four us, we were America.

  For better or for worse.

  Most of the trip up to that last night in the hotel was mindless arguing, everybody talking and nobody listening. I had plenty to write about, but it still wore me down. I remember feeling irritable every time Brad or Jim or Sandra opened their mouths. The bickering just seemed pointless.

  But all that changed that night. I hadn’t taken off my clothes. I was standing at my window, looking across downtown Beijing twenty stories below, every now and then catching the wail of a siren or the muffled cry of a nearby scream, when the Chinese cops burst through the door. One of them went for me, the other for my luggage. As I watched, the cop tossed my iPhone, my iPad, even my headphones into the trash. Then he crammed some clothes into my backpack and threw it at me.

  “But, my phone...,” I said.

  He said something in Chinese and pointed to his partner, who pushed me outside.

  Everyone else was already standing there, trying to get somebody to tell them what was going on. Jim Bowman was yelling, and it wasn’t hard to see why. The cops had pulled him and Sandra out of bed without even giving Sandra a chance to put on her pants. She was standing behind him, tugging her jeans over her hips and looking embarrassed as hell.

  Those of us who could speak a little Chinese tried to get answers out of the cops, but they weren’t talking. They hustled us downstairs and out the back door.

  As soon as the doors to the parking lot opened, we could hear the sound of screams and gunshots and sirens. I saw what looked like military helicopters sprinting overhead. I watched them race over the heart of the city, and when I looked down to street level, I saw a group of burned and bleeding people limping toward us. One of them was so badly burned I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The poor devil was black as charcoal, still trailing wisps of smoke. The others behind were less burned, but each was terribly wounded, clothes dark with coagulated blood.

  One of the girls in our group screamed, and the cops hurried her onto the bus. Then, while the rest of us watched in horror, one of the cops went to the crowd and, with deliberate headshots, shot the wounded one by one. I couldn’t believe it. The cop never even gave them a chance to run. He just shot them. And weirder still, not a single one of that crowd flinched, even with a rifle pointed at their faces. It was like they didn’t know what was happening.

  The next moment, we were on the bus. Our driver, a thin, terrified-looking man in shabby clothes, turned the bus toward the street with a lurch and built up speed. The shooting we’d just witnessed had left us stunned and silent. Cowed, I guess you’d say. We sat in our seats, staring out the windows at the destruction and the insane crowds banging on the sides of the bus, and I don’t think any of us even thought to ask where we were being taken.

  Just like I don’t think any of us thought to use the word zombie.

  At least at that point.

  §

  From our hotel they drove us to the Beijing West Railway Station. Let me say this, first and foremost, on the behalf of the Chinese.

  They took care of us.

  They never once forgot that we were their guests. They could have left us in that hotel to die along with everyone else. I’m pretty sure, had we been in the U.S., that’s what would have happened. But the Chinese had a sense of obligation so strong, so ingrained, that even in the face of a zombie apocalypse, they took real pains to get us out of harm’s way. They had no idea the hell they were condemning us to, and I cannot fault them for what came afterward.

  They tried to be good hosts.

  They really did.

  §

  The railway station was a mad, screaming hive of humanity. Hundreds of thousands of people were surging toward the platforms, trying to board trains. In that mad scramble to the trains, we lost Virginia Wilder, our teacher from Florida; and Wade Mallum, our UAW representative. I don’t know how it happened, but I saw Jim and Sandra running from where Virginia and Wade went down.

  “Those crazy yellow bastards are eating each other,” Sandra said.

  “What?” I said. I had only known Sandra for a few weeks, but I was already aware of her ability to say things that defied the logic used by sane people.

  “They got Virginia and Wade,” Jim said. “We couldn’t save them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were dead weight slowing us down.” He was winded, but he managed to turn to Sandra and smile. “We’re okay.”

  I just stared at him, dumbfounded. Amid the deafening roar of hundreds of thousands of a panicking people, after watching two of our group get trampled and possibly eaten, he had the audacity to call them “dead weight.”

  But I didn’t get the chance to call him on his words, for at that moment, our escorts managed to zipper open a path through the crowd and get us into a fairly new, fairly clean commuter car. No frills, no special compartments. Just three rows of seats on either side of a center aisle, like a small jet airliner.

  We had the car to ourselves.

  I dropped into a window seat and looked across the crowded platform. I found it hard to believe we’d ended up the only ones in our car. As we pulled away from the platform, I saw people screaming for a chance to get on. Mothers held up their babies, begging us to take them. Hundreds jumped onto the outside of the train and held on as long as they could. It was a sorry, sad sight, and as Jim and Sandra and Brad began to scream at each other about whose fault all this was, I slipped farther down into my seat and pressed my hands over my ears and tried to block out the screams of all those poor people falling away behind us.

  §

  We didn’t make it very far.

  As soon as we cleared the gates, people surged against the sides of the train. I heard their bodies thudding against metal and felt the train lurch as they collapsed onto tracks and were run over.

  I looked to one side and saw our entire group with their faces pressed against the windows, none of them speaking, but all of them wearing stunned, horrified expressions upon their faces.

  “My God,” I heard someone say. “Look at all of them. There’s so many.”

  And there were, too.

  Hundreds of thousands of them.

  I looked out the window, and all I could see were faces closing in around us. They pressed against the train, swarmed over top of it.

&n
bsp; Suddenly the train lurched and came to a violent, shuddering halt. All of us were thrown from our seats. For a moment, I felt like I was getting pushed forward, like I was on the crest of a wave. And then, just as suddenly, I hit the deck and banged my head against the bottom of a seat.

  I blacked out for a second.

  When I came to, I was groggy, disoriented. I stood up and looked around. My hair felt wet. I touched it and came away with blood on my fingers. Sandra Palmer had her hand over her forehead, a runner of blood oozing between her fingers. Her mouth was twisted, like she was about to scream, or cry, but couldn’t decide which. Brad Owens had landed in a heap against the forward door. Jim Bowman was right next to him. His arm looked broken.

  “They’ve knocked us off the rails,” somebody said.

  “Impossible,” someone else said.

  “Take a look if you don’t believe me.”

  Several of us went to the window, and I could tell at a glance he was right. From where I stood, I could see the half-dozen cars ahead of us, the lead car was jackknifed across the tracks.

  “How is that possible?” the girl next to me asked.

  I shook my head. But I knew. I think we all knew. We’d run over so many bodies the wheels had just skipped the tracks.

  And now an army hundreds of thousands strong was surging against our train car, banging on the side panels. The combined roar of their moans and screams and their fists pounding on the sides of the train was deafening. The girl next to me, a Culinary Arts major from SMU, was in tears.

  For a moment I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. But before I got the chance, Jake Arguello, our Texas cop, started hollering from the rear of the car.

  “They’re breaking in the door back!”

  Billy Gantz, our West Point cadet, rushed that way. “I’ll help you.”

  I watched the two of them punch and kick a Chinese woman who had managed to squeeze through the busted door. She fell back into the writhing mass of hands and faces, and they slammed what was left of the door against the surging crowd.