“I don’t know. Lets get going.”
Benny smashed out his cigarette and kicked it into the ditch. He turned around to see a man crossing the street. Benny did not believe what he was seeing. The man shuffling slowly towards him was nearly skeletal. He was wearing a fireman’s uniform that had been torn open at the chest, revealing a nearly shattered set of ribs. The flesh was stripped from one side of his face . . . and everything else . . . showing a skull underneath, tinged red with flesh blood. The top of his head had been crudely removed as if it was ripped apart. There was nothing inside, hardly. Just an empty cavity with a small torn membrane inside about the size of a golfball.
“What in the . . .”
The fireman uttered a low, guttural growl. The man’s voice sounded like his lungs were filled with rocks that banged together when he made a sound. The strange man, now nearly at the car walked further, favoring his right leg. It was hanging there by mere strands of skin and muscle that looked like wet ribbons. The remaining muscle underneath glistened in the approaching morning light. His left eye, the one still attached looked so blank . . . staring into nothing - and everything - all at once.
“Daryl! Lets get the fuck outta here, man!” Benny yelled as he ran towards the car and attempted to jump across the hood to avoid the thing. It was now within arm’s reach. It lurched forward in a surprisingly agile manner and grabbed Benny’s arm at the bicep . . . firmly enough to break it. He could feel the bones in his arm snapping away from the tendons, splitting his upper arm bone in half. His wail of agony careened into the early morning like a train. The people across the field all turned their heads toward him
and they began to run.
The half-skinned face of the creature in the fire department suit brought Benny’s arm up to its mouth and sank its teeth in . . . ripping the skin off of his arm like someone would a piece of chicken. It tore away in one large chunk, exposing a protruding white bone. Daryl shot his horrified gaze away and reached into the car to grab the half-bottle of Everclear he had stashed under the seat. He tossed the glass bottle at the man chewing on Benny’s arm. Benny tore himself away and collapsed onto the ground. He didn’t make a sound. Grabbing the Zippo lighter out of his pocket, Daryl attempted to throw it at the horribly-mangled stranger and missed . . . hitting the thing’s shoe. It was enough, though. The Zippo clanked on the ground, still lit. It landed next to the attacker’s shoe and caught fire immediately. The man’s whole body was enveloped in seconds. The thing didn’t scream. It just continued to make that low-toned grumbling moan. It took three more steps and fell onto the tarmac.
“Benny . . . Ben!!” Daryl ran up to his friend who was now weakly attempting to get up. He moaned loudly as a man waking up with a hangover would. Daryl knelt down to assist his trusty pilot. They had to get in the car and get the hell out. Now. He could hear the approaching crowd of people. Their quickly-paced running footfalls were coming closer by the second. “Ben! We need to get the hell out!” Benny stood up and faced his friend. Deeply bloodshot eyes . . . the color of the oozing wound on his arm, burned with a look Daryl had never seen on a person before. Daryl whirled around to see how close the crowd was. He hadn’t noticed right away that they were all crowded around him.
The faces . . . the eyes. The smell of them.
Daryl Sloan pleaded with God. The first time he prayed in his life. Closing his eyes, he could feel two of them grab his legs and lift them up. Another two behind him grabbed his arms at the wrists. They held the silently praying man in the air by his wrists and ankles as Daryl uttered his first and last amen.
There was no pain. The living sensations of both arms and legs left him. Before his sight disappeared, he opened his eyes to see his arms and legs being tossed into the ditch.
III
“I am not going to lose out on an entire city’s water supply just because some moron fell asleep at the wheel. The reservoir itself is fine, so just close the spillway. I tested the water not five minutes ago and there are no contaminates. Checked it twice. Where the frick is Jenkins? He should have been back two hours ago.”
“I tried calling, but no answer. You know how that old fool is. I’ll let you know when he calls back. I’m goin’ across the street for a bit of breakfast. Join me?”
“Come here . . . taste this . . .”
“What?”
“Water tastes funny. Come here . . . little aftertaste. See?”
“ . . .”
“Hey, you alright?”
IV
He was the best lover she’d ever had, although she had only a bit of experience. Three guys was enough to be a fairly decent judge of a man’s sexual talents. She thought so, anyway. Only twenty years old and she was already making a list. No wonder older woman go batshit. Mario could fuck, that’s for sure. He was a hell of a lot better than Robbie, Salvador or Dyson. Mario understood. Making love is okay and everything, but women want to be manhandled . . . to feel how animalistic these big, hairy, hung creatures can get. Every woman at her core is fundamentally this. Even the most prudish and stuffy girls simply want to be fucked like a whore. Grab my hair. Slap my ass. Make me swallow it . . . then make me some fucking breakfast. After I eat, I’ll let you put it in my ass if you ask nicely. Or don’t ask. I like that better.
“No, babe I have to go. Got that meeting at work today.”
He took his hand off of her breast, giving her his best pouty-face. “One more? For posterity?” he said as he lay there naked in the light of the rising sun.
“Oh, Mario Silva. You are an animal, you know that?” she said, giving him a kiss on his hand and walking her bow-legged body to the bathroom.
“And you, Miss Blair?”
“Don’t call me that, it’s creepy. My boss calls me Miss Blair. He’s one of those old perv-o’s that assigns girls to sit up front in meetings so he can look between their legs. If they have a skirt on or not.”
“Okay,” Mario said, sounding defeated. “Hey, Catherine?”
“Yeah?” She reached into the shower and turned on the water. It hissed to life after a pipe groaned and protested somewhere under the floor. The house was pretty old. The house does that.
“See you after work?”
“I have classes on Mondays, you know that. Call Natalie. I’m sure your fiancé would like to see you today. Take a shower with me, wild-man?”
He smiled. “You go ahead. I gotta pinch a loaf.”
“Your elegance astounds me,” Catherine said as she got into the shower. She playfully gave her soon-to-be best friend’s husband a playful little ass-wiggle as she stepped inside.
Mario’s legs were still weak from their two-day romp. He felt as if everything was drained out of him. That girl is insatiable. He walked into the bathroom, smiling at the sound of Catherine’s whistling. Mario stopped in front of the bathroom mirror to pop a zit. Twenty-three years old and still getting goddamn zits. “When you get off work, send me a text and we’ll grab a bite to eat, ok?” he said, inching closer to the mirror with his fingers viced around an eventual pot-mark. Catherine had stopped whistling . . . now uttering weak, dry-sounding gasps. It was a moan he knew well now. “Having fun in there? Didn’t get enough? I’ll be sad if I go in there and find you cheating on me with the shower massager.”
“Ma – mm . . . Mari . . . uhhhnnnn.”
Mario walked to the clear shower door. Catherine was standing motionless, facing the far wall . . . her back to him. From the view outside the distorted shapes the glass gave him, he could see that she was swaying slightly with her arms at her sides. “Catherine?” he said as he pulled the door open. She didn’t move. “Baby?” He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and turned her around. She had bitten off her bottom lip . . . all the way to the top of the chin. Her teeth, now exposed, had hanging strands of skin stuck in between them where she had been chewing on it. Her eyes widened into a horrified expression and looked at Mario like a person who had experienced enough to lose her mind. Her eyes pleaded with hi
m somehow. Extending her shaking closed hands to him as if to give him something, she looked down with her now extremely bloodshot eyes. A solitary tear fell down her cheek. She opened her hands and showed him what she had hidden. Her tongue, still moist and alive.
V
At the moment Daryl Sloan prayed to his god and Catherine Blair had her last orgasm, Doctor Nathaniel Winters scanned himself into the Mercy Regional’s city morgue. Any man in a white coat wouldn’t be questioned walking the halls at four twenty-two in the morning. Even on the lower level. People around there can sense a doctor. They all walk, talk and carry themselves a certain way. Nathaniel didn’t need to be too covert. This was only going to take a minute. The badge belonged to a pretty-looking doctor if he’d ever seen one. Kind of a milf . . . one he wouldn’t have minded having a go with if he weren’t married. Doctor Milf got it easy compared to what the rest of the city will endure. Her body was inside the empty Human Resources office. Nathaniel slit her throat with a straight razor when he passed her in the hallway. HR wouldn’t discover the body until at least eight o’clock when the office opens. By then, it won’t matter in the slightest.
Nathaniel scanned the card and quickly dispatched the two surgeons inside with the tranquilizer gun he took from the lab. It was the gun they used to take down gorillas. Poor bastards. Their hearts stopped before they hit the ground. Doctor Winters immediately walked to the cadaver storage units . . . sliding the slabs that lined the outer walls open one by one. All seventeen filed bodies, plus the bloated and purple man on the autopsy table. All of them needed to be out and in the open.
The hard work was already done. Hospitals are required to have above-ground sprinkler systems. There are so many lives walking a fine line in those buildings. They do that if in the event something went haywire with the sprinkler systems, people wouldn’t have to dig two feet down just to fix it.
The Lynn003 drug thrives in water. Moreso than any other version. One gallon was all it took to contaminate the entire sprinkler system’s water supply. Nathaniel casually walked out of the morgue and stepped out of the rear emergency door. An alarm immediately sounded, but it was simple to locate the key. Nate already had it. It had been attached to the bleeding woman down in the HR office. He walked to the car . . . just a short sprint from the door. He had never made a Molotov cocktail before, but when he tossed it into the propped doorway, it shattered against the wall in a brilliant burst of orange and blue flame. As Nathaniel Winters sat inside the car, he could hear the overhead sprinklers starting to hiss to life.
VI
Sheldon Little woke up to the sound of a car crashing. His hearing wasn’t so good anymore, but he opened his sleep-encrusted eyes just to see the flaming debris of the vehicle right outside the alley sail through the air . . . pelting other parked cars and setting off their alarms. Sheldon braced himself up on the cane he’d made from an old shelf display rod he found in the dumpster of a Tank’s Hardware store last year. Walking to the edge of Fourth and Broadway where he called the alley his home, he stopped when a large mass of people ran past the alley . . . screaming. One man had blood all over his face as he ran blindly with a baby in his arms.
“What’s goin’ on . . .” he mumbled. He shuffled to the end of the alley. The faint smell of smoke wafted into his nostrils. It was the only good sense he had anymore. Even his eyesight was beginning to go. A local shelter hooked him up with a used pair of donated glasses that worked just fine. Thank God for those drop-off bins that people toss their old glasses in. The bastards sat a little crooked and missed a nose piece, but they worked. Beggar’s can’t be choosers. Sheldon got to the end of the alley when a sprinting man ran into him, knocking them both over. Sheldon’s glasses were ripped from his head and landed next to his makeshift steel cane. The out-of-focus man got up and stood over Sheldon. He fumbled for his glasses and put them on when his hand reached them. The crippled old man spryly got to his legs so quickly that it surprised him. The inconsiderate prick was gonna get the good ol’ Iowa ass kicking. “Hey-a, buddy! What the fuckin’ hell are you doin’?” The old man placed the glasses onto his nose, making it all come to focus. A naked man stood before him . . . lightly swaying on his feet like a drunk. His chest had been cut open. It was a Y-shape that went from both shoulders down to the navel. The laceration had been stapled together, closing the pale and clammy skin shut. A few of the staples had come undone, exposing a green-tinted fluid that dripped out of the wound. The thing uttered a low growl – that of a dog. It was guttural and menacing. The strange apparition, like something out of a dream, reached out to Sheldon with fingers stained yellow from death and embalming fluid that was used to preserve him.
Sheldon Little turned to run from the red-eyed horror reaching out for him when his left ankle was grabbed by a strong hand. Sheldon spilled to the ground . . . his matted white hair in tangles that obscured his failing eyes. A young woman, torn crudely in half at the waist, inched closer to him with her arms. Her lips peeled back and showed teeth stained with blood. She screamed . . . a wet, gargling screech that sounded so inhuman and soulless. Her eyes burned with an intense fire that assured Sheldon that he was going to die. The panicked footfalls all around him were all he could see. People. Hundreds of them. All running.
The woman, dragging her intestines behind her, slid forward and bit Sheldon on the forehead . . . sending warm blood into his eyes. Her mouth bit down with an unfathomable force. The old homeless man could hear the popping sounds in his ears; somewhere deep inside where she had broken through his skull. Amazingly, Little felt no pain. The hurt was an afterthought . . . only a millisecond long. Something was being pulled out of the hole at the center of his forehead. He looked up to see the woman pull something out with her teeth. It was a pink, fibrous thing that stretched for a moment and snapped off. She chewed it like a starving person would; nearly swallowing it whole. Confusing and strange thoughts entered his mind. Everything became jumbled together and odd.
The smells of smoke ushered him on his way into the unstated hunger now creeping up in his stomach.
VII
Darin Miles snapped awake when the phone by the bed rang. Alone in his high-rise gated community apartment, he fumbled for the cell phone that was nearly out of reach. Glancing at the clock across the room, he answered it with a gruff and tired voice.
The piercing sounds on the other line nearly made him toss the phone across the room on impulse. The shrill and sharp noises of incoherent shouting and crashes forced him out of the slumbering mind in an instant. “Miles??!!!!” the feverish voice shouted on the other line. That voice . . . even in an obviously frightened state, was unmistakeable. It was one of the Colonels . . . a Colonel Randall Browning. Development leader for the Lynn project. Darin had never met him, but he had talked to him on the phone about once a week and seen the man’s signature a million times. This was the man that approved all the funding for the Locke labs . . . domestic and overseas.
“Browning?” Darin half-shouted, attempting to raise his voice over god-knew-what on the other end. Small pops sounded off in the distance. Tight packing sounds that reminded Darin of gunfire. “What the hell’s going on down there?”
“Wait a sec!” the nearly retired Colonel shouted. “Stay on the line with me! Gimme a minute!!” A loud, echoey slam could be heard. The noises on Browning’s end had muted a bit . . . but Doctor Miles could still hear it. Men were shouting, pops in rapid succession and crashes every few seconds. The Colonel spoke quieter now. His words were coming out in panting gasps. If Darin didn’t know any better, he’d say the old shithead was having a heart attack. “She . . .Martha Perez.”
“Who?” Darin said, trying to place the name that sounded a bit familiar.
“. . . the one Samantha Winters attacked . . . she got out of the quarantine area. Killed four of my men. She did something to them . . . GODDAMNIT!!! They’re tearing ass through the whole fucking place!”
“Place . . . you mean the Pentagon? That’s where
you sent her? I thought she was in a fucking hospital!”
The Colonel took one big, shaking breath. Darin could tell he had been crying. “Perez was in a medically-induced coma, for Christ sake! She got out and tore apart four men like they were made outta goddamn twigs! Oh, god . . . the place is overrun, Miles. They’re everywhere!!”
Darin Miles’ heart sank. He sat up in bed and got up as soon as his body let him. He got up, darting across the room to grab his shoes. “Randall, calm down . . .”
“Calm down, my ass! They can’t even be shot, man! Our weapons do nothing! There are over one-hundred of them now and they are walking around fucking eating people!!”
“Calm the fuck down!” Darin yelled. “You are no good to me if you’re hysterical. Are you in a safe place for the time being?”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding a bit calmer. “Hiding in an office closet.”
“Then I suggest keeping your voice down,” Darin said, throwing on all the clothes he had work the day before. “Now . . . take a deep breath and explain what the hell happened.”
“You friend . . . Nathaniel . . . stole Samantha’s body and hauled ass to downtown Des Moines. Probably your lab at the university. Before he left, he let Perez out of her restraints.”
“When did this happen?”
“I just read the e-mail when all this shit started happening. Nathaniel stole eighteen vials of the stuff, let all kinds of hell loose and Miss Perez got out of containment. They’re . . . everywhere . . . everyone she comes in contact with turned into things like Samantha and Brian. But this happened within seconds, not weeks! Everyone they attack too! They’re everywhere!!”
The Zombie Letters Page 9