“You’re voice is getting loud again, Randy,” Darin said in as calm a voice as he could. The Colonel responded by letting out a sickening sigh. The man whimpered like a child. “Now, listen to me very carefully . . . can you do that?”
“Yes . . . yes I can.”
“The mitochondria in their cells are repairing at too quickly a speed. Anything you hit them with won’t work. As long as their brains are intact . . . even a partial brain can still retain basic function. Separate the head from the body. And for fuck’s sake, don’t let them get any blood on you, understand? The head will still be alive, so stay the hell away from it. Burn the heads ‘till there is absolutely nothing left. Are they out of the building, or did you manage to lock down the place?”
“They’re all over . . . all over the grounds . . .”
“Get you-know-who on the phone, sir. Now. I’ll head to the university and stop Nathaniel.”
“Yes.”
“It won’t be long before they get out and they’ll be all over the place. Nate’s gonna go somewhere and I need to cut him off. If I’m not too late already. Something tells me I already am. Get off the phone with me now and do it . . . CALL!”
“Okay,” he said. His voice was quieter, but still quite shaken. “Listen, Miles. There’s one more thi . . .”
The line went dead and the phone fell silent. Doctor Darin Miles didn’t need to call back. He knew what happened.
He knew.
VIII
The place was still silent, thank God. The outbreak was still at the edge of the city. Darin knew this because of the smoke. Thick hurls of black smoke jutted out of the normally picturesque city skyline. They looked like black tendrils of some kind of monster crawling out of the earth. The apartment was only four miles to the university and the sun had only been up for thirty minutes when Darin pulled up in the parking lot. That blue Prius was parked in the driveway. Both doors were open and the car’s system beeped softly into the quiet morning. He got out of the car and pulled out the rife from the trunk. The thing was probably as old as the country it was in, but it would do enough damage should he find Nathaniel. Walking up to the car slowly, Darin peered into the Prius. Nothing was inside aside from a can of gasoline on the floorboard of the driver’s side and a bagfull of empty beer bottles in the back seat. A blood-stained pillowcase was slung around the driver’s seat head rest.
“Nathan?” Darin said as he cocked the shotgun and walked into the building. His key card worked. Nathaniel hadn’t changed any of the locks yet. Either he was expecting the cavalry to show up or he was too far gone to worry about things like that. Darin expected to see an abattoir, but the place looked the same as it always did. All the lights worked. The carpets were recently shampooed and not a speck of dust was anywhere. He could smell the wax on the tile floor that lead to the lab area. Darin made his way across the lobby and office areas, poking his head in every doorway . . . rifle first. Darin craned his head to the end of the hall and saw that the Plexiglas double doors were malfunctioning. They were opening about two or three inches, then they would slam shut. Open and shut. Open and shut. There was a flamethrower just past the doors that he hoped to god Nathan didn’t steal. Every government-run laboratory is required to have a military-grade flamethrower in it. A hushed decision by the establishment secured that. The MacReady proposal.
Darin had no idea what exactly caused the strange law, but he heard from a corporal at headquarters once about some kind of incident that happened in 1982. There was some Norwegian arctic expedition that went haywire and managed to spread its way to an American base. No one said anything as to what they were working on or what they found, but it was a matter of public record that the American base was simply there to study geological samples. The Norwegian records were destroyed. Their government locked away the rest. A Corporal back at the Pentagon told Darin once that sometime during the winter, the American base was destroyed and everybody ended up dead.
Those flamethrowers they used to knock away glacier walls and navigate the rough terrain were life savers for them . . . and possibly more people, Corporal Rich said. Used ‘em for site maintenance, too. The shit is so classified that I can’t even look at it. I’ve been curious a time or two, trust me. Always wondered what the hell happened out there. The base was destroyed and everybody in it was dead. The FBI arrived there that spring and found them all . . . and both complexes burned to the ground. There were two men outside of the American base. Both were frozen to death. It was so odd, though . . . I saw a photo of it once, believe it or not. They looked like they had willingly frozen themselves. They were sitting outside, across from each other and there was a beer bottle between them. They were having a drink together when there was a perfectly repairable helicopter and Snow-Cat less than a day’s hike away to the other base. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. I was even told never to talk about the photo. I was curious enough to go and look for it even recently, but when I checked the archives, it was gone. I didn’t press it. I didn’t want to be shot dead in a desert or left in a ditch somewhere because of a photograph. Rumor has it that whatever evidence was there at the base was shipped out to Quatar in Afghanistan for our boys to study. Why Quatar, I have no idea. Some of the boys that were out there had stories when they came back . . . stories you wouldn’t believe. The ones who talked . . . god knows what happened to them. They’re all gone.
Nevertheless, it was ordered by the military oversight committees that flash grenades and flamethrowers be placed in every high-sensitivity black project lab. Sure enough, it was in there. It was a large, bulky thing that strapped onto the back of the operator. Two tanks were on the back of it, as well as a nozzle that operated like a power washer. Darin and the rest of the staff had been trained to use them and certified, but he had never expected to use the thing. Forcing the door open, he squeezed inside and put the flamethrower onto his back. Just one flick of a lighter on the end of the nozzle was enough to ‘load’ it. The heavy thing hissed to life as the little flame on the end of the nozzle danced like a perpetual candle. He pointed the thrower’s business-end away from him and pulled the trigger. The result was immediate. The heat coming off of the thing was unreal. Even with it pointed far enough away from him, he felt like his eyebrows were going to be singed off. Even the gloves did little to insulate the heat coming from the handle. A huge blue and white flame shot out of the nose of the long nozzle . . . about three feet long. It still worked. Even though no one had come to inspect it lately and its shelf-life was a year overdue, it still worked. The gas that fuelled the gun sputtered a little bit, but it would still do the trick.
Darin walked to the end of the lab where the medical facility sat. Using his card to open the door, he saw her immediately. Samantha Winters was sitting on top of Nathaniel’s bloodied and mutilated body . . . his decapitated head in her hands. The top of his head had been chewed off. It looked like a large animal bit right through it. His head appeared to look like a bowl . . . hollowed out and everything inside removed. Sami had her face buried in the hole, eating ravenously. She pulled her head back with a piece of Nathaniel’s brain in her teeth. It pulled away and she swallowed it whole . . . moaning lightly as she swallowed it. It sounded pleasured, as if a great appetite had been sustained. It was the same sound she made when she ate something she loved. Such a strangely human sound. The sound of satisfaction sated. Brucie was in the corner of the trashed medical area . . . partially skinned. His neck was broken. Darin’s heart broke when he saw him. Of all the horrors his mind was witnessing at the moment, his thoughts came back to that animal. Brucie. He never did anything to anybody.
“Oh, Sami . . .”
She dropped Nathaniel’s severed head. It plopped onto the floor with a sound that nearly made Darin throw up. The head rolled and rested facing him. A look of pain was frozen on Nathaniel’s battered face. His eyes were wide and he appeared to have died screaming. His mouth was open wide. Darin stifled a scream when the face glared at him . . . and
weakly blinked. Samantha violently turned her face to her intruder. Blood-stained, purple lips curled back in a terrible sneer. Her eyes . . . so completely red. They didn’t even look human. A sound escaped her lips. Such a bloodcurdling sound that has halfway between a scream and a groan. “I’m so sorry, Samantha,” Darin said as he squeezed the trigger. Her body was enveloped in white-hot flame within seconds of shooting her with the thrower. Sami attempted to stand up and walk toward him, but stumbled and fell feet from him. She was still attempting to get up as she burned . . . not making a sound. She didn’t scream, wail or try to flail away the fire that covered her body. Darin ran to the outer wall and smashed the glass fire box with the end of the thrower’s nozzle. Removing the long, red axe from the glass box, he walked toward Samantha’s burning body and brought the blade down as hard as he could. He didn’t want to see the axe landing home, so he closed his eyes. He knew it had hit its mark. She wasn’t moving at all now. Just burning.
Tears welled up in Doctor Darin Miles’ eyes and he fell to the floor, sobbing. The burning body of the woman he secretly loved and outwardly respected was now a heap on the floor . . . her head separated from her body. The flames burned brightly, nearly touching the ceiling. The fire extinguisher at the end of the freezer was enough to put her out. He buried her bones outside of the grounds. Right outside the back door along with the body of his best friend.
When Darin threw Nathaniel’s head in along with his body, Nathaniel’s eyes were still blinking.
CHAPTER 6
I
Just one second. One second was all it took. Kim didn’t do the bolt on the back door. As many times as they’d all done it and agonized over how important it was, she forgot it . . . and she’d forgotten to re-drill the planks over the doorway. The dead people . . . they busted in through the door. They swarmed in, one after the other and dragged Kim out into the living room. Three of them were instantly on top of her. All of them were bent over her. They tore her open and took her stomach out while she was still alive. While she screamed, two more of them opened their mouths and clamped down onto her young face. Poor little sister kicked wildly with her midsection sort of unzipped as they took the skin off her face. Dad ran into the back bedroom and got one of the Molotovs. A Molotov cocktail seemed to incapacitate the dead a bit longer than a bullet to the head did. Dad reeled back to toss it at the ten or so that broke down the door, when a terribly decomposed man in an old grey burial suit came up behind him and bit him on the nape of his neck. Dad dropped the bottle he’d lit and it shattered at his feet. Dad ran through the house, screaming as he burned from head to toe. He fell through the east-side window boards.
Ten months. Ten months they lived and survived in that house and in less than a second, Jon Cho’s entire family was dead. The smell of the fire that had spread from the floor to the living room curtains seemed to smack Jon out of his momentary stupor. He simply stood there, watching what was left of his proud family being eaten by those less-human. Sister got up and joined in with them. She stared at nothing . . . her eyes were so unaware of the humanity . . . the soul that once inhabited that body. She was a shell now. Just something mindless and predatory. Back home in China, people call these things Jiangshi. The myths of them go all the way back to the Quing Dynasty. The Jiangshi absorb the life force of all living creatures. It was believed that since the long-dead in their rigor-mortis state could not bend their limbs, they jump onto their victims. Some back home call them the hopping ghosts. That’s why curved roofs are a part of Chinese architecture. The creatures hop onto roofs and break through them, killing everything inside. The curvature of the roof ensured that when they jumped up there, their feet would slip out from under them and they would plummet to the ground and die again. The Jiangshi came on this day to claim its own Chinese brethren. They had all heard about Jiangshi as kids. They used to be stories. No . . . they were real. They were really real.
These ones didn’t hop, though. They ran.
Jon ran into the back utility room and opened up the hatch built into the floor. Dad installed it right after everything happened. He managed to get through on his stomach and wiggle his way to the escape area at the back of the house. The Jiangshi would have to cross single-file on a small wooden bridge over the deep creek that surrounded three sides of the home to get to this area of the house. Upon exiting the hatch’s small, hand-dug tunnel, the dead weren’t trickling over the bridge as expected. They were falling into the creek at least fifty feet below onto jagged rocks. They’d get up and climb the hill to the house. Some made it up alright. Most had slid back down on the wet grass. When the grass is even the slightest bit damp, that hill was nearly impossible to climb. They were all over the place, but there were less of them at the back of the old four-bedroom house that Jon called home. Used to call home. Five years living in that house and now it was all gone. As Jon weaved through the Jiangshi that clawed and lunged at him, he thought about running over to the high school. The route he walked every morning to school was a well-visible one. Mostly alleyways in between houses cut-off by chain link fences.
The tears didn’t come until Jon Cho was well away from the house and the dead had stopped chasing. He was far enough away from the demons who were now mere dots in the distance. Cho’s home was still visible in the fog of the early morning. The light of the flames lit up an area of space around the house. It looked like a large candle flickering from within the fog . . . a lantern . . . a beacon of the life he once lived. Sadly now, that beacon lead only to death. Destruction. Madness. It was nothing more than a beacon of hell now. Jon never understood much of that philosophical stuff, but as he wept, he called out his frantic mind. Making an effort to think about something . . . anything. It was something so close to the tip of his tongue that he didn’t know whether to fight or die. That’s where it came from. A book. That book on his nightstand Mr. Shackleman made him read. Shit, what was it called? What was the name? The old book. There was one particular thing that stood out in that old book; a line from it that Jon knew well. It stood out now . . . like the world was trying to say it from every street, every corner. Out of every window and through every tree.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
II
“Stay indoors inside of a well-locked area. Reports are coming in from parts of Missouri and Illinois, as well as the western areas of Tennessee. I repeat, stay indoors . . .”
Ana Garner stood on her tiptoes, attempting to peer out of the small window. She was jerked back and whirled around. The man she had only been married to for three months faced her. His face was red and his eyes bulging. “Christ, Ana! You want one of them to see you?!” he shouted. His hands dug into her shoulders, making them hurt.
“Christian, you’re hurting me . . .” she said in a small voice.
“I’m sorry . . .” he said with his eyes cast down. “I’m just frightened. The report at noon said that whatever this is happened in DC too. Jesus, doesn’t the government have contingency plans against this kind of stuff?”
His wife turned away and unplugged the radio. “You heard them on the radio. You can’t even shoot these things. The National Guard outside of St. Louis was completely run down yesterday. You saw it . . . those poor infected people running around on fire and still knocking people to the ground and eating them.”
“I’m not fucking stupid Ana,” Christian said through his teeth. His face was turning red again. He usually only did that when he was drunk. She shouldn’t have spoken so freely to him. Christian was a good man and a good provider. She knew this and often spoke up for him. Alcohol could be controlled and he was right. She could be a little dense sometimes.
“I know,” she said with that timid, mousy-voice that had seemed to replace her once pronounced and proud one. She shrank away from him like a frightened child.
“I wasn’t calling you stupid, honey. But honestly, how much time did they really have? How long did it take for them to realize something was this wrong? I did
n’t think I would even make it back here alive. I was driving past Willie’s . . . you know, Willie’s house? The guy that runs the hardware shop on Beecher? I saw a fucking truck that crashed through his living room. An actual truck that drove right into it. I stopped and saw three people in his yard. They were on top of Will. They were all around him, ripping his guts out. It was horrible. I drove to Shandie’s Station and they were all gone. No one was there. There were . . . parts . . . everywhere. Arms, legs, ripped-off skin. Jesus, it was surreal. Babe, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Turn the radio back on. I wanna listen to it.”
“Christian, I can’t listen to that anymore.”
Christian stood up out of the chair and walked to his wife. He spun her around at the waist like a top. He reeled back to slap her . . . a feeling she was quite familiar with. She winced away and he withdrew his hand, laughing. It sounded like someone had told him the funniest joke he ever heard. “Turn on the goddamn radio. You don’t like it? Go outside.”
Ana Garner hit the power button on the old stereo and her husband sat back down, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He wanted a drink. That may actually calm him down some. That was a dumb thing to say, Ana, she told herself. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Ever since they were high school sweethearts, she always caught herself mumbling over her words and screwing up every attempt to swoon him. What he saw in her was anyone’s guess. Maybe she was stupid. Maybe Christian stuck around to take care of her like she needed taken care of. The first time he hit her was on the night of their honeymoon. They had been enjoying some rough sex – Christian only liked it that way. He bent her over and took her from behind. Up to the hilt. He pounded her, slapping her ass red as he did it. It hurt and she wanted him to stop, but he had drank a little bit at the reception and wasn’t in his right mind. He moaned loudly as he came inside her ass . . . thrusting so hard that her hips gave out and she crumpled onto her stomach. He pulled out of her and delivered a solid punch to her kidney. She remembered now how her whole side just lit up. Ana felt torn and discarded as he told her to stop being so dramatic. He left for awhile and stumbled back to that hotel room in Vegas drunker than before. He came back, tearfully babbling apologies and telling her how he’d never do it again. Later that night, he made her suck his cock so hard that she choked.
The Zombie Letters Page 10