Zombie Crusade Snapshots: Volume I

by J. W. Vohs

  Zombie Crusade Snapshots:

  Volume I

  Israel

  Ontario

  POTUS

  Maine

  Tennessee

  J.W. Vohs

  Copyright © 2013 J.W. Vohs

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1497433266

  ISBN-13: 978-1497433267

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to all our friends, family, and fans

  of the Zombie Crusade series.

  CONTENTS

  1

  Israel

  1

  2

  Ontario

  64

  3

  POTUS

  101

  4

  Maine

  123

  5

  Tennessee

  147

  Zombie Crusade Snapshots are quick glimpses of critical locations around the world as the zombie pandemic detailed in the Zombie Crusade series begins to unfold. While the snapshots connect to the main storyline of the novels (some in obvious ways, others in ways that will become more apparent as the series continues), they may also be read as stand-alone stories.

  Zombie Crusade

  Snapshot: Israel

  Professor Jesse Stiebel had two great passions in his life beyond teaching at the Jerusalem College of Engineering: archaeology and the Aliyah. Both of these interests had led him to Tajikistan this spring. Despite severe persecution in recent decades, several hundred Bukharan Jews still lived in the former Soviet republic, and Jesse wanted to see all of them safely settled in Israel as soon as possible. Aliyah was the word used by Jews to describe the process of the followers of Judaism returning to their ancient homeland, and the Bukharans had been gone a long, long time.

  After several weeks of meetings with many of the remaining Jews in Tajikistan, Professor Stiebel had travelled south into the foothills of the Pamir Mountains, a towering range connected to the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan. He wanted to spend his last day in country experiencing the “Roof of the World” and seeking out ancient Hebrew burial sites. He hoped to find promising locations for future archaeological digs with some friends from Jerusalem who shared his interest in antiquities, but halfway into the climb he realized that he’d have trouble convincing his colleagues to work this hard to get to any location, regardless of what it might hold. A few minutes later, he stopped to catch his breath and take a good look around. Always aware of his surroundings in the predominately, and increasingly militant, Muslim country, Jesse noticed with some alarm that a small group of shabbily dressed locals were following the trail he had been climbing in his quest to reach the remains of an ancient village he had learned about the previous winter.

  His concern grew as the five people continued moving toward him with a lurching, shuffling gait that he’d seen drunks leaving Tel Aviv nightclubs use as they made their way down city streets after a long night of drinking. Jesse didn’t know what to make of the possibility that a mixed group of local villagers had been heavily drinking during the day and were now apparently pursuing him; Muslim men and women didn’t publicly socialize together or consume alcohol in Tajikistan. At the rate of speed the people were walking, the professor knew that he could easily stay ahead of them if he wanted to continue climbing, but the surreal nature of the situation left him feeling nervous and longing for the relative safety of his rental car.

  Finally, unable to shake the feeling that something was definitely off about the villagers, Jesse turned and headed back down the hill. He walked some meters to the side of the trail with his head down, pretending not to notice the locals shuffling in his direction. Although he was on high alert, the professor was still shocked when he heard a chorus of strange moans coming from the people who now moved off of the trail in an obvious attempt to intercept him. Now that the villagers were so close, Jesse realized that they were sick or injured rather than drunk. They were all splattered with blood, and their pupils were so dilated that their eyes seemed to be nothing but pieces of glittering obsidian reflecting the late-afternoon sunlight.

  Professor Stiebel had served three years in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) as an intelligence analyst, but he had never considered himself a fighter until these moaning, bloody people stumbled over the final meters of gravel and grabbed for him. Their opened mouths revealed teeth riddled with strands of flesh and what appeared to be human hair. Jesse instinctively moved to protect himself by smashing his fist into the nose of the first person to come within his reach. The small, gore-covered man fell to the ground from the force of the blow, but quickly rolled to his feet with no sign of injury from what had been the most powerful punch the lanky professor had ever thrown.

  Jesse grabbed the next attacker by her blood-stained shirt, tossed her into a pile of small boulders, then screamed with pain as fire shot up his arm. He looked down to see an adolescent boy biting deeply into the flesh just above his wrist, and struggled to force his mind to accept what he was experiencing before he managed to rip the boy away by the hair and throw him to the ground. Now the last three villagers were clawing and grasping at Jesse, and he finally panicked, turning from the fight to run mindlessly down the hill toward his car. He fell once and slid painfully down the gravel-strewn path for several meters before regaining his feet, then breathlessly continued fleeing from the murderous lunatics now stumbling after him.

  By the time Jesse reached the rental car, he’d left his attackers far behind. Though his right arm was burning with pain from the bite wound, he felt a wave of thankful relief wash over him as he climbed into the vehicle and stomped on the accelerator. After a few minutes of recklessly roaring down the winding country road, Stiebel’s breathing slowed and he forced himself to calm down and consider the situation. The injury to his forearm was incredibly painful, but the bleeding from the punctures inflicted by the youngster’s teeth was slowing. A quick examination showed that the attacker had been pulled off before he could actually rip any flesh away. Still, Jesse was shocked to the core over what had just happened to him, and when the shakes set in a few minutes later he had to pull over and spend some time getting himself together before continuing his drive away from the mountains and the crazed villagers.

  He passed through a town on his way back to the regional airport where a chartered plane was waiting to provide his return trip to the Dushanbe. He was able to locate a small store and stopped to buy some peroxide, antibiotic cream, and bandages. Jesse always traveled with Percocet due to a bulging disc in his neck that flared up from time to time, and after swallowing two of the tablets with a soda the pain in his arm dulled enough that he finally stopped grinding his teeth together and worked up the courage to clean the wound.

  In the hour since he’d been bitten, the flesh around the teeth-marks and punctures had turned purple-black, and dark lines ran under the skin all the way to his fingers and up past the elbow. He realized that he was already seeing the signs of a bad infection and he needed professional medical care, but Professor Stiebel had no intention of showing the injury to anyone before he returned to Israel. Half an hour later he was in the air on the charter, where the trip back to Dushanbe was bumpy and slow. Another pain killer helped him endure the throbbing in his arm until he was aboard a Turkish Air flight bound for Istanbul, and mercifully, the hum of the jet engine outside his window lulled him into a fitful sleep until the aircraft began its descent.

  Jesse woke to find himself feverish and trembling with pain worse than any he had experienced since being bitten. After fumbling around in his carry-on bag for a few moments, he found the bottle of Percocet and decided to take three of the pills, praying that they wouldn’t fully kick in until he was sa
fely aboard the El Al flight that would take him to Jerusalem. By the time he arrived at the gate for the last leg of his long, painful journey, he was growing weaker and more confused by the minute. Somehow he managed to make his way through security and board the flight. As soon as he took his seat and strapped on the safety belt, Jesse passed out and slipped into a coma-like state. It wasn’t until the plane began its approach into Ben Gurion Airport that anyone else aboard the flight noticed that the professor was unresponsive, feverish, and struggling to breathe.

  Notified of the medical emergency by a flight attendant, the co-pilot radioed ahead to airport officials that a passenger needed an ambulance immediately upon landing. She then quickly walked back into the cabin to look over the situation. Several passengers were medical professionals, and they had placed Professor Stiebel on the floor of the plane near the flight attendant’s work-station where they were assessing his condition. An elderly doctor from Haifa was working with a young IDF medic to help the sick passenger breath as a young nurse from Tel Aviv placed towels dipped in ice water on the feverish man’s head and neck. The co-pilot asked the doctor what was wrong with the sick passenger.

  The physician briefly looked up and explained, “He’s completely unresponsive with a fever over a hundred and six. He’s also having extreme difficulty breathing. He may have blood poisoning or some other type of infection, based on the discoloration around a wound on his arm, but I really can’t say for certain. What I do know is if he isn’t in a hospital soon he could die.”

  The co-pilot nodded her understanding as she explained, “We’ll be on the ground in less than ten minutes, and they’ll have an ambulance waiting to take him to Assaf HaRofew Hospital.”

  The doctor shared a knowing glance with the IDF medic, a young man familiar with life threatening situations, who mumbled, “I don’t think this guy can wait that long . . .”

  By the time the plane rolled to a stop on the tarmac, the doctor shouted that the professor was no longer breathing and his pulse was fading. After a momentary hesitation, the pilot made the decision to open the rear safety door and slide the patient down the emergency evacuation ramp into the waiting arms of the medics who’d pulled their ambulance right up to the aircraft. The medical personnel immediately began performing CPR on Stiebel, but at no time during the trip to Assaf HaRofew did they get a pulse from their patient. By the time they pulled up to the hospital and opened the rear doors to meet the waiting doctors and nurses, the medics rolled the dead man out of their vehicle as one of them matter-of-factly stated, “We’ll let you guys call it.”

  Professor Jesse Stiebel was pronounced dead ten minutes later by hospital personnel who had briefly gone through the motions with the obviously deceased man before admitting he was gone. The body was covered with a sheet and rolled into an empty room in the emergency center by a nurse who was being paged to help with a multiple-injury situation from a nearby bus crash, and she forgot to call the morgue in her rush to help with the incoming patients. Needless to say, neither the harried nurse nor anyone else in the hospital noticed the twitching beneath the sheet which supposedly covered a corpse.

  Twenty minutes later, an orderly was passing by the room where Stiebel had been placed heard a loud crash. When she went in to investigate the disturbance, the young woman found an overturned, empty gurney and a stumbling, moaning man shuffling toward her. The strange-looking patient tripped and fell into her arms. As they collapsed to the floor the orderly instinctively tried to protect the obviously sick person, even as he was sinking his teeth deeply into her shoulder. The man jerked his head back and forth until he finally pulled a six-inch long strip of flesh from the orderly, who was screaming for help and struggling to escape from the crazed patient.

  Within seconds the room was filled with nurses and other staff rushing to the injured woman’s aid, all of them trying to get their hands on the black-eyed lunatic with a strand of bloody skin hanging from his mouth as he grunted and chewed. The patient resisted the attempts to separate him from his victim with a strength that surprised everyone, but eventually three nurses managed to yank the wiry professor away from the shrieking orderly. One of the rescuers was bitten on the hand as she gripped the attacker’s shoulder, but someone else grabbed the biter by the hair and pulled his head away before his teeth could do more than break the skin in a few places. Security personnel finally crowded into the room and subdued the violent man with handcuffs, but not before one of them was severely bitten on his forearm during the struggle.

  Even after the professor was restrained, a doctor who’d come in to assess the patient was badly bitten on his thumb while shining a small light into the man’s unusual eyes. After that everyone left the moaning lunatic alone, strapped to a gurney in the far-corner of the room. The ER doctor who’d pronounced the attacker dead a half-hour earlier was tracked down and asked to explain how a so-called corpse had just injured four members of the hospital staff, but he had no answers for the investigators other than to suggest they talk to the other medical workers who had also been certain that the man was dead.

  Eventually the blood-covered professor was wheeled into an isolation room without anyone else being bitten, but even after his head was secured he continued to moan and snap his teeth together whenever anyone came near him. Over the next hour Jesse Siebel was given three injections of a sedative that should have knocked out any human after just one dose, but he showed no sign that the medicine was affecting him in any way at all. The doctor who’d earlier called the death tried to check the raving patient’s blood pressure but argued he could find no pulse, a claim observers attributed to the man thrashing about as well as the incompetence of the physician who’d declared the poor man dead when he’d been brought in to the ER.

  As all of this was going on, the people who’d been bitten during the struggle to subdue the delusional attacker were treated and sent home to rest with the aid of pain killers and antibiotics. The orderly with the shoulder-wound needed twelve stitches and a dose of morphine, but eventually her husband showed up to drive her back to their apartment building. The doctors and staff finally had a chance to get together to discuss what had just occurred in their hospital. They argued for over an hour before deciding to keep Professor Stiebel under observation for the rest of the night until they could consult with additional specialists the next morning. All of them agreed that until they knew more about the man’s condition they would treat the situation as a medical mystery rather than a criminal matter, though the head of hospital security was asked to contact police in order to try to discover where Stiebel had been before catching the El Al flight to Istanbul.

  While the befuddled doctors made their way home for a few hours’ sleep and perhaps a hot shower, two orderlies sat in the patient’s room and watched him stare at them with strange, all-black eyes, moaning softly and periodically gnashing his teeth. One of them eventually remarked that this case seemed similar to internet reports of what was happening with a small group of wounded Marines now being treated in Washington, D.C., but the other just mumbled something about conspiracy theorists and walked off for a cup of coffee. The orderly still in the room just shrugged and sighed, whispering to himself, “Sure doesn’t seem like an internet hoax when he’s lying right in front of you.”

  * * *

  Three days later, Sophie Bauman awoke to a beautiful morning in Ma’aleh Adumim, a prosperous suburb a few kilometers east of Jerusalem. A U.S. citizen for fifteen years, she had been born in Israel and raised in the Ein Gedi Kibbutz near the Dead Sea. Following IDF service, she was accepted into Hebrew University where she planned to study religion and philosophy, and it was there that she met a young American student named Levi Bauman. He was tan, fit, and handsome after serving four years as a chaplain’s assistant in the U.S. Army. He’d been determined to find answers to questions that had evolved in his soul after witnessing the carnage of the first Gulf War. Despite the fact that he was well on his way to becoming a Messianic Jew, and S
ophie’s family wasn’t thrilled with the match, the beautiful, young Israeli student was married to the American soldier at the end of the school year.

  The newlyweds moved to New York, where they discovered that Levi’s parents didn’t approve of their son’s newfound faith, but the family was immediately won over by their new daughter-in-law’s grace and charm. Sophie stayed with Levi’s parents while her husband attended Officer Candidate School, where he earned a commission as a second lieutenant. He became an Army Reserve chaplain. The next six years passed quickly, with Sophie eventually earning a Ph.D in philosophy from New York University despite the arrival of Gracie on their three-year wedding anniversary, and Mickey just two years later. Only months before 9-11, Sophie accepted a tenure-track teaching position at Cleveland State University, and Levi easily found another job in the finance industry he’d flourished in while living in New York.

  They were living the American Dream until Levi was deployed to the Middle Eastern wars four times in a six year period. Attending to the spiritual, emotional, and psychological needs of young men and women subjected to the horrors of urban combat, IEDs, and snipers, all while trying to avoid those instruments of death himself, profoundly influenced Levi’s soul. He still enjoyed and loved his family, but he simply couldn’t find happiness in the pursuit of wealth after his latest combat experiences. Levi had served his nation, and more importantly, his fellow human beings, in the most demanding, heart-wrenching environment people ever face; he found peace by continuing to serve. He organized and led a small, Messianic Jewish congregation in Cleveland, and he worked extensively with organizations committed to helping returning veterans cope with everything from PTSD to finding employment.