by Carl R. Cart
“I didn’t know this would happen,” I opined.
“Why do you think they call it a rain forest, Doc?” Blythe laughed.
The visibility came and went as the rain intensified or dropped off to a drizzle, but it didn’t stop raining. We slogged along. The road quickly turned into a long winding mud puddle that continually tried to pull my boots off my feet. Each step became a struggle to retain my footing and my sense of humor. I quickly became absolutely miserable. The captain kept us moving through force of will; he would not let us stop. I quickly became so tired that I didn’t know what I was doing. I just kept pulling one foot out of the sucking mud, and putting it down into the muck in front of the other.
The rain was hammering my skull in fat warm drops, and the noise was deafening. I blundered into the captain before I realized he had stopped. Sgt. Dyson had come back, and was talking with him. They shouted into each other’s ears. The captain turned and yelled at me.
“There are zombies headed this way. You and Keyes stay here with Blythe!” he shouted.
Blythe took us by the arms and steered us off the track, just into the trees. The captain, Robinson and Dyson disappeared into the rain.
We crouched nervously in the trees. Blythe peered into the gloom around us, listening intently. He covered his machine gun with his poncho, only its muzzle protruded.
I lost track of time, and everything became indistinct and surreal. Keyes knelt very close beside me; I could feel her trembling softly.
Suddenly, she jumped as gunfire broke out ahead of us on the road. It was quite nearby. The KGP-9s chattered again and again, then silence descended and only the rain could be heard through the trees.
Blythe waited a moment, listening, then stood up and motioned for us to follow. He led us back onto the road, and forward towards the others. We walked a short distance, and then we had caught up.
The captain had set up an ambush, and a dozen zombies had wandered into his trap. Their headless bodies struggled feebly in the mud. The captain and Sgt. Dyson stood talking just beyond the roadway. Dyson was pointing back down the road in the direction the zombies had come. Robinson walked back and forth among the decapitated bodies. He grabbed each one in turn and pulled them off the road, flinging them into the woods to either side. I noticed he was struggling with one. It pulled at his web gear with one skeletal hand. Robinson snapped the zombie’s arm bones. He deftly slipped a wrist watch from the zombie’s other arm, and tossed its body into the trees.
I stopped to stare at him in disbelief.
“Robinson, you are risking your life for a wrist watch. If one of those zombies even scratches you, you are a dead man,” I warned.
He held up the watch. “It’s a Rolex, Doc,” Robinson explained, shaking his head at me.
“A tiger doesn’t change his stripes, Doctor!” Blythe explained with a laugh.
I walked past the mercenary. Hairy bits of skull and blackened lumps of brain matter and blood lay splattered upon the mud, marking the spot each zombie had been decapitated. I took this in grimly as Keyes snapped off a few photos and Robinson did his grisly work.
The captain motioned us forward. As we walked past the ambush zone I noticed something odd. I knelt in the mud, and examined a large clump of brain tissue still attached to a chunk of skull bone. It was green. Brain tissue was grey. Even if it had rotted, it wouldn’t be green. Then it struck me; I wasn’t looking at brain matter at all. I was looking at bacteria.
I slowly stood up and looked around. “Are any of the heads still intact?” I asked.
The captain slogged back to me. “No,” he answered. “Why?”
“We need to take the next rotter we see with its head intact, so I can examine its brain,” I stated.
“Noted,” the captain replied. He steered me towards the others. “Let’s go.”
We struggled through the rest of the long day. Everyone bitched about the rain and the mud, except for the captain. He only complained about how slowly we were moving.
I wanted to quit, I wanted to call in the helicopter and get away from the mud and the rain and the misery, but somehow I kept on going.
We stopped as the light began to fail; it went from gloomy to a very wet pitch black in moments. As we had before, we moved into the trees and established the camp’s perimeter defenses. I strung up a tarp between the trees, and spread another on the ground to lay my sleeping bag on. Muddy water ran onto it as soon as I lay down. I crawled into the bag. I had never been more miserable and exhausted. I didn’t care if zombies came to kill me anymore; I just wanted to sleep forever.
The captain woke me the next morning. He passed me a cup of instant coffee. I wasn’t a happy camper. I looked around at the others. They all looked rough.
It was still raining, just a steady drizzle. The captain gave us a few minutes to do our business, and then we struck camp and climbed back out onto the road.
Dyson went back on point; the mercenaries went back to the rear. I looked at Keyes; she looked at me and shook her head sadly. We started to walk.
We hadn’t gone too far when we caught up to Sgt. Dyson. He had stopped in the road. He put his finger to his lips for silence and motioned us forward.
He held up one finger, meaning one zombie, and pointed down the road.
The rain picked up.
He motioned me to the front of the column. Sgt. Dyson had spotted a single zombie on the road well ahead of us. He slipped the scope covers off his fifty-caliber rifle, and handed it to me. I tried to put it to my shoulder and look through the scope. It was too heavy; I had trouble putting the scope on target. Dyson pushed the rifle into position, and the lone figure came into view.
The zombie was a gruesome sight. His clothing consisted of a shredded shirt and a single shoe. I could actually see ribs and a section of vertebrae protruding from his back. The vegetation had shred his leg musculature, his genitalia were missing, and he was barely ambulatory.
I explained excitedly, “I need to have a look at this one’s brain, gentlemen.”
Capt. Christopher stood with me and directed the group by hand signals. Robinson and Blythe watched the rear. Keyes slowly moved forward until she was directly behind us. Sgt. Dyson took his rifle back and lay down in the muddy road. He extended the gun’s bipod and peered through the scope. We had discussed how we would handle this situation in great detail the night before, but I could not suppress my nervousness. Sgt. Dyson lined up the shot for what seemed a long time to me.
I jumped when the fifty-caliber barked; I was still watching the zombie. The rotter’s left arm exploded in a spray of blackened tissue. The hit spun him around like a rag doll, and he collapsed onto the road. The sergeant waited patiently while the zombie regained its footing. The zombie had turned completely around and was now facing us. The second shot took its right arm off cleanly at the shoulder and flipped it onto its back. I wasn’t sure if the thing would be able to rise again, but it slowly sat up.
Sgt. Dyson grunted and looked up from his rifle. The rest of us watched in silent amazement as the zombie struggled to stand up without arms. Dyson pushed back his cap and looked at the captain, who then looked at me.
“I’m not in any hurry,” I explained.
Capt. Christopher pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. Shielding them from the rain, he lit one and passed it to Sgt. Dyson before lighting one for himself. I continued to watch the zombie while they smoked.
Somehow the zombie managed to push itself into a facedown position, and regain it’s footing. By this time we had attracted its attention, and it slowly began to limp along the road towards us. Sgt. Dyson let it approach while he finished his cigarette. He snubbed out the butt in the road, re-sighted his gun and fired again at about 100 yards. The large caliber round shattered the femoral bone, taking the zombie’s right leg off at the hip. What was left of the zombie fell and thrashed in the mud. I knew it wouldn’t rise again.
At Capt. Christopher’s signal, our small gro
up slowly approached the dismembered zombie. Everyone donned their AVRs.
The smell hit you like a slap to the face. It took my breath away. Someone gagged and vomited behind me. It might have been Keyes. The stench was almost indescribable. The other zombies I had examined had smelled like rose petals and potpourri compared to this.
Imagine the smell of road kill. Old, summer road kill dipped in hot feces. Now, imagine handling that dripping, rotting road kill and then shoving your fingers into your nostrils. The rotter smelt pretty close to that. I had actually believed that they couldn’t smell any worse. The damn zombies kept on surprising me. Everyone choked and coughed as they approached.
Up close the zombie was more like an animated skeleton than a human. Bone showed through the rotting flesh everywhere, and the body was covered with teeming maggots. The man’s lips and nose were completely gone.
His eyes were the worst. They had burst in the African heat, and the desiccated membranes hung like rotten fruit from the blackened eye sockets. Somehow he could still sense us. The zombie twisted and snapped at us, kicking with his one remaining leg.
I think everyone was shocked by how far the disease had progressed, that somehow this could happen to them. Finally, Capt. Christopher ordered the men into action.
The zombie had to be rendered safe before we could examine it. Sgt. Dyson pushed the barrel of his rifle into the zombie’s chest and forced him onto his back.
Robinson donned surgical gloves. He knelt and slowly drove tent stakes through the zombie’s upper chest and hips, pinning it to the ground, while Dyson stood on it.
Once it was secured, Dyson stepped on its forehead.
I donned gloves and pulled a battery powered bone saw from my pack. Even though I’m a doctor, I couldn’t help but flinch as I thrust the rotary blade through the zombie’s rotted facial tissue and worked the tool into position on the joint. The bone was tough and the cutter kept slipping off. Finally, I managed to cut away the blackened, suppurated jaw bone.
Once the zombie was secured I disinfected the equipment, and prepared to work. I quickly set up my mobile field lab while Keyes established an uplink and connected the laptop computer.
I didn’t know how much time I would have, but I didn’t want to rush if it wasn’t necessary. I forced myself to slow down and think. I didn’t know exactly how long this zombie had been dead, but it was the closest subject to the original outbreak we had found so far.
I wanted to see the viral progression and I needed to look at this zombie’s brain.
I knelt beside the zombie and forced myself to concentrate. I separated myself from the heat, the stench, the zombie’s gurgled moans and the pattering of the rain.
The first step consisted of preparing a slide with a sample of the victim’s muscle tissue. I simply pressed the slide to one of the arm stumps. I shielded the slide with my body as I transferred the slide to the microscope.
I inserted the slide, adjusted the focus and looked at the first sample. I had examined the muscle tissue of the rotters before, but I hoped to see something different this time. As I wiped the rain from my eyes, and peered through the eye piece, the virus came into view once more.
There it was, in all its simplistic glory. Haet-Mombou, the walking death; man’s greatest enemy in recorded times. At 100 nanometers in diameter it was so tiny that it could only be seen through an electron microscope, yet it had already depopulated the Congo River Basin, and if left unchecked, it could destroy mankind.
The virus was nothing more than a strand of ribonucleic acid, wrapped in a protective shell of protein; so simple, yet so deadly. It was a microscopic dynamo of destruction that infected its host’s cells and reprogrammed them, turning its victim into an ambulatory husk; a harbinger of death. Already highly contagious, this virus had mutated into the ultimate engine of contagion, by transgressing the boundary of death itself, and resurrecting its victims as zombies.
I stared down at this small life form, and felt humbled by the fact that it could kill me as quickly as it had the man whose body it now inhabited. Only my respirator and the armed men around me stood between me and the virus, and the thousands of zombies that roamed the rain forest. Death was truly all around me, I could feel it pressing in from all sides. Then, from somewhere in the brush, a bird chirped. I heard insects, and felt the breeze. The moment of horror passed, and I could breathe again.
I tried again to concentrate; to think my way through. We knew so little about the virus, and I realized that every day we spent without progress brought the rest of the world that much closer to disaster. I switched the microscope’s magnification back to a cellular level. Maybe what I was looking for wasn’t hidden within the virus itself. The electron microscope automatically took pictures and passed them onto the computer, but as I worked I made mental notes that I would later record as sketches in my journal. I dictated to Keyes, she typed my findings into the computer and sent them back to base.
One thing I immediately noticed was that the cell samples taken from the muscle tissue showed some signs of cellular damage; ruptured cell walls, loss of fluids, etc.; but they were still functional as muscle. I knew that necrosis had been much more rapid in most of the other cell types, and they exhibited the characteristics I had expected from dead tissue; disintegration and total loss of cellular structure. The bacteria colonies were much more prevalent; they were present in every sample. The virus was preserving muscle tissue by feeding and exercising it. Even though the tissue was technically dead, the virus was maintaining the muscle cells, and utilizing them in their original function.
I still needed to examine a sample of brain tissue. With Capt. Christopher’s assistance, I used my bone saw to cut away the top of the victim’s skull. The grey matter inside was no longer grey; it was green, like the brain tissue I had seen in the road. The entire skull cavity was filled with a mass of bacteria that had filled the skull like a Jell-O mold. I cautiously scooped this mass out. It came free in loops and strands. I felt sick and intrigued at the same time. Finally, all the bacteria were gone and the skull cavity was almost entirely empty. Only the hypothalamus remained, and it was badly deteriorated. I prepared a slide sample of the remaining brain tissue.
Upon examination, the brain cells showed major signs of deterioration. Most were ruptured, and badly damaged. Perhaps a quarter of the cells I examined were still intact enough to function to some limited extent. I theorized that the brain still played some role in the zombie’s locomotive ability, and the destruction of the brain disrupted the zombie’s limited ability to move, much as it would in a living person. I was surprised that any of the brain tissue was still intact so long after death. Somehow, the virus was managing to preserve and utilize the cells it needed.
I stood and stretched.
“We’ve been here a while,” Capt. Christopher said softly.
The men were beginning to get nervous. The zombies would find you if you stayed in one place long enough.
I nodded. Keyes began to break down the comm equipment, and I quickly repacked mine.
Sgt. Dyson approached the dissected zombie. He stood slightly to the rear of its head and thumbed off the safety on his silenced .45 automatic. He waited patiently until we were finished and well clear.
“Be at peace, motherfucker,” he whispered.
The big handgun coughed until the zombie was a headless cadaver, twitching in the road.
I stood there for a moment, looking down at the butchered remains of what had once been a man. The captain laid his hand on my arm and pushed me gently.
“Come on, Doc,” he said quietly. “You’re the only one who can stop this shit.”
I knew he was right, I just didn’t know if I was up to the task.
We continued on down the road. It wound back and forth through the giant trees. The rain continued to fall, but I was numb to it. I kept thinking of the last rotter we had examined. Part of me was still working on the solution to our problem, the zombies and the virus, b
ut another part of me was just walking along on autopilot.
We walked on through the rest of the long, wet dreary day. Towards evening the captain stopped to check his GPS against his map.
“We only have sixty miles to go,” he stated cheerily. “We’re almost to the Congo River.”
The road seemed to go on forever, like a bad dream I couldn’t wake up from, but we hadn’t seen any zombies, any remains, anything remotely scary. I was beginning to relax a little. I realized that I had not eaten in quite a while; I was starving.
That’s when a rotten bunch of bananas fell out of the trees overhead and landed in the road ahead of me. They were blackened and bruised. I reached down to pick them up and they moved.
Everything switched from calm to chaos in a split second. Keyes started screaming and didn’t stop.
The captain and Robinson opened up with their KGP-9s, shooting into the canopy overhead. I couldn’t see what they were firing at. Then a hideous shape fell out of the treetops and exploded in the mud a few feet away from me. It was a chimp. The primate hit the ground like a loose sack of blood and guts wrapped in a rotten fur coat. Putrid loops of decaying entrails squirted across the track, and I actually heard the chimp’s leg bones break as it struck the road. Only the forward half of the chimp was intact, the rest trailed out in wet, decomposing, hair-covered globules behind it. The chimpanzee pulled itself forward towards the captain with its powerful forearms. Its skeletal claws dug furrows in the mud, and its putrid, swollen lips were drawn back to reveal its yellowed canines. The primate’s one remaining eye was white with death. It had the virus.
I could only watch in horrified fascination.
It was almost upon the captain when he shot it. The chimp’s head came apart, hammered to pieces by the nine-millimeter rounds. The back of its skull and its bacteria riddled brain splattered into the mud. The chimp’s body flipped over onto its back, and it lay there, writhing and jerking in the muddy road.
Everyone was firing into the trees. Chimps were shot or threw themselves out of the canopy. They splattered as they hit the ground, and then pulled their shattered, broken bodies towards their prey.