by S. Ganley
Emily came from a middle class family in the Sterling, Virginia area. They had met five years earlier when her sister had come to see Doug about having some reconstructive work done following a car crash that left some ugly scaring on her face. It had been a tough case that required multiple surgeries and many hours spent with the family in consultation. During that time he had come to know Emily and had actually worked up the courage following one meeting to ask her to remain behind when the rest of the family left. When it came to his work he was all business and he was highly regarded as one of the best in the business. However, when it came to his personal life and in particular any type of social life, he was a bumbling amateur whose last date had been four years earlier and that had not worked out very well. He had summoned to courage to ask her out to dinner and had been exceptionally surprised when she not only accepted his request for a date but sensing his discomfort in making the request, even offered up a location and time to meet at the restaurant. That first date had gone very well and before the evening was over Doug thought that Emily could be the one and that is exactly what she ended up being. Four months after their first date they were married, two weeks after that, he realized what a mistake he had made. He should have seen it coming from that first day when he bumbled his way through asking her out, she had taken control of things at that point telling him what time and where they would be going. He just didn't see until later how that should have told him what an absolute control freak she really was. Caught up in their whirlwind romance and the rapid progression it took, he had agreed to sign a prenuptial agreement and allowed her total control of their finances before he realized what he was doing.
He realized the trap he had fallen into shortly after they returned from a week long honeymoon cruise, the last time in their marriage that he had actually been happy. With control over his finances and a prenuptial agreement tucked safely away in a safety deposit box somewhere, she dropped the hammer on him. He was ordered, not asked or gently prodded, directly told by his new wife, that he was to fire the office manager at his office. A very effective and nice older woman who Doug had worked well with for a number of years. He was to fire her and immediately hire Emily's sister as her replacement at a much higher salary. That incident was quickly followed by a house hunting adventure. She knew in advance of their marriage exactly where she wanted to live, the type of neighborhood and house she wanted to live in as well as a long list of country clubs, social groups and community fund raising excursions that she insisted in being prominently associated with. He caved in to each and every demand, not out of love for his new wife, but out of genuine fear from the woman and her family.
His only real dealings with Emily's brood came from the time he had spent with them prepping her sister for surgery. He had drawn the conclusion that while they were not wealthy or well to do, they presented themselves as being from the upper end of the middle class. That impression was far from the truth he later learned. Her entire family was nothing but white trash, grifters and con artists. Once Emily had her hooks into his finances she opened the gates for the rest of her clan to share in her new found wealth. Before he knew it they had paid just over a million dollars for an estate in a well-established gated community deep in a wooded neighborhood of Great Falls and Emily's family had their own keys to the house at Emily's insistence and came and went as they pleased. It was not at all uncommon for Doug to finally make it home after a long day of work and fighting almost two hours of traffic to find Emily’s mother and her latest boyfriend already well into their fourth or fifth six pack of beer and camped out in his living room for the night. He had even had the unfortunate experience of walking into his own house one evening to find Emily's mother kneeling before one of these men in his kitchen and orally servicing him while the guy rummaged through his refrigerator helping himself to food and drink.
Doug was miserable in the marriage right from the start. Emily's entire demeanor towards him changed from the sweet and carrying girl she pretended to be when they were dating, to an outright miserable tyrant who made it clear that her feelings for him centered on his money much more than his heart. She allowed him to have sex with her only on rare occasions, and usually when she was drunk and could find no one else to take care of her needs. To add further insult to injury, within a year of their marriage she started packing on the pounds, not a few here and there but a truck load all at once. Doug had considered divorce more times that he could count. He had even confided his woes in a fellow doctor with an office next to his who he would sometimes meet for lunch and the occasional round of weekend golf, if Emily allowed it. His friend had hooked him up with a divorce lawyer and Doug had secretly gone in for a consultation. When Doug had presented the lawyer with a copy of the prenup he had signed, the man had read it, put it down and simply shook his head. That document amounted to giving Emily a license to do just about anything she wanted. She could screw a dozen men and a couple zoo animals in their living room with him watching if she cared to. If he tried to dissolve the marriage under any circumstance, she would walk away with more than half of his estate. The lawyer went on to explain that even though not expressly covered in the document, under Virginia law there was also a very good chance that she would also get the house and any legal bills she racked up taking it through the courts would likely become his responsibility as well. He had seen cases similar to what Doug was facing and if he tried going down the path of divorce, Emily would ruin him financially. Since his practice was also under his own name, there was even a chance that she would end up taking half of that as well and probably force him to shut the doors for good. He was basically a forty six year old successful plastic surgeon stuck in a marriage with a woman who he couldn't stand. He could see no way out, unless he wanted to start his entire life over as a penniless sheep herder in the mountains of Montana.
Considering how shitty his life had become in the last couple years he almost felt it was no small wonder that a zombie apocalypse would now crash down from the heavens on top of them to add even more misery in his life. The one concession that Emily had allowed him in some remodeling of their home was to design one third of the finished basement area as a secure storm shelter. That part of the country was known to suffer the occasional severe storm during the fall. Their house was on a two acre lot surrounded by tall trees that would easily crush through the roof if hit with a strong enough wind gust. His argument for the construction of a safe room was one of the few things that Emily gave into when it came to how the house was appointed or any of the dozens of projects Emily had commissioned for remodeling projects. While the threat of severe weather was a good selling point to have a portion of the basement turned into a mini fortress. His real motivation was to simply give him a place of solitude separate from Emily, her family and the never ending parade of friends that Emily and her sister enjoyed bringing over sometimes for days at a time. She spent little if any time in the basement of the house, usually only to grab something from their mini wine cellar under the stairway from the kitchen. This gave Doug the opportunity to have a private sanctuary where he could escape his wife.
The storm shelter untimely ended up saving both of their lives. Constructed in the same fashion as a safe room and built to withstand not only heavy damage to the structure above it, the walls and door were also designed to be chemical irritant resistant. This feature was recommended by designers of safe rooms to prevent attackers from using mace or other aerosol based irritants from flushing someone out from inside the room. In the case of the zombie outbreak this single feature prevented their body odor from escaping into the surrounding atmosphere and allowed them to remain hidden and undetected by the zombies stalking the streets of their neighborhood. When they had first discovered that their friends and neighbors were changing into the cannibalistic creatures it had been Doug's observation that they were able to easily track and locate their targets by smell. Knowing that the basement shelter was air tight he had managed to get Emily and
himself into the shelter just before a large group of undead smashed into the back doors of their house. They had been chasing their neighbor’s son, Cameron, and his parents were leading the charge after the poor boy. Doug had to almost carry the teenager kicking and screaming into the shelter. For the first day and a half, the crowd of zombies that had chased Cameron into their home had maintained a constant vigil just on the outside of the steel reinforced shelter door. They could all hear the constant banging and scratching at the door that went on and on for endless hours until finally they eventually either gave up or found something else of interest to go after. On the two occasions that Doug had left the shelter to retrieve food and other supplies from upstairs, he had only been outside the shelter for a minute or two before they started coming back to the house for him.
Even with the solid security door keeping them safe from the creatures on the outside he had put his foot down that they would never all be asleep at one time. Someone would always be awake and alert keeping an eye on the door. Emily had tried to fight him on that. She wanted no part in standing any kind of guard duty, but for the first time in their sham of a marriage he had stood his ground. It wasn't just their lives at stake, they had to think of Cameron as well. While that was not the most convincing argument to sway his loaf of a wife, it was one he was not willing to give an inch on and she had finally relented. He had to admit that with the apocalypse upon them he felt a sense of freedom from his wife. The prenup that had been hanging over his head for so long amounted for absolutely nothing anymore. If she wanted the house, cash, cars and other luxury items, she was more than welcome to them. She would just have to discuss with their rather hungry neighbors some of the ground rules about sharing the upper portions of the home. For the last day and a half Emily had really started getting on his nerves about an entirely different topic. She was actually concerned about her family and wanted Doug to find a way for them to leave the safety of the shelter and go to check on them. Of course the fact that they lived over an hour away across the river in Maryland on a normal day of driving just didn't seem to click with her. She had run her cell phone dead trying to call them over and over and with the power to the house finally failing late the prior afternoon, they had only the fuel left in their small generator to continue providing electricity. Doug had once again put his foot down hard on how their remaining bit of power was to be used. He would allow them a few hours with a single light in the evening and to run two small fans during the hottest part of the daytime. He would not let her recharge her phone only to run it dry a few hours later and insist on repeating the process over and over again. Even with that sparing level of generator use he was pretty sure they had only another day at best before it was lights out for good. Their cars in his driveway both had gas in the tanks and he had considered making a trip top side to siphon off a couple gallons to keep the generator running. He decided he would only do that in the most extreme circumstances. Stepping outside was sure to attract unwanted attention from the neighbors and he wasn’t sure that powering lights and a couple fans was really worth the risk.
The fuel and power situation was certainly one of their problems, the others he considered even more pressing. They had finished the last of their food and water the night before. Emily's family had visited at the start of the weekend just as the outbreak was starting to get rolling and they had stripped the cupboards bare. Doug had planned on making a run into town and do some shopping at the end of the weekend, but the epidemic rolled into the nightmare that it was well before he had that chance. Even the little that he was able to snatch from the kitchen on one of his trips upstairs had not lasted as long as he had intended. He had been adamant that they needed to stretch it for at least a couple days in the hope that rescue was on the way, but Emily was simply not satisfied with that idea. While she had agreed to the rationing idea to simply shut him up about it, it was a simple matter that he had to sleep sometime and when he did, she simply helped herself. His next dilemma was that he had no idea how to handle himself in any type of physical altercation. He had never been in a fight in his life and they had nothing in the form of weapons available to them even if he was able to use them. The best they could do would be to pick up some large kitchen knives or maybe some gardening tools from the garage, but even with such basic weapons for defense, he knew that none of them would last more than a minute if they came upon any of the zombies lurking around on the outside. It wasn't that he was a coward and unwilling to protect himself and Emily, despite his contempt for the woman she was his wife after all and a fellow human being on top of it, he just didn't know how to go about doing so. Physically he was not a formidable person by any means, he took pretty good care of himself but was never much for running or other exercise. Tipping the scales at a little over one hundred and fifty pounds, he doubted he would be much of an obstacle for one of the beasts if they managed to get their hands on him. To top it all off, the toilet in the small bathroom that had been installed in the safe room had now been rendered useless thanks to Emily. While Doug and Cameron had been subsisting on a starvation diet, Emily had managed to work up enough waste to clog the pipes in the toilet well above and beyond the ability of any earthly plunger to undue. Overnight the smell had started to creep throughout their small shelter and they were now faced with rapidly deteriorating living conditions.
Doug decided that it was up to him to make a run for one of their neighbors’ houses and hope that he could find enough food and supplies to hold them for a little longer. He had convinced himself that the government or military would surely have the entire situation under control soon. If they could just make it for a few more days everything would be fine. Deep down inside he knew that it was just a fantasy and that they were really in deep shit. Sitting up all by himself staring at the door into the wee hours of the morning just waiting for one of those creatures to knock the door down and come rushing inside after him, it was amazing what you were capable of convincing yourself of to keep the fear at bay.
With the sun visible through the narrow half windows at the top of the basement wall, he decided that while he had built up the courage he would sneak across to the neighbor’s house first thing. As it happened the closest house to his own was Cameron's and as their food supply had quickly dwindled he had mentioned on several occasions how his parents had well-stocked cupboards with canned goods and several cases of water.
"Just what the hell do you think you are doing?" the questioning voice made his skin crawl. Emily had been watching him from her place on the sofa as he pressed his ear to the door in preparation to make the terrifying run upstairs and across the yard to the neighbors.
"We need food. I'm going to Cameron's house and pick up whatever I can and bring it back." He could see that she was just about to fire something back and him, but it was her own damn fault that he was forced into doing this and he really didn't want to listen to any of her bullshit right at that moment while he had just barely worked up the courage to go through with leaving the house. He held up a hand to her, "just stop right there Em, I don't want to hear it. Keep your mouth shut and watch after Cameron. I shouldn't be more than twenty minutes. When I come back, I will knock three times with a pause between each; open the damn door when you hear me."
He didn't wait for her reply, he was going for food, and there was not a doubt in his mind that she would not open the door for him. He turned back to the door and eased the lock open slowly to avoid the metal scraping it sometimes made. Once the door was unlocked he cracked it open just enough to be able to peer into the rest of the basement and assure himself he was alone. Feeling his wife’s eyes burning into his back and knowing that she was expecting him to lose his nerve right there at the threshold of the door reinforced his conviction to continue on. Without looking back inside the room, he stepped out into the basement and softly closed the door behind him. Before he had taken three steps towards the kitchen stairs he heard the soft metallic click over his shoulder telling him that E
mily had locked the door securely behind him.
#
"General, that is just totally unacceptable, you have to allow us to do our jobs or we will never get a handle on this thing." Dr. Trevor Woods exclaimed.
He and his team had been moved into a large aircraft hangar designated for quarantining any arrivals at the military base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba who had been authorized to travel to the island. As things started collapsing in the United States and without any breakthrough on the horizon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had worked out a plan to evacuate Dr. Woods and the surviving members of his FEMA crisis team as well as critical scientific and medical staff from the CDC laboratories in Atlanta, Georgia and Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Maryland to the American military installation on Cuba. The conditions that had to be met before any of them were to be allowed on the base was a medical screening prior to stepping foot on any aircraft bound for the base followed by a quarantine period in strict isolation inside this hangar that had been hastily prepared in advance of their arrival. He did have to hand it to the military, in less than twenty four hours they had erected an inflatable containment shelter inside the hanger that had an independent air circulation system and would help to ensure that any contaminants they may have carried with them were not released into the surrounding atmosphere. Each of them had been required to don bio-hazard suits with attached air tanks onboard their flight to the base. Since then they had each been subjected to multiple rounds of physical examinations, had quarts of blood drawn and given up more urine and stool samples than their bodies had seemed capable of providing. The original plan had called for a period of twenty four hours’ worth of quarantine while blood and urine tests were conducted to ensure that each of them was completely clean of the virus. Even after that was accomplished they were to be sequestered at the furthest reaches of the base where construction crews were still working night and day to build a small complex that would house them and their equipment. None of the staff working in that complex would be allowed access to any other area on the base or contact with any personnel either stationed on the base or civilians from the local communities. They were to be completely isolated in their own world until a cure for the virus was found and proved effective.