by Guy James
124
Jane woke with a start. She didn’t know where she was, and for a second she thought she had been kidnapped and locked away in a basement—a dank one that smelled of body odor and chalk. Then it began to come back to her and she remembered the previous two days. Had it all been a dream?
Of course it had all been a dream. But how had she ended up in here, with Sven lying beside her? Had she gotten drunk with him and stolen away to some basement for an after-party? She had resolved not to start things up with him again, it was too frustrating and painful and there was no future in—
Jane saw the gun lying beside her, apparently placed by a woman who kept weapons by her gym mat…and who slept on a gym mat.
It wasn’t adding up.
Then she saw a mat with the unmistakable imprint of a body in it, but whose body?
Then she remembered Lorie, and the previous two days flashed back into her mind, filling themselves in and erasing any possibility, no matter how earnestly hoped for, that it had all been a dream.
Jane sighed, made her tired body stand up, and put her shoulder holster on. She popped the clip out of the Beretta, checked that the clip was full, put it back in the gun, and racked the slide.
She crept away from Sven and around the corner, holding the gun with both hands, trained downward and to her right side. Every few steps, she stopped and listened. It was all quiet.
Then she stepped into the long basement hallway and stopped. The stillness was eerie, and she expected a zombie to shamble out from one of the many doors and dark recesses lining the hallway.
None did.
Jane went upstairs and found Lorie pressed up against the building’s main doors with Ivan in her arms, standing on her tiptoes and peering out the window.
Jane holstered her Beretta.
She knew in an instant what the girl was staring at, and it made her uncomfortable. She wondered if Lorie was losing her mind, if Lorie was particularly susceptible to neurosis, and if the zombie outbreak had put her over the edge. Why was she so obsessed with the carnage? With hacking up the zombies and poking at the zombie parts and staring at the chopped-up, disgusting, mangled—
Lorie turned around. “Hey.”
Jane walked toward the girl. “Hey.”
Ivan meowed, and Lorie set him down. He padded his way over to Jane and brushed up against her legs.
Jane began to walk to the door, careful not trip over the cat, but then she stopped herself. She didn’t really want to look, didn’t want to see…and Lorie had done plenty of looking for the both of them, so…
“What’s it look like out there?” Jane asked. “And you don’t have to go heavy on the details.”
Lorie grinned, and Jane almost cried out in anguish, almost slapped Lorie, but she didn’t. Jane was guilty of similar insanities, and it wouldn’t be fair to take Lorie’s escape away. So what if the girl fixated on the gore? It obviously helped her in some way, just like fixating on the Beretta helped Jane.
She felt a sudden pang of regret on losing the .460 XVR, sighed, set her jaw, and looked into Lorie’s eyes.
“There’s a good amount of squirmage,” Lorie said. “It’s drizzling and all…but I don’t see any fresh ones. There aren’t any walking around I mean. Maybe it’s over.”
Jane shuddered as she pictured the writhing of the undead. “Maybe it is.” She hoped to hell that it was.
Lorie turned back to the window and seemed to forget that Jane was there.
Jane went up the stairs and checked out the track. She took a quick lap around, and when she was satisfied that it was empty, she went back downstairs and did a similar check of the basketball courts. Finding the courts as empty as they had been the previous night, Jane returned to the lobby, where Lorie was still peering out at the dawn.
“Come on,” Jane said. “Let’s get Sven up and figure out what we’re doing next.”
“Won’t we just stay here for a while? Until help comes? You think they’ll come for us here too?”
“I don’t know, we should have a look from the roof, and then we might have to start moving again.”
“I guess so…I like it here though, it’s—”
The first shout from the basement cut Lorie short, and she and Jane broke into a run toward the basement stairs.
125
Jane had the Beretta out again as she sprinted the length of the basement hallway. She ran straight to where Sven had been sleeping.
He was gone.
She felt a tightness in her chest. He couldn’t be gone. It was so hard to breathe all of a sudden. Without Sven, without—
There was another shout, and she could make out the words this time. Sven was calling for her and Lorie, but where was he?
Lorie caught up to Jane and turned back to the long hallway. She pointed to the left, to a door. “It’s coming from there.”
“What, is he working out? Has he lost his mind?”
The shouts came again, and Ivan ran to the nearest door on the left side of the hallway and began to scratch at it.
Lorie ran to the door, turned the knob, and gave it a hard shove. “He’s in here! He’s okay!”
Jane sighed and her shoulders slumped with relief. She put her semi-automatic away and was so happy that she had to stop herself from skipping to the doorway. When she got close, she could make out voices that were neither Sven’s nor Lorie’s.
Confused, Jane walked into the room to find Sven and Lorie transfixed.
They were in a small cardio room that was packed with as many treadmills, recumbent bicycles, elliptical machines, and rowing machines as it could hold. The room was musty, and in desperate need of some ventilation. Dust motes sailed lazily through the thick air, as if riding waves of the stale body odor of exercisers…exercisers now undead…or dead undead…their once toned muscles dry, crumpled, and unusable.
A TV hung above one of the exercise bikes. It was on, and it had Sven’s and Lorie’s rapt attention. Jane walked all the way in and turned to the screen.
Then she too, found that she couldn’t look away, could barely breathe.
126
Lorie couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe that was the cause of the zombie outbreak. It was crazy.
After the news program had begun to repeat for the fourth time, Lorie snapped out of it and began to pace back and forth in the cramped exercise room.
What a ridiculous explanation, she thought, totally insane. How could that be?
Sven made a sudden menacing gesture at the TV, as if about to hit it. “What?! What the hell does that mean?”
“I…at least…” Jane began, then trailed off and sat down on one of the treadmills.
Sven turned to Lorie. “Did you get any of that?”
“I think so.”
“The glyco thing and everything? What?”
Lorie shrugged. “Yeah, I think so. It’s like a kind of food poisoning.”
“A food-borne illness,” Jane interjected.
“Right,” Lorie said. “It was that new strain of genetically modified soy. They tried it, and I guess it didn’t work out so well.”
“But then why isn’t the rest of the country affected? Were they experimenting on us or something?”
Lorie hadn’t thought of that. “They didn’t really explain why it only went here. They did say it was a small batch though.”
“And what’s with the glycosa…glypho…whatever it is?”
“Glycophysate,” Lorie said. “It’s a pesticide.” The look that Sven gave her made her wonder if Sven knew what a pesticide was, so she decided it was a good idea to explain. “You know, pest-i-cide: kills bugs. We spray pesticides on plants so the bugs don’t get them.”
“Okay, I’ve heard of them, yeah.”
“So, the problem is that when we use pesticides, some of the pesticides can harm the plant that we’re trying to grow…because they’re a lot like poisons. So, scientists have made genetically modified plants that are resistant to the pes
ticides they want to use. That way, we can spray the plants all we want and kill only the bugs, because the plants are made to withstand the pesticide. So here, they came up with a new strain of glycophysate-resistant soy—glycophysate is a type of pesticide. And…well…we all know what happened.”
“So the tofu that came from these soy plants…was infected with something?”
“I don’t think so. It seemed from what they were saying that it’s not a virus so much as a poison, like the human body reacting to something in the genetically engineered plant. It explains what happened to Randy...or at least what Milt claimed happened to him. He ate that vegetarian, no, vegan frozen dinner.” Lorie looked up, trying to remember exactly what he’d eaten. “Yeah! I remember now, it was Kung Pao Tofu. He even described it to me, telling me how great it was—peppers, peanuts, rice, celery, carrots, but then, instead of meat…tofu.”
Sven nodded. “And it dries us up.”
“Severe dehydration,” Lorie said. “The water gets all expelled, and severe mineral loss along with it. They just go crazy and try to replace the water and minerals any way they can, by biting us I guess. I don’t really get that part.”
“It doesn’t add up,” Jane said. “It does seem more like a virus, like an intelligent virus that’s trying to spread itself. At least that’s how it seemed to me, based on the way they chased after us. If they were just dehydrated, why did they try to bite us? To suck our blood? Wouldn’t it be easier to just drink water?”
“Yeah,” Sven said, “there’s something here that just doesn’t make sense. The zombies were trying to get us for some reason, as if they were trying to spread, to make more of themselves. The dehydration was there, they did dry up and crumple, but I don’t think that’s all there was to it.”
“You think they’re lying to us?” Lorie asked.
“Who knows,” Sven said. “I’m not about to start talking conspiracy theories. Right now, I just care about next steps—the plan.”
Lorie gestured at the TV. “They said the worst of it is over, that as long as we stay inside and away from any of the remaining ones, that we’ll be okay. They said that by day five we’ll be all clear. It’s day three, and I didn’t see any outside. Maybe it’s over already.”
“Let’s go up on the roof,” Jane said. “We can have a look around just in case we need to move again.”
Sven got up in a swift movement. “You’re right. We need to go check.”
He rushed out of the room. Jane followed.
Lorie patted Ivan’s head. “You knew all along, didn’t you?”
Ivan meowed.
Lorie was sure that he did.
She left the smelly exercise room to catch up with Sven and Jane, not caring to see any more replays of the President speaking from the safety of the Oval Office. Apparently, he had made two inspiring addresses during the progression of the zombie outbreak.
“Speeches didn’t help us much, now did they?” she asked Ivan as he padded eagerly beside her. Lorie decided that Ivan agreed.
Lorie exited onto the roof, leaving the multiple sets of stairs behind her. The humid air jolted her out of her thoughts of the mangled zombie corpses.
Although it was still early in the morning, the air was heating up quickly, and was beginning to feel stifling. One of the first things she noticed when she walked onto the roof, despite the humid, somewhat stifling air, was the absence of that strange, terrible smell that the zombies had brought with them—their secret weapon of sorts.
Lorie watched Sven and Jane walk to the edge of the roof together, and Ivan started after them but then stopped a short distance away. Lorie could see that Sven and Jane cared about each other, and she was certain that after all of this was over, if they lived through it, Sven and Jane would end up together.
She was surprised to realize that she wanted to stay with them. Her family was now completely gone…Lorie hoped Sven and Jane would let her…otherwise where would she go, what would she—
She sighed and walked to another of the roof’s edges, away from Sven and Jane. She looked out over the University of Virginia grounds and took a deep breath.
The air was getting clearer, that was for sure. The rancidity of the zombies was fading. Lorie poked at the surgical mask that hung around her neck and hoped she would never have to use it again, even while a part of her savored the violence of the past days’ events. She wondered what that meant about her, if that meant that she was crazy. Lorie shrugged and walked over to Jane and Sven.
“Can you see anything?” she asked.
Sven and Jane both shook their heads. Lorie looked out from their vantage point and couldn’t see any roaming zombies anywhere.
Then she walked all around the perimeter of the roof, checking as far as she could see in all directions. Sven and Jane did the same, while giving Lorie her space. Only Ivan stayed close to her, rubbing up against her legs and meowing gently each time she stopped at the edge of the roof to peer down and out over the landscape. She felt so much affection for Ivan that she couldn’t imagine leaving him…he was such a good cat.
After walking around the roof for a good ten minutes, Lorie was satisfied that the outbreak had ended—at least in their immediate surroundings.
She realized then that they hadn’t encountered any more people since Randy.
Were there no more human survivors?
Surely looters would have been out if there were people left.
Could it be that they were it? She, Sven, Jane, and Ivan? Were they the only survivors of the zombie outbreak?
The news report had made it sound like there were others, like the government was relaying a message to all of those people still hiding in their homes. Lorie wondered if those people existed...the news report had been so vague, so neatly packaged…too neatly packaged.
She turned back toward the center of the roof to find that Jane and Sven were standing close to each other, watching her.
“Anything?” Jane asked.
Lorie shook her head. “Maybe it really is over…maybe we can go…” Lorie didn’t know what she was going to say next. Go home? Where was there to go home to now? She didn’t want to go home and find her mother and Evan’s father and their crumpled bodies or whatever was left of them. She couldn’t go back there.
“What’s wrong?” Jane asked, looking concerned and starting toward Lorie.
Lorie stepped backward instinctively. “Nothing, I…nothing.” Lorie looked up at Jane. “I don’t want to go back …back to my house.”
Jane put an arm around Lorie, which Lorie found comforting. “You don’t have to. You stay with us as long as you like.”
Then Sven walked over, looking as perplexed as he’d looked in the small exercise room after watching the news program. “I don’t believe it,” he said, looking into the distance and shaking his head. He had a sad, resigned look in his eyes. “I told him not to eat that crap, but he just wouldn’t listen, I told him…” He shook his head again. Lorie watched Jane put her other arm on Sven’s shoulder, and then the three of them were linked…no, it was the four of them, because there was Ivan, pawing at a mallard on Sven’s calf.
“Why don’t we go home?” Jane said. “It’s over.”
As they walked back down into Memorial Gymnasium, Lorie began to wonder what the zombie outbreak meant.
Who had won? Was it the people who were against genetically modified food, or was it the meat eaters who denounced tofu?
It seemed exceptionally ironic to Lorie that the tofu eaters were the ones who protested the proliferation of genetically modified food, and yet they were the ones that had taken the brunt of the zombie onslaught, as if they were targeted.
Then again, Lorie realized, that wasn’t quite right either, because almost everyone in and around Charlottesville seemed to have been affected. Soy was in just about everything, she recalled, and maybe she and Sven and Jane had something peculiar in their bodies that kept them from turning into zombies even though they actually had
been exposed to the tainted soy.
She shrugged and tried to put all of it out of her mind for the moment. It was over, and there would be plenty of time to put the pieces of the puzzle together later. If the public was ever allowed to have all the pieces, that was.
127
Sven had a hand on each machete when he stepped out of Mem Gym and into the late morning light. Ivan was in his backpack, perched atop Sven’s shoulder. The cat’s head swept from side to side as he sniffed at the air.
“How’s it smell?” Sven asked.
Ivan didn’t hiss, and Sven took that as a good sign. The cloying, paralyzing odor seemed to be settling out of the air, becoming fainter with each passing hour. It was almost noon on the third day of the outbreak, and if the newscasters were correct—if they knew and were telling the truth—then the last of the zombies were crumpling, the outbreak was ending.
“Self-contained deterioration,” that was one of the terms they had used on the news program. Sven didn’t know how anyone could refer to something like this as self-contained. It was ludicrous. The zombies were trying to kill the remaining humans. How could that ever be characterized as self-contained?
Even if the newscasters had just been referring to the course of the virus, the term was at the very least inept, and having dealt with the zombies firsthand, Sven found it offensive.
He looked up at the sky and found a reassuring, almost unmarred blue staring back down at him.
He walked carefully down the steps of Mem Gym, keeping his eyes averted from the area where the burned zombies were. He didn’t want to look at any of that, and there was no time for rubbernecking anyway.
The plan now was to check his house, clear it out if necessary, and relocate there with Jane, Lorie, and of course Ivan. They all agreed it was best to move to a smaller space, one that they could watch more closely, one that at least one of them—Sven—was intimately familiar with.