Medora: A Zombie Novel

by Welker, Wick

  “What will that do?”

  “A pulse that large could potentially have the same effect as passing an electrical current through all of the infected people. It would be like casting a gigantic net of electromagnetism all over the eastern seaboard. We could disable the virus in all of the infected people with just a couple of nuclear detonations.”

  “That’s crazy, what about the fallout?”

  “No! That’s the beauty. We will get a large EMP without the destruction or the nuclear radiation from the actual detonation, which could destroy the virus without hurting human tissue. All the radiation will just go out into space.”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Yes, I studied electromagnetism and pulses for ten years. I know this stuff. Everyone else should be safe from the effects of the EMP. And at the same time--”

  “We would completely disable all of China’s military equipment,” Rambert finished his thought. “They’ll be sitting ducks.”

  “Exactly! They would never dream that we would attack them with such a huge EMP because it will destroy all of our own satellites, communications, and cell phone towers and, and… I mean everything will be wiped out. But we are already completely destroyed by the infection so we have nothing to lose.”

  “This is… unbelievable. Will this actually work?”

  “I have no idea, but the current alternative sounds much worse. Just think of this acting like a massive solar flare, it will be the same effect.”

  There was a small pause in the conversation.

  “Reg, this might be brilliant.”

  “Or it might be really stupid. Either way, it’s up to you to decide.”

  Chapter twenty five

  “Ellen?” A man’s voice spoke from behind the curtain.

  Ellen awoke from a groggy sleep, unsure if the voice was from a dream. The drugs they gave her had made her sleep for a few hours. “Hello?” She replied.

  The curtain moved and a man in military fatigues appeared from behind it. It was Dave Tripps.

  “Dave?” She propped herself up on her elbows.

  “Ellen,” he said enthusiastically. “I knew you were here, half the hospital is saying your name.”

  “How did you get here? Keith said you died.” Her voice sounded strained as she got out of bed. She stood up and wrapped her arms around him.

  “Keith is alive?” He hugged her back. “I thought for sure he had died when he jumped down into that stairwell. How could he have possibly survived? There were hundreds of them down there.”

  “He thought the same thing when you stayed behind in the building. How did you survive?” She laughed.

  “You honestly wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He let out a laugh of disbelief. “And I can’t believe you’re here. Where is he? Where is Jayne?”

  “I don’t know. He’s out there on the streets right now. Some military people shot him in the leg because he shattered their windshield. Jayne is safe at the children’s hospital, for now anyway.”

  “He’s shot?” Dave said with wide eyes.

  “Yes, he was trying to get them to bring me here. I was bitten but I haven’t gotten infected. He thought I was special for a cure or something.”

  Dave hurriedly went to the window. “Do you know what street it was?”

  “Yes, I looked at the street sign when they were taking me away. It was Haverford. They were supposed to be looking for him, but who knows. No one cares about anyone anymore.” She began to cry. “Everything is just so shitty now. No one cares about anyone else, Dave.”

  “Okay, I’m going to get him.”

  “Really? What does it look like out there? And how the hell did you get those clothes?”

  “It doesn’t look great,” he said, peering through the blinds. “But I got to go find my buddy.”

  She let out a long sob and started to cough. “Everything is so messed up, Dave.”

  “I know, and it’s going to stay messed up.” He took a gun from his side holster and checked the ammo clip.

  “Where did you get that gun?” She asked, sitting back down on the bed.

  “I got picked up by this unit. It’s a long story. You just stay here, and I’m going to go find him, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay. Thank you so much, Dave. You’re…” She stopped, looking at his stubbly face.

  “What?”

  “You’re just different. Totally different. I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “Okay, I’m going to go.” He briskly walked out of the room.

  “Thank you,” she said again, incredulous that he had come and went so quickly like a dream.

  Dave jogged through the hallway and down a stairwell leading to the ground floor of the hospital. He knew what he saw out the window. It didn’t look quite so bad as New York, but there were a lot of the sick walking around, following cars and trying to corner runners. I know what I’m doing, he thought. I now have more experience than anybody has on the street right now. Just move quickly and don’t hesitate to shoot.

  Pushing through the hospital entrance doors, he made his way to the emergency department carport. A parked ambulance was being rocked back and forth by a crowd of infected people. They wriggled their bodies against one another, trying to squeeze into the back doors to where Dave assumed someone was trapped. More and more of the sick were being drawn in by the commotion, creating a large crowd around the entire hospital entrance.

  Dave stopped to think quickly about his next best move. He wasn’t sure about heading straight through the looser parts of the crowd or trying to sneak around some bushes that were adjacent to the concrete wall of the hospital. Before he could move, a few from the crowd saw him and with a few stragglers, began moving towards him drawing even more attention with their movement.

  Moving back towards the entrance, he hesitated for a moment and then moved straight forward, firing his gun at a few of the infected that were approaching quickly. He smoothly weaved through several bodies but was soon slowed as the crowd began to thicken ahead of him. In a flash, he began to panic, realizing his over confidence. He turned around to make it back to the safety of the hospital doors but found the loose crowd behind him quickly closing in. He felt the first hand loosely clasp his shoulder and quickly shrugged it off. Dumb, dumb, dumb, what did I do? Another hand grabbed his ankle with surprising force, but quickly retracted after he stomped on the wrist.

  He shot his gun into the head of a man in front of him and shoved his body into the crowd, knocking over several other people. However, all the commotion had brought in more of the infected and soon there was nothing but limbs and hair surrounding him. In just a small moment and it was over, he thought. Just like that? Firing off round after round, his gun finally let out the feeble click of an empty cartridge. From his primal instinct, he started beating his fists outward at anyone that came in front of him.

  As the bodies fell into him, he only waited now for the piercing pain of a bite. What happened next, Dave couldn’t understand but he saw an expansive flood of golden light surrounding him before everyone around him simultaneously toppled to the ground bringing him down.

  *****

  Two days prior, the hub of humanity teemed with working minds and witty talk; a living city of bustling coffee shops, colored collars and streams of cash. The people moved with deliberate action, independent thought but collaborative engineering. For over a century, it attracted world leaders and famous faces, a constant torrent of the chic and the savvy. Within a few days, the men and women had died by the millions. In haste, their souls had departed, no longer churning the gears of their human minds. Yet, those levers did still move and the cogwheels did not cease to turn. Their bodies remained to writhe and groan, never knowing the cool relief of a physical grave. They marched indefinitely, hungry for that which they had never craved without the capacity to reflect on their own metamorphosis. Kicking and clawing, their tendons began to tear and their teeth began to crack. Their bodies were fueled by the
absurdity of science and a few men’s insatiable desire for more than their already wealthy lives. Families feasted on families and most that fled had died. Of hurricanes and earthquakes, world wars and terrorism, nothing could have wrought so much death as much as the trust in the hands of the miracle of science.

  The rot of America had brought unwanted guests. Billowing red flags rode smoothly along the coastline of the Chesapeake Bay, while deployment ships opened their cargo of tanks and military trucks onto the white sand of the beach. Sounds of garbled radio transmissions buzzed in the air while turrets were assembled and sandbags were stacked. An Eastern language was shouted across the sand, claiming to be the cure and next rightful sovereign people. Their ships began their siege of the land; their jets streamed from their carriers with payloads for the scourge. The campaign moved deliberately through the streets, overcoming sections of the city, block by block. With the organization of a prepared army, the sick were easily dispatched. The audacity of the army was only possible because of the paralyzing speed of the infection and the helplessness of a government taken by surprise within their own borders.

  World order change is never predicted and thus has no adequate preparation. Only with a swift paradigm shift in how the people perceive their world can regime change happen in an instant, and where other nations were cautiously helping, the Chinese had taken advantage.

  As they flooded D.C. with expert precision, their commanders were delighted to find no American military resistance. They did not know the extent of the devastation of the infection, but it had apparently completely debilitated American defense. They smiled and joked at the fall of the country, knowing they must put on a more compassionate face in front of the natives. “We are here to help,” they made sure every soldier knew in English.

  Their delight, however, turned cold when a golden swath of light began to color the ground and buildings. It appeared insipid at first, but soon coated everything they saw with a dark gold as if someone had put a pair of aviator sunglasses over their eyes. Looking up, they saw an expansive mass of orange clouds rapidly filling the sky until it spanned the horizons.

  Suddenly, one fighter jet fell from the sky backwards and landed vertically in an apartment building. Another fell diagonally to the ground, crashing into the bay. Soon a barrage of aircraft was littering the sky as dozens of pilots ejected their seats. Radio transmissions instantly ceased and all ground vehicles slowed to a stop. The turrets on their carriers stopped firing and the massive ships went dim from failing generators.

  In a scramble, the Chinese snapped into bodied formations in preparation for ground combat with the infected. Yet, they found no resistance, no movement or groans. The sick lay dormant, collapsed to the ground.

  *****

  In a flash of gold, they fell to the ground in a single act of unison. From the roof of an apartment building, Keith thought they looked like thousands of marionette puppets all falling down at once with their masters abandoning them. It was a sea of bodies in the streets, smothered over buses and dangling from windows. The entire scene looked like a macabre painting with lifeless bodies captured in still life.

  He looked up into the sky, saw orange and gold shoots of clouds, and fire as they spread across his view. Long arms of whorled gases covered the sun, filtering in a bronze hue that covered the land. Somehow, they had figured it out, he thought. In some way, they figured out how to stop them. He knew it was Ellen. They had gotten hold of her blood and had somehow figured it out.

  Closing his eyes, he laid on the gravel top of the roof and rested the back of his head on the side of the building with his nose towards the sky. His soul collapsed on itself, decompressing with aching relief and releasing an enormous amount of anxiety that had slowly accumulated during the last two days. The muscles in his body finally relaxed, his belly muscles unlatching their grip on his organs. His nerves slowed down their streaming impulses allowing his mind to free up workspace finally to reflect on what had just happened to the world. Even the pain in his wounded leg had become dulled by the break of the waking hell that had unleashed itself on the country.

  In a brief panic, he looked again over the edge of the building to make sure that what he had previously seen wasn’t a dream. There they were; a horde of the infected that had stopped in their assault and now lay lifeless in the cluttered street. There was movement inside a few buses and cars, as people began emerging from their hiding places, yelling to one another across the fields of bodies. They timidly rocked the infected bodies with their shoes, daring them to wake back up again, but they remained motionless and finally dead.

  A deep silence fell on the streets. Keith hadn’t realized how loud the infected hordes were until they all dropped dead at once. He only heard a few scattered shouting voices of people who still had their facilities and hadn’t been corrupted by the disease. One voice in particular began to have permanence in the air as he realized that someone was calling out his name in the distance. A man’s voice was repeatedly calling his full name somewhere down the street.

  Turning to rest on his knees, Keith looked out again over the street and saw a small man in the distance running between the bodies and climbing over parked cars. He was dressed in military fatigues and had blond hair. The quality of the man’s voice became clearer to Keith as he approached closer to the building. As he felt how familiar the voice was to him, he realized who the man was.

  “Dave!” Keith shouted, waving both arms above his head. “Dave, over here, man!”

  Dave stopped, lifted his hand to his brow, looked up at Keith and smiled. He stood motionless for a moment and then ran towards the building, crying, happy to meet his friend.

  epilogue

  “Santos Rodriguez.”

  “That’s the name he used on the account?”

  “Yep, Santos Rodriguez. Guess how much was in the bank account?”

  Stark shrugged his shoulders looking out the window. “How much?”

  “One hundred and eighty million dollars.”

  “That is insane. Captain Ortega must have had some rich tastes.”

  “And Crimmel had some deep pockets.”

  “So you’re thinking it was something with the hand off in Manhattan?”

  “It had to be.” Rambert sat down behind his desk and watched tractors moving outside.

  “It must’ve been the container the virus was in. Maybe it got damaged before Ortega found it at Medora and he had no idea. Who knows.”

  “You don’t think Crimmel intentionally leaked the virus before he got on the plane?”

  “No, the guy was a money whore, not a terrorist. At least, I think. He could’ve used Virulex to make hundreds of millions more.” Stark watched a dump truck drive by, brimming with bodies.

  Diane quietly walked into the room. “Dr. Stark, I have a letter for you.”

  “A letter? I wouldn’t think the Post Office would be the first government agency to be up and running again.”

  “It was hand delivered.”

  “Oh.” He took the white envelope that simply had his name scrawled on the front and opened it:

  Dr. Stark,

  This is not an apology, it is an offer; I would not make apologies for something I have not done. Three days ago, I successfully cured a fourteen-year-old girl of metastatic melanoma. She had a tumor in her brain the size of a golf ball and it is now gone.

  I invite you, Dr. Stark, to be a part of the next modern age of medicine. I believe your expertise in electromagnetism could be vital in manipulating the nano-virus. We could cure not only every cancer, but be able to target bacteria or viruses anywhere in the human body. We could target the tau proteins that build up in brain cells, curing the world of Alzheimer’s. The potential is limitless.

  A price must always be paid for scientific advancement. This price happens to be a very large one but this work will go on, with or without you.

  I’ll be in touch.

  Dr. Sabin

  The End

&n
bsp; Read on for a free sample of “Six Days With The Dead”

  DAY 1

  ‘Take your sister, Lizzie,’ Carol whispered, as she handed her daughter the baby she had been holding tightly to her chest.

  The 10 year old looked up at her mother, fear clearly written on her young face. Seeing the thing that only that morning had been her loving father, attack nice old Mrs Chilvers from next door had changed her young mind for ever. Something had broken in her, even though she didn’t have the words to explain it.

  The bathroom door banged again, her mother breathing in and out heavily as she put her hands against it. She could see her mother’s hands shaking, leaving bloody prints behind.

  Carol looked down at her daughter, her own fear mirrored in Lizzie’s wide eyes. She didn’t know why Dave had pounced on their neighbour as he had lumbered through the door, his teeth quickly ripping at the old woman’s throat. She had tried to pull him off, the blood making her hands slip. Sooner than she thought possible, Mrs Chilvers struggles became weaker and weaker and then stopped altogether. But Dave kept on chewing, pulling at strips of skin and flesh like he was starving and Mrs Chilvers was a last chance at a meal. And then slowly, he turned his face to her.

  ‘His eyes are wrong,’ she thought.

  As if the flesh in his mouth and the blood over his face weren’t wrong enough, his eyes, white and filmy, looked without seeing, yet they saw her. A hunger she had never seen in those eyes bore into her. He struggled to get up slowly. Carol knew that whatever that man was in front of her, it was not her Dave. This thing, and instinctively she knew that’s just what it was now, a thing, this thing was not her Dave and never would be again.

  It was then that Lizzie’s screams broke through her shocked stillness. Breaking eye contact, she grabbed her daughter and ran to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. With no lock on the door, she knew this was no safe haven. She ran to the cot in the corner, picking up her 3 month old baby.