This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial)

by Robert Chazz Chute

  “Oh, shit! Four!” The doctor leapt at her and planted the heel of his shoe in the middle of her chest. She flew back against the wall and a satisfying streak of blood smeared the brick behind her skull.

  “Three!” he said, but his heart was hammering and he was out of breath. He looked back as he reached the mouth of the alley and the three infected ghouls were closer than he expected. He only had one last burst of speed born of terror left in him, but after that? What?

  He guessed the best he could do was to try to make it to the marina and jump in the water. Then he’d find out if zombies could swim as well as they could run.

  Sinjin-Smythe looked forward just in time. It was a wonder he managed to avoid getting hit by the speeding truck. He threw himself sideways and rolled, scraping his knees and elbows raw and bloody.

  The truck rolled over the man in the doorman’s uniform first. The van’s rear wheels tore the coat and pants off the infected man and left him dead and nearly naked. The van’s grill hit Sinjin-Smythe’s remaining two pursuers. They flew back and van’s tires screeched and skidded as the vehicle rocked to a stop. In the moonlight, he made out the insignia on the side of the truck. His rescuer drove a delivery van from Harrods.

  Sinjin-Smythe fell back, too bruised and exhausted to stand. Should have run more and done less tennis, he thought.

  When he looked up, a small, brown man held a sledgehammer high over his head, poised to bring it down on his head. Sinjin-Smythe tucked into a fetal position and screamed. “Don’t!”

  The moment passed.

  “You’re a surprise.”

  The doctor looked up cautiously.

  “Sorry, mate. Thought you were one of them.”

  The man held out his hand. Sinjin-Smythe took it and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. “I almost killed you twice,” the man said. “Where are you headed?”

  “That way,” Sinjin-Smythe pointed. “To St. Katherine’s docks. There’s a boat waiting.”

  “Then it’s good I almost killed you, mate.” The man pointed in the opposite direction. “St. Kat’s Marina is that way.”

  “Then I think you could say you saved my life three times over. I’m Craig.” They shook hands.

  “I am Aadi.”

  “Do you usually run over crazed infected people in your lorry, Aadi?”

  “It’s a new hobby, but I had to clear the area before I dared to get out of the truck. It’s worse uptown. You should have seen the masses and mobs around Knightsbridge this morning.”

  “Glad I didn’t.” The doctor glanced at the man’s jacket. It was a dark blue and he made out the words Harrods Security in white stitching. “Why were you ‘clearing the area’ exactly?”

  Aadi smiled. “I stand for safety and security. Gotta get a boat, man. My friend and me and my daughters — ”

  A scream rose from behind them. A zombie, one of the women Aadi hit with his delivery van, was not dead enough.

  Aadi ran forward with his sledge, but before he could get there, the truck lurched forward and slammed into the infected woman. Whoever was driving the van kept their foot on the accelerator, crushing the monster against the brick wall. The zombie’s compressed lungs didn’t allow it to scream. Instead, it pushed uselessly at the truck’s hood.

  The infected woman looked up. Aadi moved to put her out of her misery with his weapon. She looked up toward the stars and, in a grisly display under the van’s bright headlights, her eyeballs burst from her sockets. When the dead woman collapsed forward, her head bounced and rang off the metal.

  The large black woman sitting at the wheel rolled down the driver’s window as Sinjin-Smythe ran up. She was crying. Aadi reached through the window and patted her shoulder. “Craig, this is Dayo. Dayo saved your life, too. My daughters are in the back.”

  Two young girls cried in the rear of the truck.

  “You all have my thanks,” Sinjin-Smythe said.

  “Your thanks is nice, mate, but what we need is your bloody boat.”

  “Of course. Come with me. I need a security force and you’re it. If I don’t get across the Atlantic with this” — Sinjin-Smythe slapped his briefcase — “we’re all zombies.”

  Dayo frowned and wiped her tears with the back of her sleeve. “That sounds mad, but after today…”

  “The situation is mad. I’m not. From the last reports I saw, Sutr-X is killing about 60% of the world’s population. If I don’t get to America, the remaining 40 percent will turn into crazed cannibals like that.”

  An involuntary reflex made the pinned corpse shudder and Dayo, Aadi and the doctor shrieked in unison. The zombie’s mouth opened in a riot of jagged teeth.

  Season 1, Episode 5

  Beware wolves at the door.

  History shows they huff, puff and blow your house down two-thirds of the time.

  ~ Notes from The Last Cafe

  Here we sit in Death's Cafe

  The dentist wasn’t waiting at the dock where he was supposed to be. Worse, his 24-foot sailboat wasn’t there, either. Sinjin-Smythe cursed. “The bastard left without me.” He glanced down at Aadi’s children, embarrassed. The girls, Aastha and Aasa, were six and seven. They had been left behind in a city crawling with the infected, as well. Sinjin-Smythe looked to the girls’ father. “Sorry, Aadi.”

  “Don’t be sorry, doctor. Fix it.”

  Sinjin-Smythe shrugged. “I don’t know how to sail, either. Even if I knew how to steal a ship, I’d run us aground before we cleared the river.”

  Dayo scanned the shoreline, shifting her great weight from side to side. “We have to get out of here before sunrise. If those things find us, we’ll be torn apart. Let’s figure out how to steal a boat. I don’t care if it’s a paddleboat.” She glanced at the little girls. “If it comes down to it, I’d rather drown.”

  Aasa, the seven-year-old, tugged on her father’s sleeve. “You want to go to America, Daddy?”

  Aadi frowned. “Yes, darling. That’s what we’re trying to work out.”

  “Don’t people take an airplane if they want to fly there? I want to go in an airplane.”

  Dayo and Aadi looked to Sinjin-Smythe, but he shook his head.

  “It’s a great idea but for two problems. I’d be a worse pilot than I am a sailor and we’re officially in a red zone. All flights have been grounded except for military jets. Any planes leaving British airspace will be shot down. I don’t have the clearance to get us out.”

  “How can they do that? We’re rats in a trap.” Dayo paced and her voice shook. “This can’t be happening. I thought the regular plague was quite bad enough.”

  “I’m sorry. I begged my CDC contact not to go from green to red, but the protocol is, as soon as a new Level One outbreak variant is declared, that’s the way it is. As far as the World Health Organization is concerned, the British Isles are gangrenous and you have to lose the arm to save the body. In a small boat, we’ll have a chance to escape, but my understanding is, any plane caught on radar will be blown out of the sky.”

  “It’s monstrous,” Dayo said. “They condemn the uninfected and the infected alike.”

  Sinjin-Smythe scanned the Thames up and down, hoping to spot another boat that would suit their needs. He didn’t think houseboats would fair well in the North Atlantic’s high swells. “I remember being in a meeting in Atlanta. Some military men came in and it was all very hush hush. They talked about all kinds of scenaria. This was one of those projections. I didn’t give it a moment’s thought. I just dismissed it with confidence that it would never come to this. Now there are nineteen or twenty ships out there, trying to keep the infection in, trying to stop the red from bleeding all over the map.”

  Dayo held a length of lumber. Sinjin-Smythe wanted to take it from her and go bash some zombie heads. He’d die, but he’d feel more useful.

  “What if we got a plane and headed north or south?”

  “Same problem. If British jets didn’t get us, the French woul
d. Getting hold of a boat was enough of a long shot.”

  Aadi stepped close. “Craig. You’re sounding very defeatist and I’ve got two scared little girls here. I don’t have time for your tone. I told you to fix this and you will. You’re the smart insider. How does a fellow with a name like Sinjin-Smythe not know how to bloody sail?”

  The doctor took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I was never a joiner, I guess. The other kids were in sailing clubs. I played with a microscope and a chemistry set. I’m out of ideas.”

  A man’s voice whispered from the darkness. “I have an idea.”

  Dayo whirled, lumber at the ready. “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Neil McInerney. Keep calm and please do shut up.”

  “Easy, everyone. It’s my dentist.”

  An older, balding man in glasses stepped out of the shadows carrying a long boat hook. “Those things are very sensitive to sound. If they hear you, they’ll come for us. We had some trouble on the way here. Whatever this is, it’s like mass psychosis. I’ve never seen its like.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. McInerney. Your boat isn’t in its slip,” the virologist said miserably. “I assume someone stole it.”

  “They did. No matter. It’s catch-as-catch-can. My wife and I stole a better one.”

  * * *

  “Excuse me. What’s your name, Miss?”

  The young woman looked up slowly from her iPad. At first glance the man was dressed casually, but his shoes alone were worth more than all her possessions. She knew this from years of serving men like him. “My name is Lijon, sir.”

  “I’ve never known a Lijon. Where are you from?” His smile revealed perfectly even teeth that gleamed white. His accent said he’d been educated at Eton and Oxford.

  “The Marshall Islands.”

  “Marshall Islands? I think I’ve been just about everywhere but I’ve never heard of them. Where’s that?”

  “You’ve probably heard of the Bikini Atoll where the United States government performed sixty-seven nuclear tests in the atmosphere? There. Everyone has seen the atmosphere detonation tests on film. My mother and father saw them in person.”

  “Wow. You’re a long way from home.” He glanced at his watch. It was platinum with diamonds set in its face at twelve, three, six and nine.

  “It was better for me to leave, sir. I do love Dublin, but I emigrated here as a little girl in the hope that I wouldn’t get stomach cancer like my parents did from the terrible radiation.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, but his charming mask did not change. “Listen, Dijon — ”

  “Excuse me. Lijon, sir.”

  “Yes, Lijon. Very well. Do you know who I am?”

  She tapped the identity card clipped to the lanyard around his neck with her scanner. The machine let out a sharp beep and she read the liquid crystal display. She looked for his name on the list on her iPad. “Yes, sir. Edwin George Stanhope. You’re in the correct boarding area. I’ll let you know when we’re ready for you and your family.”

  Stanhope cleared his throat and stiffened. “Here’s the thing, Lijon. I received an evacuation call. A bunch of executives from our company did, in fact. The ones who lived in central London haven’t arrived.”

  “Sadly, I’m sure they won’t be joining you. You were very lucky, sir.”

  “Luck’s not something I believe in. I’ve been hiding out in a concrete bunker waiting for Sutr to pass and now the whole country has gone crazy. We thought it would be economic collapse or race riots. I can’t believe we ended up in hiding from this sort of madness.” He pulled back his suede jacket to reveal an oil company emblem over his breast pocket. His shirt was a fine, white linen. “The thing is, we all paid a lot of money in advance on the chance we’d need to be evacuated in this situation. My family and I are anxious to get aboard the big ship. That’s what we paid for with all those heaping sums.”

  “Yes, I’m sure permanent residency on the Mars will be very exciting for you,” she said. “Until then, this container ship is the Gaian Commander.”

  “After some things I’ve heard, we want you to put us aboard this thing now. Also, we couldn’t help but notice this is a container ship. Where is the bloody ship I paid for? Where is the Mars?”

  “Don’t worry, sir. The Mars is the world’s most expensive condominium cruise ship. It’s safe in international waters. This is merely the evacuation ship to accommodate people like you. We have to get outside the military barricade first.”

  “I paid handsomely for clearance to get us on that ship. Isn’t there another ship to take us faster and more comfortably? No offence, but this ship looks like a rusty scow to me.”

  Coming in low out of the night sky, a jet helicopter swung in fast to land on the Gaian Commander’s helipad. Lijon had to raise her voice to be heard above the rotors’ din.

  “We will rendezvous with the Mars in Reykjavik!”

  “Reykjavik?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Stanhope!” Lijon put a soft hand on his arm and leaned close to his ear. “We do it this way for your security. You’ll find your transport ship is quite deceptive. The comforts aboard aren’t what you imagine. Soon you’ll see what all that money bought you, I promise.”

  The moment passed and the man relented as the big helicopter’s rotors wound down. “Alright, then. But can’t you at least get us on the bloody scow so we can pick out a good bunk?”

  Lijon glanced at her iPad. “I’ll call you in order, sir.”

  “Excuse me, but what’s the order?”

  “We’re waiting on a bus full of bankers, actually. The bankers must board first. They get the first choice and best cabin assignments. Passengers board in order of priority and you are not our first priority…sir.”

  “Lijon, before this is over, I’m going to make sure you stay right here for that remark.” Stanhope leaned closer. She thought the man might strike her. “I hope you love Dublin as much when it’s overrun by those psychotic cannibals.”

  He stalked back to a cluster of executives and stood glaring at her as he spoke to his fellows.

  Lijon turned back to her post. Lijon’s eyes widened as she spotted a beautiful pregnant woman in a blood-red dress, high above her and standing at the rail. A moment later, she heard that same woman’s voice on the radio receiver tucked in her ear.

  “Do you have a report on our investors, Sister Lijon?”

  “Two-hundred, twenty-six accounted for with a bus of fifteen more on the way from the Shannon airport. The piggies are restless but well-behaved, Dear Sister.”

  “Good. I like my piggies anxious for the slaughter,” Shiva replied.

  We are the zombie's reluctant buffet

  Bently pushed Oliver forward. The old man stumbled as they walked into the Spencers’ house. A drunk man lurched past them. He wore a ripped white wedding dress. “Liquor’s under the sink.” He pointed vaguely with a shaky hand that held an opened bottle of red wine. The drunk wandered to the front step, looked up at the moon and howled.

  The living room was surprisingly bright. Three gas lanterns threw circles of white light across the long room. Bently used his rifle as a prod to slam his prisoner against a wall. A picture of Theo, Jack, Anna and Jaimie rattled by Oliver’s head. Bently shoved the old man against the wall again and the picture fell. Shattered glass from the portrait’s frame skittered across the floor.

  “That glass will never come out of that area rug, dude,” Bently said. “Now, to business. Where you keeping that sweet young thing?”

  Oliver smelled the little rat man’s hot breath and recoiled.

  “Where is she? You can introduce us, right?”

  “I don’t know where she is,” Oliver said.

  Bently hit him just above the kidneys with the edge of the rifle butt.

  Oliver would have sunk to his knees but Bently used the rifle again, this time pushing him up by the back of the skull. He forced the old man to stand, pinning him to the wall.

  �
��Where are you hiding her? Which house?You might as well give her up. We’re doing this whole neighborhood tonight and I’m sure you didn’t hide her far away. She’s too pretty to be far away.”

  Bently leaned in close, whispering in Oliver’s ear. “We checked the old lady’s house. She’s not there. You keeping that family over at your house still? I’m sure you are. You could have moved them farther. Should have. But that’s where they are aren’t they?”

  Oliver turned to look Bently in the eye. “You already know where they are. You’re asking me questions just so you can hit me. Is this foreplay? You aren’t my type.”

  Bently punched Oliver in the kidney and the old man cried out. Bently leaned in close again. His breath smelled of rot. “No, not just so I can hit you. I could do that, anyway. I want you to tell me. I want you to give them up. I want you to betray them, old man. Then maybe we’ll get some cans of soup and bash your face in. That was a good con. That family trusted you. Now I get to play. Just for fun.”

  Tears ran down Oliver’s cheeks. He wondered if, when he eventually died, he would suffer enough that he’d see heaven. Would his old lover, Steve, be waiting for him with consoling words in a peaceful place that never knew disease or cruelty?

  Someone cackled behind them. Bently turned Oliver around, now holding the rifle’s muzzle under the old man’s throat. Two large middle-aged men in green camouflage jackets, blue jeans and new, white tennis sneakers stood across the living room, each holding a bottle of beer. It wasn’t just that they wore the same clothes that marked their resemblance. They were twins. “The front door was locked,” said one. He held up his rifle. “But this key opens all locks. Where’s this pretty girl Bently’s been telling us about?”

  “Slow down and save me some beer!” Bently said.

  “You’re so little,” one of the men said, “you won’t need much.”

  Bently pushed Oliver toward the top of the basement stairs. “Jackson! Jackson!”

  A shirtless teenager appeared. Jackson was covered in tattoos and his head was shaved. He held a long crowbar with the tips painted yellow.