by Joe McKinney
Painfully, uncertainly, he pulled himself to his feet.
He was exhausted.
The downward pull toward unconsciousness was almost irresistible. But he hadn’t lost his will to live. Not yet.
He turned and limped off toward the EOC.
Mark made his way as fast as he could around the corner of Farish Hall and continued on through the courtyard, past the Cullen Performance Hall and then onto University Drive. The library was up ahead on his right. Glancing around, he saw about forty zombies following him. Some were starting to fall back, but more than a few were keeping pace. A few were even gaining on him. He could probably make it all the way to the parking lot where Captain Shaw was trying to assemble the refugees and put them onto boats, but somehow he doubted it. The entire campus was overrun with zombies. The captain was surrounded the last Mark had heard, and that had been about two hours ago. He’d be doing his impression of Custer at the Little Bighorn by now. And besides, Mark thought bitterly, the way his body was rebelling against him, he’d probably collapse before he made it halfway. And that would mean letting those things tear him apart with their teeth and fingernails. That wasn’t going to happen.
So Mark Eckert ran.
But not wildly. As a kid he’d played with his dog in the surf down at Galveston and he knew how tired you could get running through shallow water if you didn’t pump your knees like pistons when you ran. Up ahead there was a ten-foot-high chain-link fence with a large white sign with red letters—KEEP BACK FIFTY FEET AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY—posted near the gate. All he had to do was get through that gate and lock it. From there, the main office of the EOC was only a short distance away.
The gate was hanging open a few inches. His heart was pounding when he reached it. Every breath made it feel as if he were getting stabbed in the ribs with a pointed stick.
But for as bad as he felt, he stopped and took a quick look back at his pursuers.
The original group of forty or so that had cornered him in the lobby of the art building had thinned out to a long staggered line now.
The nearest zombie was a big white guy in mud-soaked jeans and a T-shirt that hung in bloody rags from his shoulders. Through the tattered shirt Mark could see the man’s white belly glistening. Water drops splashed up around him like white sparks as he charged the fence.
Behind him, maybe ten paces at the most, was another man who was missing one side of his face. The rest were coming up behind them. He could hear them, but he couldn’t see them in the darkness.
He jumped through the gate, spun around, and pulled it closed. Someone had left the padlock dangling from one of the diamond holes in the fence—even when the EOC was in everyday use, they’d been sloppy about locking it. Mark and his fellow officers had joked about the piss-poor security around here more than once, but he was thankful for it now. He fumbled with the padlock, trying to pull it out, but his fingers felt fat and numb. And trying to hurry only made it worse.
The lead zombie was closing on him now, close enough that Mark was getting splashed by the zombie’s awkward movements through the water.
“Come on, come on,” he pleaded with himself. “Come on, damn it.”
And then he had it. The padlock slid off the fence and Mark held it up triumphantly in front of him. He glanced at the zombie, and a chill went through him. The man’s eyes were clouded over, nearly completely white, as though with cataracts. They seemed utterly empty . . . even as the man’s lips drew back, revealing blood-soaked teeth and shredded gums.
Mark swallowed the lump in his throat and then jammed the arm of the padlock down through the latch and locked it.
A moment later the zombie crashed into the gate. He was followed by two more, then a third. Within seconds there were seven, then nine, twelve. And more were appearing at the fence with each passing moment.
Mark backed away from the fence, his head swimming, his vision blurry. He was wincing with every breath. He looked down the row of ruined faces leering vacantly back at him through the fence and he suddenly felt more scared than he had ever been before. At that moment, listening the almost musical clink of fists against the chain-link fence, it suddenly dawned on him just how much trouble he was in.
Earlier in the day, just before sunset, he’d been with a detachment of officers assigned to quell a fight at the field hospital. The four of them had waded into a confused mass of screaming refugees and seen a handful of what looked like drunks taking bites out of one of the nurses. Mark, who was wearing only a paper surgical mask and latex gloves for protection, had thought little of wading into the fight. He pulled the man off the gutted body of the nurse and tried to cuff him. He’d gotten the bite on his shoulder for his trouble. Only then had he realized he and his squad were surrounded by people with ruined faces and bloody mouths and vacant, empty eyes.
He’d managed to fight his way to the lobby of the art building across the quad from the field hospital before they finally pinned him down. Mark had drawn his pistol and screamed commands at the crowd closing in around him, but he hadn’t fired until he saw the gutted nurse from the hospital among their number.
After that, his night had turned into one long rolling gunfight.
But one thought had nagged at him since he was first bitten. At first, while he was still running and shooting, it had been only a feeling, sensed, but not articulated. But the thought was clear as a bell on country Sunday morning now.
Mark Eckert, you are going to die.
“No,” he said aloud. “No, I won’t.”
His fear had fed his denial, keeping the thought of death at arm’s length. But now, as the necrosis filovirus waged war within his veins, he felt a sort of reluctant acceptance pour over him, and his fear slipped away. And with that acceptance came a moment of clarity. In it, he saw clearly what had happened to him, and what would come. The fog in his brain was only the beginning. Soon, maybe in a few minutes, maybe a few hours, he would become like those people out there. His face would look like theirs, the expression vacant but somehow sinister, lips shredded like confetti, ropes of bloody drool hanging from his chin. He would become like them, one of them.
Mark Eckert, you are going to die.
And all at once a memory opened up and he was standing in his parents’ kitchen. His father was off by the refrigerator, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his pants, his eyes pointed down at his shoes, while Mark’s mother turned her back on him and dried her hands on a dish towel over by the sink. He could hear her sniffling back a tear.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she said quietly. She hated the idea of her only child becoming a policeman, especially a Houston policeman, and now that he was standing here in her kitchen with his acceptance letter to the academy in his hand, her anger and fear and hurt were causing her to lash out with tears.
“Mom, it’s a good job,” he said. “No matter how bad the economy gets, the job will still be there for me. And cops make good money these days.”
“You have a master’s degree, Mark,” she snapped back. There was a look on her face as if he had just tracked across her kitchen floor with something nasty on his shoes. “You can get a real job. One that doesn’t involve getting shot at by drug dealers and”—and here her face puckered so that it looked as if she was spitting out the next words—“wife beaters.”
“Mom, with a degree I can promote fast. I could go as high as I want to. I could even use this to go into politics.”
“You could get shot,” she said, and turned to her husband, who had been conspicuously silent since Mark broke the news. “Say something, James. For God’s sake, he’s going to get himself shot.”
James Eckert was a pediatric dentist who had told his son on more than one occasion that the federal government had fucked up health care so badly that he would not wish a career in medicine on his worst enemy. And Mark wasn’t sure about this, but he had a sneaking suspicion that his father was secretly thrilled about his son becoming a cop. It was a chan
ce to live a life of action and adventure vicariously through his son. Mark would later get confirmation of this, for when he got out of the academy and was working the evening shift in Houston’s gang-addled Second Ward, his father made him call him every night, regardless of the time he got home, and regale him with stories of fights and car chases and crazy calls.
But for now, the problem was his mother.
“Well,” she said. “Tell him.”
“Listen, Gina,” he’d said in that slow, measured way he had of talking when he knew he was about to piss his wife off, “I’m not really sure it’s such a bad idea. He’s a tough kid. He’s a smart—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” she’d screamed. Then she’d thrown her dish towel on the counter and stormed out.
Mark looked at his father and waited.
The next words out of his father’s mouth weren’t entirely unexpected. “You’ve thought this through, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s what you want to do. You know it’ll break her heart.”
“Dad . . .”
“No,” his father had said, “hold up for a second. I want to tell you some good news and some bad.”
A pause.
“Okay,” Mark had finally said.
“The bad news first. Somewhere right around forty, you get tired. Your hair gets gray, your belly gets fat, your muscles soft. Work is hard. It grinds you down. Some days, all you want to do is say fuck it all and take a nap. That’s when your will, your drive, call it whatever you want, takes over. That’s when you decide when you’re going to be a success or a failure. The success stories . . . those are the ones with the will to work beyond the body’s exhaustion.”
“Okay,” Mark said hesitantly. None of that made sense, but okay. “So what’s the good news?”
“Well, the good news is that you’ve got today. You’ve got your health and strength and your looks and your flat belly. Revel in it, Mark. Seize the day. If you want be a cop, son, that’s fine. . . . Just promise me that you’ll be a damn good one.”
“I will, Dad.”
“Good. Your mom’s going to be pissed as an old wet hen for a good long while, but she’ll get over it. Just make sure you remember she loves you more than her own life. That’s why she’s so mad.”
Mark nodded soberly.
“And son?”
“Yeah, Dad?”
“Do me a favor and try not to get shot.”
The memory faded slowly. It was easy, he found, to shut off his conscious mind and let himself float. Too easy. But even as he tried to focus, he found that his body didn’t want to comply. Everything ached now. He’d had the flu two years before, shortly after getting assigned to Captain Shaw’s team at the EOC, and the way he was feeling now was a lot like the worst part of the fever back then.
It was seeing the zombie falling off the top of the fence to his right that finally got him moving again. A large tree had fallen across the fence there and bent it back and a few of the zombies had already found a way to crawl up and over the chain-link slope. Two more fell off the top of the fence. More were climbing over.
“Shit,” he said. “Gotta go.”
He turned and pulled himself slowly toward the library.
The water was two feet deep inside the library. The only light came from the mini LED flashlight he kept on his gun belt, and that light bounced constantly around the darkened hallways as he struggled to control his movements. Even through the haze in his brain he was aware of the sickeningly sweet odor of open sewage and rotting bodies.
He found four of them in the main ops room.
Two were policeman he couldn’t recognize because they’d been partially eaten and because decomposition had set in. The other two were civilians with bullet holes in their faces.
Mark Eckert pulled one of the dead policemen aside and sat down at the laptop where the man had died. Miraculously, the thing still worked. Briefly, it occurred to him that he had expected it to work. He had no Plan B. He fired it up, activated the video feed feature he had set up for Captain Shaw earlier in the day, and started talking.
“My name is Mark Eckert. I’m a Houston police officer assigned to the Emergency Operations Command. My direct supervisor is Sergeant Eleanor Norton and above her Captain Mark Shaw. I don’t know if either of them are still alive so . . . oh God, it’s hard to think.”
Mark swallowed with obvious difficulty and then took a deep breath and went on.
“I don’t know who’s still alive and who’s dead. A lot of people are dead. I think I’ll be dead here pretty soon. But I guess . . . hell, I don’t know, seeing as I’m not dead yet and they probably are I guess that makes me the one in charge. Wahoo!” He raised a not-quite-clenched fist into the air. “Hear that, Mom? I made it to the top after all. Go me.”
Here, on the video, Mark can be seen to sag visibly into himself. He tries to laugh, but then he begins to cough. The coughs are violent and painful-sounding. They go on for thirty-seven seconds. Several large flecks of black blood are hacked up onto the screen.
But Mark is a strong kid, as his dad once told him, and eventually he pulls himself together and focuses on the screen once again.
“Let’s see . . . oh, yeah . . . we’ve got zombies here. How do you like that? It’s pretty screwed up, actually. It’s not anything like the movies we all saw.”
He leans forward, smiling, sort of, as only one side of his mouth manages to curl upward. The other sags like the curiously limp arm at his side. In the short few sentences he’s spoken his voice has taken on a whiskey roughness.
“They’re dead,” he says in a mock stage whisper. “You can shoot ’em, burn ’em, cut ’em . . . you name it. If it’ll kill you, it’ll kill them. The only thing is, they don’t know it. You can see ’em walking around with their guts hanging out of their belly and gunshot wounds to the face, and they don’t know they’re supposed to lie down and die. But hey, whatcha gonna do?”
He falls back in his chair, still staring at the screen (and later, several commentators would note that he never blinked, not once) and gives the audience that half-formed smile again.
“Don’t come and rescue us,” he says. “It would be suicide for you. Let us die and make this city our tomb. Hell, we’re already dead. We just don’t know it yet. Sorry about that, Mom and Dad. I guess I went and got myself dead after all.”
He laughs suddenly, a demented sound accompanied by another round of hacking coughs.
“Wow, I really messed that promise up, I guess.”
He leans forward and wipes a spot of blood from screen. Then he looks at it on the tip of his finger and his nose wrinkles in disgust.
“Okay,” he says, and he’s obviously giving it everything he’s got just to rally up the strength for this last part of his warning, “here’s the deal. We got overrun by . . . wait. We got . . . okay, I’m . . . Mom, I love you. Dad, I love you, too. Please don’t be mad. I didn’t want this. I didn’t . . .”
And there’s no more on the audio track.
But there is more video.
Mark’s head falls back against the chair, and he remains motionless for twelve seconds. Then he raises his head, and when he does, his eyes have glazed over with a white, cloudy film. His mouth is slack. His face has taken on an emptiness that a few conspiracy theorists attempt to blame on withdrawal from heroin.
But Mark Eckert is no junkie.
He rises from his chair and slowly turns around. And as he walks off into the darkness, he has no idea if his message reached anyone. He has no idea that his video, though initially denied and dismissed as a hoax by the White House, has in fact been posted to the Internet and gone viral like nothing before it. He has no idea that within twenty-four hours his video will be watched more than half a billion times.
He has no idea that he is the first zombie rock star.
And he has no idea that his simple and poignant farewell to his mom and dad will become the clincher that will even
tually cause his government to seal more than six million people behind a quarantine wall that stretches from Gulf-port, Mississippi, to Brownsville, Texas.
Some people get their fifteen minutes and never know it.
CHAPTER 13
As it turned out, Brent Shaw had crawled off and gotten drunk, just as Anthony suspected. Anthony finally found him curled up on a couch in the lobby of the Cullen Performance Hall, a bottle of vodka cradled to his chest like a child’s favorite toy. He was sobbing in his sleep.
Anthony called his name and shook him, gently at first, and then, when he still wouldn’t wake up, more brutally, finally kicking him out of frustration.
“Get up, Brent. We got work to do.”
Brent sat up groggily and only looked at him for a moment. He blinked, and Anthony could see that behind the screen of drunkenness, his older brother was terrified.
“What’s wrong with you, Brent? Jesus Christ, we got work to do.”
Brent sniffled. He had tried to meet his little brother’s gaze, but quickly turned away. He seemed uncertain, still frightened. Fumbling drunkenly, he’d tried to unscrew the cap on his bottle of vodka.
Anthony watched the display with mounting disgust.
“Gimme that,” he finally said, and snatched the bottle from his brother’s hands. He threw it against the wall and it exploded with a muffled pop, the liquid spreading down over a poster advertising a student-run production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming that was fated now to never see the stage.
Brent had watched the bottle fly, his hands still outstretched, with a strangled cry eking from his throat.
“Why did you . . . ?” he managed to say.
“Shut up!” Anthony screamed. “You drunken shit. Get up. Come on, get up!”
But Brent could only manage an inarticulate groan.
The sight of his brother sitting there, stupefied by vodka, unable to speak, was like a red haze dropping over Anthony’s mind. The anger rose up in him so suddenly, so powerfully, so like his father, that he was hardly aware of when he started slapping Brent’s face. He was only aware of the anger coursing through him. He was grinding his teeth in rage, grunting with every ferocious slap he raked across Brent’s cheek.