I Zombie I [Omnibus Edition]

by Jack Wallen

  The food in the building had already been ravished, but there were still scraps and crumbs to be found on the floor. She knelt down and began picking up anything edible to shove into her dirty, starving mouth. Her fingers tasted of filth, but it was somewhat reassuring to know she still held the capacity to taste.

  She went about her scrounging silently until she spied a glorious, unpeeled orange nestled gently under a bag of rotten potatoes. When she cradled the valuable find in her palms the tears began. It had been weeks since she had tasted a piece of fresh fruit, days since she had nearly enough to call a meal. From the well-spring of tears came the sobs that gave her away to the monster. She was so busy basking in the orange glow of the fruit she didn’t even notice the moaner behind her, its rotten maw about to bite down on her skull.

  The woman didn’t put up much of a fight. Once the zombie had her on the floor of the cafe, her head was just a few cracks to the cement floor from splitting open, spilling out the “life-giving” nectar and sweet meat.

  As her skull cracked her vision began to tunnel. The last thing the woman would ever see was the bright orange rolling across the floor.

  Blog Entry: 12/3/2015 11:49 PM

  Paris, France. The city of lights. The city of love. The city that beckons every romantic soul to taste of its special flavor of life. When you dream of Paris, it is so easy to get lost in some romantic notion that someday you would arrive, sporting your best beret and black, and be swept off your feet by a soul-mate ready to spend the rest of forever locked in your love’s embrace.

  We will always have Paris.

  Or so we thought. That sickeningly sweet romantic dream was recently shot to hell when Armageddon decided it was time to pull the trigger of the “fuck you” gun and blow the world’s collective brain matter across the painted sky. It wasn’t just the dream of Paris that was crushed. Every dream is now either dead or dying. The world, our world, is crumbling around us and its people are evolving into monsters.

  Unless you’ve been lucky enough to live hermetically sealed in a bomb shelter, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You may not yet know why this is happening, but you know without question that everything has changed. The food chain has a new member and the human race no longer perches safely at the top. We are now the hunted and not the hunter.

  If you have no idea what I’m talking about, or if you want to know the big “why”, I suggest you read the closest thing we have to a handbook for the Apocalypse. I am, of course, referring to the journal of the late Jacob Plummer. It’s called “I Zombie I”. You can download it from this very site. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do and do so right away. Read it carefully…as if your very life depended on it. Why? Because it just may.

  What happened to Jacob could happen to anyone. My guess is that it might well happen to everyone eventually. A single bite from a moaner or screamer is a sure-fire, one-way ticket to Zombieville.

  That’s right. Zombies. The undead. Moaners. Screamers. Call them what you will, but they are the new majority leaders and they don’t want your vote. What they do want is your brain. And when they get to you, you’re dead. And by dead I mean undead. One of them. If you’re one of them, you’re not one of us. And if you’re not one of us, you’re the enemy and must be killed.

  If you are bitten, the change could happen instantly or it could take weeks. But that trip to Zombieville will happen, you can count on that. Trust me, you do not want to take that journey. I witnessed it firsthand. I saw the man I loved fall down that rabbit hole and not return. It took Jacob a few weeks to go from human to brain-sucking-undead, and you cannot even fathom the pain he endured.

  In the end, Jacob was a hero. He is the reason I made it out of Munich alive. But in the end… in the end it was me who shot him. It was the single worst thing I have ever done in my life. But I had to do it. I watched a man I made love with turn into a monster. And then…I put a bullet in his head. Had I not, I would now be suffering the same fate and the only hope the human race has of climbing out of this nightmare alive would be forever lost.

  Thankfully I am not alone. I have in my care a young girl named Susan who is somewhere around the age of ten. Just before I shot Jacob he infected Susan. He grabbed the poor girl and clamped his teeth onto her arm, biting through the flesh. As the blood pumped from her veins Jacob looked at me with those awful, sour-milk eyes (eyes that had once been so beautiful) and begged me to take his life.

  I’m not sure what to do with Susan. The question “Should I put her out of her misery?” keeps popping into my head. Could you? Could you put a bullet between eyes of an innocent young girl? I can’t. The thought merely has to tickle my brain before I feel like retching. So instead, I have Susan sedated, hoping it will buy me some time until I find a cure for the plague that has ripped humanity to shreds.

  A cure… that’s right. In my possession is an encrypted file I hope will contain a cure for what I have dubbed the “Mengele Virus”. I believe, with every molecule in my brain, that the world’s only hope rests in the contents of that file. My only hurdle is the encryption. I’m a hacker of certain repute and I have never seen crypto the likes of which is securing that data. Someone wanted to make sure whatever is hidden in the file remains hidden. But I will crack it. I have to. And when I do, I am going to need help. A chemist, a biologist, a doctor…anyone who might know how to manipulate molecules and might want to help salvage the earth’s population. If that person is you, please reach me as soon as possible.

  If you do decide to make that pilgrimage, know this; the world has become a biological nightmare. You risk death (or worse) just by opening your door. If your heart still beats and you fear for your life, lock your doors and windows and hide deep within the bowels of your home. But if your life has become meaningless among the new world order, or if your only purpose is driven by an insane desire to help others, then please get here as quickly and quietly as you can. I need as much help as possible.

  By the way, I’m in a hospital in Paris. Val de-Grace. I and my little group of survivors made it here by train, the only means of transportation we could find out of Munich. What should have been an overnight trip, took us about a week, thanks to running into hordes of the undead and crowds of starving, rioting, living humans. As much as I am ashamed to admit this, we couldn’t save them. With only food enough for a few, we had to make a hard choice to not take anyone on board. At the moment our goal is to get into the Mengele File and create a cure for the rot that has taken over the planet.

  Right now I’m sitting on the roof hoping to hear the sounds of another human echoing off the stone walls of the neighboring buildings. It’s evening. The ash has finally stopped falling and the sky is clear. I can see the stars. I never thought I would see them again and it is quite the lovely sight. One could be easily lulled into thinking everything was okay. I could step outside and enjoy my life again. Don’t be fooled. The minute you let your guard down a moaner or screamer will bite your face off and that’s it, lights out, you’re dead!

  But at this very moment, darkness has enveloped the city of lights, hiding from sight the gray blanket of ashen death that has covered the land. A soothing quiet has fallen peacefully onto the city that used to never sleep.

  That was short lived. Every now and then a scream echoes up from the streets below, but it’s hard to tell if the scream is human or zombie. That really sucks the desire to save right out of your marrow.

  I suppose I should tuck myself deep within the heart of the hospital and get some sleep. Every day is long and challenging now, so rest is at a premium. The big downside of sleep is that the images of the horror I have seen plague my dreams. I have seen the bullet push itself through the skin of Jacob’s forehead and crack through his skull in slow motion over and over. The haunting image of Dr. Lindsay Godwin shattering the bones in his hands in an attempt to break through inch-thick plexi in order to get to the sweet meats in our heads, threatens my nightmares. Zombies eating zom
bies, zombies eating babies, blood, viscera…it’s all there, waiting for my eyelids to seal out the world and sleep to overcome my senses. But when sleep does come it is fitful at best.

  I plan on documenting everything I see and do and posting it all here on my blog. Learn from my successes and mistakes so we can survive what could easily be the end of the human race. Hopefully I will soon have a cure for this shit storm that has sucker-punched the planet. When I do, you will be the first to know.

  My name is Bethany Nitshimi. I have information that could lead to the cure for the Mengele Virus. Find me. Help me.

  Blog Entry: 12/04/2015 9:10 am

  Waking up in absolute darkness wreaks havoc on the senses. My body clock is so far off it may never right itself. I could have slept through an entire day and not known it. Fortunately, I didn’t. I slept nearly nine hours, which is shocking, since sleep is such a hard commodity to come by now. With the echoing screams in the distance, the constant fears one of the undead will dine on my unaware brain, and the lack of a bed, it’s amazing sleep ever tickles the inside of my eyelids. Last night was an exception. Exhaustion has a way of playing favorites with your needs. And for once, since the virus hit, the nightmares didn’t bother to sneak in and haunt what fragile bits of sanity I have left. In fact, I can’t even remember what I dreamed about. In this moment of so little joy, that was a blessing. After such a long, deep sleep I should have awakened refreshed and ready to take on the day. In light of the current situation, that is completely laughable. So instead, the morning only brings more exhaustion.

  The first task of the day was to check email. I set up an email server on the hospital network so I could allow the outside world to communicate with me. It was a stroke of good fortune the hospital had a working T-1 line, so my needs for plenty of bandwidth were fulfilled. Besides, having access to my best friend, Google, will come in handy for just about everything from medical information to weapons of zombie mass destruction.

  A second server was kind enough to play host to my blog and, at some point, will also include a forum. I want to encourage as much communication as possible. What’s left of the human race will be desperate for even a glimmer of hope. If the few living humans are able to communicate with one another, they can connect and begin rebuilding communities.

  That idealism gets flushed down the metaphorical toilet if I don’t crack the Mengele file and find a cure. Said cure is my primary focus.

  Before I began the job of sifting through email a visit to Susan’s side is necessary. The girl is under constant sedation.

  Not surprisingly, one of my other companions, an older German gentleman, was a medic in the army during his younger days, and he remembered enough about sedation that he could put Susan under. His name is Gunther and he stands sentinel, as the Father Figure among our little group. He is constant calm in a world of swirling chaos. Of course, the conspiracy theorist in the back of my mind wonders why Gunther neglected to mention he had served in the German military. Dare I say ‘note to self’?

  I assumed keeping Susan just under the surface of conscience would hold off the virus from taking over; at least in theory. To be honest, I have no idea what the 24/7 sedation will do to her health. For all I know she could be slowly dying and just out of help’s reach.

  “Good morning, Susan. Did you sleep well?” My softly whispered greeting to an unresponsive Susan woke Sally, who was sit-sleeping by the sedated girl’s bedside.

  I might have neglected to mention Sally. She hooked up with our original group shortly before Jacob went full-moaner and perished at my hand. Sally is a newscaster. I suppose it’s more fitting to say she was a newscaster, as there are no more television stations actually broadcasting. The signals are still there, the people necessary to actually make television happen, on the other hand, have all probably filmed their last scene.

  Sally’s not bad. In fact, I have to say she’s become my only real friend now. At first I thought her a bit shallow, but when she told me her life story on the train ride to France, a story which included caring for her multiple sclerosis-stricken brother and pretty much supporting her entire family, I realized I had judged her book by her all-too-pretty cover.

  “I slept for shit. What about you?” I tried to add a level of jest to my voice to lighten the fact that the situation, from every possible angle, was utterly and completely fucked.

  “Thanks to a nice little prescription I had filled before the world popped, I slept just fine.” Sally’s eyes were slightly glazed over, making me wonder what said prescription could have been.

  Susan could have easily sat up and sided with Sally. Instead she lay in her bed, in the same position she was in when I last saw her. The medication worked wonders; she looked calm, at peace. I envied her that.

  “Is it safe keeping her out like this?” Sally reminded me of my concern for the girl. “We really need to find a doctor.”

  Could anything be more obvious at the moment? A fraction of me wanted to bitch-slap Sally for reminding me of that painfully apparent fact, but the truth of the matter is, she’s right. We needed a doctor and we needed one sooner rather than later. My original plan was to cast out the net and hope the fish swam right in, but that plan was obviously way too passive. I had to figure out a means to find someone who could care for Susan while I continued my work on the Mengele file, and I needed to do this right away.

  “What if we had the phone numbers for all of the doctors employed by this hospital?”

  I stopped instantly, staring at Sally hard enough to peel the little remaining eye shadow from her eyelids.

  “I know, I know…we don’t have their numbers.”

  Sally had no idea, but I was staring in disbelief that a seemingly ditzy TV personality type had arrived at such a simple, yet brilliant plan ahead of me. That’s right, even amid the Apocalypse, ego was still capable of driving the human being forward into dark, angry places.

  “Do you know something I don’t?” Sally asked, seeing the smile creeping across my face.

  “I know there are computers here that probably have HR records stored on their drives. I also know how easy it can be to get around HIPAA compliance. That phone list is as good as ours.” As soon as I finished the last word, I turned to leave Susan’s room, but not before I flashed a smile and offered up a thank you to the woman.

  I had to admit it was nice to finally do something. Even though we’ve only been here a few days, I feel like I’ve done nothing. That is not my style. As I said, I’m a hacker…I have a compulsion to always feel like I am accomplishing something, anything. And while Sally watches over our ward, I will gather intel on the doctors that are - or rather were - employed at Val de-Grace hospital in Paris, France and drag one of them back.

  It didn’t take long to find a PC begging to be cracked. The nearest nurses’ station had four little desktops haphazardly arranged on a large U-shaped desk. Each PC had power and had a password-protected screen saver – thank you HIPAA. Passwords are so funny. You would think that by now the population would have wizened up and used a bit more logic in the choice of passwords. But no, a hacker can crack the average password in no time. It was usually a date, a name, a phone number, or (in some really sad cases) just the word “password”. I generally try the latter first and fifty percent of the time I hit pay dirt.

  I sat down at the first desktop and began typing the word password when all hell broke loose. From Susan’s room an ear-splitting scream slashed through the air space between us. Without hesitation, I stood and ran back to the room.

  When I arrived at the room, what I saw nearly dropped me to my knees. A moaner was standing in the middle of the room. Instinctively, I reached for my gun but it was nowhere to be found.

  “Oh my God! Where’d that thing come from?” I asked Sally.

  “I don’t know…just help me!”

  The monster didn’t even acknowledge my entrance, it just continued on toward Sally and Susan.

  “Hey, over here! Ye
ah you, dumb fuck!” I had no idea if the undead French moaner understood English, but I didn’t have time to shoot for a translation.

  “What are you going to do?” Sally screamed.

  “I don’t know. Find me a weapon.”

  “Where’s your gun?”

  “If I knew I wouldn’t be asking you for a weapon.”

  Sally was near a mental breakdown. “I don’t know how to kill those things.”

  “Just watch Susan. If he tries to get near her, move her or something.” I had to get between that thing and Sally, but first I had to find a weapon.

  In my periphery I noticed a tray of surgical tools, on which remained a single scalpel.

  “A scalpel? You’re going to…” Sally questioned the only idea I could come up with.

  “You have a better idea?” I didn’t, so I was sure she wouldn’t. She didn’t answer. “Come here you son of a bitch!”

  I did it. I killed the fucking monster. The scalpel easily slid into the eye socket of the monster. It only took a few extra twists and jabs to bring the moaner to a sudden, final death. I will never forget the sound the scalpel made as I scooped around the inside walls of his skull. That sound (and the ensuing silence) marked my first real zombie kill. I knew it would be the first of many. This moment changes things…cements the reality of the situation firmly in my heart. And with that moment, something inside of me snapped, twisted, turned cold. Where fear had once simmered, anger now boiled. Before this moment I feared I couldn’t survive the new freak show called life. Now? Now I’m just another part of it, another cog in the wheel of Hell’s engine.

  The silence that overcame the room was profound. In all the ugliness I have witnessed, even with Jacob dying by my own hand, nothing has yet to be so defining. That briefest of moments proved to anyone willing to believe that I had it in me to protect, to defend, to kill. Yes I took Jacob’s life, but that was nearly preordained…premeditated. This time around it was all out war. No preparation, no plan, no time to even think.