The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series)

by Mathis Kurtz, Robert

  COALITION OF THE LIVING

  Book One

  THE STATE OF EXTINCTION

  By Robert Mathis Kurtz.

  Looking down at the streets, he thought about the things all of those old end-of-the-world movies got wrong.

  More than anything, it was the vegetation. None of those crazy old movies ever got that part right or even mentioned it. It had only been eighteen months since the various arms of the government had stopped working, and he doubted that there was more than a hundred yards of road anywhere in the state that a wheeled vehicle could navigate. Within days of the last maintenance crew, becoming either dead or chow for the Deaders, most of the streets were impassable. He swatted at a deerfly that had landed on his neck to take a bite. His neck was just about the only exposed surface showing through his clothes, despite the almost 90-degree heat. He glanced at the thermometer he had erected under an overhanging ledge just outside his safe house and grunted. Ten o’clock in the morning and it was 85 degrees already. Shit, it was going to be a scorcher.

  He scanned the parts of the city that he could see from his perch six floors above the streets. The sun was up, unfiltered by clouds of any sort, and the deads were out in force. Within a two-block area, he did a quick head-count of fifty, and those were just the ones he could see. If he went down, he would have to be exceedingly careful. Of course, it was hard to be any more careful than he was at any other time of the day or night. Sometimes, he was surprised that his heart didn’t burst or his head split fucking wide open just from the stress.

  The deads were doing their usual thing; just standing around or merely staggering absently from point A to point B. They rarely did anything that made any sense at all. Unless, of course, you thought that standing around doing nothing at all was logical. Hell. Maybe it was.

  Maybe they were the only things that really made sense anymore. Sometimes, he wondered what good it was just staying alive.

  “Shit!”

  He swatted at another deerfly that had located the patch of unprotected skin around his collar. Cutter hadn’t really been thinking of going down into the streets and so hadn’t pulled on his full rig. One of the first things he had learned when the big shit had hit the giant fan was that you needed to make yourself as hard to bite as possible. Sometimes that meant just adding a couple of layers of durable cloth. These days, that was a definite, even if it was going to be 90 degrees and up. Cutter squinted, scanning the local area, trying to see if any of his living neighbors were out and about, or if indeed they were still among the living. Despite everything, despite knowing that too much compassion could get you really dead, really fast, he still worried about some of the people he’d come to know as his very strange neighbors. Of course, that made him think of the final days of what had once been normal.

  **

  When things finally went all to Hell, Cutter was at work. There were some tiny details during the insanity that came before that crazy stuff, which he could not now recall, but that particular day was burned into his mind like a brand.

  Looking back, it was surprising how many people had actually shown up for work that final day. At first, they’d had a full crew; a person at every desk. The government all the way from the White House down to the local commissioners had been encouraging everyone to try to continue to live as if things were going to get better. When he thought about it now, it almost made his blood boil. The folk who were supposed to look out for society had been more concerned with keeping the economy chugging along than with ensuring a citizen’s safety. Protect yourself, they had been told. But don’t panic. Don’t shut yourselves away. Go to work. Go shopping. Spend money.

  Right. Spend some money.

  On that final day, he had left his apartment after his boss had called him to make sure he was coming in. “I’m calling everyone,” Linden had told him, the New York accent coming over the phone. “I’m not picking on you, but I just want to make sure you’ll be in. That is why I’m calling everybody,” the man said, and he was probably telling the truth. In fact, Linden was a physical ox of a man, liked to think of himself as the alpha male, and seemed to relish lording his power over his subordinates. One of his specialties was threatening employees with their jobs.

  “I’ll be there,” Cutter had said, parting the blinds of his bedroom window and peeking out at the driveway, looking to see if any of those shambling wrecks was staggering around, looking for someone to kill and eat. Even at that point, everyone was aware of what was going on. Something that had happened started to making the recently dead come back to life. Not actual life, but nearly so. They weren’t very smart—not even by American standards—something about a lack of oxygen while the brain was waiting to reactivate. However, there were two things about them that almost made up for that lack of smarts; they were freaking mean and they all seemed to wake up very damned hungry for one thing—human flesh.

  Almost from the beginning, it got out of hand. At first people thought these newly, risen folk were just sick. They weren’t really dead, but in a walking coma of some kind. Families locked up their relatives and friends in rooms and figured they would come to their senses in time. All that resulted in was ensuring that more people were attacked, bitten, and some of them eaten up. If everyone who was bitten ended up as a meal, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead, the bitten got very sick and in short order they died, and then rose like the undead folk who had bitten them. Cutter had seen some guy on TV doing the math, trying to warn about how bad things were getting, and how bad they were going to get. Nobody listened to that guy, and the story was that he’d been arrested and locked up.

  Nevertheless, the government kept assuring everyone that things were going to be all right just as soon as they could get a handle on the nature of the situation. However, that had been the problem. How could you pin down the nature of something that wasn’t at all natural?

  During those last days, they had all been pretty much ordered to keep doing things the way everyone was supposed to. “Keep living your lives,” the authorities had told them. He remembered the President and Vice-President making appearances telling one and all to just go about their ways—within reason. “Go to your jobs. Go on your vacations. Go shopping.”

  Jesus.

  After taking that call from his boss, he had called his ex-wife Patsy to tell her one more time to watch out for their daughter Amelia. He had been after Patsy for more than a month at that point, trying to get her to let him move back in with her just for the sake of safety. “I’ll take the downstairs bedroom,” he’d offered. “Just let me come home and that way, I can keep an eye out for you and Amelia.” He had all but begged her. Now, he wished he had begged.

  When it was too late to do anything, but regret everything that came before, it was at work that he had realized that things had broken completely down. He should have bolted and made a run for his old place, and Patsy’s complaints be damned. It would probably have already been too late, but who knows? He might have been able to save them. Likely not, though. These days, he kept himself sane by repeating that last bit of argument. He didn’t like to think of Amelia. She had only been eight years old. Whenever her blue eyes, light brown hair, and smiling face came to mind, he would shake his head, blink his eyes, and banish the image as quickly as he could. The world as it turned out was no place for regrets or self-sympathy.

  On the way to work that final day, he had seen no fewer than a dozen of the dead going about their mindless ways. Well, not quite mindless. When they had the living to target, they seemed to concentrate just fine. It was when they didn�
�t see anyone to hurt that, they appeared to be less than the killing machines that they were. Before those days of bloody insanity, he had never much given any thought at all to the power of human jaws. He had never thought of a person’s teeth as weapons. Now he knew that they were quite effective. It was especially bad when the thing working those jaws and teeth was infused with any number of infective pathogens ready to invade a victim’s body and send it into septic shock.

  Cutter had read the reports and listened to the news bits on what the CDC had been able to discover as society was plummeting into destruction. The cause of the rise of the dead wasn’t ever pinpointed, except that a virus was suspected. They figured something like AIDS, or maybe some kind of flu. A mad genius terrorist was also another option he had heard about, but when the cops started descending on workplaces to warn people about spreading lies that could create more panic, that story had soon been put to rest in a way the dead could not be.

  One report he had watched on CNN had conjectured that this had happened before, on a smaller scale around the planet down through history, and that is where our legends of vampires and ghouls had arisen. However, the outbreaks had been very limited in those days and either faded out or brought quickly under control.

  He often mused that maybe if people were more savage, then things would not have ended up the way they did. Perhaps a man from the Dark Ages was far more likely to cave in the heads of his parents when they became raving fiends instead of loving relatives. Never having faced putting down the reanimated corpse of a loved one, he couldn’t say now what he might have done in those early days. Initially the practice of treating them had been as sick people and it had enabled the situation to get completely out of hand. He was convinced of that.

  By the time he had arrived that last day at his place of employment, he had already seen two people attacked and bloodied. The first one had been a man coming out of a convenience store with a bag of food. Before the man could react, a shambler had lunged out of the autos parked between the street and the shop. Cutter would have gotten out of his car to help, but a police officer arrived and started shooting, so he had given his Toyota the gas and fled as quickly as he could. Less than five minutes later, sitting at a red light, another shambler loomed out of a yard to his right. At first, he thought that it was coming for his car, but it suddenly veered left and latched on to a woman who’d been standing, waiting for the bus. He shook his head, just thinking of that. Waiting for a bus. Christ! Two men standing near her leaped to her aid, but it was too late. The thing had already taken a hunk of meat out of her neck. Blood was everywhere and once more Cutter just floored it, steering around the car in front of him and running the light. That hadn’t been very courageous of him, but the fact that he’d rarely put himself at risk over the intervening months had ensured his survival.

  When he had finally pulled into the lot and was parking his car, he had peered around to see if there was any sign of danger. Quickly, he had opened his door and sprinted for the brick façade of Briggs Stationers, his employer for most of his adult life; three floors of rooms attached to an enormous warehouse stacked to the ceilings with all manner of supplies important to the running of any office. Someone inside unlocked and opened it for him as soon as he got to the door. That was the way they had been admitting people for the better part of a week. Someone watched and opened up. The door was quickly latched behind anyone entering. On that day, Vickie Penland was the one who had been standing, waiting for him with the key in hand, and peeking out from behind one of the thick curtains that kept out the bright sunlight.

  Cutter had actually leaned against the wall, feeling the cool air on him, keeping the heat and humidity of the outside at bay. Back then, he hadn’t known that one day soon air conditioning would just be a memory in the worst parts of summer. As with so many things from before, he missed that cool, dry air. When the weather was oppressive there was now no way to cut it.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. Vickie was a pretty girl with red hair, and a kind of short, nice figure. Thinking of her, he recalled that she liked to wear tight dresses with bright primary colors. That day, though, she had been wearing some bland color—a pair of slacks and a long-sleeved shirt. At the time, he thought it was a bad choice for such a hot day, but maybe she already knew what a person needed to do. Cover that soft, vulnerable flesh. Of course, she probably didn’t make it, no more than anyone else at Briggs Stationers had made it. He knew of no one there who had. At least he had never met one of them in the days since.

  Maybe, I’m the only one out of there who did make it, Cutter thought.

  “I’m okay,” he told her. “Just saw some crazy shit on the way over here. Now there are more of them than ever. They need to lock things down,” he whispered. Cutter was afraid of what might happen to anyone who spoke out too much about the way things were being handled. Maybe the cops would come and haul your ass away for spreading panic, the way they had when the terrorist rumors had been making the rounds. Some panic might have done some good, but by then it was already much too late.

  “Me, too,” she confided. Leaning in close, she whispered. “I saw a woman and her kids killed this morning,” she said. “Out front, on fucking Tryon Street, for God’s sake!” She had glanced around to see if anyone was watching them. “An ambulance came and took them away, and a little bit after that, a fire truck drove up and hosed down the street.” She peered down the hallway, toward Linden’s office, Cutter knew. “What the fuck are we doing here? We should all just leave,” she insisted. “I’ve got family up in Brevard. My parents, a brother, his wife and kids. I’m going up there and holing up with them. It’s out in the country. Safe,” she added. “I wouldn’t be here, except that asshole not only threatened my job, he hinted that he could have the authorities either bring me in or haul me to jail. But fuck it. I’m thinking run now, while we still can.”

  “Who’ll unlock the door for us?” Cutter asked, trying to make light of things.

  Instead of answering him, the shapely Miss Penland had turned and walked away. He never saw her again, and he supposed that she had gone through with it and slipped out before all Hell broke loose.

  In his office, Cutter had gone about the tasks left out for him. He had more than twenty accounts to cover that day and the list of each contact with whom he had to deal. As the company’s salesmen went, he wasn’t the best of the lot, but he was getting closer every month. A few times in the previous year, he had topped the team in total sales, and he was learning the ropes as well as anyone at Briggs. In a year or two, he might actually be the top salesman. Even at that point, things like that mattered to him. Somehow, despite everything he had been seeing and hearing, he still had thought the authorities would figure out a way to make things right.

  Surprisingly, the first half dozen calls he had made that morning had actually gotten through to people who knew who he was and why he was calling. Three of the men on the other side of the line had ended up buying a tremendous amount on their accounts. He had topped $10,000 before ten in the morning, not quite realizing that he was dealing with people on the edge of hysteria and agreeing to whatever he proposed. Desks, chairs, filing cabinets, reams of paper, crates of ink cartridges—all went down on his sales sheets as he typed the numbers onto the screens. Well, at least Linden would be happy.

  The last call had been the only sane conversation he had with any of the accounts. Someone picked the phone up on the eighth ring. Cutter had been about to hang up.

  “Hello? Is this the police?” Cutter recognized the voice. It was Dan Stallings at Charlotte Digital. They were a mid-list client, but generally reliable for a decent purchase if you hit them at the right time.

  “This is Ron Cutter,” he told him. A few seconds of silence was his initial reply.

  “What the fuck?” Stallings said. “What are you calling for? They’ve broken in here. They’re breaking in everywhere. What the fuck are you calling about? I can’t help you. I need help.” His vo
ice had started as almost a roar, but had suddenly cranked down several notches to barely a hiss.

  “What’s happening there?” Cutter asked. “Things…things are okay here at Briggs. We’re…we’re all at work today. We’re holding the line,” he said, repeating something the governor had mentioned in one of her recent speeches.

  “Holding the f…” Stalling choked. “Let me tell you something, Cutter. I’m on the 15th floor of the Union Tower. I can see the entire north half of town from up here. And if I’m not mistaken, I can see the Briggs Stationers’ warehouse…wait…” Cutter could hear sounds as if Stallings were moving across a room. “Yeah. I can see you guys fine. Only ten blocks north. The streets all around you are packed with what looks like crowds. You guys ain’t having any parades, are you?

  “No, I’ll bet there aren’t any parades due anywhere in town today. So what I think is that all of those people ain’t quite people. And also what I think is that you and yours over there at Briggs are about to be as fucked as we are here at Digital.”

  “Dan? What can you see?” Cutter asked. But there was a crash from Stallings’ end. It sounded as if a door had been thrown open. Stallings obviously had dropped the phone, but Ron heard a voice, a series of curses, followed by screams.

  Then, of course, the phone lines went down.

  Cutter’s office was windowless. He had one of the interior rooms, which had a little more space, but were in the center of the building. Hanging up the now useless phone, he opened his office door and stepped out into the hallway. The silence of the place stunned him. There wasn’t another voice. Nothing at all. Not even the muffled sounds of conversation coming from the break room where there were almost always a couple of people engaged in some kind of talk.

  He went from office to office. Most of the doors were standing open and no one was in any of the rooms he checked. He called out.

  “Ms. Penland?” No answer. “Anyone here?” They had all fled, he realized. While he had been sitting in his interior office making calls to people who were either clueless or insane, the entire population of his workplace had taken their leave. They had obviously gotten out while the getting was good, and not a one of them had bothered to warn him.