Blood Soaked and Contagious

by James Crawford

  Chain Bridge is a bridge. Clever name, don’t you think? It stretches from what used to be an insanely ritzy enclave of Northern Virginia into the upper northwest side of Washington, DC. Trust me, it is a high-dollar area, with heavy commuting and lots of undead formerly rich people meandering around.

  The bridge itself is the sort of structure that always seems to be under constant repair for one reason or another.

  Another bright spot in that general area is Langley. The CIA. Smack in the middle of many people who are not keen on organic meats, artisan-baked breads, and superb wine cellars anymore. These days, they’re immensely interested in foraging for two-legged, free-roaming people.

  Having been human, spoiled rotten or not, these creatures are not stupid. Where are you most likely to find your meat animals in quantity, if those meat animals are still trying to live their lives and “make a living” by going to work every day?

  Yes, you guessed it: high-traffic arterial roadways and intersections. Shopping centers. Houses of worship. Office complexes, and in the Washington, DC area that meant either federal government or government contractors.

  The area around Chain Bridge was positively stuffed with the undead. They just waited for infected people to drive by or to stop at the traffic signal. That’s when a dozen or so would block your car, break in, pull out whoever was infected, and then feast.

  This caused quite a blockage of abandoned vehicles in that area. Again, these are not stupid creatures. Some former project management professional created a feeding schedule, and a car removal system based around a team of three Action Groups per day.

  It worked like this. Action Group A, “Team Lobster Bisque,” would intercept the vehicle, remove the occupant(s), and feed. Action Group B would drive the car back into town and park it in the grocery store lot. Action Group C follows Action Group B in a re-purposed school bus, picks them up, and brings them back to the Project Work Site.

  Each team would rotate through. B eats, C drives, A retrieves, and so on. It was deadly efficiency.

  It was also decimating a significant part of the workforce that keeps America at least partially operational, from a governance standpoint. That couldn’t stand. The Powers That Be made a decision to cordon off the area, destroy all zombies, and maintain the area as a protected commuter zone.

  Two major mistakes were made. The first being that the assault happened at night. The second, I feel, was the assumption that our former friends, family, and so on had come back from the dead with moron-level IQs.

  Night vision equipment is not super effective in making creatures with low heat signatures visible in contrast to local foliage, automobiles, rocks... up in the trees behind you... sneaking, jumping, and generally flanking the living shit out of the poor sods who were assigned to this mission.

  In the heat of the one-sided rout, some poor schmuck used a laser targeting system to “paint” a group of rushing vitality-challenged combatants. I believe I’ve mentioned they move a lot faster than normal humans do. That’s absolutely the case.

  By the time the artillery sergeant (two miles away in an armored fighting vehicle) got the order to fire, the zombies had already overrun the soldier who had targeted them while they were still on the bridge. Consequently, the missile hit the bridge, not a horde of critters.

  I don’t remember what the weight of TNT that weapon was compared to, but I do know it collapsed the bridge entirely.

  Undead: low losses, had to relocate toward Route 29 in Arlington.

  Army: 100 fatalities, 31 wounded, and a genuine, gold-plated dunce cap.

  The backlash from this event was intensely personal. The zombies relocated to the major intersections near my home. I have new neighbors, and we will need to get rid of them.

  Chapter 4

  Prior to being dead, he was probably a stoner. Substantial, really dirty, blood-caked dreads draped around his head like a bead curtain made of wooly bear caterpillars. Thankfully, the caterpillars were dead, otherwise he would have been doing the Medusa thing, and that would have been far too much for me to handle. The fact that he was browsing around in my hardware store was just icing on the soufflé.

  Yes, you don’t put icing on soufflé. Think of it as nouvelle cuisine.

  “Hey man,” he said to me, clearly aware that I’d been watching him from the moment he’d walked up to the door. “Have you got any hatchets?”

  “No.”

  “Axes?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Uh. Any kind of,” he gestured, “choppy thing? Machete?”

  “Nope. Not a thing. Got a few brooms,” and I pointed toward that section of the wall.

  “Yeah... I don’t think brooms would do it. Got some stuff I need to cut up.”

  He turned toward me and smiled. It was a fairly horrible, full-of-teeth kind of smile. His gums had receded, making years of fine suburban orthodontic work look like a White Picket Fence of Doom. From the look of things, he’d been a zombie for a rather long time, maybe even an early conversion.

  “So, dude,” he continued as he began to approach the counter. “Is there any chance at all you’d, like, let me move in?”

  “Marvelous,” I remember thinking, “this one is going to try to fuck with me.” Any moment, I imagined, he’d move forward at some insane speed and be sitting on the counter in front of me before I could blink. Again, just to fuck with me.

  While dying and coming back does not make you stupid, it doesn’t do a thing for increasing your IQ. He was stupid enough to be clever, stay alive, hook up with people smarter than he was, and be completely predictable to someone with a sufficiently cynical mind. Me.

  Zoom! Plop! There he was, sitting cross-legged on the counter in front of me, his rank scent filling my nostrils. I guess he felt as though he’d invented the shit-eating grin.

  If “shit-eating grin” was an Olympic competition, I think the stoic French judges would have allowed him a 7. The Russian judges, from behind their vodka bottles, would have been hard-pressed to offer him a 5.5. Your favorite American judge, me, gave him a 2.

  A 2-pound sledgehammer.

  Zombie testicles. Meet Mister Hammer. Aw! Did he upset your composure?

  He didn’t scream. All that came out of him was a long, whiny exhale of fetid air as he rolled backwards off the counter. There was a delightful thunk when his head met the concrete floor.

  I took about four steps backward and vaulted over the counter, landing behind the body on the floor. He had not changed position at all; he was still cross-legged in a sitting position, just facing the floor instead of me.

  I heard some mumbling.

  “Speak up, Sonny Boy, this old fart can’t hear ya!”

  “You crushed my nuts. Why?” It came out as a breathy whisper.

  “You offended my social sensibilities.”

  “I was just messing with you. You don’t smell right. I wasn’t going to eat you.”

  “Thanks for clearing that up. Just so you know, and we can have clear communication from this moment on: I do not give a flying gob of opossum semen why you’re here or what you want.”

  “Man. That’s nasty.”

  “How are your nuts?”

  “Did you have to remind me?”

  “I’m friendly that way,” I said, and raised the sledge over my head. I have never had compunctions about hitting people from behind, or from the front.

  “They don’t look so goo—”

  As much as I hate to cut people off in the middle of what they’re saying, I decided to make an exception in his case. The hammer did exactly what I hoped it would, since his head was so conveniently resting on a hard surface and I put a solid amount of force behind the blow. His skull caved in and turned the rear of his brain into borscht.

  Never turn down the opportunity to make a statement or use a symbol to express yourself when raw material throws itself into your lap. I took the head, a permanent marker, and an empty milk crate outside. The head sat on the ups
ide-down crate to the right of my doors, and I wrote “Oops! Wrong Store!” on the forehead with the marker.

  Smelly, but useful.

  The only problem with beheading things in your store is that it makes a mess. Thankfully, this can be remedied as long as you’re speedy about it with a mop and a bucket full of soapy bleach water. I hopped right to task after I set out my porch decoration. Of course, you are still left with the headless, bloodless body.

  Our neighborhood had a very ecologically friendly approach to such things: drop the buggers into a 55-gallon plastic drum with a bag of quick lime. In three months, drain off the smelly goo, grind up the bones, mix it all back together, and trade it as fertilizer.

  Let me tell you, it is the secret to award-winning heirloom tomatoes.

  I admired my handiwork for a few minutes after I closed the door to the store and debated how long I would actually leave the head there. Dead things, even twice dead, do not smell good. Certainly, it wasn’t an issue of being off-putting to my customers, because there really weren’t any. Anyone worth speaking to would come to the back door in our little barter neighborhood.

  I suppose my concern was for the overall ambience of our civilized enclave of craftspeople. I blinked a few times and realized I was starting to think like some sort of post-apocalyptic homeowners association director. Whether it was due to coming down off the endorphin high of having one of the enemy saunter into my home or because I really needed to eat something, I may never know.

  Taking my train of thought and rumbling stomach as a warning, I locked the front door and went for a walk up the street. Bajali and his lovely bride, Jayashri, would probably have a pot of something tasty cooking, and they were the most generous hosts anyone could ever imagine. Of all the people I’d come to know during these months of upheaval, they were my favorite.

  Baj had been a programmer for one of the large defense contractors before things went down the tubes. He was tall, smart, and gentlemanly, with a hint of British Raj accent that I enjoyed hearing, and one of the most intelligent people I had ever met. Five years ago, he had gone back home to Delhi to meet his future wife. He joked it was “positively countercultural” to do something so traditional in a modern world where traditions are rewritten every day.

  I suspect that Jayashri knocked his composure to bits. To not use the word “brilliant” to describe her—everything about her—would be a travesty. Her voice was music. Even I fell a little in love with her; she matched his graciousness and added her own sublime beauty to it. Imagine a Disney Princess brought to life in a glorious red-and-gold Indian sari with a smile that could melt the heart of every evil overlord in the galaxy, and you might have an idea of what she looked like. Unfortunately, such beauty might blind you to her other amazing attributes. The lady is brilliant and has a will of hardened steel. Fuck with her at your peril.

  While I can’t speak for the rest of the world, when you see two people who truly love one another, it ignites something inside. It might be a yearning to find your version of the love they share. On the other hand, it might inflame you with a sort of jealousy. For me, I found it made me want to protect them both. Something like finding a flower growing in the sewage.

  I knocked on their door, and Baj opened it before I could put my arm down.

  “Ha! I saw you walking down the street and thought to myself that you would be coming here,” he reached out, put an arm around my shoulder and ushered me into his home, “and, as you can see, I was right!”

  “One of these days, I’ll surprise you, you know.”

  “Not bloody likely, and you know it!” His smile was more contagious than the common cold, and I could not help but smile with him. “You have come over for supper?”

  “Yes,” I answered, feeling a bit sheepish.

  “What? Did Shawn forget to tell you that you I invited you as well?”

  “I suppose he did. I’ve not spoken to him today.”

  “Ah hah. I will bet you he fell into tinkering with one thing or another and forgot. Seeing you here will remind him. Come! Let us teach him the error of his ways!”

  We marched together, as jovially as you please, through the house to the dining room. Baj was right, and Shawn looked properly abashed when he saw me.

  “Oh. Damn, I’m sorry man. I meant to come over and get you,” Shawn blushed to the roots of his receding hairline and shrugged his elephantine shoulders, “but I got stuck on tricking out that M-50 I got last weekend.”

  “No worries. We all know how you are when there’s a project on the bench.” I slugged him on the shoulder and sat down in the chair next to him.

  There isn’t anyone I can punch affectionately like I can Shawn. He’s built like a Hell’s Angel crossed with a freight train. Rumor has it that two of his younger brothers made it into the NFL, after full-ride football scholarships in college. I don’t know if it’s true, but I could believe it if the rest of the family was built along the same lines.

  I knew he had a kid sister. I found that idea both daunting as Hell and strangely erotic, all at the same time. No point pumping him for information, because he knows my piss-poor history with the opposite sex.

  Jayashri brought the food to the table in quiet flutterings of her sari, sending the aroma of spices into the air around us. They were vegetarian, keeping with the particular Hindu traditions that they had grown up with, but did allow themselves cheese, cream, milk, and butter. I was immensely grateful that they weren’t as strict with their religion as some people that I’d known in the past, because her paneer was painfully good.

  Don’t make me tell you about her cream sauces for pasta. If anything happens to Baj, she’s mine. I’ll fight you for her. I’ll win.

  The initial dinner conversation was light, and by unspoken agreement we didn’t bring up our smelly new neighbors.

  Shawn made conversational noises but was too busy savoring the cooking to really make a dent in the chatting. I knew his family was from rural Somewhere and that their idea of ethnic cuisine was pizza. Watching him eat and enjoy foods that had been alien to him just a year ago was amusing and oddly joyful.

  It was so damned normal and we all loved it. That was a common thing we all felt: the absence of our normal lives. The three of us ate our food, and the conversation quietly faded in favor of sharing Shawn’s delight in something that was so common to the rest of us.

  “Shawn, you should try the raita with the curried daal,” Jayashri said, spooning a bit of the yogurt sauce onto his plate.

  “Thank you. I certainly will,” and he did. His expressions were priceless. For someone as strong, solid, and intimidating as he was, he had no guile at all around people he cared about.

  We watched him close his eyes in bliss, gently rolling the flavors around in his mouth.

  I heard Jayashri sigh and looked at her out of the corner of my eye. She was crying noiselessly and immediately noticed that I’d seen her. She sniffed, rose quickly in a bustle of draped fabric, and floated over to my side of the table.

  She kissed Shawn on the forehead, mussed my hair, and whispered, “I am so happy.” A moment later, she was gone, but I heard the bathroom door close down the hall.

  Baj looked a little misty himself. Shawn looked confused. Me? I don’t know how I looked.

  “Guys, did I just miss somethin’?”

  “Ah, you know,” Baj said, “women will be women sometimes.”

  I just chuckled to myself.

  The wistful look on Baj’s face slipped away and was replaced by something far more serious. I tensed up, immediately expecting bad news. Shawn’s breathing changed.

  “I wanted to talk to both of you for a number of reasons. Serious ones. Please don’t feel as though I invited you both here under false pretenses, because Jaya and I very much wanted to see you,” he said, ducking his head slightly. “What we have is an unfortunate confluence of events and data.”

  Shawn sighed, tore off a piece of naan, and began munching on it in a very thou
ghtful way.

  “All right, Baj, what’s going on?” I believe I actually asked the question, but it could have been either of us. The tension in the room was enough to inspire near-telepathic communication; empathic, at the very least.

  “As you both know, I’ve been working on establishing some kind of reliable internet connection for the past month. Two days ago, I managed to do it. The news out there is not good. The zombies are even using the web to advertise.”

  Looking back, I’m still pleased that my mouth was both empty and dry at that moment. I would have probably ejected anything in my mouth after hearing such a thing.

  “What are they doing? Telling people who are infected to come see them and get pumped full of anesthetic before they’re eaten alive?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice.

  “Yes, there is that. I also saw quite a lot of ‘We are the Master Race’ sorts of things. Disgusting, but not as disturbing as the news feeds.”

  “I guess you’re going to tell us that things are worse than we imagined. Right?” Shawn asked.

  “Oh yes. Africa is almost devoid of human life. South America is nearly as bad off, but there are pockets of civilization in Belize and Costa Rica. China is,” he just shook his head, “very bad off. They bombed and gassed major population centers to destroy the zombie population but keep the industrial infrastructure.”

  “Good God Almighty. That is beyond insane.” I couldn’t find words, but Shawn’s were eloquent enough for both of us.

  “What about things here in the US?”

  “Based on what I saw, we may be somewhat better off in terms of existing industry and services, but the rate of infection is increasing. DARPA and the NIH have confirmed the virus is passed human to human. Luckily, it has yet to go airborne.”

  “What is the,” I needed to ask, “viral vector between people?”

  “They are confident it is passed through sexual contact and non-sexual fluid exposure. There is some possibility it may even be passed in sweat and saliva.”