by Gibb, Lew
“You mean, where’s Alicia, don’t you?”
“Damn.” Mike’s eyes were wide. He shot a glance at Jerry. “Is it that obvious?”
“Not to blind people.” Jerry had to smile. “But everyone else? Yeah. Alicia knows, too, in case you were wondering.”
“What do you mean? Did she say something to you?”
Jerry turned in his seat and looked at Mike. “I knew you were just pretending go along with this to get close to her.”
Here they were on day six of the apocalypse, and Mike was worried about his crush on his coworker. It was surreal how no one seemed to be acting any different. Were he, Bob, and Alicia the only ones that knew what was going on? Or were they deluded? Rachel was so pissed about the MREs she hadn’t talked to him since their argument the day before. She’d barely given him a sleepy kiss when he had left at five that morning, and he wasn’t sure she would have kissed him at all if she had been fully awake. He didn’t know what kind of damage it would do to their relationship if he was wrong. If he was right, it would all work out. If they survived. Damn, he wasn’t even one hundred percent positive the apocalypse was happening, but he couldn’t see the benefit of ignoring the possibility. If Bob was wrong, he was only out a few dollars for some food that they could eat anyway. Well, a few hundred dollars anyway.
“Earth to Jerry?”
“What?” Jerry asked, realizing Mike had been talking to him.
“Dude. Quit spacing out. I know you’re worried about your mythical apocalypse, but this is important. Has Alicia said anything to Bob about me?”
“Seriously?” Jerry pointed at the road. A semi was slowing down and veering to the side of the on-ramp. “Watch where you’re going. And how old are you?”
“What?” Mike changed lanes, sped past the semi, and began to merge with traffic.
“That went out in junior high. Now grown-ups talk—I’m sorry, text—each other.”
“Text. Talk. Whatever. Has Alicia mentioned me?”
“Holy crap, dude. You’re ridiculous. I’ll ask Bob if he can pass her a note tonight at dinner. How’s that?”
Mike took a hand off the wheel and clubbed Jerry on the shoulder with the side of his fist. “Man, this is serious. You have to help me.”
“Why don’t you just ask her out?”
“I can’t get up the courage. She literally knows about everything. I heard her arguing with one of the firemen about inboard versus outboard motors the other day.”
“Cool.”
“Not cool.” Mike shook his head. “I don’t know shit about motors. I just nodded like I knew what she was talking about so she wouldn’t think I was an idiot.”
“Wouldn’t want her finding out the truth, would we?”
Mike ignored him and continued, “And she has that wicked sense of humor. I don’t want that directed at me.”
“Well, I guess you’ll just have to continue being her creepy stalker then.” Jerry gave Mike a retaliation punch. “Like some ten year old with a crush on his teacher.”
Mike rubbed his shoulder. “It’s not that bad. I just can’t seem to think of the right words when I’m around her. And besides, there’s always a bunch of people around.”
They were both quiet for a while. Jerry was troubled by the fact that people seemed so wrapped up in their lives and their daily mini crises that they were completely incapable of registering something so potentially dangerous. Even when he broached the subject in a neutral way, omitting any mention of zombies, people only saw the attacks as isolated incidents in which crazy people had done what crazy people do. And besides, they all said, it was all happening in Brazil. The fact that Brazil was a mere ten-hour flight from Houston seemed not to make any difference.
People had evolved to recognize threats from carnivorous animals or other humans attacking with spears and swords. They couldn’t process something as nonthreatening as an image on TV or a disease that had no symptoms. There were thousands of people killing themselves every time they lit up a cigarette. In spite of all the scientific evidence that smoking caused lung cancer and would most likely kill smokers, people simply refused to believe they would be the ones affected. Jerry saw the same thing in people with high blood pressure and diabetes. Since there were no actual symptoms, it became easy to ignore or even deny the existence of these diseases altogether. He knew of far too many patients who had stopped taking their blood pressure medicine because they felt fine or because it was too expensive in spite of their doctors’ warnings that their disease was slowly killing them.
The more Jerry thought about it, the more confident he was that he and Bob had correctly identified the situation. It was just like diagnosing an illness. They had looked at the symptoms, come up with a list of possibilities that matched them, then decided on a course of action.
He looked over at his partner as they rolled into the ambulance bay at their pickup hospital. “Maybe you should be thinking a little less about your love life and a little more about how we’re going to survive this transfer without getting eaten.”
“Yeah, right,” Mike said, getting out on his side.
Jerry shouldered his door open and got out. Beyond the ambulance bay, there was a man leaving the hospital by the main ER doors and walking toward the parking lot. He had a limp and white bandages covering one arm. Jerry watched as the man got into his car and drove away before joining Mike at the rear of the ambulance. He wondered whether he had just seen his first zombie victim. Even now, his rational mind was fighting it and didn’t want to believe that something so apparently benign could be what he and his friends had been looking for.
“Hey,” Jerry said, “did you see that guy walking through the parking lot? He was all bandaged up.”
“You think he got attacked by zombies?” Mike said, widening his eyes in a comical way while opening the ambulance’s rear doors.
“His arm was all bandaged.”
Mike pulled the stretcher out of the ambulance. “He’s at the hospital. Of course he’s got bandages.”
“He looked like that guy we picked up last week that got taken down by the police dog. Maybe someone bit him.”
“Dude.” Mike was outright laughing now. “He probably just did something stupid like the majority of our patients. Or—here’s a shocker—maybe he got bitten by a police dog.” Mike pushed the stretcher toward the door. “Let’s get moving. I have a lot more aliens waiting for me to kill them.”
They waited over an hour for the nurse to finish their transfer paperwork before they finally got their patient—a likable guy named Brian who needed cardiac surgery—and returned to the ambulance. Jerry couldn’t stop thinking about the man in the parking lot. He had even asked about the guy in the ER on their way in, but the snotty nurse had claimed she couldn’t say anything because of HIPAA.
Mike and Brian were arguing about baseball as they pushed the stretcher into the ambulance. Jerry still felt uneasy about the way the man’s bandages had looked. It wasn’t really anything he could pinpoint; it just didn’t look completely right. Jerry kept working it over in his head as he pulled out of the hospital grounds and headed for the highway.
He yelled back to Mike, “Did you see how many people they had restrained in the ER?”
Mike yelled back, “About the normal amount of belligerent drunks sleeping it off on a Saturday morning.”
“I guess so,” Jerry said, remembering how two of them had also been bandaged like the man in the parking lot. Because Mike was anxious to get back to his video game, they had passed through the hospital too fast for Jerry to get a good look at them. He did notice most of them seemed to be sleeping, though. As far as he knew, zombies didn’t sleep. “A couple of them were really straining against the straps like they really wanted to get out.”
“I’d want to get out of there, too, if I woke up chained to the bed because I was such an asshole the night before that the doctor decided I had to be tied down and sedated,” Mike said. “Besides, everyone looks
like a zombie when they’re hungover and handcuffed to a hospital bed.”
Jerry moved over to the left lane, giving plenty of space as he passed three cars and pulled off to the side of the road. An ambulance and fire truck had already arrived, and people were walking toward the emergency vehicles. One of them was holding the side of his face. “Wow, those people don’t look happy,” Jerry said to himself. “Glad that isn’t our call.”
Chapter Fifteen
Turning into the driveway of the three-story brick-and-stone mansion where she would be catering a Habitat for Humanity fundraising dinner that night, Rachel was struck by the sheer size of the place. The house was nearly as big as some downtown apartment buildings, with an entry portico flanked by life-sized stone lions and supported by massive white columns. It also boasted a wrap-around porch big enough for several shuffleboard courts. The place reminded her more of a mountain-retreat hotel than a residence designed for a single family.
Rachel continued around to the building’s rear, driving her van along the gravel drive through immaculate grounds that backed up to the mountains on the western edge of Boulder. At the parking area in the rear she discovered her assistant, Lisa, walking across the lawn toward the van. Several groundskeepers were scattered around the rear gardens, which were bigger and better maintained than some parks she had been to. None of them was working at the moment. They had all stopped to lock their eyes on Lisa as she walked away from them. The kid had a lot going for her, Rachel thought. Unfortunately, she was nineteen-going-on-thirty, one of those people who had the world all figured out and wouldn’t listen to any opinion that differed from her own. Since she was tall, blonde, and beautiful, people rarely contradicted her—or, at least, men rarely did. But she was a good worker and generally a nice person in spite of being opinionated, which wasn’t the worst trait a teen working in a kitchen could have. She didn’t do drugs and didn’t drink while working, something that seemed almost a prerequisite in many of the kitchens Rachel had worked in, so Rachel was willing to put up with Lisa’s other traits.
Rachel rolled to a stop and jumped out. “Hey, sorry I’m late. There were a bunch of accidents on the highway coming up here.”
“I just got here myself.” Lisa met Rachel at the van’s side. “What’s the deal with all the crashes? Is it a full moon or something?”
“Or something. To hear my husband tell it, it’s the beginning of the zombie apocalypse.”
“Seriously? Isn’t Jerry, like, forty or something?”
Rachel smiled and shook her head as she walked to the rear of the van and opened the doors. “He’s actually only thirty-five. But he works with a bunch of young guys on the ambulance. They’re all into it.” Rachel slid a big white cooler out of the van and waited while Lisa grabbed the handle on the other end.
They walked past a pair of massive planters overflowing with mums and flowering cabbage and up the walkway to the rear door of the mansion.
Lisa balanced the cooler on her leg while she opened the door. “I thought when you got older, you were supposed to be the voice of reason.”
“I know,” Rachel said. “This thing in Brazil has him pretty freaked out.” Rachel was still brooding about the way she had laid into him over the MREs. Maybe she could have been a little more understanding of his position. It wasn’t like the cost would break them if he couldn’t get the store to take them back. What made her mad was that he had promised her he wouldn’t get all crazy.
Maybe he isn’t crazy, did you think of that?
“Oh, yeah. That’s pretty wild,” Lisa said.
The two women maneuvered the cooler through the door and into the mansion’s kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was huge and well laid out and contained far more high-end equipment than necessary for most of the events hosted there. The party of twelve they would be feeding in a few hours wouldn’t require a fraction of the place’s capacity.
Rachel tuned back into what Lisa was saying.
“That is sort of weird, how those people went crazy and attacked each other. But what does that have to do with zombies and a bunch of car accidents in Colorado five days later?”
Rachel set her end of the cooler on the floor. “Apparently, they look like some zombies in one of those movies Jerry and his friends watch and discuss endlessly.”
“Most guys are seriously obsessed with zombies. And sex, of course.”
“Tell me about it.” Rachel started taking vegetables out of the cooler and putting them on the gleaming stainless-steel countertop. “But now Jerry thinks something like that could actually be happening.” Rachel couldn’t believe she was talking about it again. It didn’t help that Jerry wouldn’t shut up about it and kept trying to get her to take precautions. Now everything she saw was colored by the question of whether it could be a sign of the beginning of the apocalypse. What she thought of as her rational brain would step in and tell her that zombies weren’t real, and she would try to go on with her life until something else made her think about the apocalypse again. It was making her paranoid and depressed at the same time. She needed to shut this craziness down. When Jerry got home in the morning, they were going to have a serious talk.
Lisa thumped a head of lettuce on the table. “I agree there’s, like, some kind of mass hysteria going on down in Brazil. But the zombie apocalypse?” she asked, making air quotes with her fingers. “That’s just crazy.”
“Well, it’s out there.” Rachel’s forehead wrinkled. “But if you look at the pictures from Brazil….”
Lisa put her hands on her hips and looked at Rachel with narrowed eyes. “You’re not telling me you buy that crap. Are you?”
Rachel shook her head. “I’m just saying it might not be as completely out of the question as I used to think. Not dead people rising from the grave, but possibly a version of rabies that causes people to go crazy and attack other people. That’s what this doctor in Brazil says.”
“OMG! Rachel! We need to get you some therapy.” Lisa took an armload of vegetables over to the sink and started washing them.
“It’s possible.” Rachel shrugged. She hadn’t managed to check out the doctor’s website, but the fact that Jerry had a supposedly rational scientist on his side made her wonder. “Maybe?” She had to wonder if she really believed it. “Anyway, let’s get moving. I’ve got one more box in the van. And my zombie apocalypse survival kit.”
Lisa’s eyes went wide. “No way!”
Rachel nodded and grimaced. “Jerry wouldn’t let me have the van keys till I promised to keep it with me.” She started back out to the van with Lisa following.
When they arrived at the van, Rachel grabbed a large black duffel bag and slung it over her shoulder. It felt pretty heavy. Lisa grabbed the box of utensils and miscellaneous items, slammed the van’s rear doors, and followed Rachel back toward the house.
Lisa poked the duffel. “So what all do you have in there?”
“Well, the main thing is clothes to prevent zombie bites. Kevlar jacket and pants, gloves.” She stopped, extended her leg, and turned her foot from side to side to show off a pair of bright red cowboy boots. “I’m already wearing my anti-zombie footwear.”
Lisa nodded and smiled. “Those are nice.”
Rachel set her foot down and continued walking. “Who knew my favorite boots were good for something besides making me feel sassy?” She shook her head. “Jerry put it together, so I’m not sure what else is in there. Probably some food and stuff, maybe a flashlight.”
“Ha! If that’s what it takes to stay married, I’m not sure I’m up for it.”
“I must really love him. I just hope I never have to use any of it.”
Lisa rolled her eyes and held the door while Rachel entered the house. The weird thing was, all day long Rachel had been feeling a growing sense that something was wrong. It was nothing specific she could put a finger on or even really identify the source of, but it wouldn’t go away. Maybe her subconscious—or whatever part of her brain was resp
onsible for monitoring the environment and warning the rest of her about danger—was saying she needed to be careful. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to keep the bag close.
Chapter Sixteen
It took twenty minutes longer than usual to get to their destination hospital. By the time he turned into the hospital’s driveway, it was early afternoon on what looked like a perfect day. Jerry felt more rather than less worried when he looked at the sun shining in the cloudless sky. One of the things he liked best about fall was how the sunlight had an ethereal brilliance that made things seem both extremely sharp and unreal, almost like he was watching the world on HD TV.
He turned off the engine and got out, pulling on his jacket and scanning the area as he walked to the rear of the ambulance. The parking lot was about half empty, and a few people were making their way to the main entrance. Just fifty feet away, an older couple walked arm-in-arm toward the ER entrance, the man limping slightly and supporting himself by leaning on the woman.
Jerry opened the rear doors and started to pull the stretcher from the ambulance. “Hey, Mike, where’s your jacket?”
“It got too hot,” Mike said, jumping down beside the stretcher. “I’ll put it on later.”
“What are you guys talking about?” their patient said, shifting his gaze from Jerry to Mike.
“Jerry’s convinced we’re in the beginning of the zombie apocalypse.”
Brian’s eyes widened, and he looked at Jerry. “Really?”
Jerry shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s a hundred percent, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Right, Mike? You don’t want to be like the guys you always make fun of for having their helmets strapped to the back of their motorcycles.” Jerry rolled the stretcher out of the ambulance while keeping his gaze on Mike.