As for Phil, he was in and out of conscious, and not coherent at any point. I got him cleaned up—which was really awful and I would rather not recount the disgusting details—and after I got a few bags of fluids in him and his heartbeat evened out, I decided to find out ASAP how badly he was infected. I removed some spinal fluid and began the tests.
“This can’t be!” I said as Cam came into the kitchen to see what I was up to.
“What can’t be?” he asked, rummaging around in the cabinets and finding a box of graham crackers, much to his delight.
“I ran the samples three times, and he has some eggs and larvae, but no mature parasites!” I said, completely puzzled.
“Well, that’s good, right?” he asked, offering me a cracker, but I was far too distracted to eat.
“Yes, but that can’t be,” I repeated. “You saw that containment facility. There’s no way he could have spent all that time with all those infected people and zombies in those filthy, unsanitary conditions and not be teeming with mature parasites by now.”
“Well, maybe he’s kind of immune,” Cam said, crunching into his second cracker.
“Oh for god’s sake, how could he be immune to these parasites,” I snapped, then immediately apologized. “I’m so sorry, Cam. I’m just so tired and stressed out. And I’m afraid I might be screwing up the results of these tests.”
“It’s okay, Trues,” he said wiping the crumbs from his lips before he kissed the top of my head. “You were a real trooper out there today. I can’t blame you for being a little strung out. And I don’t even pretend to know what you’re talking about with all this medical stuff. I just thought that maybe there’s something about Phil that’s different.”
Cam’s words hung in the air for a while as the wheels started spinning in my head. Of course, there was something different about Phil! He had a neurological problem that caused those facial twitches. Perhaps that same chemical imbalance or the electrical anomalies in his neurons that caused his twitching somehow inhibited the growth of the ZIPs and prevented a serious infection.
“That’s it! You’re brilliant, Doctor Everett,” I said jumping up and giving him a big hug—and swiping half his graham cracker.
I rushed into the bedroom to begin the QK drugs on Phil immediately. If the tests were correct, and there were no mature ZIPs, he could be infection-free in a couple of days. Now I just had to wait to see if he could recover from exposure, and lack of food and water.
Naturally, I wanted Phil to live. But regardless of his fate, we had plunged into the Lion’s Den and came out alive. It taught me a great lesson in teamwork, perseverance, and faith. Of course, whether or not I would ultimately take those lessons to heart remained to be seen during the coming months of the zombie apocalypse.
Chapter 12
Phase 12: A Ruined Man: When I was growing up, we had neighbors who had their elderly father living with them. I didn’t see him much, but when I did he was always moving very slowly and unevenly. His posture was stooped, his left foot dragged more than it stepped, and he kind of leaned to the right, like a ship that’s taken on water.
I happened to be riding my tricycle by his house one day as he was at the front gate getting the mail. It was a rare sighting, and while I wasn’t exactly afraid of him, there was something about him that made me feel quite uneasy. I was going to move over to the other side of the street when I saw he had dropped some letters and was struggling to lower his twisted frame to try to retrieve them from the damp grass.
I put aside my feelings of unease and stopped to help, but I was too shy to say anything. I just picked up the letters and handed them to him. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and when he extended his arm I saw there were numbers tattooed on his forearm. I had no idea what the numbers meant, and I wasn’t about to ask.
His lips moved and he looked as though he wanted to thank me, but he didn’t speak a word. Instead, he smiled and patted my head with his gnarled fingers. Then he turned and started his agonizingly slow, limping walk back up the driveway.
That night at dinner, I told my parents about the incident and commented that it was such a silly thing to have numbers tattooed on your arm. They both looked at one another for a moment, then my dad said he guessed I was old enough to hear an explanation. He told me that the old man had been in a Nazi concentration camp and the tattoo was his prisoner number. He had been repeatedly beaten and starved almost to death.
“The terrible ordeal left him a ruined man,” my father concluded.
“Yes, the poor soul,” my mother chimed in. “It left him a ruined man.”
I didn’t really understand at the time, but what I did take away from what my father told me was that “Not Sees” (whoever they were) were very bad people, and when you became broken beyond repair, like the china doll that I had accidentally stepped on, you were a “ruined man.”
I thought about that old, broken man as I looked down at Phil the next morning. Even though he had been cleaned up, he didn’t look like himself. If I didn’t know better, I would have said that he had been gone twenty years instead of just three weeks. By that evening he was conscious to the point of recognizing me, but he still didn’t speak. He just forced a slight smile, weakly squeezed my hand, and had a few tears roll down his cheek. He sat up in bed and started eating solid food the next day, but still didn’t speak. But he did cry, a lot.
Two days later, I brought him the good news that the ZIPs larvae and eggs in his system had all been killed by the QK drugs. For a moment he smiled and nodded his head, then he burst into tears and finally spoke.
“I can’t, Becks. I just can’t!”
“Phil, what’s the matter? What can’t you do?” I said, sitting on the bed and taking his hand.
“I can’t talk about what happened in that awful place,” he said, trembling with emotion.
“That’s okay, I don’t need you to talk about it. I can imagine,” I replied with a brief shudder of my own at the mere thought of that hellish containment facility.
“No. No, you can’t imagine, you…” his voice trailed away and he had this far off look.
“Phil, what about your family? Did you find them? Are they all right?”
He snapped back into focus and with all his strength he clutched my hand with both of his.
“I don’t know! I never got there. The patrol stopped me, and they saw this damn twitching eye and assumed I was infected. They wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t listen! I failed my family. I let them down. They needed me, and I failed them. I wasn’t there for them and I’ll never forgive myself,” he said with an expression of self-torture that went far beyond anything another person could have inflicted. “I have to get to them! I have to know what happened! I have to go, now!”
I tried to tell him he wasn’t going anywhere, but he wouldn’t listen until he tried to stand and collapsed. I managed to keep his head from hitting the floor, but had to call Cam to help me get him back to into bed. For his own good, I gave Phil a sedative and fashioned some restraints from bed sheets to keep him from trying something stupid.
There was no way Phil would be fit to go anywhere for at least a week. Even if he was strong enough, I didn’t want him to see what I knew would be a gruesome sight at the family farm. There was only one thing I could do—go there myself and give Phil some closure. To my surprise, Cam didn’t fight my suggestion. In fact, he said he was going to go even if I didn’t want to. When Phil woke up and I told him the plan, he objected and insisted on going. When he realized that I wasn’t budging, he gave me the address, but made me promise to tell him the truth, no matter what I found.
Some of the men had gone back to the compound and a few stayed in the house to look after Phil, but there were still a dozen of us who headed out early the next morning. It would be about an hour’s drive to the north, if everything went smoothly, but when does that ever happen? About 30 miles into the trip, we encountered a roadblock at the top of a steep hill. There were tables
, lawn chairs, couches, mattresses, and all manner of stuff piled across both lanes of the road to a height of about six feet. There was no going around it as both sides of the road dropped off steeply into a culvert.
The lead truck stopped about 50 yards from the obstacles and we all were on our guard for an ambush. It was no secret that people would do desperate things to stay alive. The past few days we had all been listening to the Voice of the Hudson report on attacks of humans against humans. In cases where the attackers were wounded or captured, those who were “shown mercy” were being “branded.” Knives or razors were being used to cut a “Z” into the left cheek of anyone who preyed upon other people. This “scarlet letter” in their flesh would let others know they couldn’t be trusted, that they were just as bad as zombies.
We waited for several minutes to see if we would come under attack, but no shots were fired, and we didn’t see anyone moving in the woods around us. Perhaps whoever built the barricade was intimidated by our numbers, not to mention the armored Humvee with the machine gun? The men conversed over their walkie-talkies for a few minutes, and decided to try to push ahead—literally. One of the men had a huge Dodge pickup truck with those massive crash bars, and he eased it forward and nudged it up against the wall of furniture and debris. I didn’t think there was any way he was going to budge that enormous pile, but apparently I had underestimated the power of the almighty hemi engine.
Rather than beginning to push a hole through the wall, the entire entangled mass started to slide as one. After pushing the mass about ten feet, one section on the far left rattled loose and toppled off and over the edge of the road. The driver was too close to see, but when that part of the wall of debris fell, it revealed a wall of zombies behind it! Cam shouted into the walkie-talkie and the Dodge’s tires smoked as the driver punched it into reverse.
Zombies began pouring through the breach, and while everyone started backing up, I pulled forward. No, I wasn’t crazy (well, maybe just a little). I just happened to be the owner of a beautiful Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun, and damn it, I was getting tired of it just being a roof ornament. I slid into the back seat, and then stood up into position behind the formidable weapon. It took me a few seconds to remember what I was supposed to do, but I quickly had it locked and loaded, and aimed right at the steady stream of zombies flowing through the gap in the wall.
I had fired a lot of weapons in my day, but with the first squeeze of the trigger, I let out a yell of surprise. The gun absolutely roared and the massive .50 caliber bullets tore through at least the first five or six rows of zombies!
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” I shouted right before I started laughing.
And I couldn’t stop laughing as I continued to mow down line after line of zombies with short, but devastating bursts of fire. And really, using the term “mow down” is no exaggeration, as chunks of flesh and splintered bones were flying around as if I was running them over with a lawn mower. Men, women, children, I didn’t give a damn. I tore them all to pieces.
Between the deafening roar of the machine gun, and my complete immersion in the moment, I didn’t realize that all the other trucks had pulled forward again. The men sat mesmerized at the sight of the crazed doctor who was slaughtering zombies left and right, while all the while laughing maniacally. I honestly couldn’t tell you how many zombies I ballistically chewed up and spit out that day. If I had to guess, I would say over a hundred; maybe closer to 150. The images of that scene of carnage that come to mind now are horrific, but at the time it wasn’t real. It was like I was playing a video game, and I was definitely going for high score. Honestly, I was actually disappointed when there were no more zombies left to masticate with my deadly .50 caliber teeth.
When I stopped shooting, I expected all kinds of Dr. Kilzombie jokes and high fives from the guys, but they all just stared at me with these odd, stunned looks on their faces. Even Cam was at a loss for words. While the Dodge pulled forward over the heaps of flesh to push the rest of barricade aside, I calmly reloaded my new best friend, and tried to refocus on the task ahead.
Fortunately, there were no more roadblocks, and no more huge packs of zombies. There was the occasional loner, or the more frequent “six-packs” as the men called any group of about four to ten zombies. I didn’t want to hog all the kills, so I let them have some fun, too. Whereas in the past I usually drove by zombies if they weren’t in my way, the men had the policy of “any zombie you kill today is one less that will try to eat you tomorrow.” It made sense, and it was a policy I would adopt.
We turned onto a country dirt road and after about half a mile came to a dead end. All of our GPS units said we had “arrived at our destination,” but clearly we had not. We actually drove up and down the road twice before someone spotted a dirt driveway that had been concealed behind some piles of brush. It was a smart move if you were trying to hide from people. But of course, that wasn’t the problem these days. At least, the thieving human problem was not as bad as the zombie problem.
A few of the guys pulled the brush aside, and I drove in first, as I had the most intimidating vehicle. After a few hundred yards, the woods gave way to open fields with some grazing cows, sheep, and horses. Up ahead, there were a couple of big, old barns, and a picture-perfect white farm house—or so I thought at first. As I got closer, I noticed the front door was open and there were bloody handprints around the doorframe. Even closer, and I saw blood spattered on railings and stairs, and at least two bodies—or what was left of them—on the porch.
We all cautiously exited our vehicles, and Cam directed us to stick together and search the barns and outbuildings first. Apart from some dead and starving chickens (which we released), the coast was clear. We then split into two groups and approached the house from the front and rear. I was with Cam going in the front door, and from what I could tell, the remains on the porch were of an older man and woman, probably Phil’s in-laws. But that was just a guess based on the relative sizes of the mostly-eaten corpses and the clumps of gray hair scattered about.
Inside, the scene was even worse. A partially consumed woman was in the kitchen, and enough of her face remained that I could tell it was Phil’s wife. In the upstairs bathroom was the young daughter, and I don’t even have the stomach now to tell you the condition of her remains. Let’s just say that what zombies did to a body made Jack the Ripper look like a boy scout. We searched the rest of the house, basement to attic, but didn’t find anyone else alive or dead.
“A pack of zombies must have come through,” Cam said, brushing a tear from his eye as we stood in the upstairs bathroom. “They’re all dead.”
“No, there’s someone missing,” I replied. “He also had a son, Phil, Jr. He’s only about five or six years old.”
Cam got on the walkie-talkie and asked if anyone saw any other remains. No one had seen anything, but we conducted a much more thorough search of the house and barns. At one point near the chicken coops, one of the men heard something rustling in the leaves and called us over. It turned out to be a dog—an Australian shepherd, I think—munching on one of the dead chickens. After swallowing another bite or two, the dog came bounding over to us with the chicken carcass hanging from his mouth, acting as though he wanted one of us to play with his “toy.”
Zombies were rarely able to catch animals, especially one as fast and agile as this shepherd, so I began to have hope that Phil, Jr. had also been fast enough to run to safety. Of course, three weeks had passed, and the boy could be many miles away by now, but it would be worth a search. While a couple of men volunteered for burial duty—god bless them!—the rest of us devised a search strategy to try to cover as much of the surrounding woods as possible before nightfall. But as we were gearing up, one of the men brought our attention to the dog, who was standing under the porch stairs, whining and barking.
“At first I thought the poor fella was just missing his master, but now I’m not so sure,” he said thoughtfully, rubbing his
beard with fingertips exposed from cut-off leather gloves. “I ain’t saying he’s pulling a Lassie, but I think he’s trying to tell us something.”
There were 4x8 sheets of wood lattice around the entire base of the porch, but where the dog was standing, one of the sheets was loose and easily bent inward when Cam pushed on it. He knelt down and turned on his bright LED flashlight.
“Shit, it’s the boy!” Cam whispered to us. “He’s alive, but he looks scared out of his mind. Trues, you talk to him.”
I crawled under the porch, but didn’t try to go any nearer to the terrified child. Once my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness, I could see the boy’s dirty face and his wide open eyes. He was wrapped in a blanket, and there were boxes of cookies and bottles of water scattered around him. I spoke softly, calling him by name, and telling him his dad sent me. There was no reaction, he didn’t even blink. I inched forward slowly, speaking in soothing tones, telling him that everything would be all right. Still, there was no reaction. This boy wasn’t just terrified, he was catatonic.
I hurried over and took him in my arms. He was all skin and bones. As I crawled out from under the porch, I yelled for someone to get my medkit. The boy’s pulse was fairly strong and his breathing was normal, but I couldn’t get any reaction out of him.
“What can we do?” Cam asked, pacing the floor of the boy’s bedroom after I gave the child a thorough examination. “Can he be helped?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do for him,” I replied, truly at a loss. “But I don’t see any reason that we can’t take him back to his father. I would rather do that than keep him in the place where his family was slaughtered.”
Cam drove the Humvee while I cradled the boy in my arms. Of course, we also had to bring along the dog, who had to sniff and lick the boy’s face at least once every few minutes. The ride back was uneventful, except, of course, for the section of road that was a rather bumpy due to the zombie tartar where I had mowed down the pack. I kept my eyes on the boy instead of looking out at the results of my WMZD—Weapon of Mass Zombie Destruction.
HVZA (Book 1): Hudson Valley Zombie Apocalypse Page 20