Brooks looked at Copper’s body and shook his head. On any other hit, he would have checked for a pulse to confirm death, but quite frankly, he didn’t care if this guy lived or died. The assassin turned to leave but the train was passing the alcove, so he had to wait until it was all the way by. He stepped into the tunnel as the last car rumbled past, pulling his phone from a clip on his belt. “Lynch? Yeah, I got it. Pick me up at the Kendall Square Station, right outside the stairs. I know, right? It sounds like you’re right next to me. Who would have thought reception would be so good in a subway tunnel? No, you need to stay at MIT for the foreseeable future. Yeah, I want to see how this plays out and you can keep tabs. Hey, I’m thinking Thai food for later.” Brooks pressed the end call button and replaced the phone on his belt. He hummed Sad But True by Metallica as he walked the tracks back to the platform.
The delivery system the good doctor had helped create for Rama had gone to work the moment the lid on the small case opened, when it had impacted the ground in the tunnel at his feet. The program contained on the quantum europium embedded crystal hard drive enclosed in the case locked on to the beta waves of Copper and Brooks. Rama’s quantum information, which had been written onto the nuclear spin of the europium using a spread-focused laser at Vantel, was then uploaded (Grafted) via the beta waves of both men in its entirety and stored in the hippocampus of their brains as memory. The procedure had taken approximately three-hundredths of a nanosecond. While both men were now armed with Rama, neither of them had the ability to manually access the code stored in the hippocampus, but both began broadcasting immediately.
Brooks, uninfected with Abaddon, suffered no ill effects of the antivirus and went on his merry way, albeit broadcasting Rama to every human being and machine capable of absorbing the code. Doctor Copper, also uninfected with Abaddon, but infected with six .22 caliber bullets, was not so fortunate. Nor were the people he would soon meet.
Doctor Donald Copper passed away at 8:08 PM on Friday, the fourth of June. Whatever thing that made Donald Copper Donald Copper fled or was forced from his body and he was, quite simply, dead. Rama, designed to remain dormant until Abaddon was detected, or a machine shut down, now had a task. As the doctor’s biological systems began a cascading failure, Rama kicked in to turn those systems back on.
The near instantaneous assessment of the body’s crucial structures yielded important information to Rama. The skeletal and muscular systems, similar to the housing and moving parts of a machine, were not badly damaged. The cardiovascular, endocrine, respiratory and lymphatic systems, much like fluid transfer or hydraulic lines, intake, exhaust, and self-diagnostics were put on the back-burner in lieu of more important issues. The nervous system, with its billions of components, was where the program began. The digestive system would be second on the list.
Rama began by creating imbalances in the positively charged atomic structure of the doctor’s cells, thereby causing electrons to flow from one atom to another. This generated copious amounts of bio-electricity and caused the doctor’s body some slight spasms. The re-routed residual and newly produced electro-chemicals were then stored in the neurons of each cell until enough charge was built up for a jump start of the entire system.
The thing that had been Doctor Copper ceased being dead at 8:23 PM on Friday, the fourth of June. It opened its eyes and sat up. A monumental task, considering it had not been alive an instant prior.
The antivirus now needed more resources than the former doctor’s body could provide, so signals were sent out to the rest of the new creature’s brain from the stored code in the hippocampus. More bio-electricity and fuel to sustain the reactions would need to be acquired. Driven by a singular need, the thing stood, listening for the first time. Auditory signals coming from the right compelled the creature to investigate and it moved toward the sounds, looking to fuel itself for further functionality. It stumbled and jerked, the motion not fluid as the neurotransmitters fired less efficiently through the synapses now. It reached the platform and surveyed the fuel sources in front of it, choosing the one that was in closest proximity.
Don Trapp, a Harvard frat-boy and a bit in his cups already for so early in the evening, noticed the doctor attempting to climb out of the tunnel, the smile on his inebriated face evaporated. He pointed toward the newest species on earth and stood up. “Hey, that guy fell off the platform!” Don, his two college buddies, and two subway patrons, rushed to help the former doctor out of the tunnel before a train could run him down or he stepped on the third rail.
The first to reach the hapless tunnel rat was Carl Willis, a sausage vendor who usually worked outside of Fenway Park, but was off today because he was on his way to his daughter’s wedding. He grabbed the shirt and arm of what used to be Dr. Copper and Don’s friend Matt Samuels, a good-looking undergraduate law student and defenseman for the Harvard Crimson hockey team, grabbed the other arm. They dragged him onto the platform, where Matt immediately received a bite on the hand. It was more of a nip really, the skin had barely been broken, but he still ripped his injured hand away yelling, “He friggin’ bit me!” Carl, upon hearing what had happened, looked up in fear and rightly so. Strong hands fastened onto the jacket portion of the three-piece suit he was wearing for the wedding. The guy he had just rescued both pulled Carl in and leaned toward him. Carl felt pain explode in the lower portion of the right side of his neck just above his collarbone and a significant portion of his expensive jacket was torn away along with a moderate chunk of his trapezius muscle.
Carl yelled. Everyone else except former Doctor Copper backed up to assess the situation. During the assessment, the dead man leaned in and tore a strip of Carl’s cheek away, exposing his molars and bicuspids beneath.
Carl screamed. Several people figured the time for assessing was over and jumped in to help. Don and another subway patron pulled the assailant off the bleeding man. The patron received a bite on the arm, not terribly deep, but there was blood in the semicircular wound. Don punched the man in the face as hard as he could. Growing up in rural Michigan, Don had never punched anyone before and was completely unprepared for the pain involved in performing the act incorrectly. He shook out his hand but was pleased as punch to see that he had knocked the assailant down, even if he had cut two knuckles on a tooth.
The man appeared to be chewing as he stood back up. He was chewing on the folks he had just bitten. Eating them. Many of the folks on the platform decided that this was enough, and they fled, some slowly, some in full sprint.
Two transit police fought through the crowd and seeing six people push one around, they naturally assumed that the one was the victim. Rushing in to protect the man, one of the cops began yelling at the attackers. The victim, now on the ground, grabbed his leg and bit into his calf. The leg must have been particularly tasty, as this time no amount of pulling or kicking would free the policeman from his attacker’s grasp. Cop number two drew his baton and thumped what he thought was a man on the back of his skull. Stunned, the thing let its meal go and cop two put his knee on the thing’s back and cuffed it.
Naturally, the thing was unresponsive to commands, so the policemen both whacked the thing again and put a zip tie around its ankles when it wouldn’t stop trying to bite anyone within reach. More police and some emergency medical personnel arrived, took everyone’s statement, (except the dead guy’s) and then took Carl and cop one to the hospital.
Matt and the helpful patron were treated at the scene and told that human bites could be very serious, and they shouldn’t wait to go to the hospital, as the bites could get infected quite quickly.
Don and Matt continued to further their inebriated states until the wee hours, when Matt began to feel ill. His arm looked infected and something smelled nasty, but his friends were drunk, too and passed it off as somebody didn’t pit-up. Don had stumbled home a half an hour previous, not feeling well.
Dr. Omar Vencedees, a prominent reconstructive surgeon, showed up at six o’clock the following mo
rning at Mass General Hospital to look at Carl Willis’ lacerated face. Carl was quite ill. Being bitten in the face by another person will do that. When Dr. Vencedees removed the bandage from Carl’s face to look at the wound, the smell made him gag. It was not possible for gangrene to have set in overnight, but this is exactly what appeared to have happened. Carl was prepped for emergency surgery, the doctor planning to remove the infected tissue before it could consume the poor man’s entire face.
Carl never made it to surgery and expired in his room during the prep stage. He was pronounced dead by the floor-resident at 7:14 Saturday morning. He was un-pronounced when he sat up to survey his surroundings at 7:17. The resident actually held his stethoscope up to visually inspect it. The room nurse looked at Carl and knew something was amiss. “Doctor… Doctor, look at his eyes!” Carl’s eyes were a deep red and a single tear of blood rolled down his cheek. The resident looked at his patient, the patient returning the stare.
The resident rushed to Carl’s aid, donning his stethoscope on the way. Dr. Vencedees picked that moment to open the door and storm in, demanding to know how his patient had died from a bite on the cheek. What used to be Carl picked that moment to grab the resident, pull him toward the bed, and sink his teeth into the unfortunate doctor’s neck. Arterial spray painted the white curtain, wall, and blood pressure machine. The nurse bolted in to help and the sausage vendor bit off her pinky and ring fingers at the second knuckles.
When security showed up, Dr. Vencedees was battling Mr. Willis using his clipboard and not faring well. Two security men and the doctor received bites for their trouble.
One floor down, Officer Tabor, the cop bitten on the leg, attacked the doctor and two nurses that had rushed from the nurse’s station to check on him when they noticed his vitals monitor had flat-lined. All three were bitten before the officer could be restrained, one of the nurses quite badly.
Across town, Don expired at exactly ten in the morning on Saturday. His corpse stood in his dorm room, looking at its surroundings until it heard a noise in the corridor. It began banging on the door until someone asked if he was alright in there. Then he began banging and moaning. Quite a crowd had accumulated before the resident assistant showed up fresh from the shower, in a towel. He used his key to open the door and the thing that had been Don stumbled out and bit four people before the kids were able to hold him down long enough to tie him up with a fire hose.
The patron who had gotten a bite for his trouble in the subway died at six past ten on Saturday and murdered his wife as she slept next to him. They were sleeping in for the first time in quite a while. They both killed their teenaged son.
The next-door neighbor’s black lab Brutus began barking at just before eleven in the morning and the neighbors investigated only to hear breaking furniture and odd sounds coming from the house. The police were called and both cops were attacked, one fatally, when they responded. The live cop shot the teenager and his mother twice each, none of the four bullets doing much. The dead cop stood and attacked the live cop. The patron, his wife, and son completing the job.
By noon that Saturday, there were sixty cases of folks being attacked by their friends or neighbors. By three o’clock, two hospitals in Boston were overcrowded with patients who had been bitten. By 9 PM, both of those hospitals were overrun with the living dead. Midnight arrived with more than seventy thousand infected either dead or alive. Two days later, Boston belonged to the dead.
The rest of the world would follow.
END
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Acknowledgments
Each time I complete a book, I am amazed at how many helpful people I know. As a general rule, people are horrible, so I am fortunate in my family and friendships.
Firstly, thanks to all of my family who humor me and tell me I’m funny. Donna, Danielle, Richy, Chloe, Mom, and Pops. You’re why I keep doing this, and you’ve been my inspiration for several characters, anecdotes, and unique phrases in my work. My mom and dad made me, my wife and kids made me better.
In 2010 or so, I began reading zombie stories on a website. That site is Homepageofthedead.com, and it changed me a bit. I decided that I wanted to write, so I pumped out a couple of short stories which I uploaded to HPoTD and was rewarded with my first reviews. They were overwhelmingly positive, and that is what drove me to publish. I would like to thank all of the readers on HPoTD for telling me to get my ass in gear and write a book. Thank you, Neil, for such a great site as well.
While I was reading some fantastic stuff on HPoTD, I trolled the internet to find fellow lovers of zombie fiction, and was again rewarded with some new friends. This is where I first met Joy, James, and FF, three fantastic online friends who share similar interests. Several iterations of websites later, and Zombiefiend.com was born. It is the premiere living dead aficionado site on the internet. If you liked this book, or even if you hated it and like other zombie books, I highly recommend you head over to Zombiefiend and check it out. Jump into the chatroom and you can talk to some of the authors you have already read as well.
Speaking of authors, I would like to thank some of my fellow writers who have created unbelievable worlds full of horror, terror, great characters, and settings:
Thanks Dave Evans, Christopher Artinian, Jonathan Maberry, Craig DiLouie, David Simpson, James Jackson, James Schannep, Chris Philbrook, William Todd Rose, S.P. Durnin, Ricky Fleet, Bowie Ibarra, Shawn Chesser, and John O’Brian. There are dozens more, but these are the folks I’ve read in just the past few months, and they inspire me. They also piss me off because they think of things I should have thought of first.
Thanks to the folks who have made my stuff better by telling me I have no idea how to use a comma, where to put quotation marks, and that a banana cannot, in fact, be used to bludgeon someone. Tanya Saunders, Shelley Loring, Tamra Crow, and Dawn Trapp. You all have helped me so much. God help planet Earth should you ever form some type of cabal.
One final acknowledgement: Thank you George Romero. You are the creator of the modern zombie. You started an entire ethos, that quite literally, will never die.
Chapter 1: Now
The Zombie Apocalypse started two months ago, and it started exactly where you’d expect it to--on television. Or, more to the point, on Facebook.
It went viral on the internet only slightly faster than it did in real life, and lucky for me, it happened on a Friday night so being a socially phobic shut-in saved my life.
While everyone is blabbing about undead bullshit on their social media feed, I’m lubed up and kneeling in front of my computer, whacking off to Sativa Rose and Lorena Sanchez having steamy, raunchy sex with some guy who looks like he stepped out of Duck Dynasty.
Before mankind ended, the AC Nielson Company reported that the “average” American watched 5.2 hours of television per day. That’s 36.4 hours per week, one and a half days straight, staring at the idiot box! So if they lived to the ripe age of 80, that means 16 years of their life were spent living vicariously through celebrities, being told what to buy and who to be. A nation of consumer cyborgs whose brains were equal parts Kardashian-ized, Monsanto addled, and pharmaceutically stunted in a 24/7 online shopping, social media, virtual reality orgy porgy. America runs on High Fructose Corn Whiz and McMeat, and humans were retarded by Candy Crush long before the zombie plague actually devoured their brains.
But none of that really matters now: TV doesn’t exist anymore; neither do the mentally handicapped, the government, or the status quo. And when civilization died, I was 38, chronically single, and jacking off to Lewd Contact #29, so who am I to really talk shit about everyone else? I’ll tell you who--I’m the smug asshole who’s alive to record history.
Four things they don’t tell you about zombies in the movies:
1) They shit themselves when they change, so you can smell them a mile away.
2) They aren’t actually dead; they’re just diseased, brain-dead cannibals, and yo
u can kill a zombie all the same ways you can kill a regular person (burning, stabbing, Columbian Neck Tie, dropping in a pit of crocodiles, etc.), and not just by killing the brain.
3) They eat almost anything, including vegetables and rotting garbage, they just prefer the taste of flesh. And they maliciously hate humans on sight. Like, if you see a zombie eating a deer, and you think it’s probably stuffed and won’t bother coming after you, you’re wrong: even if it’s not hungry, it still wants to bite you, almost like it’s jealous that you’re still a person.
4) Humanity probably won’t survive this.
If we get our shit together enough to destroy all the zombies, then maybe we can rebuild a newer and better civilization that isn’t brought to you by Nabisco. Most likely, you’ll find this notebook stashed with a bunch of mildewed porno mags in some discarded, blood-soaked backpack in the northeastern United States. Its owner will hopefully be nowhere in sight, having shambled off to look for warm fleshy people like yourself to chomp on.
The Lazarus Virus, as the media so generically dubbed it before they were all devoured, supposedly began with a terrorist attack on New York City.
There’s a lot of debate in the aftermath as to whether or not a bunch of goat-herding Islamic Fundamentalists actually had the capabilities to create such a virus. 15% of survivors believe that the US military created this biological weapon, and polls are split pretty evenly between those who believe it was released by the government as a form of population control, and those who believe it was released by some rogue faction.
Just joking--survivors are so rare that we don’t really take polls of anything anymore, and those stats are just based on my conversations with the stragglers left alive. Do you remember all those ridiculous statistics that quantified every facet of our daily existence before everyone got eaten? 34% of Americans believe Candidate X didn’t grope Woman Z, while 56% of consumers preferred Coke to Pepsi, and 14% of American males have received a blowjob while driving a car (present company excluded).
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