by David Wong
John stumbled to his feet and spent a few minutes looking for his shoes. He never found them, so he figured he would just trade with one of the guys there. He put on a pair of Nikes he found by the door that were downright huge—seemed to be size 18 or so. They looked newer than his own but he figured he could catch up with the guy later to see if he wanted to trade back. Some people like shoes that are a little more broken in …
* * *
John realized he was staring at the wall and that some time had passed without him realizing it. Brain was still trying to boot up, loading all of the extra shit into the task bar. Finally he made himself get up and head out. Amy was going to do something rash if he wasn’t there to calm her down. He hit the cold air and found the Bronco parked haphazardly across the lawn. John cursed when he saw some jackass had spray painted ZOMBIE ASSAULT VEHICLE on the door, but then recognized it as his own handwriting.
He pulled out and saw the dorm tower looming ahead. He actually wasn’t more than five or six blocks away from Amy’s bus stop at the Mexican place. Awesome. He let the Bronco idle for a bit so the heater would have time to warm up.
* * *
John found the bus stop easily enough, but instead of a bus, pulled up to it were four windowless, black vans. Yellow tape roped off the whole sidewalk and the parking lot beyond. Guys in black space suits were prowling everywhere.
Amy was nowhere in sight.
John stopped right in the middle of the street, threw open the door off the Bronco and ran to the first van. He yanked open the back door.
“AMY! HEY!”
Nobody there. He ran to the second one. Before he could get it open, two of the space suit guys grabbed him.
“Sir! Sir! You are risking contamination by—”
“AAAMYYY!”
The men dragged John away from the vans and wrestled him to the sidewalk. John got a good look at what they were wearing and it was fucking terrifying. The glass on their helmets was tinted so that when light hit it, it glinted blood red. They had armor and machine guns and wires and shit running around like they were on the way to fight a war on Mars.
A third space suit guy came up to them and said, “What, is he family?”
John said, “Yes! I’m Amy Sullivan’s … dad.”
“Sir, do you know—”
“Listen! I’m infected! Take me and let her go! The infection, I got it all over. Look at my enormous inhuman feet!”
The guy said to his coworkers, “Okay, see if you can get ID and let him ride with Otto.”
For the second time in nine days, John’s hands were bound with the heavy-duty zip tie handcuffs. He was stuffed into the third van, but Amy wasn’t in there, either. Twenty minutes later it jolted to a start, and he knew that he and Amy would be in Undisclosed in a little over two hours. He had that much time to think up a plan.
45 MINUTES EARLIER …
Forty-five minutes before John would get hauled away in a van …
Amy sat and waited at the bus stop bench for the government to get there, watching as four more people with gun cases and army satchels strolled by. Were they like a militia or something? The sight of these regular people wandering around with all that hardware scared her more than the zombie thing. If everything fell apart and civilization came down to this, to guns and people fighting over food and medicine, what would she do? She wasn’t strong. She didn’t have strong friends. She didn’t have a family. The closest she had was David, and what if he was hurt or—
“Excuse me, what’s your name?”
Amy looked up, expecting to see a guy in a jumpsuit and gas mask or something. Instead it was a hipster-looking guy with a beard and glasses and wearing a black peacoat.
“Amy.”
“Hi. My name’s Josh, and we keep running into each other. We sat across from each other on the bus on Z Day. Remember? Then I come back and it turns out you live on the floor below me.”
Amy remembered him now, but wouldn’t if he hadn’t brought it up. He was a nice-looking guy but he also looked exactly like seven hundred other guys on campus. Same build, same beard, same glasses.
Z Day?
“Oh, yeah. I remember.”
“Did you lose someone in [Undisclosed]?”
“My boyfriend is there.”
“Me, too. Not my boyfriend. I’m not gay. My brother, my nephew and one of my best friends. That’s three different people obviously. Are you here for the meeting?”
“Oh, no. I’m just waiting for a ride.” She realized in that moment the strap Josh had draped over his shoulder was not a backpack, but a rifle case. “Wait, is this the gun meeting everybody’s going to? Because I left all my guns at home.”
“You should come anyway.” From an inside pocket he pulled out a sheet of paper, and she didn’t need to read the details. She recognized the huge letter Z the moment he unfolded it. “When your ride gets here, bring them, too.”
“Oh, I don’t think they’ll want to come. The CDC or whoever is coming to pick me up to take me to quarantine.”
Alarmed, Josh said, “Excuse me?”
“Yep, I’ve wasted a week here and finally I said, screw it. If that’s where David is, that’s where I want to be. I told them to come get me.”
Josh looked nervously down the street in both directions, then said, “Amy, listen. You need to come with me. Give me ten minutes to explain what’s going on. If after that you don’t think I’m right about this, I’ll bring you back here. Hell, we’ll drive you down to the checkpoint ourselves. But you don’t have all of the information and I’m telling you right now, if you go with whoever shows up here, you will never see your boyfriend again.”
Another nervous scan of the street.
“Come on. I’ll explain everything once we’re off the sidewalk.”
Amy sighed and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “So, so many kidnappings begin this way.”
“We’re going right down there, to the Powder Keg. It’ll be packed with people. It’s full of rednecks with assault rifles and shotguns, if anyone tries to put a hand on you, they’ll be perforated. Come on. There’s no time.”
He put a hand under her armpit.
“Up.”
She went with him. They hurried along the sidewalk, Josh with his hand flat on her back pushing her along and ducking down like they were dodging machine gun fire.
* * *
The Powder Keg was a gun store/shooting range and not, as Amy had thought, a gay nightclub (this wasn’t a snide private joke, it would be days later before she would remember that the nightclub she was thinking of was called the Bomb Shelter). The place was absolutely packed, and the crowd was armed to the teeth. In any other country on earth, this kind of gathering would be cause for an all-out military response.
Josh pushed her through the door and into a crowd. He stopped to tell two burly shotgun-bearing men, “REPER is looking for her. If they show up at the door, tell them we’ve never seen her.”
Amy thought, Did he say Reavers? Like on Firefly?
Josh pushed inside, pulling Amy through the crowd behind him to the front of the room, Amy still carrying her bag of pharmacy stuff and her stupid pillow.
He reached a spot where a white bedsheet was hanging in front of a display of earmuffs and safety glasses. Josh put his back to the wall and stepped up on a huge cardboard box of clay pigeons, so he’d be a couple of feet above the crowd. He quieted everybody and said, “Okay everybody, we don’t have much time. Now, I need to get something out of the way first thing, I begin every meeting with this. Some of you were dragged here by friends or family, rolling your eyes over the whole ‘zombie’ thing. If you don’t like that word, feel free to pick one that suits you. The Zombie Response Squad was a club promoting physical fitness, weapons training and safety, and wilderness survival. These are skills I believe that every human should possess regardless—they can save your life in the event of anything from natural disaster to civil unrest. The zombie angle was just our way of h
aving fun with it and, obviously, we had no way of knowing that, you know, something like this was coming.”
He paused here. That seemed like a really important point to him.
“So if you don’t like the word zombie, feel free to mentally substitute any word you wish when you hear it. But for the purposes of this discussion, I am going to use the word zombie. The infected are contagious, they exhibit animalistic and predatory behavior toward other humans, they can survive massive organ and tissue trauma. So regardless of what science eventually figures out about this outbreak, right now, the danger these creatures pose to your personal safety, and the method of dealing with them, fully fits the profile of ‘zombie.’ So just deal with it.”
Josh gestured to a guy in the crowd and said, “Fredo?” That was presumably Fredo’s cue to turn on a projector hooked to his laptop. An image appeared on the sheet next to Josh.
Oh my dear god, Amy thought. They have a PowerPoint presentation.
Josh said, “Okay, very quickly. Here’s what we know. For some of you this will be repeat information, just bear with me here.”
A blue slide appeared, with white writing in Comic Sans font. It said, ORIGINS?
“We don’t know where the infection originated from. We may never know. Since it behaves in a way that’s different from anything known to science, I prefer to think it’s man-made. In fact, I also happen to think that the pathogen was specifically engineered to ‘zombify’ the victims, for the psychological impact. Humans have been scared of walking dead since hunter-gatherer days. Zombies are burned into our genetic memory. I was just reading about that in a book. Fredo…”
Next slide. This one had a line graph, starting at zero and spiking rapidly upward. The left-to-right axis was ticking off the days since the outbreak.
“OGZA estimates are that the infection rate within the borders of [Undisclosed] was at twenty percent as of last Wednesday. It exceeded fifty percent yesterday, and will be at ninety to one hundred percent within forty-eight hours.”
Gasps from the crowd. Amy thought, that couldn’t be true, could it? And who was OGZA?
Fredo hit the next slide. It said, WHO IS OGZA?
“For those of you who haven’t been to previous meetings and who have been following this story in the mainstream press, let me quickly fill you in. A group of resistance fighters have formed inside town, gathering supplies and scouting secure locations where they can hole up as the situation deteriorates. They call themselves Outbeak Ground Zero Alpha.”
He brought up his final slide, which said, SO WHAT ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT?
“One final point I want to make, and I leave this for last because it’s what you need to keep with you when you watch TV tonight. An anonymous source within the government has leaked a series of e-mails between the Centers for Disease Control and the task force for Rapid Exotic Pathogen Eradication slash Research, outlining what they call Operation Leppard. From these e-mails we know that REPER determined within forty-eight hours of the outbreak—based on autopsies of infected dead—that the physiological changes caused by the infection are radical … and irreversible.”
Another “let that sink in” pause from Josh.
“Even if they could kill off the agent of the change—the bacteria, virus, parasite or whatever it is—the subject’s entire nervous system is no longer recognizable as human. There is nothing to be done for the infected. From there they have made the logical conclusion that quarantine is not separating the infected so that they may be isolated and cured. They are being separated—and concentrated in one location—so that they can be wiped out in one step. Just like amputating an infected limb.”
He let that sink, too.
“And our goal, as of now, is to do whatever we can to help them accomplish this.”
The room erupted in cheers.
8 Hours Until the Massacre at Ffirth Asylum
John found himself packed into the most depressing room he’d ever been in—and in Undisclosed, that was really saying something. It was a gymnasium in the depressing old Ffirth TB asylum, a building that had been old, abandoned and almost certainly haunted since his father was a kid. Inside, the place was even more of a rotting, mildewing shithole than out. The long boards in the old gym floor had warped and curled up over time, creating a rippling floor that, if painted blue, would look like the surface of the ocean on a windy day.
He didn’t see Amy there but he wouldn’t have even if she were—there were partitions with curtains set up to divide the gym into dozens of little rooms containing cots. Teams of guys in those spooky Darth Vader space suits were rolling a cart from one “room” to the next, taking blood samples from everyone. John wondered what exactly they were checking for. He wondered what his blood-alcohol level was.
John’s hands were still bound behind him. Everybody else was getting a standard checklist read off a clipboard (“Are you having hallucinations? Any unexplained urges or mood swings? Are you experiencing any unusual sores or lesions in the mouth area?”) but they came back to his cot twice after his interview, asking him his name, asking how he knew Dave and Amy, and so on. Finally they asked him if he knew Amy’s whereabouts, and John felt a Gatorade bucket of relief get dumped over his head.
They don’t have her.
On the fourth visit, they brought a white space suit that contained a smiling, gray-haired guy who John instantly disliked.
“Hello there, John. I’m Dr. Bob Tennet. How are we today?”
“I know you somehow…”
“I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure of meeting, but I know your friend David.”
“Right, right, you’re his crossbow therapist.”
Tennet grabbed a rolling office chair and dragged it over. He sat on it backward, straddling it so that he could cross his arms over the back in a casual, folksy way, which looked absurd in his huge, bulky hazardous-materials suit. He pulled out a device with a series of clips dangling at the end of thin wires.
“Your left hand, please.”
Tennet clipped the five clips to John’s fingers. At the other end of the wires was a box with a small screen. Tennet punched in some settings. Was this thing going to give him a manicure?
“Now please answer the following questions honestly. They might seem odd to you, but reading your reaction will give us vital insight into your condition.”
John said, “Whatever. Wait, you said ‘know’ David, present tense. Is Dave still … around?”
“We’ll explore that in a moment. As you can imagine, John, we’re working just as hard as we can to give a clean bill of health to the people who don’t need our help so we can devote as much time and attention as we can to the ones who do.”
“And by help, you mean throwing them behind that goddamned prison camp you’ve built next door?”
“You feel what we’re doing here is unethical.”
“Is that … some kind of a joke? You can’t tell me the government knows what’s really happening here. We have … rights and shit.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Why do I say there is such a thing as human rights? Wait, what is all this? Who are you?”
“You understand the irony of you asking that question, when my entire role here is figuring out who—or what—you are. You and the rest of the patients in this facility.”
“We have rights either way.”
“Human rights.”
“Yes.”
“But you may no longer be human.”
“Jesus Christ. Look at me. You know damned well there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m sitting here having a rational conversation with you. In English.”
“There is a species of carnivorous turtle whose tongue has evolved to look exactly like the worms local fish are known to eat. The fish swim right into its mouth, going after the ‘worm’, only to have their heads severed by powerful jaws. If, say, a hypothetical predator of humans had learned to mimic human speech and mannerisms in order to make it a more efficien
t predator, that would hardly make it human, or guarantee it rights under our Constitution or any common system of morality.”
“Holy shit. The whole world has gone insane out there, hasn’t it? So you just throw everybody in a concentration camp and figure you’ll sort it out later? That’s where things are at?”
“Ah, your friend called the quarantine a prison, but you have elevated it to concentration camp! Your generation does have a flair for the hyperbolic when it comes to describing your own adversity.”
“Wait, so you did talk to David? So he’s alive?”
Tennet looked up from his readout and said, “Let’s explore that. That’ll be a good jumping off point for us. If David were here, but was infected, would he still be David?”
“What?”
“Say his personality remained exactly the same, but the parasite caused his head to transform so that his face was replaced with the face of a leech, complete with circles of tiny teeth for sucking human blood. Would you still consider him to be your old friend?”
“Are you saying he’s infected, or are you just fucking with me?”
Instead of answering, Tennet studied the screen on the device hooked to John’s fingers and made some notes on his clipboard. “Good. Now let’s say the opposite happened. Say he still looked, spoke and acted like David, but was, in reality, an inhuman predator. How would that make you feel? Please answer.”
“Are you serious?”
“Please, we have a lot of patients to get to.”
“It would make me feel bad.”