Her father fell out of the basket, and disappeared into the dense foliage of the tree.
“DADDY!” she bellowed through the windshield of the speeding pickup truck. A second later she saw his limp, spread-eagled body fall out the bottom of the tree and land either on the sidewalk, or the grassy slice beside it.
A powerful snap broke the relative calm of the late morning, followed by an enormous electrical explosion above the tree. The balloon had touched the wire.
The propane tanks erupted, spewing tongues of gas-fueled flame into the center of the tree, igniting the old growth in an instant. As she approached it the tree erupted into a firebomb, consuming her father’s passion–the balloon–above it, turning it into so much ash.
Her father lay still below the raging firestorm just ten feet above.
Malinda wiped tears of panic and fear from her face and maneuvered the truck around a car backing out of a driveway. She screamed obscenities at them as her tires screeched on the pavement. She flew directly at her dad’s body beneath the fire-engulfed tree and skidded to a stop. She threw the truck in park and leapt out the door. He’d landed mostly in the grass with only his feet on the curb.
“Dad! Wake up, we gotta go!” she yelled at him through a series of gasps and sobs. She stopped all movement–didn’t even breathe–when she saw his body.
Head to toe he was covered in blood. His pants were soaked with it, his shirt was ripped open and his chest sported a cluster of ragged tears in the skin that seeped blood. Worst of all, his face… his cheek had been torn open on the left and the teeth were exposed all the way to the back of his jaw.
“Dad?” she whispered.
He didn’t move. Didn’t respond. Above the tree’s heat grew, and she heard branches breaking and falling. Some hit the ground a few feet from her, snapping into bits and sending red embers in all directions. The heat grew.
She leaned over him, cautious now of his being alive or dead, and brushed the gray strand of hair off his brow. A dried bit of blood broke free and the clump of hair moved for her. With the same hand she reached down to his neck. She pressed her fingers into his wrinkled skin, and felt for a pulse.
Throb.
She laughed out loud and kept her fingers against his neck. Another throb came, slow, but strong. He wasn’t leaking blood in any serious manner, so unless he had broken bones… he might survive.
“Dad!” she yelled in his face. “Dad you gotta wake up. I need to move you,” she said, shaking his shoulders.
Her dad’s eyes popped open, revealing the same hazel eyes she had. Through the pain she knew he was in, he smiled.
“…Malinda. Good. You’re safe,” he whispered. No sooner had he finished talking he winced. Something hurt him badly.
“Daddy, can you move? The tree is on fire. The balloon is history.”
Tim closed his eyes and Malinda knew he was taking stock of his body. He nodded.
“Fuck the balloon. It’s not important. Yeah. Fingers and toes are all moving, I think. Quite the fire, eh? Did I do that?” Tim’s eyes looked directly up into the center of the tree that burned out of control.
“Yeah Dad,” she said, laughing. “Take my arm, sit up.”
She got him to sitting, then to a knee, then to his feet after far too long. Thicker and thicker branches fell around them, one landing on the hood of the truck and leaving a dent across the entire length of it. The branch rolled off and into the street where its leaves burned bright and hot. She walked her father around it, and opened the door for him. A minute later she had him in and seated, and was running around the safer rear of the vehicle to get in the driver’s side. As she slammed the door shut, a branch as thick as her thigh came down, bouncing off the front fender and obliterating the headlight and hood edge. A car filled with passengers screamed down the street, racing the burning tree to get past.
“We should move,” her dad mumbled. His voice sounded wet, and hollow from the tear that made a hole in his cheek.
Malinda chuckled and threw the truck in reverse as a loud, rumbling crack emanated from the burning tree. She paid no heed to what was behind her; she had to escape the tree, nothing else mattered.
As the truck careened over the curb across the street and up onto a lawn the burning maple toppled, felled by the propane fed flames across the street, taking down multiple power lines, crushing the car that tried to pass, and came to a catastrophic rest between two houses placed close to one another. Both homes had their roofs caved in from the tree and lost more than a dozen windows. Two cars were crushed in driveways in the process as well.
Flames caught on the eaves of both homes, and by the time Malinda had the truck in drive, both homes were engulfed in flames, and she could hear the screams of the people inside the cars, and the houses.
“Should we help them?” she asked her dad, who came in and out of consciousness.
“With what? We’re not firefighters. We’d burn to death trying to get to them. We need to get you safe. Go, get gas and head north.”
Malinda floored the truck, ruining the lawn of the house she’d already driven on. She turned away from the spreading conflagration and headed back towards the center of Westfield.
“How did this get so bad, so fast?” she said aloud, putting her hand on her dad’s leg.
“The will of Satan, dear,” he muttered before resting his head back in the chair.
“Satan doesn’t exist, Dad.”
“Look around you. This is the work of something. Does this look like the work of God, or his arch nemesis to you?” It hurt him to speak.
She sighed.
“Any chance you tried illegal drugs?” he asked her with his mashed face.
“What? Dad, no. Jesus. What kind of a question is that?” She slapped his leg.
“I can’t believe you hit me, in the state I’m in. I’d hoped you might have something to take the edge off the pain I’m in. Mary Jane. Meth. I’ll take anything right now. I hear cocaine makes your face numb. There’s a hole in my mouth, Malinda, I stabbed a man in the eye earlier, and I threw a young lady out of my balloon just a minute ago.”
“Life’s hard, Dad.”
“Worldstar.”
She rolled her eyes, smiled, and drove the truck faster.
One Hell of a Field Trip
- Part One -
A History Lesson
“Why do they keep them here?” Mary asked her teacher as the classroom of sophomores trampled down the granite floored hall of the museum. “It’s sad, and dangerous.”
“Because we need to remember,” Mrs. Parker said back to her. The middle aged teacher with mousy brown hair streaked with strands of gray and glasses that needed a new prescription looked over her shoulder. She would’ve tooted a tune on her pipe to keep the kids in line if she could.
“No one is forgetting anytime soon,” Aiden said in his ‘I’m never not the quarterback’ voice.
“But they might, Aiden,” Mrs. Parker said as they reached the end of the echoing corridor. “And with something so vast as a potential extinction level event… there can be no cutting of corners, and no coddling. For your generation–the first generation that didn’t experience the outbreak first hand–you must see the unvarnished horror.”
“That’s so bleak,” Mary said.
“That so metal,” Todd said. Unlike the jersey wearing brute Aiden, Todd was a waif who wore old black band shirts salvaged from before the Ravaging. His long black hair sat atop his head in a man bun.
Aiden scathed at him.
“Metal indeed, Todd,” Mrs. Parker said as she and her posse of hormonal teenagers came to a stop at a T intersection. “Ah, over there. They must’ve moved the habitat.”
“Why again do they keep them in museums? Why not zoos?” Mary asked.
“Too few zoos still,” Mrs. Parker explained. “Not enough money to capture and rehabilitate wild animals I guess. Did you know there are still cities across world that are in ruins? Counties where the entire p
opulation turned or died? We’ll be looking at the voids left in the world in next week’s work.”
“I heard County Cork in Ireland was wiped out,” Aiden said. “We had family there.”
“I believe that’s true,” Mrs. Parker said.
“Jakarta, Shanghai, most of Sri Lanka, Ireland got hit hard,” Todd said, his face growing more worried as they pushed deeper into the oddly empty museum. The place should’ve been busier at midday. “South America and Africa didn’t do well at all either.”
“That’s right, Todd,” Mrs. Parker said, happy and surprised. “Neither did the rural south here in America, or the inner cities. Treatments took too long to be delivered. Local police and military couldn’t maintain order, or control the spread of the outbreak. How do you know all that?”
“I read ahead,” he said and looked away from Aiden, who’d found another reason to give him a dirty look.
“Good. The more you know,” Mrs. Parker said. She said that a lot. “We’re very lucky, here in California. Our restrictive pre-outbreak laws kept the tainted vaccines out a little longer than most other places. We didn’t suffer the worst of the initial weeks. One of the few examples of over-regulation of anything proving to be a complete boon to the public.”
“Boon?” Mary asked.
“A benefit,” the teacher explained.
“Terrorists did it, right?” Aiden asked as the quiet class followed their teacher down the stone hallway towards a large, open room ahead. Just out of view were lights shining down from the ceiling that illuminated some kind of large display. Maybe a dinosaur skeleton?
“A very wealthy family that owned a biomedical conglomerate. They were swept up into a cult that promised them salvation when some alien overlords came to destroy us all, or something like that. Craziness. They were proactive about their fanciful invasion though,” the teacher said, her voice dropping. “They developed an inoculation against the infection their cult leader told them the aliens would bring. They hid their precious life-saving vaccine inside a real flu vaccine that their company was already producing, and then paid enormous sums of money to produce it in large scale and pay off federal officials, allowing the poison to enter the markets across the world.”
“That’s insane,” Mary said. “So many corrupt people.”
“It didn’t take many bribes, as I understand it. Very few people are actually in that role, the watchdog role. A few checks written here, a boat left a dock there. Greed is a terrible thing,” Mrs. Parker said. “And corruption… well… Let’s just say that there were entire countries whose governments functioned on how fat the pockets were made by those who wanted something done. It’s a shame.”
“Whatever happened to them?” Mary asked. “The rich family?”
“Took their own vaccine,” Todd said before Mrs. Parker could. “Army found them in a bunker beneath a mansion in the Montana mountains. Dead as doornails and still trying to kill people. Their whole cult died like that, in the mountains. Echoes of Jim Jones. Twisted shit.”
“Who is Jim Jones?” Aiden asked.
“Cult leader who tricked his followers into drinking cyanide laced punch. Hundreds died because they were devoted to him and his ideology,” she explained.
She came to a halt ten feet short of entering the large room and the display beyond and to the right. The teacher spun on her heels and faced her class. Her face was the face they all dreaded. The serious face. The, “you’re about to get a lecture” face. Todd took it personal. He’d just cursed. She’d never let that slide.
“How many people here have seen an infected on television?”
The entire class raised their hands.
“How many people here have seen an infected behind bars, or glass, in a habitat, in person?”
About a quarter raised their hands.
“Okay good. Your families are doing a good job, then. How many people here have seen an infected in the wild? Not restrained, dangerous to everyone who can’t find shelter, or isn’t armed?”
No one raised their hand.
“That’s good. That means we are doing our job as a society to protect ourselves from another outbreak. Treatments are now administrable to those freshly exposed and still alive to halt the sickness, the vaccines have been removed and destroyed meaning only bites can spread the infection, and with our new community policing laws, and gun disbursement requirements we stand a very good chance of never having to live through what happened before. Now, there will be infected ahead. They will be in cells, behind thick, bulletproof glass. They should be restrained as well. If you find the need to take space to gather yourself, please return to this spot in the corridor. If you need to vomit, please take one of these bags,” she said, and offered out a handful of flat, brown paper bags.
Paper, because plastics manufacturing was still lagging in its recovery, even now, over ten years on. Half the class took one of the small bags. Aiden took his last.
“Follow me, and please ask any questions that come to mind. Now is the time.” Mrs. Parker paused, assessed her kids, and pushed into the large atrium space beyond. Her bravery had an effect on the kids.
She paused and took a breath. Even she wasn’t prepared for this.
“Holy shit,” Todd said, and halted at her side.
The new habitat for undead specimens had been built with a whole new vision. Instead of a row of cells reminiscent of Hannibal Lector’s room from Silence of the Lambs, there instead was an enormous glass cube, reinforced with evenly spaced metal bars. A glass ceiling lined with steel beams rained sunlight down, illuminating a created nightmare. Inside the raised cube a diorama of a city had been built, ostensibly designed to look like a snapshot of the worst days of the outbreak; during the military bombings. During Operation: Debridement.
A burnt out minivan had been placed and flipped on its side, and a false corpse draped to hang out the shattered windshield. A pavement base was littered with prosthetic limbs, fake blood, and debris, and a false brick wall against the back was plastered with missing posters, authentic contagion flyers from the days of the outbreak, and more than its fair share of fake blood spatter.
What wasn’t fake were the mass of zombies roaming the scene. A dozen maybe.
They wore tattered, old clothing stained with blood. Maybe real blood, maybe fake blood. Some were missing an arm, one had its face split wide open from a hatchet or axe strike. They were gaunt, emaciated creatures straight from history, and with their dead eyes, and dead flesh, they bumped errantly into one another, and picked at the fake flesh in the fake world they’d been confined to. A horrid memory stuck in repeat for all time. The room around the glass enclosure even smelled like smoke.
If the scene wasn’t so grotesque, it would’ve been sad.
“Are those real?” one of the students in the rear of the class asked. He pointed a trembling finger at the zombies roaming the scene.
“Yes,” Mrs. Parker replied. “Get close if you wish. See them in the flesh. Understand them. Expect them. You mustn’t be shocked if you encounter one in the open world. Pay close attention to the young lady in the corner. She died right after turning, it looks. Very fresh. No decay or severe weight loss the dead usually suffered. Also look at how much damage they can sustain, and remain active. No arms there, et cetera. They are hard to kill.”
No one looked at the dead teenager. Their attention was affixed to the worst of the corpse-spectacles. The smashed face man, the severed arms lady. One of the men had a loop of gray-green intestine hanging out from under his torn polo shirt. He was popular too.
“How old are these zombies?” Mary asked, then looped a lock of her dark hair behind an ear.
“Half are from the original outbreak,” a tall black security guard wearing a heavy leather coat, and what looked like canvas uniform pants said from a few yards away. On a waist high table to his side sat a helmet with clear faceguard. “Some were brought in from the Gulf Coast a few months ago when the exhibit was being rebuilt.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Mrs. Parker said to him. “How are they kept alive?”
“They’re fed a concoction of bloody garbage or something every few days. A bucket of… gross,” he said, and wiped his mouth like he’d tasted it.
“All for the sake of history and education. Is this… this thing safe?” she asked him, gesturing at the giant cube. “Why aren’t they frenzied, trying to break the glass to get at us?”
He smiled, and shrugged. “It’s a fishbowl. Mirrored on the inside. They can’t see us. As far as safe goes, the platform the habitat is on has gyros and is independent of the building. Earthquake proof. The glass is two inches thick and can take repeated hammer blows before marring. I couldn’t break it with a fire axe even I wanted to. Each of the exits here have steel shutters that drop in the event of a breach. Cameras, three veteran guards on site. It’s pretty safe. Plus I’m right here,” he said, and tilted his hip to show the teacher his holstered sidearm.
“Now kids, I’m sure you know that this man, Officer…” Mrs. Parker looked at his nametag, “Officer Tamani wears his heavy coat and protective pants to protect against any bites he might suffer if he had to grapple with the infected.”
“Because they spread their illness through bites?” Mary asked, half as an answer.
“Correct. The ‘vaccine’ created a viral state in the host body that was transmittable via saliva, and through sexual fluids. Now stop laughing, I already know what you’re thinking. No zombies spread the outbreak by being romantic.”
“That you know of,” Todd said under his breath.
“So… why aren’t they rotted?” Aiden asked. “If they’re over ten years old, they should be skeletons by now.”
“Correct, that’s astute, Aiden, thank you,” Mrs. Parker said to him. “The virus killed the host’s frontal lobes, and slowed down their base metabolisms to what we would recognize as dead. If you feel their pulse when they aren’t trying to kill someone, it’s so slow, you wouldn’t find it. Ergo, they bleed slower, breathe slower, age slower, heal slower, and die slower. A fun side effect of the virus was that it kept vermin away too, which meant no maggots to eat them, and enormously restrained microbial damage. A perfect storm of calamity.”
An Ill Wind: Tales from the world of Adrian's Undead Diary Volume Five Page 6