by DeLeon, Jon
Kurt looked at the pathetic form lying there and felt a strange feeling. It was a mix of hatred, adrenaline and pity. This thing was a killer who would have eaten Kurt like a gourmet meal at the first chance, but it still wasn’t the zombie’s fault. It hadn’t chosen to take Enerjax. It was a buried soul in a mass, unmarked grave. This man probably died in one of the great wars. He deserved peace. Instead he got to come back and become an undead murderer in his next life. Either his karma was shit or he was a victim once again. Whatever soul occupied this body before didn’t earn a life as a zombie. He also was going to attract others with that noise.
Kurt held Philip’s gun and pointed it at the trapped zombie’s head. Too loud, he thought. He tucked the gun into his waistband. Kurt looked around until he found a good rock. He took a step toward the zombie rolling on the ground in front of him, planning on smashing the stone into its head. As soon as he got close, the zombie reared up and flung both bony hands in Kurt’s direction. Kurt barely jumped back in time. This creature still had some fight in him. Kurt couldn’t get too close. He steadied himself and threw the stone with all his might. He missed, hitting the zombie in the back. He cringed, “Oops, sorry man.” He grabbed another couple of stones and took better aim. This time, the throw hit dead center of the zombie’s skull, fracturing it. The zombie’s arms flailed at a much slower rate than before. Clearly the impact had hurt its capacity. Kurt took this opportunity, bringing down another rock, this time from much closer. The impact sent the stone all the way through its head and into the leafy mud. Black blood mixed with rotting leaves. Kurt covered his nose and stepped back, retreating from the putrid scent.
Kurt turned away from the scene beneath him and headed back into the forest, this time at a much slower pace, hoping to avoid the same fate. Watch for bear traps, check. It was just another danger to look out for in this new zombie world. A few hundred feet farther into the forest, Kurt stepped over the early alarm system of bells, officially leaving the settlement behind.
Florida Keys: Outbreak Day +64
Bright lights burned Joe’s vision, and his eyes weren’t even open. He could see the orange, reddish glow through his closed eyelids. Joe felt the warmth scorching on his skin.
Oh my god, Joe thought. I’m dead. I must be. When I open my eyes, what will I see? I can feel the heat. Is that a good or bad thing? Am I in the good place, or have the souls of those I killed condemned me?
Joe readied his mind and, with all his effort, attempted to open his eyes. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t. They were stuck shut. Joe wanted to panic, but the rest of him seemed completely unresponsive. He was trapped in his head.
What do I do? Think, you idiot. You must not be dead. There is no way that God or the devil would let you see or feel nothing. Well maybe the second would? No, that wouldn’t be torture enough. Maybe this is just death? What if when you die, you simply stay stuck in limbo forever? A feeling of fear came over Joe’s mind. Well if that’s true, then there’s nothing I can do. Are there any other options? Well I guess I could have been rescued from that ocean. If I were, I would be in rough shape. I could be on an operating table right now. Sometimes they tape the eyes shut to keep them moist. That’s a possibility at least. Okay, as long as there is a possibility I may be alive, then I’m not giving up. I’m going to keep fighting.
There are people out there who need you. Think of them, Joe. Kira’s face came to the forefront of Joe’s mind. He watched her as she spoke to him. He relived his conversation with her. “You promised, Joe. You promised you’d come back to me. Say it. Say it again.” I promise. Next, Kurt appeared. “Don’t leave me alone out here, bro. I need you. You have to save me.” I’ll find you. I will. I promise. I promise. I promise. Joe recited his promise in his mind continuously. As he did, his sense of fear changed to one of determination. Soon Joe felt an immense feeling of exhaustion overtaking him. He fought to stay awake a little longer, to foster this feeling of unwavering drive, but eventually sleep came.
Joe fought against the sleep. He opened his eyes and squinted against the brightness. The sun was shining brightly in the midday sky. Birds chirped, and bugs flitted away as Joe and Kurt jogged down a Florida hiking trail. The humidity stuck to their bodies as both ran shirtless along the path. The parking lot was only a quarter-mile away. Joe smiled at Kurt, and Kurt nodded back. They both took off in a dead sprint, racing each other. They were dead even. Both looked at each other, smiling, a challenge between two loving brothers. Joe felt like he hadn’t seen his brother in some time. He was so happy. They tied as they came thundering into the gravel parking zone. Joe slowed up. Kurt continued on and touched the car.
“First!” Kurt squeezed out the word under labored breaths. He put his hands on his knees and bent over. The final push had emptied his tanks.
Joe was walking toward the car with his hands on his hips. He caught his breath faster than Kurt. “The race was to the parking lot.”
Kurt stood tall now. “No, the race is always to the car.”
“Since when?” Joe laughed.
“Since today.” They both smiled.
Joe walked closer to his brother. “I miss you, man.”
“I miss you too, bro.”
Joe leaned against the car, lying back on top of the hood, soaking in the sun. The car began beeping. Joe stood up quickly and pulled out the car key. He went to press the alarm button. Before he did, a voice interrupted him.
“What are you doing?” Kurt was looking at him questioningly.
Joe responded like he had just been asked the dumbest question ever. “Turning off the car alarm.”
“What car alarm?” Kurt remained confused.
“The one in front of us.” Joe answered condescendingly.
Kurt turned around in a circle, searching for any alarm.
Joe was now the one confused. “Wait, you don’t hear that?”
Kurt asked, “Hear what?” He put his arms out to his side, indicating he did not.
“That constant beeping. You’re joking, right? It sounds like . . .” Joe trailed off.
Kurt asked back. “Sounds like what?”
Joe stammered, “Like, like . . .”
The world around him dissolved to black.
Florida Keys: Outbreak Day +65
Joe opened his eyes in a hospital room. He rolled his head to the side and looked at the heart rate monitor. It beeped at a constant pace. Seeing it, Joe began to understand. As he woke from his deep sleep, the monitor began beeping faster and faster. A nurse ran in, straight to the machine. She turned and looked at Joe’s open eyes, and recognition flared. The nurse turned off the machine’s sound and looked at Joe.
“Welcome back. How do you feel?” The nurse’s name tag read “Ricard.” She was a larger woman in her early fifties or late forties. She was wearing a pair of simple, teal-blue scrubs.
Joe answered with the only thing he could at that moment. “Like I want to be back asleep.” He had felt joy and love in his sleep. There was no place for that in this world. The world was an evil place.
“I don’t blame you, especially after all that happened. Rest up. I’ll let the commander know you pulled through.”
Joe stared at the drop ceiling as tears poured down his cheeks. Images of men dying and Martinell’s outstretched hand began playing like a twisted slideshow. The final image was that of his brother looking into the void as Joe had been pulled from the dream. Joe cried himself back to sleep.
The next morning when he woke up, after a dreamless night, the nurse was in the room, adjusting the flow of the IV into his arm.
“What are you doing?” Joe asked.
She answered back in a good-mannered tone. “Good morning. I am turning down your anesthetic so that you can start moving around on your own. You’re still going to be here in bed for a few days. The damage you sustained wasn’t too extensive.”
Joe looked down at the hospital blanket that covered everything but his arms. His arms had some cuts and
bandages on them. What did that cloth hide? What was underneath?
Reading the fear in Joe’s eyes, Nurse Ricard chimed in. “The worst of it was a concussion. You did have some shrapnel pieces that punctured your back as well as a bullet that pierced your leg. You were in surgery for a few hours. Luckily for you, a talented surgeon had just retired and was visiting his family in the Keys when the outbreak occurred. He said he knew you. He said you saved him. He said that you had pulled his family and him off a roof a few months ago.”
Joe thought of the elderly man he had saved on one of his first missions. Maybe karma was real.
The nurse continued. “He was able to close up your bullet wound and get all the shrapnel out with only one incision. You will only have a small scar to remember it all by, the size of a quarter on your back. Luckily the shrapnel was all localized, so he was able to do an arthroscopic surgery. I’m sure you’re curious about what that is. Basically we puffed your body up a little with gas, and he was able to reach all the metal pieces through that single small incision. You’ll recover quickly. Just a few days here in the hospital and you’ll be on your way. You will have some pain there for a while, but not terrible, which is good because we can’t spare painkillers. The only downside is that you may fart a little as the gas works its way out, but you’ll survive. As for those around you, they may not.” Nurse Ricard giggled a little.
Joe twitched his right index finger. The nurse noticed his struggle. “Good, you’re already regaining movement in your extremities. It won’t be long until you can sit up.”
“What is that stuff, Nurse Ricard? I’ve been put under before, but something’s different about that serum. My head is still clear. Usually when you get put under by drugs, you feel messed up.”
She smiled back, “When were you put under?”
Joe responded, “A couple times.” He didn’t know how to answer that question. Joe could have told her about the wisdom-tooth surgery that had complications, or the time he broke his ankle as a kid while trail running with his brother, or the training to resist enemy interrogation using pharmaceuticals in Special Forces.
“Well it’s an older drug. As you can imagine, we don’t have an endless supply of the good stuff.”
“Why don’t they use it anymore?”
Nurse Ricard’s smile vanished. “Well it can have some side effects if you’re not careful.
“Side effects?”
“Oh, don’t worry, it’s not like you won’t be able to love a woman again or anything. For one, because you’re clearheaded. Sometimes people seem to give up on life and accept death. Sometimes when they wake up, they reject the world around them as real.”
“Wow.” Joe thought back to his inner discussion with himself.
“That’s not the worst. If the dose is too high, even a little bit, the drug can burn out nerves, leaving areas of your body senseless. Or if left too high for too long, it can result in paralysis. In some cases, of the heart and lungs.”
“So this stuff can kill me?”
“Yes. That’s why we’ve been monitoring you so closely and are now taking you off it.”
“Sounds good to me. Take it out of my arm, Nurse.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“Is it not?”
“We have to slowly dial it down or you may go into withdrawals.”
“I like the plan of weaning me off it,” Joe said.
“Me too. Now rest. When you wake up, you’ll feel a lot like your old self again.”
“Thanks.”
Nurse Ricard smiled politely back.
Joe closed his eyes. He prayed to dream of Kurt again.
Florida Keys: Outbreak Day +66
It was late night when Joe woke from his sleep. He hadn’t dreamt at all again. What a waste. The orange-tinted hospital lights cast a burnt pallor over everything. Joe looked around the room. It took him a few seconds to notice the man sitting in the chair in the corner. The man was sitting with a notebook, rubbing something metal in his hands.
Joe pushed himself to a seated position. His arms had regained most of their strength. His legs were still numb. As he pushed himself up on the pillow, he let out a muffled groan. That “small pain” in his back was a little worse than Nurse Ricard had let on. The man in the corner looked up from whatever he was working on.
“You’re awake.
Joe coughed out some remainders of his sleep and, with a dry throat, responded, “Yeah.”
The man stood up and grabbed a cup of water on the bed stand. He handed it to Joe. “Here.”
“Thank you.” The water had been sitting out for some time and become lukewarm. It didn’t matter. The water soothed Joe’s cracked and parched throat. “I think I need a new IV.”
“Oh, the nurse said they aren’t going to give you any more. Something about saving them for emergencies. I guess that means you’re recovering well.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Joe looked absentmindedly at the wall in front of him. He shook his head, dislodging the last few cobwebs from his nap. “I’m sorry, who are you?”
The man shifted his notebook to his other hand. “Hi, my name is Kevin, I’m here to take your after-action report.”
“My report, are you serious? Can’t they wait until I can type it myself?”
“I’m afraid not. The faster we take care of this the faster you get to sleep.”
Something about this guy rubbed Joe the wrong way. His “Spidey sense” was tingling.
“What branch are you in?”
“Oh, I’m not military.”
Joe grew more suspicious.
“I’m a civilian volunteer. My brother is in . . . well I guess, was in the military.” A clear hurt came over his face. He glanced down at the object he was playing with earlier. Joe saw it clearly for the first time. It was a dog tag. “Well he . . . he died. The Army asked me to help, but I couldn’t fight. I have epilepsy, and explosions or gunfire triggers it. So I volunteered to help in any other way I can.”
Joe read the man in front of him. There were no lies in his words. “So you’re not a reporter or some blogger trying to get the details of our first failed mission?”
“No. I’m just here to take your statement.”
“Okay, but can you answer me a question first.”
“Sure.”
“How did I get here?”
“Your, I guess you call it an ‘exfiltration boat,’ well it came to pick you all up. It saw the massive explosion and high-tailed it to shore. When they arrived, no one was there. One of the men spotted you in the waves, floating to sea. They pulled you out. You were still breathing. Then you were rushed here.”
Joe nodded. “Okay, where . . . where do I need to start?”
“Start from when you left the helicopter.”
As Joe relived one of the worst days of his life in explicit detail, Kevin sat quietly and took notes, only asking the occasional question, clarifying events. After Joe had painfully explained everything, Kevin closed his notebook and stood pacing near the foot of Joe’s bed.
“Why?” Kevin asked as he stopped.
Joe asked back, “Why what?”
“Why did you leave Specialist Eddie Martinell in that hole?”
Joe became defensive. “Leave him? Are you joking? Did you listen to anything I said?”
“Why didn’t you lift him out first and then jump up to him yourself?”
“He didn’t have long enough arms to reach down.”
“Why didn’t Eddie climb up over you once you had caught the wood?”
“I guess the board couldn’t have held us both. We made a split-second call. What we tried was the only chance for both of us to live.”
Kevin sat back down in the chair, hunched over, rubbing the dog tag. “You guess? He started to rub the dog tag he was holding, his breathing audibly growing fast. He grabbed the dog tag hard. His breathing slowed, and he sat back down, oddly calm all of a sudden. Do you have a brother, Captain Feller?”
/> “Yes.”
“Is he here with you in the Keys?”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
“Russia.”
“Is he alive?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know? You’ve been out for a couple of days. Are you in communication with him? I saw your sat phone is still working.” Kevin pointed at a table in the corner of the room. Joe’s possessions sat on the table, including the satellite phone. “I’m amazed it survived the salt water. Yet it works just fine. I took the liberty of charging it while you were sleeping. How lucky you are. Have you two been talking?”
“No. But I know he’s alive. I just do. I just know.”
Kevin still stared at the dog tag. “I know what you mean.” He looked up with tears in his eyes. “Let me tell you a story.”
Kevin sat back in the chair but never broke eye contact with the steel in his hands. “Once upon a time, a recent time, there were two brothers. They loved each other very much. One brother became a software engineer in New York, while the other joined the military. Even though they may have chosen different lives, they would talk every day. They made plans for the future. One day, one glorious day, they would live close to each other. Their kids would play together in backyards and on the same T-ball teams. The two brothers were separated for the moment, but it wasn’t going to last. Do you know why? Because they were covenant brothers. They were always there for each other when one needed the other.” Kevin had been smiling while telling this part of the story. His face glazed over with happy emotions. In an instant, those emotions and the blood drained from his face. “Then something happened. The world changed. Zombies became a thing and began attacking everything. Mayhem plunged the globe into a survival mode. Well the two brothers had no way of contacting each other. Even if they did, they didn’t have the time. Each of the two brothers was fighting and running and doing things they would regret for the rest of their lives. None of that mattered though. Anything that ensured survival was necessary, not just for a selfish desire to live but, more importantly, to live for the other brother. Well after a long time and a lot of struggle, the brother in New York made his way down the coast and ended up here, in the Florida Keys. Compared to what he saw up north, he realized these people had no idea what was going on. He envied them. Their innocence, their ignorance, and most of all, he envied the families. Brothers played together on sandy beaches, throwing a football back and forth, and talking about the future. What had they done to deserve something that great? Did that brother not sacrifice? Did he not love enough? Why? Why was he destined for such a torture?”