Resurrection: A Zombie Novel

by Michael J. Totten

  “I’m getting food,” Frank whispered. “It’s right here next to the clothing.” He grabbed packages of freeze-dried turkey tetrazzini and chili mac that could be “cooked” in the wilderness just by adding hot water. The expiration dates were years into the future.

  Hughes watched over Annie as she grabbed two fleece pullovers and two pairs of pants off the rack. “Get five pairs of socks,” he whispered, “or your feet are going to rot. And grab some strong boots.”

  He heard nothing in the store but himself, Annie, and Frank. If one of those things was in there, they’d know by now. The only quiet way in was through the front door. He lowered the shotgun, took his finger out of the trigger guard, and beckoned Annie to follow him toward a large glass counter displaying the expensive items the store owners didn’t want to be shoplifted.

  “Frank,” he whispered. “Over here.”

  Frank sidled up behind Hughes and shined his Maglite through the glass. Hughes saw exactly what he was hoping to find. Hunting knives, GPS systems, and one-eyed night-vision devices.

  “Sweet,” Frank said.

  “Grab those night-vision monocles,” Hughes said. “Grab several. We won’t be able to recharge the batteries.”

  “Sure, we will,” Annie said. She held something in her hand. “It’s a portable solar panel. Says it’s for charging cell phones and iPads while camping.”

  Hughes lit up. “Get as many of those as you can carry.”

  “There must be some first-aid packs in here somewhere,” Frank said. Hughes saw that Frank had placed five night-vision monocles in his basket.

  “Go find some,” Hughes said. “Get the biggest packs you can find. One minute.”

  Hughes grabbed a water filter, a small camp stove, a compass, and navigation maps of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. He collected six small emergency blankets made of reflective Mylar, two hunting knives, two more portable solar panels from where Annie had found hers, a handheld GPS that looked like it might plug into the panels, two winter jackets, two sleeping bags, seven candles, packs of waterproof matches, fistfuls of fleece hats. He stuffed everything into the biggest backpack he could find. He slung the weighted-down backpack over one of his shoulders and grabbed a second empty one for good measure, then hustled toward the front door.

  “Time to move,” he said. “Frank. Annie. Let’s go. We can’t push our luck.”

  Hughes tossed his items into the Chevy’s truck bed. Frank and Annie followed him out and set their items next to his.

  “Shh,” he said and held up his hand. Everyone cocked their heads and stopped breathing for a moment.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Annie whispered. She shuddered at the implications. The poor girl still didn’t know what was happening.

  “I don’t either,” Frank said, though unlike Annie, he looked relieved.

  Hughes thought for a moment.

  “If anything heard us pull in here,” he said, “they’d be here by now.”

  Frank nodded.

  Annie said nothing.

  “Nothing is coming,” Hughes said.

  “How do you know?” Annie said.

  “If something was coming,” Hughes said, “believe me, we’d know.”

  “But how?” Annie said. “How would you know if someone is coming?”

  “You’ll find out when it happens,” Hughes said.

  The last thing Annie remembered was visiting her older sister Jenny in Olympia. She had no idea how much time had passed since then and when all—this—happened.

  She had driven down for the day from Seattle. Both she and Jenny moved to Washington State from South Carolina—Jenny because she got a job working for a congressman and Annie because she had broken up with her live-in boyfriend of two years and felt the need to start over. Jenny told Annie the Northwest was a fabulous place to live, and Annie figured that made it as good a place as any to reboot her life. Seattle was as far from South Carolina as a person could get in the United States without moving to Alaska or Hawaii, and since her sister was out there, she would not be alone.

  She lived near the University of Washington campus just north of downtown Seattle. She clearly remembered hopping in her Saturn and driving down I-5 to Olympia. She and Jenny picked up some lattes at the Starbucks downtown near the state capitol building and drank them across the street on a park bench. It was a warm late-summer day. She remembered thinking the moderate dry heat of summer would soon be replaced with the cool musty air of October. There was no plague, nor talk of any plague.

  The next thing she knew, she was waking up on the forest floor aching and dehydrated and covered in blood and gore. She reeked something awful and her mouth tasted like a rat had died in it. She got up, stumbled around for a few moments, and heard Hughes and Frank’s truck on the road just a few dozen yards away. And now she was in the truck heading to what Hughes said was their home base inside a grocery store.

  A grocery store? They lived in a grocery store?

  Where the hell had she been living these last couple of months?

  “What’s the date today?” she said.

  “Dunno,” Hughes said. “Must be early November by now, I guess.”

  “It feels like a whole year has passed since this happened,” Frank said. “But I guess it has only been a couple of months.”

  Early November. It was, what, early September when she was at her sister’s? So she was missing a solid two months of memory.

  “How far are we from Olympia?” she said.

  “You don’t know where we are?” Hughes said.

  “It looks like the same general area,” she said, “but no, I don’t know where we are.”

  “Olympia is fifteen miles north of here,” Hughes said. “Portland is an hour and a half to the south. At least it would be if the roads weren’t so bad. It would take a week to get there in these conditions. The freeway is impassable. We’d have to walk.”

  She looked through the windshield in amazement. Both sides of the road were jammed with stopped cars. They spilled out of their lanes and onto the shoulder. Some of the doors were left open. What on earth had happened to everybody? Were all of them struck down by the virus? Even while out in their cars? Where did they go? Was there a refugee center somewhere? She swallowed hard, not sure she wanted to know the answer just yet.

  “How does the virus spread?” she said.

  “Bodily fluids,” Hughes said. “It’s not airborne, thank God. We wouldn’t be alive if it were. Don’t touch anything that’s dead. Don’t touch anything if it looked like something dead touched it. If you get blood or fluid of any kind on your hand, you scrub that bitch down. I can’t believe you’re not sick with all that blood on your shirt and on your face. I’d tell you to keep your fingers the hell out of your mouth, but if that virus was on you somewhere, you’d be infected by now. That’s for damn sure.”

  “What are the first symptoms?” she said. She saw the five skeletons next to the Jeep they’d passed earlier.

  “Sore throat,” Hughes said.

  Annie had a sore throat.

  “Coughing.”

  But that was probably because she was dehydrated.

  “A fever like you wouldn’t believe. Then coma. It only takes a couple of hours. Some people go down within minutes.”

  She caught herself rubbing her throat and stopped. She didn’t want them to think she was getting sick.

  “Water?” Hughes said. He’d noticed her rubbing her throat. She wasn’t surprised. Hughes didn’t look like the type of guy who let much get past him.

  “Thanks,” she said as he reached under the seat and handed the bottle to her again.

  There was something else Hughes wasn’t telling her. Frank had said the virus makes people aggressive. Like rabies? Does that happen before or after the coma? How could it happen after?

  Pine needles and leaves covered the road ahead. The cars were covered too. Off to the right she saw the burned-out husk of what was once a Volkswagen Bug. They
passed a boarded-up mom-and-pop gas station on the left side. She wondered what happened to mom and pop.

  “How many people do you suppose have been killed?” she said.

  Hughes and Frank looked at each other.

  “Pretty much everybody,” Frank said and rubbed his mustache.

  She sank in her seat. Pretty much everybody? How was that possible? Not even the Black Death killed pretty much everybody.

  But somehow that felt right. It didn’t sound right, but it felt right.

  She didn’t remember any of this, but the weird thing was that she almost remembered. She felt as if she were watching a movie that she had seen a long time ago as a kid. She had no idea what was going to happen next, but she sort of remembered things as they happened. She didn’t know what Hughes and Frank were going to say when she asked them a question, but everything they did say seemed right, like some part of her knew. Her mind was throwing up walls, leaving her stranded somewhere between amnesia and denial.

  Frank swerved around a tight knot of cars in the road and had to drive most of the way to the tree line to get past them. Annie felt Hughes tense up as they neared the edge of the forest. He had that gun of his pointed out the window and was ready to pull the trigger. He looked like he wanted to pull the trigger.

  Frank swerved back toward the asphalt after clearing the pileup. “Bogie at eleven o’clock. Hold onto something.”

  Annie glanced left. A man came charging out of the trees on the other side of the road. He was covered in blood and screaming like he was terrified or enraged.

  “Watch out!” Annie said. “There’s a—”

  But Frank swerved into the man’s path and swiped him with the side of the Chevy. The impact sounded like someone threw a sack of potatoes at the driver’s-side door. The man bounced off the vehicle and flopped onto the shoulder. Frank kept going and checked the mirror.

  “It’s down,” he said.

  “You just hit that man!” Annie said. “You probably killed him. Did you do that on purpose?”

  Silence in the truck.

  “Annie,” Hughes said and shook his head. “He was one of the infected ones.”

  “You thought I was infected.”

  “He was covered in blood.”

  “I’m covered in blood.”

  “He was screaming. You heard him.”

  “So you killed him?”

  Frank and Hughes said nothing.

  Something was wrong with her brain. What Frank did seemed wrong but felt right. Why? Her gut knew something her mind couldn’t access. Her short-term amnesia, her denial, her mind blockage—whatever it was—was tenuous. It wouldn’t last. Her memories were just barely below the threshold of consciousness.

  She looked at the body in the rearview mirror. It did not appear to be moving or even twitching. The man was already covered in blood and gore before Frank hit him. Aside from the fact that he no longer moved, he looked no worse now than he did when he ran out of the trees.

  “Can we stop for a second?” Annie said.

  “What for?” Frank said.

  “No,” Hughes said.

  “I want to go back and get a closer look at that man,” she said.

  “He wasn’t a man,” Hughes said. “Not anymore. He was one of those things.”

  He wasn’t a thing.

  “Infected or not,” Annie said, “he was a man.”

  Hughes said nothing.

  “We can’t stop here, Annie,” Frank said. “The truck’s noise attracts them. We’re damn lucky none of them followed us to the sporting-goods store. And anyway you don’t want to get too close to even the dead ones. Bodily fluids and all that.”

  She needed to study that body, but she didn’t know why. Probably just her brain-lock trying to resolve itself. Her memory, her knowledge and understanding of the insanity all around her, was trying to punch its way out through whatever barrier had been put in place. Stopping to think and scrutinizing things might help, but Frank wouldn’t stop, and Hughes wouldn’t let him stop if he wanted to.

  They rounded a few more corners and arrived at the outskirts of another town, the kind of outskirts that look exactly like outskirts everywhere in the country. Gas stations, fast-food joints, used-car lots, Jiffy Lubes. The place had been torn to pieces just like the last town they passed through, but here the streets were entirely empty of cars. Everyone had evacuated.

  Trash, branches, leaves, debris and broken glass covered the streets, the sidewalks, and the parking lots. A pickup truck had smashed into an electrical pole. What looked like a used-car lot had exploded and burned to the ground. Dead bodies—bones, mostly—were strewn all over the place. The windows of a Burger King were covered with nailed-up boards blackened by fire.

  Was the Burger King boarded up to keep people out or to keep people in? Why had the car lot burned down?

  Though the details weren’t familiar, the brushstrokes were. She was certain she’d never been there before, but she felt a sense of déjà vu coming over her. Something was banging inside her head and trying to get out. Something of earthshaking significance. She could feel it, like a just-forgotten dream on the other side of the mist.

  Why couldn’t she remember? There was a reason she went into brain-lock. Something had happened to her. Something that didn’t happen to Hughes or to Frank.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Kyle Trager stared while Parker cleaned his guns. Parker had parts from three handguns greased up and spread out before him on the counter of the checkout aisle, the one nearest the grocery store’s door where there was more light.

  “We should shove off tomorrow,” Kyle said. “Get a boat and head up to one of the islands.”

  Parker set down a pistol and his oil rag. “None of us has seen a better place than where we are right now. It’s secure and our food will last months.”

  They were holed up in a well-stocked grocery store in a medium-size suburban-looking town just off the interstate. A nearby lumberyard provided all the wood and nails they needed to board up the windows and fortify the front and back doors. They had no electricity, but plenty to eat.

  “We’re only safe here,” Kyle said, “until we get attacked by 200 of those things at the same time. We’ll never be safe on the mainland. We need an island.”

  “Those things aren’t going to last,” Parker said. “Winter is coming and they’re running out of food. We stay here, wait for them to start dying off, and then we can go to your little island.”

  Kyle’s group of five had only cohered a week or so earlier. He and Frank were traveling together when they ran into Hughes and Carol. Then the four of them found Parker rummaging around in somebody’s van. They all understood there was safety in numbers. They didn’t even discuss whether or not they should stick together. They did it instinctively.

  And they were all thrilled when they found an unlooted grocery store. It must have been the only one in all of Washington State. It was a great place to hole up for a while, but it wasn’t home. Surely it wasn’t secure enough to stay there all winter, but Kyle couldn’t get Parker to see that. They’d been butting heads ever since Kyle first suggested sailing north to the islands.

  Somebody was bound to emerge as a leader eventually. That’s how these things usually worked, but it hadn’t happened yet. Even if the leader wasn’t a boss issuing orders, somebody would have the most influence. That person was bound to be Kyle or Parker. Theoretically it could be Hughes, but Hughes didn’t seem interested. He didn’t talk much. And silent types can’t be leaders.

  Frank wasn’t incompetent, exactly, but he was definitely sidekick material. No one with any sense would want Frank making decisions, including Frank.

  Carol was out of the question. She was a nervous wreck, a total disaster. She wanted someone to tell her exactly what she should do and when she should do it.

  That left Parker and Kyle, but Parker was bullheaded, difficult, and just … off. It wasn’t only the guns. The man looked like a slob with his carg
o pants, army jacket, and big scruffy beard. Hadn’t he heard of razors? There must have been hundreds of disposables in the toiletries aisle. The world was fast running out of just about everything, but Kyle figured he could easily loot a lifetime supply of disposable razors. And Kyle thought it was important to look like a civilized person, now more than ever.

  “You want some more light?” Kyle said to Parker as he ran the oil rag through the barrel of one of his pistols. “I could bring some candles over.”

  “I’m fine,” Parker said and didn’t look up from his work. He faced the line of windows so he wouldn’t get in the way of the light, though there wasn’t much to get in the way of. Every window in the grocery store was boarded up. Only twelve or so inches were left exposed at the top to let in some sun. They had to be conservative with the candles.

  At least the water still worked—for now, anyway. And it came out of the sink with incredible force. Apparently the pressure just kept building up since hardly anyone was left alive to release it, but it too would eventually break like the electricity had.

  Kyle didn’t like it when Parker cleaned his guns. Didn’t like it at all. Parker cleaned his guns all the time, every single day, even when he hadn’t fired them since the last cleaning.

  He did it to intimidate everyone else. Kyle was sure of it. No one was really in charge, nor had Parker tried to appoint himself boss, but he wanted to make damn certain everyone took his feelings into account. Theatrically cleaning his guns was a big part of it.

  Parker also wanted to make Kyle feel inadequate and incompetent. How can you expect to lead this group if you can’t even clean a damn gun?

  Kyle was no kind of idiot. He knew how to shoot. His father showed him how when he was a kid. And he had gone shooting dozens of times with his friends on the range and in the forest. He just didn’t own a gun. His home state of Oregon was awash in guns. It had more guns than people. There just weren’t as many guns or gun owners in the city, and Kyle was a city person.

  He had worked as a computer programmer in the suburbs of Portland. That’s where he was when the plague struck. He headed north into Washington, but not to Seattle. That would not have been smart. Seattle wasn’t safer than Portland. Seattle was the first American city to be hit with the virus. Kyle aimed straight for Olympia at the southernmost point on Puget Sound, an island-studded inlet extending hundreds of miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. From there he planned to take a boat to the San Juan Islands just shy of the Canadian border. That was a plan that made sense. Those things couldn’t get to him on an island.