The anti-zombie crowd considered anyone with the flesh eating virus as much a zombie as full blown killer zombies, and wore bandannas and surgical masks over their mouths and noses to guard against catching the virus in public, despite the fact that it was not an airborne contagion.
Television news crews from every network had been covering the event, reporting from every vantage point.
“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization will be meeting for the next two days here at Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center to discuss what the administration is calling the Global Zombie Defense Initiative,” a CNN field reporter rehearsed for his cameraman. “Zombie sympathizers, along with groups like ZORO, Zombie Outcasts Rights Organization, and ZAPT, Zombies Are People Too, are here protesting the NATO Summit in an effort to raise awareness for zombie rights.”
As a rebuttal to the position held by those staunchly defending zombies, Senator Wendell Rivers’ comments were being digitally edited in a news van to extract the most appropriate sound bite for broadcast.
“Let’s face facts. Zombies are the new terrorists. What began as a virus has created an enemy that needs to be dealt with as a threat against human-kind, which is certainly what it is. It’s just that simple.”
Another pre-recorded feed broadcasted Dr. Janine Ward’s insights as she claimed, “We must also look forward to how we might be able to learn something from studying zombie biochemistry that might help our nation and our future.”
Dusk was descending on the city as Tom meandered the periphery of the throng to get as close to the convention center as possible. He scanned the crowd and spotted a ruckus nearby.
At first, it appeared to be a small group of zombies breaking through a barricade and attacking police. “Here we go,” Tom thought in expectation of what he would do next, but as he moved closer to the commotion he discovered that it was members of ZAPT; some of them with the flesh eating disease and others in fake zombie makeup.
The group shambled in mock zombie style defiantly through the police barricade, carrying signs bearing slogans for their agenda.
Officers began subduing the protesters as more police support was called in.
The Chief of Police had given strict instructions to refrain from gunfire while foreign dignitaries are in the building. Instead, officers were instructed to wait for the military to take the lead on herding the zombies out of the area. In the case of self-defense, deadly force with a baton to the head was perfectly acceptable.
Tom was relieved for the moment that the zombie attack wasn’t real, although, he knew such skirmishes and chaos could work to distract from the real threat at hand.
Standing close to the fray, Tom was shoved back by police. While attempting to break free of the protesters, Tom felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Tom? Tom Zombie,” a familiar voice laughed. “I thought that was you.”
Tom turned to see a memorable face from his days on the force. Officer Stanley Baycheck grinned haughtily at him.
Baycheck studied Tom’s face, which had worsened since their last encounter. “Man, you look like shit.” He sniffed the air. “Smell like it too. I’m not surprised you’re with these zombie sympathizers. Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?” Baycheck laughed at his own bad humor.
Tom wasn’t in the mood to banter with the precinct prick. He also knew better than to reveal anything about the NATO plot.
Without real proof it was a slippery slope. All he had was his story that he had thwarted an effort to be used as a human robot to kill the president and other heads of state, and that he thought Major Fleming may still have a backup plan. Yeah, that would go over real well with douche bag Baycheck.
Tom was on his own.
Before Baycheck could spout any more wise cracks, his shoulder radio broke in. “We’ve got zombies! Western side of the convention center.”
Baycheck pressed his mic button and responded, “This is Baycheck. Yeah, we’re dealin’ with our own on this side. Just cuff ‘em and stuff ‘em and we’ll deal with these rowdies down at the station.”
“This is the real shit, Baycheck!” the officer called back. “All hell’s broken loose! Must be fifty or more of the undead bastards!”
The radio squawked again. “This is Thompson on the north side. We’ve got the same thing here. Looks to be about seventy five of them. How the hell did they breach the military blockade? It’s like they came out of nowhere!”
By the time Officer Baycheck turned his attention away from his shoulder radio, Tom was gone.
Tom raced to reach the breached area where the living dead were flooding into the western side of the building.
“Where did they all come from?” Tom wondered, “And how could they have gotten passed the military lines with no soldiers in pursuit?” It was as if the zombies were allowed a head start on their stiff legged stampede on McCormick Place.
It wasn’t hard to guess that soldiers on the blockade would blindly follow orders as usual, oblivious to the fact that key military officers were pulling the strings to orchestrate a strike on NATO members.
The horde penetrated deeper into the complex from multiple entry points. Police and fire department personnel focused on trying to evacuate people and prevent zombie contact than actually trying to stop the zombie infiltration.
It was as if they weren’t a mass of creepers to be stopped, but rather a flood of death and decay that the living instinctively ran from out of self-preservation.
Civilians and the city’s finest all evacuated the building leaving the NATO members behind closed doors.
The opportunity quickly presented itself for Tom to insert himself into the midst of the unleashed walking corpses, and he entered the group like a surfer catching a wave. He was among them; one of them.
He advanced at their pace, moving through the creepers, and knocking the legs out from under several of them to create a domino effect of zombies falling on top of each other to slow their approach toward the summit’s meeting room.
NATO members were in the middle of their working dinner session when they received the news about the zombie invasion. U.S. Secret Service agents, along with security personnel and guards from every member nation, systematically herded the meeting’s delegates into the center opening of the oval meeting table configuration. Some delegates hid beneath the blue table skirts. Translators were left to fend for themselves cowering behind their desks which lined the side of the room.
The lead U.S. Secret Service agent heard the repeated order and code name feeding into his ear piece from the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, “Secure Renegade! Secure Renegade! Damn it, is Renegade secure?!”
The agent’s team had already surrounded the president as a human barrier, but replying back to the PEOC that the president was indeed secure was something of a stretch.
The conference room’s forward entry doors led to the main hall that the murderous living corpses now occupied.
The most feasible course of egress was to evacuate at the rear of the room via the doorway marked in French: sortie de secours - emergency exit.
Part 7
Advancing through the main hall, Tom began to feel invincible as he moved among the undead group. No monster laid a hand on him, and there were so many of them.
Up ahead he saw the other group that had come in through the north side of the building. Where had they all come from?
They were all in front of the NATO meeting room now, but the doors appeared to be mercifully secured from the inside.
Then, Tom spotted something; someone in the other group of zombies. It was a young man whose face bore the ravages of the flesh eating disease, but he was not moaning or clawing his way toward the conference room doors like the rest of the horde.
Instead, the man was calmly continuing around the hall. Tom noticed that he was wearing a familiar padded vest and pursued after him, as did a dozen or more blindly following flesh eaters.
There was something else about t
his young man that struck Tom as familiar. He searched his memory and quickly recognized him to be the young man that his daughter Holly knew from school. What was his name? Ron. Tom remembered.
Yes, he was definitely the same young black man he and Holly saw caged up along with scores of other zombies at Fort Sheridan, just like the ones at the Navy Pier.
“Good Lord! That’s where they all came from. That’s why the zombies were herded and stored… so the major and his superiors could unleash them now,” Tom acknowledged in horror.
“If Ron’s a brainwashed automaton,” Tom thought, “then he was caged with the zombies because the major must have been testing the effects of the same thing that is making me immune to zombie attacks.”
The military was keeping its distance from the convention center and ordering police to do the same, for now.
It certainly wasn’t spoken in the orders that came down, but Tom figured that Fleming and his general wanted everyone clear of the impending explosion. No more collateral damage than absolutely necessary.
There were only two points of entry into the NATO meeting room, Tom recalled from the instructions in the envelope. The main doors and the emergency exit at the back of the room. If the delegates inside perceived that the total threat was at the main doors they would presume the emergency exit might be safe.
Ron had allowed several of the undead to advance ahead of him to the exit door. The representative from Norway was ripped to shreds as he tried to escape.
Chancellor Merkel of Germany had broken free from the grasp of a bony dead hand and retreated with the rest of her NATO members back into the room.
A crowd of zombies rushed in after them. Screams came from the room followed by gunfire from security guards and secret service agents.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came face to face with a bloodthirsty monster that had risen up from the floor after being shot in the chest.
Pushing the Defense Secretary out of harm’s way, Secretary Clinton quickly removed her shoe and drove the black kitten heel into the zombie’s skull. Blood squirted from the wound onto the blue graphic backdrop of the city skyline that decorated the wall. The putrid body collapsed to the floor in a heap, and Clinton wasted no time kicking her other heel into the side of the creature’s head for good measure. She slipped out of the shoe and hustled, in her stocking feet, behind the human shield created by the secret service.
Ron was about to make his move and enter the room amid the chaos as he was programmed to do, when Tom sidled up behind him and uttered a single word, “Obediere.”
The automaton froze mid stride in the corridor. Tom guided him into a nearby service area and calmly instructed him to remove his vest. Ron obeyed.
For the next several seconds there was uncertainty about what to do next.
The security force inside the room had been doing well to dispatch the zombies that got inside.
A Croatian military guard yanked the NATO flag from its base and rammed the pole into the eye socket of a rancid middle-aged soccer mom, who clutched the tie of the Prime Minister of Greece.
Some of the creatures were downed by bullets to the head, some by dinner knives and forks to the brain stem, and others by bludgeoning by any means possible.
The British Prime Minister toppled one creature after he held it at bay with a chair until one of the caster wheels rolling across the torso got lodged between the broken bones of the exposed rib cage. As it hit the floor, the frail rotting torso had split in half over the spoked legs of the chair. The top half of the body writhed on the floor gasping and gurgling until the crack of another chair across its head silenced the zombie noise permanently.
The battle waged on inside the NATO meeting room. One of the translators saw an opportunity to pull the emergency exit door closed and locked it from the inside. Whatever zombies were already inside were being dealt with systematically, but at least no more could get in.
Tom stared at the statue-like man in front of him, and rather than simply stopping him in his mission, Tom knew that he could use his help.
If he snapped him out of his hypnotic state there would be too much explaining to do and precious minutes were ticking away. He had the perfect soldier at his disposal. He would obey any instruction. It was the only choice he had with such little time at hand.
Tom emerged from the service area, instructing Ron to follow.
Several zombies were in the hall lingering outside of the meeting room’s emergency exit, still gorging themselves on the innards of the dismembered representative from Norway.
Tom grabbed at the representative’s arm, yanking it from one of the fiends, and instructed Ron to drag the severed torso down to the front doors of the meeting room, while he followed with the legs.
The zombies followed their food, feasting on it where Tom and Ron laid the remains. Tom commanded Ron to remain at the front doors, and he did so, as if standing sentry like a robot awaiting further instructions.
The officers outside the building were keeping the citizens protected behind police lines.
At the sight of zombies flooding into McCormick Place, many people fled the vicinity, but a surprisingly large number remained, armed only with cell phone cameras to document the spectacle.
“Where the fuck’s the army?” Officer Baycheck shouted into his radio. Local police were instructed to let the military take the lead on engaging the zombies, but there was no military presence in sight. The military barricades had obviously been breached, yet no additional personnel were dispatched to respond.
“This ain’t right,” Baycheck exclaimed. “The president’s in there. If the military won’t do anything, we gotta go in.” Baycheck and several of his fellow officers disobeyed orders to wait for the military, and entered the building. The zombie attack was from the west and north sides of the convention center, so Baycheck and his team gained entry from the east tunnel corridor.
Their trampling feet and radio chatter had become louder the closer the officers got to the meeting room. Tom ran in the direction of the noise to warn whoever was coming before they drew the attention of the zombies that he had lured away.
Tom spotted Stanley Baycheck and waved his arms to flag him down. Officers drew their guns to shoot the zombie-faced figure approaching them, but Baycheck quickly ordered them to hold their fire.
“Dexter, what the fu…?” Baycheck began to question.
“We don’t have much time,” Tom explained, “I’ve lured about sixty creepers to the front doors to the NATO meeting room. The rear exit door is clear now.
If you hurry you can evacuate the president and everyone out through the service corridor.”
Baycheck considered the route in his head. “Good idea, but we can’t just waltz them out of the building and down the street. It’s chaos out there.”
“What about the METRA Station?” Tom asked.
“Perfect.” Baycheck agreed that the best course was to get the NATO members to the METRA commuter train tunnel running beneath McCormick Place. He radioed in the escape route, demanding that, “Someone better make sure there’s a goddamn train waiting when we get there!”
Baycheck called to Tom who was heading back down the hall, “Stick with us, Tom. You can’t go back there alone.”
“I’ve got to make sure those monsters stay where they are until you have everyone out of the building.”
“Hey, Tom,” officer Baycheck spoke, offering a humble tone, “I’m… well, I’m sorry about all those zombie wisecracks. I was an ass. Hell, we’ll both be heroes after this, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Tom agreed, “You are an ass.” They gave each other a friendly grin before Tom disappeared down the main hallway.
Tom had expected to see Ron exactly where he had left him, but the growing mass of zombies surrounding Ron had pressed him against the double doors.
What was left of the bait corpse hadn’t been enough to satisfy, and the bulk
of the horde was after the fresh meat inside of the meeting room.
Ron was like a mannequin, unflinchingly being crushed against the doors.
From inside the room, the main doors began to bow inward from the force against them. The latch was on the verge of breaking.
NATO members were relieved to discover that the police had somehow cleared the hall outside the emergency exit, and were now trying to evacuate everyone to safety as quickly as possible.
The main doors soon gave way, and secret service agents at the back of the evacuating group fired upon the zombies that began spilling inside.
Ron caught multiple gun shots to the torso before falling into the room. As the last of the secret service agents exited the room and pulled the exit door closed behind them, Tom watched Ron go down and raced to pull him from the undead mob.
He pushed his way through the stinking throng to find Ron flailing on the floor among fallen bodies that had toppled over him. The mob kept pouring into the room.
Ron was severely wounded and confused, as he was shaken from his hypnotic state by the trauma to his body. By the time Tom had reached him, Ron was in absolute terror upon seeing the reality of grotesque, half-rotted people around him.
Ron’s eyelids fluttered and he was startled by Tom’s disfigured face in front of him.
“It’s okay. My name’s Tom Dexter. You went to school with my daughter Holly.” Ron began to register a memory and his eyes focused on Tom.
“Listen to me. You’ve been shot.” There was very little that Tom could tell this young man who was losing a lot of blood. There was nothing that would make sense as to how he had gotten into this surreal situation. All Tom could do was to give this dying soldier piece of mind that his life was not for naught.
“Ron, you’ve done a great thing for your country. Look at this room, Ron. See the flags? See the NATO flag? You just helped the president and NATO members escape these zombies. You saved them. You should be proud, son.”
Ron looked around the room, now littered with bodies, and gave a hint of a smile through his pain and confusion.
The Tale of Tom Zombie (Book 2): Zombie Lies Page 4