Zombies! (Episode 3): Love Bites

by Ivan Turner

  Zombies! Episode 3 - Love Bites

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2010 by Ivan Turner

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  ***

  What has come before.

  Shawn Rudd, a high school senior in a hurry to meet up with his secret boyfriend, encounters a zombie on the streets of Brooklyn. With no hesitation, Shawn confronts the zombie, stabbing it and then bludgeoning it with a lead pipe. He then turns on the zombie's hapless bite victim, killing her with a blow to the head as well.

  Investigating the crime, Detectives Johan Stemmy and Anthony Heron are confounded and chilled by the fact that the man Shawn killed had been dead for twelve hours at the time of the incident. Their investigation takes them to the apartment of the Koplowitz family where they

  confront Mrs. Lucy Koplowitz, and her eight year old daughter Zoe, already zombies. Zoe bites Stemmy in the leg, thus infecting him. He dies hours later and Heron sees to it that he will never turn.

  A week later, a customer, of Push Ups gym, Karl Rappaport, becomes ill while working out and drops a weight on his foot. Abby Benjamin wheels him to the Sisters of Charity ER and waits for a doctor to attend him. While waiting, Karl dies from the infection. The doctors bring him straight back and try to revive him but to no avail. Minutes later, he awakens on his own. A nurse comes to help him only to be bitten by the zombie that he has become. Her wound is severe and it only takes seconds for her to die. Shortly thereafter, there are two zombies in the ER. While the chief of emergency medicine tries to get everyone out, a young doctor named Peter Ventura recognizes the threat and locks down the ER.

  Coincidentally, Anthony Heron is also at Sisters of Charity that day, visiting with the surgeon who is scheduled to operate on him the next day. Heron has been diagnosed with lung cancer. The situation in the emergency room draws his attention however, and he takes charge of the situation outside the locked down ER.

  Before long, there are three zombies in the ER, as a security guard, attempting to subdue Karl, is himself overrun and partially eaten. The ER chief, Abby, Ventura, and three others barricade themselves inside one of the exam rooms. One of their number is bitten and they all know what her fate will be. When the zombies break through, the chief uses their bitten companion as bait and winds up trapping herself inside while the other four escape. Her success, however, effectively traps the zombies in the room and the police are able to come in and dispatch them.

  Dr. Denise Luco arrives on scene to begin gathering samples and run tests. She has been researching the zombie infection ever since discovering it in Johan Stemmy a week before. The mayor authorizes Captain Lance Naughton of the NYPD to assemble a Zombie Task Force at the head of which he puts Detective Heron. Heron names Francis Culph as his second in command. Naughton makes a statement to the press and chaos ensues.

  ***

  IT took three weeks for the city to normalize once the story behind the incidents at the Sisters of Charity emergency room broke. The initial reaction was one of disbelief, but then pictures were released. Someone in the ER had used a camera phone and snapped a couple of shots of Karl. These were posted on the internet and people began to grow frightened. Canned goods and bottled water began disappearing off of store shelves. The mayor issued a mandate limiting the purchase of such goods. Looting became a problem. Store owners hired private security people to guard their wares and half of the security people wound up stealing from them as time wore on.

  Day after day, the mayor, the police chief, and police captains, with Naughton at the forefront, came on the television to tell the public that things were under control and people should go about their normal lives. People weren't having it. Men and women stopped showing up for work. Shops were closed down. The schools were practically empty. The governor declared a state of emergency and FEMA stepped in.

  Meanwhile, other states and cities were preparing for the worst. Governors and mayors all over the country took to the airwaves to assure the public that no cases of zombieism had been reported anywhere else in the country. It was recommended that people consider this a particularly ugly form of the flu and go about their lives.

  Still not having it.

  People got in their cars, trucks, and vans, and got the hell out of town. And not just New York. The big cities were deserted. As if you could just outrun a plague. With millions of people trying to get out of a city, didn't even one of them think that the plague was going with him?

  But the truth was that it wasn't really a plague, was it? After all, three incidents in three weeks hardly constituted a plague. In a week, the city seemed like a ghost town. So many people had left and those who had stayed had stocked up on food and barricaded themselves inside their residences. Those brave souls who actually dragged themselves out of the house every morning and went to work were giddy about the complete lack of traffic. Plague or no plague, they considered it the best time of their working lives.

  But then no one else died. No other incidents were reported (although there were a few that the police squashed nicely). The population of New York City and the United States in general began to realize that they couldn't hide forever. Like groundhogs after a long winter, they stuck their noses out of their doors, wiggled their whiskers, and ventured into the well known. People began to go back to work and school. Shops opened up again. The supermarkets were able to restock and provide goods to the public at a regular rate. Evacuees began to trickle back into the city.

  The traffic got bad again.

  And the president informed the mayor of New York City personally that the next time Hollywood encroached upon reality, his police captain should think twice about making a public statement. It was going to take everything he had to get other nations to allow travel to and from the U.S. and the economy was as upside down as it ever had been.

  It was a bad three weeks.

  ***

  JOHN Arrick was a teacher of English at Clinton High School. He taught just a few blocks from Push Ups gym where he sporadically worked out after school. He liked Push Ups. He liked Abby, the clerk at the front desk, and Whitaker who was her assistant. He had never met the gym's owner. Abby had introduced him to her husband once, a nice bloke from London. But they hadn't had anything in common except the side of the Atlantic on which they'd been born. Arrick was never quite sure why Abby had introduced them but he suspected her husband was having trouble getting on in the states socially. It wasn't so different from the UK but it was different enough.

  When Arrick had first come over to the States from Scotland, he'd been a little bit lost. Just a teenager then, he'd heard about all these Americans who'd backpacked their way across Europe, staying in hostels and living day to day. That had seemed like such an adventure to him. But, as the favorite son of some very rich parents, he'd seen most of Europe already. He'd seen a fair bit of Australia and Africa, too. It was the United States he'd never seen. Despite its prominence in the world and on the television, his parents had never seen fit to travel there. So he figured he'd turn the backpacking thing up on its other end and go to the States.

  It didn't last long. Apparently, as the favorite son of some very rich parents, Arrick was not prepared for the rigors of hoofing it cross country. The planning of his trip was flawed and things began to go awry almost immediately. He'd
barely made it out of New England when his parents all but ordered him to come home. When he'd stubbornly refused, they cut him off financially. His father said that he wasn't going to throw good money over the ocean so his idiot son could waste it. From there it was a work Visa, some education, citizenship, and eventually teaching. Without his parents' money, the adjustment to the new country had become that much more severe. He didn't love the U.S. He didn't hate it but it didn't draw him the way it did others. At first, he'd stayed purely out of stubbornness. His father continuously ordered him home while his mother just got on the phone and begged. So he'd dug in his heels and made a life for himself.

  Even still, it never really seemed permanent until his father had died. That had been almost ten years before. It had been summer when it happened and the memory of the phone call was as vivid as it ever had been. He could relive it day to day if he liked.

  "John?" his brother, Malcolm, had said through a staticky phone line. "I'm with mother."

  Already that sent up warning bells. "What's wrong?"

  "Dad took ill a few days back. He didn't make it."

  "Didn't make it? You mean he's dead?"

  "You've got to come home, John. Can you come home?"

  Arrick remembered thinking that it was all a hoax. He remembered his doubt and, most of all, he remembered his anger at his parents having dragged Malcolm into the whole thing. Of course, he'd spent more money than he'd had on a plane ticket the next day and arrived home to find that it was no hoax. His father had really died and he would never see him again. There would be no way to make amends for having left and never coming back. After the funeral and the subsequent sorting of affairs, he'd stayed with his mother for almost six months. He'd helped her through the grief long after Malcolm had grown tired of the circus and returned to England where he made his home. And then one morning, as he stared out at the beautiful mountains of Scotland, he realized that he didn't think of that country as home anymore. Though the life he'd built in the United States seemed thin by New York standards, it was his life. He missed it and wanted to go back. After another month of helping his mother prepare herself for life alone, he boarded a plane and returned to the United States and New York City and teaching English.

  So three weeks after the confirmation of the existence of zombies, life was beginning to return to normal. Arrick had stuck around, fearful of the things he heard on the news yet perceiving it in a way that one perceives the news of catastrophe in another nation on the far side of the world. There was no evidence of it in his day to day life except the disappearances of so many panicked people. So he went to work and bought his groceries miles away at the one store that was open. And he did whatever it was he had to do until the everyday returned in full force. With the reemergence of the paranoid into society, shops began to open and buses and trains began to run on schedule. Class schedules were put right and Arrick began running his regular lessons again. Even Shawn Rudd came back to school, which was odd because Shawn's truancy presumably had had nothing to do with a fear of zombies. He'd gone missing a full week before the news broke. The guidance department had sent a note out to Shawn's teachers two days later simply stating that they were aware of his absence and that it would continue indefinitely. With a hundred and fifty other students to worry about, Arrick had simply shrugged his shoulders and thrown the note away. Shawn was a decent student and a likeable enough lad but if guidance was aware of the issue then Arrick was perfectly happy to let them handle it. He'd later heard that Shawn had been arrested but didn't put much stock in that rumor.

  At the end of the day, Shawn came to Arrick to ask for any makeup assignments. Arrick had a few things collected but wasn't particularly organized. The truth was that not too much had happened. With the city in disarray and attendance at an all time low, there hadn't seemed much of a reason to teach anything. They were all playing catch-up.

  When the room was empty, Arrick exhaled his relief as he did at the end of every day. It wasn't that he didn't usually have any more work to do. There were always essays and exams to grade even if he'd polished his lessons years before. But today he didn't feel like it and the workload was light due to the events of the previous three weeks. It was also Friday which meant he had the weekend ahead of him. Maybe, just this once, everything would just…keep.

  From the locker in his room, Arrick pulled out his coat and umbrella. The weatherman had promised rain and then broken his promise. It was still cold, though. It was as if the zombies had brought a chill with them. For a moment, he stole a glimpse of the unlikely future. He thought he saw a world with no government and no civilization and humans, behaving as animals, trying to survive in the cold of winter. But that was a world of fiction. In those scenarios, it took days for society to collapse. But reality had proven fiction wrong again. Zombies on the loose and three weeks later people were all going about this business.

  Choosing a route from the school that took him past no offices or occupied classrooms, Arrick stole away from work. Once on the street, he hurried away from the building. Ironically, he wasn't very different from Shawn Rudd, who often rushed away from the school and avoided his friends so that he could see his secret boyfriend. Of course, Arrick didn't have a secret boyfriend. Quite the opposite in fact. He had a very well known bitch of a girlfriend. And they had a date tonight.

  He should have probably gone home, but he started toward Push Ups anyway. He wasn't a work-out nut. He didn't feel the desperate need to be fit or even healthy. But the exercise helped to clear his mind and somehow Suzanna always knew it when he worked out. Despite a shower and some cologne, she could always just sense that he'd been exercising and it seemed to excite her. That was probably why he stayed with her. An excited Suzanna was an exciting Suzanna. And Arrick, who led a fairly dull existence, enjoyed the excitement she brought to his life. Also, it didn't hurt that she was absolutely beautiful.

  He supposed it wasn't one hundred percent fair to say that she was a bitch. She was intense. There was no doubt about that. While he rarely saw her at the gym (not since the school year had begun), he knew that she was there almost every day. She worked out hard two or three times a week and simply toned on the other days. She was serious about fitness to the point of obsession. For her, though, it wasn't about looking good. She wasn't vain in that way. He felt that she was more addicted to it than anything else. Arrick knew that a regular and proper workout regimen released endorphins into the human body. It made you strong and healthy and ready to take on the world. That's what Suzanna craved.

  When Arrick arrived at Push Ups, Abby was sitting behind the counter looking bored. She'd almost quit, he knew. He wondered if she'd ever considered pulling out during the mad exodus. The gym had been closed for a few days right after the news from Sisters of Charity had broken. Arrick had wandered by a few times and seen the police cars and other official vehicles. There was never any indication that the trouble was related to the zombies in the news, but then again there was never any indication against it. Abby wasn't saying.

  Arrick knew that Larry Koplowitz had died. Suzanna had told him. They'd often exercised together and, though she tried not to show it, she'd been pretty shaken up. There was another man who didn't come to the gym anymore because he'd died. Karl something or other. With an R. Anyway, all this tragedy seemed to have taken its toll on Abby. She seemed a bit shell shocked. Absent minded. Her son had been sick as well, which must have been scary in light of the zombie plague. It was just a bout of strep throat, though. Nothing to worry about.

  "Afternoon, John," Abby said to him as he walked in.

  "Nice to see you," he responded entirely sincere. "How's your lad?"

  She smiled because he'd asked her that every time he'd seen her in the last three weeks. "He's fine. He's been back at school for two weeks."

  "Right. Just making sure. And the old man?"

  She shrugged. "He's working at least. Best Buy over in the Market. He hates it."

  "Tell him it cou
ld be worse. He could've been a school teacher."

  She laughed at that and gave him that queer look that she'd been giving him lately. It wasn't readily identifiable but it gave him the impression that he had a fatal disease and only she knew about it.

  After that, he went to the locker room to change into his sweats and then hit the treadmill. Arrick liked the treadmill. He could plug his headphones into the speaker and watch the television while he walked. It helped him forget how boring it was to run the hamster wheel, as he liked to call it.

  As predicted, the news of zombie infestation and plague had dwindled to a handful of blurbs. You'd think that something like that, even without constant support from reality, would have legs with the media. The reality of the supernatural. And yet they shied away from it as if they were just as afraid as the rest of the populace. Arrick kind of liked that idea. Maybe the notion was so terrifying that even the media didn't feel it was right to sensationalize it. And while the media were keeping their respectful distance, the advertisers were doing their best to capitalize on the incident. All of the networks were scrambling to produce mid season zombie shows. Commercials for ordinary products now had a zombie flavor to them. One company had taken its popular cold and flu medication and renamed it Head Shot, the perfect defense against the zombie virus. And with Halloween on the horizon, it was all even worse.