Contagion On The World

by J. B. Beatty

  “Anything but the small talk. We’ve got all day to burn, so I’d appreciate your going into depth on just about anything.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything. Like tell me about when your puppy died.”

  “That’s horrible! And I never had a puppy.”

  “Child abuse. Every kid should have a puppy at some point. And eventually, they would learn to deal with tragic death. It would have prepared them for the Apocalypse.”

  “You really are a cynic,” she says.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “If I were a cynic, I probably wouldn’t still be around. I’d say that just be alive anymore is a genuine expression of optimism.”

  She puts her hands in her hair, either exhausted or exasperated.

  “But as we were saying, how are you? Answer it any way you want.”

  “Okay, well, I hurt, but that’s my default,” she says.

  “You’ve got pain killers? The good stuff?”

  “Yes, and I can do that in the bunker sometimes, but out here in the real world, I need my head clear. No, my real problem is balancing my feelings about Christianity with my desire for bloody revenge.”

  “Ahh,” I say. “That’s a good one. Keep going. Explain.”

  “The way I read it, to be a good Christian, I have to forgive everyone.”

  “Even the undead?”

  “I’m not sure the New Testament addresses the question of the undead satisfactorily. Jesus had a few people rise from the dead, but they weren’t biters. It just doesn’t apply. So I’m really not sure if I’m supposed to turn the other cheek when one tries to eat me.”

  “But I’ve seen you kill zombies.”

  “Right. Which already puts me on the dark side. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is a thing. And since Justin is technically right on this, they’re not even undead—they’re flu victims. And killing them is killing them. I don’t see any theological way around it.”

  “Therefore you’re a sinner.”

  “We are all sinners.”

  “You don’t even get an exemption if you’re killing someone in self-defense?”

  “See, now there’s where I have issues with a lot of other so-called Christians. When you start talking about self-defense, they whip out their Old Testament and quote Ezekiel: ‘But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, and the people are not warned, and a sword comes and takes a person from them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood I will require from the watchman's hand.’ Yada yada.”

  “Wait, you know this stuff by heart?” I sit up.

  “No, not all of it. Just the fun parts. I had a lot of time on my hands once I became a sicko. And everyone kept bringing me Bibles. But what I was saying is, that’s the Old Testament. And you get a lot of—actually, before most of the world ended, we had a lot of so-called Christians who would go Old Testament whenever they needed a justification to hate one someone—or buy lots of guns. The Ezekiel thing was used by the NRA types. The haters mostly used Leviticus to go after gays and whoever else they wanted permission to hate. But they never went after the tattoo shops or Red Lobster, and Leviticus clearly prohibits both tattoos and the eating of shellfish. Which always struck me as hypocritical. Either the Old Testament is an authority or it’s not. Make up your damn minds.”

  She musses her own hair in frustration. “Look at me! I’m getting all worked up over this even though all of those people are dead.”

  “I’m sure there are plenty of elderly ones out there who fit the bill.”

  “Well, they’re almost dead. They’re pre-dead. But back to the self-defense thing. I always fashioned myself a Christian, meaning I tried to live by the actual words of Christ, at least all of them that were recorded. I mean, think of it. How many millions of words he said in his 33 or so years that weren’t recorded at all. Everything from ‘Mom, can I have some more hummus?’ to ‘Really, do I have to be a carpenter? What am I ever going to do with that skill in this economy? It’s the Middle East—we have no wood!’

  “There’s a huge debate in Bible Land about whether the words of Jesus overruled the Old Testament or supported it. Whatever. There are a lot of contradictions in the Sermon on the Mount. But bottom line, I look at what Jesus actually said, and that’s enough to live by, so I personally don’t give a hooey about the Old Testament.”

  “I would think that you’re going to hell then.”

  “Of course I am. But self-defense, I think that’s a no-no. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus told his dudes to put their swords down: ‘Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.’ And if you can’t use a weapon to defend God himself, how can you get away with using one to defend yourself or a loved one? Right?”

  “I guess. So going with your interpretation, what is the true Christian response to a zombie apocalypse?”

  “To die. I can’t reason any other way around the problem.”

  “But you’re still alive…”

  “That’s why I’m going to hell. Because in the end, I don’t know. I was just a diseased teenager trying to figure out the Bible alone in my bedroom. And I spent all of my time praying that I wouldn’t get sicker and die.”

  “The power of prayer.”

  “Yeah, well, that worked out real well for the human race, didn’t it? And these days, I don’t know if I count as any kind of a Christian. Because all I want to do is stay alive and keep my friends alive and I will kill anyone or anything that is a threat. If I go to hell, I go to hell. But I admit I’m half-hoping that I misread everything and when I die I will go to an awesome heaven and Jesus will be like, ‘What the hell? Of course I expected you to kill zombies and men in black! What kind of a god do you think I am?! And here, have a margarita!’ ”

  “I like your heaven. Can I come?”

  “If that heaven exists, I’m sure you’ll be there.”

  “Sweet.”

  Carrie leans her head back on the couch. Justin clears his throat—he’s standing behind her. I don’t know how long he’s been there. “Fascinating,” he says. “I’m going to take a nap. You guys got this?” He indicates the front windows and the whole keeping watch thing.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say.

  “We have back windows too. And side windows.”

  “Okay, we’ll move around and keep watch out of all the windows.”

  Carrie and I split up, moving to opposite sides of the room so we can watch nothing happen out a variety of windows.

  “What worries me a little,” she says when we pass in the hallway, “is just how much I want revenge on the GAC.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “It’s not just, they’re a threat and we need to face them. Or, they killed our friends and we want to go all Old Testament and pay them back…”

  “Uh huh…”

  “It’s really like I don’t want to just stab them once in the heart. That would be effective, but what I want goes a little bit beyond that. I want to slowly cut them apart piece by piece and leave the heart and brain intact for as long as I can. I want my hands to be drenched in their blood and I want their eyes to follow my every move. I want them to truly feel every pain I give them in triplicate. And even though I’m not a zombie, part of me wants to eat their beating hearts. Kind of a Queen Daenerys touch.”

  “Cooked, or…?”

  “Rare, very rare. Okay, raw. Yes, that’s how I want it.”

  Later, I wonder about Carrie. I can’t get her straight in my head. Her hot-and-cold emotions. Her self-described Christianity and her growing bloodlust. I don’t even know.

  30→DEEF WITH THE NOISE AND PRETTY NEAR BLIND WITH THE SMOKE

  We put twigs and things against the doors and windows so if we come back, we can tell if someone has come into the house. Then we creep to the truck and slowly drive down dirt roads to the west, lights out. We only see signs of life at one cabin along the way, a lone light burning and perhaps smoke rising from the chimney. It is set
off the road a good distance. We assume the best and keep going.

  Finally, we reach the bend in the road that we picked out and find the remains of the old road that we had discerned from the satellite pictures. The going is rough. It might actually have been a road 100 years ago. Now trees are growing in it. We scrape some, and drive over all of the smaller ones. Finally, we see the freeway ahead of us. We stop and start cutting branches to make the truck invisible in case anyone curious or observant comes by in the daylight. Then we unload our supplies and start.

  “Good to go?” says Justin, cinching the straps on his backpack. We’re all carrying heavy loads: weaponry, sleeping bags, food. And bombs.

  “Yeah,” I say, looking at Carrie, who is already heading down into the ditch that runs along the northbound lanes.

  With one last look behind, we set out. I find this is incredibly exciting and incredibly frightening. We’ll actually be hiding in a narrow wooded area in the median, maybe 150 yards from our truck. That will give us the best perspective on the road as well as being a spot where we’re least likely to be stumbled upon by random wanderers.

  Usually it’s not hard to find abandoned cars along the roads these days, but when you really need one, apparently it’s impossible. None are in sight. I jog about a mile up the road and come back down on the other side. I do the same going south. Nada.

  Improv time. We down a big tree as planned using the big two-man tree saw that Justin has been lugging around. A chainsaw would have been lightspeed compared to this, but the noise from it could be our undoing. With ropes we are able to fine-tune the positioning of the tree so it will funnel traffic to our side of the road.

  To conceal the bomb, we don’t have the anticipated car to hide it in. Carrie finds a deer carcass about 200 yards down. She ties ropes to it and drags it to the bomb site.

  She drops the ropes in exhaustion when she gets to us.

  “Do you need a hand with that?” I offer.

  She just glares.

  “Dinner?” I say.

  “Hide the bomb in it,” she says.

  “A dead deer is not going to protect us from the blast while projecting the force at the passing vehicle,” says Justin. “Not even close.”

  “We’re open for other ideas, Justin,” she says.

  “At least a tree,” he says. “We can put a big fallen tree on the shoulder behind the deer. Might help a little.”

  And he finds an old one that’s ready to fall anyway. We do a little sawing and are able to push it down. It takes forever to get it in the right place.

  “If we’re close to this blast, we’re still going to die,” I say.

  “Then we move farther back and hope your controller has enough range to handle that.”

  It should, but we don’t know. Just like we don’t know if the bomb will really go off and we don’t know how the GAC will react and we don’t know if whomever we catch alive will even talk. We don’t know anything. We’re just making things up as we go along. And we don’t have the luxury of failure.

  Once the trap is set, we retreat into the woods. We spread out so that we each have different vantage points, but we’re close enough that we can hear each other if need be. I am closest to the IED and hiding behind a thick tree root that protrudes from the ground. We’ve all dragged a few branches on top of us, so that we’re not easily seen by any patrolling aircraft or drones.

  And then we wait. Several hours later, the sun starts to come up. An hour after that, I fall asleep. An immeasurable period of time after that, I wake because a bug is in my ear. I think about Maggie, who would probably already be in fuck-this mode. Within 15 minutes, I am nodding off again.

  I hear engines. Like a caffeinated wake-up call, I jolt to attention and ready the controller. The sound grows louder and louder until I feel like something’s going to smash me in its treads. My thumb shakes above the button of death on the controller. Can I even do this? It’s one thing to kill in hand-to-hand combat or to take a shot at someone who is an immediate threat, but to blow up unsuspecting people in an ambush? Suddenly I am shaking more. But I have to do it.

  “No,” I hear. I wonder if I suddenly have voices in my head, if my conscience is asserting its control over my actions.

  “No!” again, and the voice sounds much like Justin. “No, too many.” It is the voice of Justin, which is a terrible relief. I see the convoy come into view… a Humvee with a 50-caliber machine gun on top leading three trucks. They slow down slightly at our tree and I know that I have to hit the button if they stop and examine the area. Instead, they accelerate once they’re on the other side and minutes later their sound fades completely.

  A half hour later, a second convoy passes through. Again with the machine gun Humvee but only two trucks. We let it pass.

  As the sun starts to climb higher in the sky, I see a large bird float over, its wings held flat and steady. It flaps them once and goes back to its glide, its white head jutting forth. When I recognize it, a tiny happiness descends upon me. I think, “Okay, America still has that going for it.”

  I nap again. And then am jolted again by Justin saying, “This is it!”

  I grab the controller and wipe the sleep out of my eyes. I hear an engine, maybe only one. Certainly not as loud a droning as came from the caravans.

  A single Humvee. It slows slightly at the tree. A thought hits me—I feel as if I need to have an internal debate about whether to push the button. Serious. It’s like I think, “Wait! I’ve got to think about this!” And just as I’m deciding to have that thought, my thumb says “Too late!” and the explosion rocks the forest before I realized I pushed the button.

  My head rings with the blast. I hit my ears with the heel of my hand.

  “Move! Now!” shouts Justin. Carrie steps out to the road and provides cover as Justin and I sprint to the Humvee which has been dented and torn. Not as destroyed as I thought it might be, but it took a solid hit. He reaches through the window for the driver but backs away quickly. “This one’s dead.”

  On the other side, I pull out the man who was riding shotgun. He is gasping and bloody, but I can’t tell if it’s his blood.

  “Drag him to the ditch,” says Justin. He checks inside the vehicle for more, but these two were the only passengers. I am moving slowly till Justin grabs one of the man’s arms and we hurry into the ditch.

  The man’s eyes are open. He looks young, maybe my age. He coughs and gurgles while Justin’s hands search him for wounds. Justin looks at me and says, “Get talking to him.”

  I have to interrogate. “What’s your name?”

  “Louder,” says Justin. “He probably can’t hear anything after that blast. And ask him questions we care about!”

  “Who are you guys?” I yell.

  His eyes start to point to me; they flicker with understanding. “Who are you?!” I repeat. The flickering stops. He looks up at the sky that the bald eagle had just flown across. He shakes and stops.

  “Fuck,” says Justin. Our prisoner is dead. “We’ve got to clean up and get out of here. Get the truck.” Carries keeps looking over her shoulder at us while watching the road in the distance and the sky itself.

  This part we argued about heatedly. It’s the most dangerous part of the mission. If we leave the wreckage of the Humvee where it is, the GAC will see it as soon as they drive past or fly over. And instantly they will bring all of their heat down upon us. If they find us, we don’t stand a chance.

  But to “clean up,” we’ve got to expose ourselves, knowing that a convoy could appear at the top of the hill any minute or a plane could fly over. We’ll be dead instantly.

  But if they don’t see us while we’re cleaning up, we may have bought ourselves valuable hours in getting away. How long will it take them to realize that the Humvee that is not answering the radio is actually gone? And how long will it take them to figure out where it happened?

  As much as I want to just race away from the scene, I am outvoted, so I start up the
truck, drive it out from under the cut branches down into the ditch, onto the northbound lanes, into another ditch and thread it through the trees until I can drive up onto the southbound lanes. Justin and I attach the cables to the Humvee and I gun the engine and drag the squealing wreckage into the ditch on the far side. I unhitch and race the truck back onto the road to drag the large tree into the same ditch, hoping that will provide a tiny bit of cover for the Humvee.

  Justin jogs across the lanes, carrying the dead soldier. He tosses him into the ditch. I race the truck back across the median and the northbound lanes and go back up the hill to its original hiding place. The operation takes about 10 minutes. As planned, I wait there for Justin and Carrie. He is cutting more branches to cover up the Humvee and the body. She is watching the road, rifle ready.

  “Let’s go,” I hear. It’s Carrie. She climbs into the truck. I’m about to say we need to wait for Justin when I see him climbing into the back. We go.

  The ride through the woods is just as crazy as it was the first time. They’ll be able to track us with no problem just by eyeing the small trees and brush that we run over. They’ll be able to see the scorched road where the bomb went off as well as soon as someone looks in that direction.

  “We’ve got to be hidden before they find it, before they get the planes in the air,” Justin says. We hit the dirt road and I hit the gas, intending to go back to our temporary safe house.

  “Stop! No,” says Justin. “The other way.”

  “I thought…”

  “I have a bad feeling about that place. Just go north here, and then the road turns to the east. Go fast. We’ll take cover until nightfall in the woods.”

  For the next 15 minutes, we race. I keep the truck to the side of the road, as much out of the view of the sky as possible. Still, we are leaving a cloud of dust behind us. Along the way, we see an old man walking the road, carrying a gun. He steps beside a tree as we pass, but he doesn’t threaten us. He just watches. The cloud of dust envelopes him. About 8 miles later, we turn down a two track that Justin spots. We slow, and eventually we see an overgrown path that leads into a wetland of sorts. We take the truck as deep as we can into the lush growth. When we reach what looks like an old hunter’s campsite, we turn it around and point it out.