Death and Biker Gangs (Grave New World)

by S. P. Blackmore

  Death and Biker Gangs

  By S.P. Blackmore

  Copyright 2012 S.P. Blackmore

  Cover art by Steven Novak

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To my friends, even those who aren’t ready for the zombie apocalypse.

  ONE

  Things get weird at the end of the world.

  “Really brings whole new meaning to ‘death bit him in the ass,’ doesn’t it, Vibeke?”

  Very, very weird.

  “He’s got a bite on his butt,” I read aloud from my clipboard. I looked from the dark-haired man in front of me to the sleeping patient on the wheeled gurney. Tony McKnight hadn’t bothered concealing his shit-eating grin when he brought the patient inside, which told me I was either the butt of a great joke—pardon the pun—or this one was really going to freak me out. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I wish. They brought the poor bastard in bleeding through his jeans.” Tony attempted to stow the grin, but genuine glee leaked into his voice. “Dax told me where the bite was, and we figured this was a case for you.”

  “I’m honored.” You learn to expect strange stuff when you live through the apocalypse, but I still found myself constantly bewildered by what turned up. Bites on the ass just scratched at that iceberg.

  I pressed my fingers against the patient’s neck. His heartbeat seemed steady enough, which was a nice change from the bleeding, hysterical patients I usually treated. “And where is Dax?”

  “He couldn’t make it, but the entire processing unit has bets on how the poor dude got chomped.”

  That sounded about right. I stayed busy in the medical building for the most part, but from what I’d seen of processing, they had an interesting sense of humor. I guess they had to; they were the first people to see new arrivals, and let me tell you, no one is in a good mood after they’ve had a run-in with walking dead people or vicious gangsters, both of which had sprouted up like weeds after Earth got pummeled by the meteor shower from hell.

  The three of us had arrived in camp at least a week and a half after the world had gone to shit. We’d held out in Astra, the next city over, for as long as we could, finally abandoning ship when some gangbangers decided to torch the place, driving the undead right to our building. The commanding officer here at Elderwood Refugee Camp had been quick to sort us into new jobs, and Dax, being the most pleasant of our trio, had been assigned to processing as one of the friendly faces greeting incoming refugees.

  I poked at the patient’s left leg. “Did he pass out?”

  “He’s sedated. He…struggled.” Tony stopped trying to hide the smile. I felt around the back of the patient’s head, but didn’t detect any lumps or other telltale signs of violence. Tony saw me feeling around and rolled his eyes. “Oh, relax, it’s proper sedation. I didn’t go after him with a bat.”

  Then he leaned toward me. “Wanna see it?”

  The last time a man asked me that, the world had still been the world and I had been on a particularly terrible date. But hell, this was a bite on the butt, and I was kind of curious. I shrugged and gestured for Tony to go on. “Yeah, let’s see it.”

  He peeled back the blanket, revealing a naked rear end and a particularly bloody bite mark. “Cool, huh?”

  Clearly, Tony and I have differing opinions on what’s cool. Still, I couldn’t deny a sort of macabre interest in the patient’s situation. I’d seen all sorts of bizarre things in the weeks since the meteors fell and the dead walked, but even I couldn’t begin to explain how someone could allow a zombie to actually take a chunk out of his ass. They aren’t really quiet—letting one sneak that close to such a sensitive area requires a certain level of obliviousness.

  I set the clipboard back on the gurney and looked down at the patient. Talk about a candidate for the Darwin Awards. Maybe this was the sort of stupidity we should allow to die out.

  Now, Vibby, the general wouldn’t like that. I was pretty sure General Hammond, our camp boss, would frown on just letting people die, even if they did bring it on themselves. I sighed. “Well, let’s get him stitched up.”

  I led Tony through what had been the Student Health Center at Elderwood Community College, where the most important medical decisions had once been what kind of birth control pill to prescribe, or how to clear up a nasty case of pre-finals hives. Since the military had taken the campus over—renaming it Elderwood Refugee Camp in the process—the medical facility handled more exciting things, like infections, broken bones, and the ubiquitous zombie bites.

  Excuse me, the ubiquitous revenant bites. General Hammond didn’t like us to use the term zombie, which apparently sounded too much like a pre-apocalypse beverage.

  I pushed open the door of exam room 2B. “Just wheel him in—oh.” I stopped, and the gurney bumped against my backside. Doctor Samuels glanced up from his spot on the far side of the room, then quickly tugged the stained curtain partition until it concealed half of his patient.

  “Is this occupied?” I asked.

  The doctor pushed strands of overly shaggy gray hair out of his face, then wiped his hands against his ratty lab coat. “You can come on in. I ran out of room up at the lab.” Doctor Samuels leaned around me and spotted Tony, then lifted a hand in greeting. “G’afternoon, McKnight. Here to walk the lady back?”

  “No.” Tony slapped his hands against the gurney. “Some biker got bitten in the ass.”

  “He’s a biker?” I asked, looking at the patient with renewed interest. The military camp had been dealing with trouble from what General Hammond referred to as a bunch of idiots on bikes. Groups of them had made modifications to various motorcycles, allowing the machines to run—albeit maybe not all that well—despite all the gunk in the air. They’d become a definite pain during the last few weeks, preying on our scavenging teams and clashing with the patrols Hammond sent out.

  I’d been curious about what they looked like, as we hadn’t actually managed to catch any up to that point. But aside from the usual post-apocalyptic scruff, bruises, and general pastiness that all survivors shared, the patient didn’t display anything that screamed biker. No leather. No chains. No tattoos of spiders or naked women or guns.

  Overall, I found him rather disappointing.

  “So here he is,” Tony said. “I thought Vibeke would get a kick out of it.”

  “You always bring me the nicest things.” Last week, he’d showed up with ammunition for the antique assault rifle I’d grown fond of. The week before that, he’d filched me some chewing gum from his latest scavenging trip. I still wasn’t sure if he was just being decent, or if this was Tony’s brand of post-apocalyptic courtship.

  A few months ago, I wouldn’t have minded. I used to think Tony was pretty damn good-looking, with his dark eyes and devilish grin. Nowadays…well, he still had the dark eyes and devilish grin, but his brown hair had grown shaggy and greasy, and I was not entirely sure he’d bathed since we reached camp.

  Besides, who had time to flirt? I had zombie bites to tend.

  Doctor Samuels sidled over to take a look as I straightened out the gurney. “Bitten on the butt?” His eyes widened when he got a look at the wound. “How did he manage that?”

  I pulled on a pair of gloves and gathered my suturing kit from the counter. “You didn’t deal with this stuff from college students?”

  The doctor laughed, then reached up to massage the back of his neck. Doctor Samuels had been the on-call physician for the health center when ECC still served s
tudents and not survivors, and I figured he’d seen some odd things from the coeds. He examined the patient’s wound visually, taking care not to touch it. “Now that you mention it, this is rather reminiscent of a bad outbreak of herpes.”

  Tony snorted back a laugh, clearly enjoying the comparison.

  “How did it happen?” the doctor asked again.

  “We’re not sure,” Tony said, “but there’s a pool going over whether he answering the call of nature or doing something really…stupid.”

  Doctor Samuels wrinkled his nose. “And what kind of stupid things does one do with a zombie?”

  “Well—”

  “Let’s not go there, boys,” I said. I didn’t care to know what sort of stupid activities one could engage in with a moving dead person.

  I dipped a scrubbing brush in iodine and got started on the biker’s left butt cheek. The bite looked pretty fresh; most of the tissue around the wound hadn’t necrotized yet. “This might be from the last few hours. Shouldn’t be too hard to clean up.”

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it.” Doctor Samuels straightened his lab coat and strolled back over to his side of the room. “I’m keeping an eye on Harrison.”

  Tony leaned over the gurney, apparently intending to stick around while I tended the wound. “Who’s Harrison?”

  “The latest pet project,” I said. Once I’d scrubbed out the wound, I snipped away the first two inches of flesh around the marks, pleased that only the innermost millimeters oozed out blackened blood. “Yeah, this is recent. He’ll probably be okay.”

  “He was freaking the hell out when he was brought in. Even Dax couldn’t calm him down. I think the dude thought we were going to…dispose of him.” Tony leaned in closer.

  I bumped him out of the way. “Quit breathing on it,” I said.

  I tucked the infected flesh into a sample bag for the doctors in the science building to puzzle over later. They did so love investigating the whole Revenant Mystery, and yeah, I guess there’s definitely something interesting about it…if you haven’t been chased, attacked, or otherwise harassed by said revenants.

  Doctor Samuels and most of the medical crew had been locked up here since the big rocks first fell out of the sky, and they’d missed all the initial excitement that followed the dead getting up and trying to make the rest of us into dinner. I think the science crew was trying to make up for it by finding a cure, or at least some sort of answer.

  As far as I knew, they hadn’t made much progress.

  I rinsed the wound with saline—we were going to miss that stuff when it ran out—and applied a strong antibiotic paste, which reportedly stung like hell when the patient was awake. “Two weeks of oral antibiotics and he’ll be fine. He’s actually pretty lucky.”

  Tony gave me a frank look. “I’m not sure I’d call a zombie biting my ass lucky.”

  “She’s right,” Doctor Samuels called from around the curtain. “We had a man come in with a week-old bite, and half his arm was necrotized. The virus was already deep in the bloodstream at that point, and harder for antibiotics to reach.”

  Tony didn’t bat an eye. “What happened to him?”

  “I amputated the arm, and he died a few hours later.” Doctor Samuels let out a sigh. I could picture him shaking his head and lacing his hands together behind the curtain. “There was nothing we could do about it. We’re just not properly equipped for massive trauma…or anything, really…up here.”

  The ironic thing in all of this is that zombie bites were pretty much the only thing we could treat with genuine consistency. Elderwood Refugee Camp had a seventy percent post-chowdown survival rate, assuming we got to the patient within two days of the bite, and that was as good as anyone in the country had managed.

  Well, that we knew of, anyway. The rest of the country had been pretty much unresponsive for the last couple of weeks.

  Tony glanced at the curtain. “So what’s wrong with Harrison?”

  “Nothing. He’s just dead.” I inspected the cleaned wound and decided to stitch up the lone segment of it that had a regular edge.

  “Oh.” Tony took a moment to process that. “What do you mean, he’s dead?”

  The curtain rustled behind me as Doctor Samuels pulled it back. “Sorry. We ran out of observation rooms at the lab, so I had to bring him down here.”

  I hadn’t been too thrilled to hear that the good doctor was bringing the dead dude down to the medical center, but you learn to shrug things off after the endtimes get going. Once the sun went away and revenants started walking around, stuff like stitching up a man’s ass while sharing a room with a dead person seemed almost passé.

  I gotta say, whoever designed this apocalypse should get some extra points for variety. No, it’s not enough that the initial meteor shower wrecked our infrastructure, leaving us huddled in refugee camps, largely cut off from the rest of the country and the world while trying to figure out what to do next. No, we had flesh-eating revenants running around, too, and better yet, in some cases they were our roommates.

  I concentrated on my handful of sutures, which would probably have gotten me kicked out of Suturing School, if such a thing existed. Tony edged closer to the curtain, presumably looking around it to see what was up with Harrison. “So you’re treating a guy while there’s a decomposing corpse in the room?” he asked. “That seems…unhygienic.”

  This would all be much funnier if the whole cultural fascination with the undead hadn’t been at the height of its popularity when the end came. Yeah, it’s ironic; of all the possible ways the end could come, we got zombies. Seriously, what the hell? Approximately one percent of the population—the zombie fanatics—were probably feverish with joy, assuming they hadn’t been vaporized by the meteors or devoured by the objects of their desire.

  What a way to go.

  “Vibeke hasn’t touched him,” Doctor Samuels said, “and I doubt his cooties are going to jump all the way across the room.”

  I think I really started accepting that the world as we knew it had irrevocably changed when seasoned medical professionals began calling the undead virus cooties.

  “Besides, if my theory is correct, the cooties won’t make a difference at all.” The doctor sounded like he was sitting down, probably with clipboard in-hand. The research never stopped.

  Tony ambled back over as I finished up the stitches. “How’s that look?” I asked.

  He tilted his head. “Messy.”

  Well, that’s what they got for deciding my long-ago stint as an EMT meant I was qualified to actually treat people. When we first arrived at the camp, I’d been sent right up to Doctor Samuels, where I promptly received a crash course in suturing, pushing antibiotics, and bone-setting—all typical medical problems when the endtimes arrive and zombies pay social calls—but that didn’t mean I was any good at it. I poked at the wound and decided the handful of stitches, while ugly, would probably hold.

  I got started on the more familiar task of bandaging. “What’s going to happen to him?”

  Tony shrugged. “Hammond will probably try to be civilized and ask him some questions. He bitches about those bikers every damn day…”

  Tony had been assigned to outgoing patrols, and thus wound up hanging around the general and getting all sorts of semi-juicy information. He never seemed to mind sharing it, either.

  Bandaging completed, I stripped off my gloves and set them down on the table next to the sleeping patient. “What’s this theory you were talking about, Doc?” I asked.

  Something rustled on the other side of the room. “Come on over and have a look,” Doctor Samuels said. “He’s waking up.”

  Tony and I exchanged glances, then made a beeline for the curtain.

  Doctor Samuels was indeed seated in his chair, gazing morosely over his clipboard at the squirming dead man in the bed. Waking up meant reanimating.

  The corpse’s mouth moved, almost curving up into a smile. His lower jaw moved up and down, slowly at first, then faster, his teeth clac
king together audibly. I’ll say this about the undead: they have outstanding jaw strength. No wonder so many people turned up with entire chunks of flesh missing—these guys really bit down.

  Doctor Samuels looked at his watch. “Approximate time of reanimation…five-fifteen. Fingers twitch first, then mouth…” He scribbled away on his clipboard. “If he follows the typical pattern, he’ll open his eyes next…”

  Harrison opened his eyes. The corneas had clouded over, and they shifted slowly from side to side, not focusing on anything in particular. A few up close and personal experiences with the undead had led me to steer clear of them, but watching it actually happen was sort of fascinating.

  And gross.

  “Ugh,” I said.

  Harrison twisted his head around to look at me, his neck creaking loudly. I cringed away from the unfocused stare; the zombie leer has never failed to make my skin crawl. The living dead don’t look much like people up close, at least not people you’d want to associate with. From a distance, the better-preserved ones can pass as sick or feeble survivors, but once you look at them in the face…well, there’s nothing human left in that ravenous stare, or in the hollowed-out cheeks or constantly moving jaws.

  “Reacts to sound,” Doctor Samuels said. “But we’d figured that out already. Still not sure if they see us or just sense us.”

  “So you guys experiment on zombies often?” Tony asked. “Is this what you do all day, Vibby?”

  “Don’t call me Vibby.”

  Harrison’s arms and legs moved slowly up and down. Tony and I both reached for our respective firearms—I carried around a pistol from the Korean War, or so he’d told me—but Doctor Samuels held up a hand to stop us. “Vibeke deals with the living. But she’s got a strong stomach, so I figured she wouldn’t mind if I used her exam room.”

  “You know she barfed on the first zombie she saw, right?”

  I stomped on Tony’s foot. “Dude.”

  “But she hasn’t barfed since, correct?”

  “Actually—”

  “Tony,” I said warningly. He sent me one of his patented devilish grins, but fortunately didn’t elaborate further on my stomach issues. I’d actually managed to develop something of a reputation as a hardass around camp, much to my surprise, and I preferred to keep it that way.