Zombie Reign (Book 1): Death in Detroit

by Joseph Edward

  “8-60 say again?” replied the dispatch center.

  “8-60 we have an injured officer and are requesting a rescue.”

  “8-60 okay, one enroute.”

  “6-10 okay on that” came over the air. That was the radio equivalence of being told to get off the stage in America’s Got Talent. The supervisor was on his way to follow up. Things were about to get interesting. I wish they would’ve stayed so mundane.

  As I looked over at Bill, I could swear the black void where his eyes used to be was staring straight through me. His head was split open, exposing the grey matter that was once his functioning brain. His gaping mouth still had bits of Bobby’s flesh between his teeth. His tongue was outstretched past his lips and hanging by a thread. It was as if the impact caused his jaw to clamp down, almost removing his tongue. Or was it something else?

  Chapter 4

  “What do you mean he ‘bit’ you Bobby? Did you cut yourself on his teeth?” I asked.

  “No, no! The fucking…thing…clamped down on my hand and tried to bite my fucking fingers off!”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t like a muscular reflex or something?”

  “No, I’m sure that it wasn’t anything like that. I actually felt his jaw muscles tense up and his tongue lick my fucking palm as he bit down!”

  It wasn’t long before the rescue arrvied to get a look at Bobby’s hand. The paramedics felt it best to transport Bobby to the local hospital to get patched up, as it was clear this wasn’t going to be fixed by a few stitches.

  If it weren’t for the fact that Bobby had one (or more) of his fingers broken, the Sergeant would’ve never believed us. He wasn’t too happy about Bill having his head caved in on the coffee table. This was going to be one tricky sell to the family and the funeral home doing the patch job. The Sergeant advised just chalking up the damage to Bill falling and injuring himself that way when he died. That was fine by us. We weren’t going to tell, and we were hoping Bill wasn’t going to come back to contradict that story. More than likely a cremation would be in order anyway.

  The Sergeant still wanted a full report, but told me that he wanted me to head home and take my vacation early since Bill would be out of service. He called another officer to make our current scene, to which I objected. It wasn’t until the Sergeant told me that my wife had called the station requesting me to come home as she was violently ill that I agreed.

  Why would Kate call the station instead of my cell? Obviously, she was seriously ill and wasn’t thinking clearly. Hell, I wasn’t thinking too clearly myself after witnessing what amounted to the dead coming alive and making a snack out of Bobby.

  Then it hit me like a jack-knifed semi on a two- laned highway.

  Bill had been sick - that was evident. Bill had been down south.

  My detective skills were in full gear. No need for a Scooby snack, but I felt that I was solving this mystery a day late and a dollar short.

  What if Bill had been infected with the flu, virus or whatever it was when he was in Florida? What if that is what killed him? All the strange news reports, all of the mysterious workers in hazmat suits…the Umbrella Corporation! See, I told you I liked video games.

  No, this was no Resident Evil. There was no such thing as the T-Virus or zombies for that matter. Right? I immediately hit the speed dial to Kate on my way back to the station to change. No answer. I checked my missed calls – there were none from home. Kate hadn’t tried to call my cell, but why?

  I got to the station and changed in record time. I raced home quicker than I ever have in my life. It was during this drive home that I realized something. There were little to no cars on the freeway. Even at this time of day, there should be some traffic. It was eerily still, with the exception of a few cars. I turned on the radio out of habit and was greeted by more reports of the flu outbreaks, which in just a few hours had moved north and were debilitating communities locally. It had only been a few hours, how could this have happened so quickly? How could no one have known or had any warning?

  My phone rang. The incoming call was from my Sergeant.

  “Yes sir?”

  “Griff, you almost home?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I just wanted to let you know before you heard it somewhere else.”

  “What is it, you don’t sound so good.”

  “It’s Bobby, Griff. He’s dead.”

  Chapter 5

  The rest of that long drive home was a blur. I had almost forgotten why I’d rushed home in the first place. Kate’s condition was immediately overshadowed by the immense loss and grief that I now felt.

  My Sergeant took advantage of my silence to fill me in on what had transpired in the short amount of time since Bobby left in the ambulance. Bobby became violently ill while being transported. It was first believed to be a severe case of shock, as Bobby began perspiring, thrashing and vomiting horribly. This was followed by Bobby passing out on the gurney. I did recall Bobby saying that he wasn’t feeling well today, but what the Sergeant was describing was too sudden of a change in his condition to be explained so easily.

  I was told that they had strapped him down due to the convulsions and exhibiting signs of going into shock. I am sure it was the longest 10 minutes of those young paramedic’s lives.

  The paramedics stepped up their response based on Bobby’s condition and upon arrival to the ER he was pronounced dead. No one had any explanation for it.

  I advised my Sergeant of the suspicions that Bill had contracted the now infamous virus and may have spread it to Bobby during the fateful contact. I explained the concern I had over what I was seeing in regards to the CDC from the news coverage and it was agreed that the Sergeant would be notifying them. My next thought was focused on one thing, Kate.

  I arrived home and pulled up into my driveway in the same fashion that the Space Shuttle would hit the tarmac during landing. Complete with smoking tires. I wonder how horrendous the noise would be if the Space Shuttle was slammed into park while moving like I did with my car at that moment. I wasn’t sure if the transmission was ever going to work again.

  I ran through the front door and instantly called out for Kate. I got no response.

  I checked the first floor and she was nowhere to be found. There was no response to my persistent calls. That’s when I heard the first “thud” coming from the floor above me. I stopped in horror as the muffled sound of an appendage hitting the floor above me was followed by a moan.

  I rushed upstairs to our master bedroom, which had an attached bathroom. The bathroom door was open and the noises I heard before were now replaced by a vile vomiting sound. There was the strained groan, followed by the wet snapping of innards and the release of the retching into the toilet.

  After the sudden loss of Bobby, all I could do was focus on the negative and fear the worst. I couldn’t handle losing Kate too, not now…not like this.

  As I swung open the door she lifted her head from the toilet, with dark circles around her eyes and missing that spark of life I witnessed just hours ago. A thick strand of mucus and vomit mixture hung from her bottom lip. She could only muster enough energy to tell me one thing before she passed out on the cold tile floor.

  “Hi Honey, we’re pregnant.”

  Chapter 6

  Kate and I were rudely interrupted by the sound of my cellphone ringing again. It was my supervisor calling back again.

  “Yes, Sarge?”

  “I just wanted to let you know that there seems to be more to your virus hunch than we expected.”

  His voice sounded distraught and there was a short pause that told me he was trying to keep the conversation in confidence. There was considerable commotion going on in the background.

  “Griff, the hospital had a…situation,” he continued as if he was adjusting himself for privacy, “Bobby wasn’t dead like they pronounced. They had unstrapped him from the gurney and were taking him to the morgue when he jumped up and took a bite out of the nearest nurse. They t
ried to restrain him, but he continued clawing and biting everyone who grabbed onto him. He even had one of the poor nurse’s aides pinned on the ground and ripped open her fucking stomach with his bear teeth! Some armed hospital security guards responded and had to shoot him…they had to shoot Bobby! They said that he didn’t stop coming at them until they shot him in the head. They said that he even got a few bites out of them before they were able to put him down.”

  I was absolutely speechless.

  “The weird thing is,” he began as he modified his speech to a whisper, “they said his eyes were glowing yellow when he came to. Now the CDC is here and they aren’t allowing anyone to leave, including me. I gotta go – I’ll call...”

  The phone line went dead. It wasn’t hung up, it just went silent like a lost signal.

  Kate continued heaving into the toilet as I put my phone away. I would have to try to make sense of what had just happened at another time. My wife was my first and foremost priority.

  Looking back now, even though the virus may have killed people and re-animated them, it was much less taxing on a living soul than Kate’s morning sickness. I have never seen anyone so violently ill in my life!

  Inside, I felt no better than Kate looked at the moment. As I lifted her limp body and carried her back to bed, I cried tears of joy and loss simultaneously. How could I have let Bobby go the hospital alone? How can Bobby be dead? What’s the connection to the CDC? What if I had been bit? What if I got the virus? What if I have the virus? What if I am endangering Kate and our…our baby? How did that happen? No, I mean, I know how that happens! We had agreed we didn’t want children and I thought that she, I mean we, oh man…now I felt like I was going to be the next one hugging the toilet as I felt my stomach flutter up past my lungs into my throat.

  I placed her down gently on the bed, covering her lightly. I went back into the bathroom and prepared a cool compress for her head, to help alleviate the severe headache I was sure she was going to have from that upheaval.

  When I returned, she was resting and looked much better. She had a newfound glow about her that I hadn’t seen since our wedding day. As I placed the cool compress gently on her head, I wept like I never had in my entire life. I began feeling a bit like Peter Parker in the Spiderman movie where he should have, by all accounts, turned in his man card. I needed to get myself back together.

  Once I was able to gain my composure I decided to turn on the TV to see what news had transpired. Kate and I felt it a necessity to have the HD cable package with over a billion channels. Well, that is slightly exaggerated, but you know the channels offered. A hundred or so music channels (no videos, just music through your television), a channel for every ethnicity spoken in their native tongue (we weren’t fluent in any language other than English), and more reality shows than I ever cared to watch (why do I want to see someone else’s train wreck?).

  While I felt like I overpaid just to get G4 and the Comedy Channel, Kate was happy with the overabundance of choices. While she loved watching the “domestic” shows on crafts, cooking and gardening, she could never pass on a Honey Boo Boo marathon. The last brief glimpse of that show I could recall while sharing some TV time with her was an episode dealing with the many chins and the crusted deposits in those folds of the mother. My male mind went immediately to her nether regions and couldn’t figure for the life of me how she had ever procreated. Perhaps the child was a conscious being that evolved from her belly button deposits and took on life? That scenario would be much more plausible, but I digress…

  Every single channel was available. Even the pay per view adult movie channels that I, uh, just now discovered that we had (yes, I fear Kate more than the virus). They were all available, but they all had the same emergency broadcasting message: “STAY INDOORS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE – THE CDC WILL ADVISE WHEN TRAVEL IS RECOMMENDED”.

  It occurred to me that this message was probably in effect when I was sent home from work. It also occurred to me that the bosses at work were probably keeping us out of the loop to avoid a panic and mass exodus from the department. I can imagine everyone would’ve been returning home if they knew the severity. The thin blue line was rapidly looking more like a light blue mist, for all of the protection they could offer in such an outbreak.

  I kept it on one of the 24-hour news channels, just to make sure if the broadcasting changed I would be alerted to the latest updates. What I couldn’t make out if the static emergency broadcast message was local, regional or national. I decided my next best option would be to turn on the radio.

  Funny how the phrase “turn on the radio” still holds. Like your favorite band releasing an “album”. I realized that the only radio I owned was installed in the dashboard of my car, and everything else I streamed on the internet. While my internet connection was working, I couldn’t get anything. By anything I mean any sort of connection to the outside world. So getting any information from the most reliable and “real time” source would have to wait.

  Kate was resting comfortably and out cold, so I decided to make a quick run out to my car. I figured that I may have thrown the transmission out in my haste to park it, but the radio should still work. I needed to find out more information on what was happening.

  I started down the stairs and towards the front door. As I took a step outside, another remembrance of 9/11 struck me. That day, as anyone who was alive can attest to, there were no planes in the sky. After the hijackings were confirmed all civilian air traffic was halted. The only sound was the scrambling of military jets in the sky looking for threats. This day was similar with one exception – there were no military jets out either.

  This sent a chill up my spine. You see, I live a few miles from Selfridge Air National Guard Base (SANG). Peacetime or not, there was always some type of activity in the air around here. But on this day, not a single plane or jet could be heard. I tried to tell myself that maybe they didn’t want the pilots in the airspace above civilian populations in the event they came down with the virus, but that did little to console the eerie silence that permeated the skies.

  That chill was magnified once I opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. Everyone has had the dream of being faced with something horrific, only to be frozen solid and unable to move or run. I was experiencing that same feeling while wide-awake in broad daylight. It was something I have rarely encountered before – being paralyzed with fear. At that moment that I realized that I’d locked my keys in the car.

  Don’t tell me that I’m being overdramatic. The same feeling hits you when you can’t find your wallet, when a child steps away from a parent in a store, or you forgot a homework assignment in school. Your ass puckers, your stomach does a backflip, and you have a small outbreak of nervous perspiration. It all passed as I turned to get my spare key from the house.

  I never made it that far however. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my neighbor Greg. He was running towards my porch in a very odd way. Not a “run like a girl” arm flapping way, more like a “my legs fell asleep and are numb” kind of way. More like a drunken trot than a run, I guess you could say.

  “Hey, Greg!” I called out with a casual wave.

  The homes in our suburban neighborhood were spread out nicely, with each lot being two to three times what you would find in most places. Greg was our nearest neighbor, but with that being said he wasn’t close enough to converse with across the yard without yelling.

  As Greg got closer I could tell something was horribly wrong. Greg was wearing what looked to be pajamas, with a slipper on one foot. Presumably he would have had a slipper on the other foot too, but the mangled remains at the end of his leg stump didn’t leave much to slip it on to. As I looked back up to his face, I could see that he had a mess of what looked like melted black cherry ice cream mixed with pea soup frothing down his chin. His eyes were a milky white with a glowing yellowish hue and there was an abnormally striking black glimmer where the pupil would be. The dark circles around his eye sockets a
ccentuated this feature, leaving him ghastly looking. He had scrapes on his forehead, with dried peeling skin and dried blood around them.

  It wasn’t until he was with ten feet of me that I heard the moan. It was the same death gurgle that Bill had given before Bobby and I had tried to turn him over. As Greg approached, the moan became more like a growl and he began gnashing his teeth. The gnashing almost took off his tongue, which he was manically flapping down towards his chin lapping up the frothy discharge.

  Greg lunged into me full force with his hands and arms extended outright towards my neck. My training instinctively kicked in as I sidestepped his lunge, pushing him off to the side as he glanced my left side with his hip. Greg fell to the ground face first, but quickly began trying to navigate his way back up. He never made it that far, as a crack of thunder erupted – and likewise did his skull. His lifeless body collapsed to the ground in a thud, less the top of his head. My front lawn was now littered with greasy gray brain matter and chunks of white skull fragments. I caught the barrel of a shotgun being lowered from the corner of my eye.

  Chapter 7

  “What in the FUCK!?” I yelled as I looked off to my side.

  There stood my other neighbor Tommy, holding his Mossburg pump action shotgun with smoke coming from the barrel. Tommy quickly racked the shotgun, loading another shell.

  “Zombies.”

  “Again, what in the FUCK!?” I repeated.

  “Zombies!” Tommy said louder, as if I didn’t understand his southern drawl the first time around.

  I decided to try a different approach, and hoped Tommy would understand I wasn’t quite on the same channel he was tuned into.

  “Tommy, what are you talking about and why the fuck did you just kill him?”

  “Zombies. Greg was a Zombie and was going to try and make you join him in Zombieville.”

  Tommy had a way with words. He was an ex-marine dealing with PTSD and didn’t have time in his mind to explain much beyond the basics to get his point across. Everything he spoke of what short and concise. He acted as if every conversation was a battle plan that had to be executed immediately and flawlessly. The only exception was when he was taking about guns. It was then that you felt like you just tuned into the 24-hour History channel “all about guns” marathon. Tommy was one of those people who would do anything for you, at any time he was asked – just as he had served his country in the Marines just a few short years ago.