Three Zombie Novels

by David Wellington

  “Dick Walters, NIH,” he agreed.

  “You do me a favor, Walters,” she said, and pointed at a pine about twenty yards away. “You run over to that tree and back.”

  Dick laughed but then he looked at her hatchet. The sharp edge was filthy with blood and hair. This was a farm, and animals on farms got slaughtered all the time. Still the sight of it made him uneasy. He swallowed and dashed over to the tree, then ran back to where he had originally been standing.

  The old woman nodded. “Fair enough. They don’t move that fast.” She dropped her hatchet on the carpet of pine needles and stomped into her house, her boots crunching in the snow. The door had no lock. Not knowing what else to do Dick followed her inside.

  MORMON BISHOPS IN HARPERSVILLE FORBID POLICE INVESTIGATION: Small Town Tabernacle Could be Hiding Terror Cell, State Bureau of Investigations Warns [Deseret Morning News, Salt Lake City, 3/18/05]

  They left her there for hours, strapped to the bed, unable to move. She didn’t grow stiff or uncomfortable but she couldn’t even reach over to turn on the television set mounted in a steel bracket above her bed. She tried to sleep but she failed at that, too: her body refused to truly relax, not when she kept hearing screams outside her room. No more gunshots, at least. She tried to calm down and failed.

  Being strapped to a hospital bed left her with a lot of time to think. To try to remember. She pushed hard into the dark parts of her brain, like developments full of houses with no lights on at all and nobody home. In the abandoned suburbs of her mind she tried to piece together anything, anything at all: the faces of her parents, her lovers, her friends. Did she have kids? Did she have a home somewhere? She tried not to color her thoughts with half-hearted guesses, but failed: the clothes she had on, the piercings had to mean something, at least, that she wasn’t homeless, that she didn’t work in an office. At least that much. These superficial deductions got in the way, though. They summed up a caricature of a life with no detail nor any texture at all. She tried to put them out of mind and remember something. She dug for any shard of memory: a birthday party. A trip to the mall. Where she had left her purse. She tried to remember her own name, even her initials.

  She failed.

  WEIRD: Horse bites dog in Wyoming. Apparently the horse was sick and the dog was a jerk. Cats and dogs still not living together. [Fark.com news portal, 3/16/05]

  The Blackhawk set down well clear of the prison fence. There were pressure plates and laser sensors and dogs trained to attack without barking in there. Searchlights stabbed out from the guard towers and bathed the helicopter in a brilliant glow. As the rotor spun down Bannerman Clark jumped down to the sandy soil of the outer perimeter and looked for the man he was supposed to meet.

  Assistant Warden Glynne of the Florence Administrative Maximum Corrections Facility greeted him with a snappy salute he did not return. Military personnel were not supposed to salute civilians and vice versa and Clark already knew enough about Glynne to know the man had never been a soldier.

  “Welcome to the Big One,” the Corrections Officer said, unfazed. The man hadn’t shaved in days and his tie hung loose from an unbuttoned collar. “I’m glad you came so quickly. Things are degenerating and we could really use some help.”

  “I understand you have a riot on your hands, Mr. Glynne and that it’s been going on for three days. I’d appreciate knowing why I’m here, though. Surely this is a problem for a SWAT team or the State Bureau of Investigations. The National Guard shouldn’t be called in unless—”

  Glynne spoke over him with the assurance of complete exhaustion. The tone of a man who doesn’t have the energy left for deference. “This isn’t a riot, Captain. This is a complete protocol failure. It’s been going on for seventy-nine hours. You’re here because this is something we’ve never seen before. Follow me, please.”

  They passed through the main gate of the prison and into a well-lit series of rooms painted and repainted so many times the light switches and doorknobs had taken on a softened, rounded look. Glynne lead him through a series of tight passages with heavy iron doors that had to be unlocked manually and which snapped shut and locked with an electronic buzz once they were through. “There are ten thousand doors in this facility, Captain. In an emergency lockdown all of them close and lock automatically. Nobody ever gets in or out unless we know about it. We’ve got eyes everywhere, even in the CO areas. That’s the good news.”

  “All I see here is bad news,” Clark said, glancing around in distaste at the dusty corridors.

  “This is a supermax prison, Captain Clark, where the real dead-enders go. Violent inmates who can’t be allowed to mingle in a normal prison environment. We impose twenty-three hour per day solitary confinement. Prisoners have to wear leg and wrist shackles when they go to eat. They get one four-inch-wide window in their cells. The toilets are designed so you can’t fit a human head in them. They do that, you know. If you give them an opportunity to do something, no matter how sick or perverse, they’ll do it. Just to fuck with us. The only control they have over their lives is to make things worse for each other, and they take every chance they get.”

  Clark made a grunt of understanding. Beyond one last door lay a control center, a red-lit claustrophobic space filled with computer monitors and desks and half-empty coffee cups. A dozen men and women in Corrections uniforms sat slumped in uncomfortable chairs, most of them gathered around one dimly flickering monitor. Two other men stood before what looked to Clark’s eyes like a black wall until his vision adjusted and he saw it was a slab of transparent polycarbonate plastic. A bulletproof one-way viewport. The men watching the view wore image enhancement optics—AN-PVS 7B night optic devices—and were rapt by what they saw on the other side of the window.

  When Glynne spoke again it was in a whisper as if he were afraid something on the other side might hear him. “Directly underneath us,” he said, gesturing at the window, “is where the real bad guys go, one of our special housing units. The inmates call it the Black Hole. There are a hundred and forty-eight punishment cells down there which we keep darkened and sound-dampened at all times. Nobody can stay violent for long in an environment like that. It’s been psychologically proven.”

  Clark picked up a set of night-vision optics from a desk and strapped it onto his head and chin. He switched on the unit and looked down into the SHU. It took his brain a moment to make sense of the false-color images the goggles created but quickly enough he saw what was happening. The cells were completely closed off from one another but they had transparent ceilings so the guards could look down into them at any time. In the cells prisoners lay motionless on their beds or paced endlessly around their tiny rooms. Some stood at their doors patiently as if waiting for them to open while others smashed at their walls with arms and heads and shoulders. He looked straight down at the center of the unit and had to gasp in disgust. Two dozen inmates were milling about in a central open area, many of them naked and clearly injured. He saw arms and legs that hung limp, faces contorted by lacerations and swollen bruises, fingers and eyes missing. Another ten or so inmates lay in a pile in one corner, their bodies wriggling like fat worms. “What are they doing?” Clark demanded.

  “They’re eating each other,” Glynne said, his voice flat. “Some of them… some of them eat, and some get eaten.” The last bit of energy had gone right out of the Assistant Warden.

  “Good God! Where is your staff? Where are your guards? You need to get them in there and stop this at once!” Clark demanded.

  “You don’t understand, Captain. The inmates are never allowed out of their cells in this unit. The men in that open area you’re looking at? Those are my guards.”

  “The chickens are coming home to roost, everybody. Coming home to roost. You see all this violence—what? No, the chickens is what I said. This violence in the western states, just out of control, which is what happens when your prison system is like, it’s like, it’s a country club, you know, it’s the cotillion ball for felons. The
y’ve got cable, they’ve got porn. Porn! I want to go to prison! Somebody arrest me! They have swimming—no, no, no! I said Chickens! The chickens are coming home to roost!” [Ted Thiokol, “Ted and Andy’s Morning Zoo” radio show, WNCI 97.9 (Columbus, OH), 3/18/05]

  One whole wall of the mountain house had been converted into a mural painted in bright psychedelic colors. It showed a girl, perhaps thirteen years old with blonde hair exploding outward from her head. She had a pair of butterfly wings and she was hovering over a swirling galaxy of bursting stars. The colors had faded over a period of decades but someone had tried to touch it up periodically.

  Mrs. Skye banged a half-full bucket of water down on an old, scarred table and started washing her face and her gnarled hands. The water came away dark with grit and dirt and dried flecks of blood. She shook as she rubbed at her eyes and her ears. “You’re too fucking late, Walters, but I won’t hold that against you. You help me slaughter them and we’ll call it even, yeah?”

  Dick sat down in a hand-made chair and tried not to look at her. “Mrs. Skye, I’m sorry we took so long to get back to you after your call. You have to admit though that you’re kind of secluded here. It took me six hours to drive here from my office and then I had to climb over a hill to find you. How many sheep are we talking about?”

  “Sheep,” the old woman said. She peeled off her jacket and threw it on the floor. She had a bad cut on her arm that looked infected. With a dishrag she started cleaning out the injury. “You’re here about the sheep. Ain’t that a shit sandwich.” She took a bottle from a dusty shelf and poured clear liquid down her arm. She winced visibly—it must have been rubbing alcohol or maybe even bleach. “The sheep are all dead. I slaughtered them myself. Next you’re going to tell me you came up her unarmed.” The look on his face must have convinced her that this was, in fact, the case. “I called this morning, I called your office and then came right back here. You didn’t get my message? Fuck!”

  “Maybe,” Dick said, holding his hands up for calm, “we should just start over. You reported a case of scrapie a couple of weeks ago—”

  “Yes, I did. And yesterday I called again, and said it was really urgent this time. Goddamnit! I make two phone calls in three years and you don’t even bother to listen to the important one!” She stomped to a window and stared out at the trees. “Well that’s as it is,” she said, running her nails across her scalp. “I can’t do this alone, I’m tired—I haven’t slept in two days, I haven’t eaten today. We’re just going to have to…” She stiffened visibly. “What’s that? Come here and look at this, Walters.”

  Dick rose from his chair and started over to the window. Before he got there he jumped back at the sound of broken glass and screaming. A human hand covered in blisters had come in through the shattered window and grabbed Mrs. Skye by the bottom lip, broken finger nails sinking deep into her skin, tearing her flesh.

  Instead of panicking she got her teeth around the fingers and bit down hard enough to snap them off. She reeled backwards and Dick rushed to catch her before she could fall. She sank into his arms, then reared up and spat the fingertips into the corner of the room.

  “Uh gud,” Mrs. Skye wheezed, her mouth covered in blood. “Thur utt!” Dick had no idea what she meant but she could only seem to repeat over and over, “thur utt! Thur utt!”

  He heard a thud on the side of the cabin, the sound of bone hitting wood very hard. It came again a moment later and then he heard boards creak as someone stepped up onto the porch.

  “Shut thuh dur!” Mrs. Skye screamed but it was too late. Dick laid her down gently on the floor and stood up, wiping his sweaty palms on the backs of his pants. By the time he reached the door the assailant was already there.

  He looked like a mountain climber—the purple ballistic nylon jacket, the rock boots, the ice axe hanging from his belt gave that away. He also looked like a sculpture of a human being made out of butter and left out in the rain. The flesh of his face had dripped away from the bone, revealing bare yellow skull in some places. One eye was completely obscured by collapsed skin, while the other had the white cast of glaucoma. A few long black hairs dangled from the climber’s face but none were left on top of his head.

  He didn’t speak. He didn’t turn his head to look at them. He just lurched forward, toward Dick, his mouth cranking open and his teeth biting at air. The climber moved slowly, so slowly Dick thought he must be running on adrenaline himself as he dodged the climber’s clumsy advances. He ducked under an outstretched arm and tried to knock the climber’s legs out from under him, amazed at how quickly he was reacting, at how instinct just took over.

  The climber grabbed his belt and clambered up onto Dick’s back, forcing Dick down to the floor with his weight. Dick could hear his own explosive breathing but the climber made no sound at all. The weight on him shifted a little and he tried to get out from under but then he felt teeth digging into the roll of fat at his waist. The pain was bright and intense: a vibrant horror splashed across his desperate senses. Dick heaved and the climber rolled off of his back.

  Blood seeped into Dick’s pants as he roared for breath, sucking down the rarefied mountain air to sustain his panic. Dick saw the ice axe hanging from the downed climber’s belt and he wanted it, wanted it like a sixteen year old wants a new car. No—he wanted it like a sixteen year old wants a girlfriend.

  The climber got one knee under himself and thrust out one arm for support. He was taking his time about getting up. Dick grabbed the axe and yanked. It came free of its quick-release buckle. The rubberized grip felt so good in his hand. Dick swung.

  The pick end of the axe went right through the climber’s jacket and into a hollow space that must have been his lung. Dick expected to get sprayed with arterial blood but only a little dry brown powder billowed from the wound. Dick yanked the axe back out but by the time he was ready to swing again the climber had regained his stance.

  The next blow hit the climber in the shoulder, hard enough to make Dick’s own arm vibrate with the impact. The climber didn’t appear to even feel any pain. With his free arm he reached for Dick’s throat. He would have gotten it, too, if Mrs. Skye hadn’t chosen that moment to cave in the back of the climber’s head with a ball-peen hammer. The skull collapsed like cracked pottery and the climber slid to the floor, limp, seemingly boneless. Dick brandished the ice axe, ready to strike again but the climber didn’t so much as twitch.

  “Huh’s dead, Wultuhs,” Mrs. Sky said, clutching her lip. She took her hand away and spat blood at the corpse at her feet.

  “Call me Dick.” He felt no guilt, no remorse, just a high singing lightness in his stomach and a tension in his shoulders. He couldn’t let go of the axe.

  “Alrutt. Call muh Bleu. Layk thuh chis.”

  PRESIDENT CANCELS SKI WEEKEND: No Reason Given [USA Today, 3/19/05]

  “Can we get some lights on? Surely there’s emergency lighting in there. Let’s get it on.” Bannerman Clark stood rigid before the polycarbonate window, not sure what he would see once the lights were on in the Special Housing Unit. The Special Horror Unit, more like. Whatever could possess a man and drive him to cannibalism—possess rational men with good jobs and families, no less, like the prison guards—wasn’t going to look pretty.

  The Assistant Warden shrugged when his underlings looked to him for confirmation of Clark’s order. “I’ve been relieved of command. Do what he says.”

  It had taken six phone calls to have Bannerman Clark assigned as the Local Incident Commander for what had yet to officially become an Incident. It used to be next to impossible to get around civilian chains of command, even in an emergency. After September Eleventh the system had been considerably streamlined. Clark’s Captain’s bars hardly warranted the kind of power and influence he was then authorized to wield but this was an OOTW (Operation Other Than War) and the normal priorities and niceties were overturned. Somebody needed to be in charge. Somebody needed to start giving orders.

  “We thought it
had to be drugs,” Glynne said. “That’s what we’re trained to look for. I sent in men who don’t even take aspirin when they have a headache. They didn’t make it back out.”

  It did not surprise Clark at all that Glynne would look no further than the end of his nose. In 1997 an inmate had been murdered at ADX-Florence and the body wasn’t found for four days. The prison was so tightly circumscribed and controlled that any deviation from the standard timetable—even a dangerous one—just didn’t register. He flipped open his phone and thumbed a quick text message to a First Lieutenant at the Buckley Air Force Base with the 8th Civil Support Team, the Guard’s WMD task force. It was quite clear to Clark that the men in that holding area were not under the influence of drugs. Only some kind of virulent disease could cause this cannibalistic behavior. Perhaps a mutated strain of meningitis. Or rabies.

  “We had men go in there in full riot gear with electric prods. We filled that room with CS gas, we turned high-pressure hoses on them. Whenever I sent a man in there they just ripped off his armor and tore out his throat. I personally fired six rounds from a .357 into the chest of one of those assholes. He spun around like a top but then he just kept coming. He’s still down there, walking around. Eating.”

  An emergency lamp near the ceiling of the Black Hole turned orange in the darkness as it started to warm up. It was designed to do that—if the inhabitants of the SHU were exposed to bright light without warning they could be temporarily blinded. Clark took the image enhancement optics off of his head and laid them neatly on his desk as the lamp ramped up to full power.

  In the new illumination Clark saw one of the afflicted stumbling across a mound of trash—unspooled rolls of toilet paper, torn newsprint, pieces of ripped riot armor. He moved like a frog in a terrarium, his legs extending slowly to find purchase, his upper body motionless. The rest of them wriggled in their pile, naked and unashamed as they fed. The men in the cells looked up at the light but they didn’t blink. Clark grunted despite himself. The victims were in bad shape. One inmate had lost his ears and lips. Another had most of his midriff torn away, everything between his rib cage and his pelvis. How could anyone get up and move around after sustaining such an injury? How could anyone survive it? Clark shuddered and recovered himself. He had a job to do.